Media Monday: Death Kiss

A bit of a brief post today, as I'm in what's typically the busiest week of the year at work. If you've been around this blog for any amount of time, you know my fascination with the DEATH WISH series, both the two books written by Brian Garfield, as well as the *five* movies made starring Charles Bronson. And of course, it's no secret that much of my fiction writing is inspired by the notion of the urban vigilante.

So I was definitely curious when the micro-budget crime movie DEATH KISS came onto the scene. Basically, you can treat it as an unauthorized, unofficial follow-up to the Death Wish film franchise, although that is never truly acknowledged. Death Kiss is available on Amazon Prime Video, and you can check out the trailer here:

 

Just as interesting as the movie (and perhaps for some people, even more so), pulp aficionado Bill Cunningham of Pulp 2.0 Press has written a book that does a great job of breaking down the production and marketing of Death Kiss from a business perspective.  Allow me to quote my review of his book Death Kiss - the Book of the Movie, here:

To preface, I have seen DEATH KISS and read through Cunningham's dissection of the film, and I write this review from the point of view of a novelist and storyteller, as well as someone who went through film school in the late 1990s, when low-budget independent film-making was on the mind of many of my fellow classmates. I am also a huge fan of Brian Garfield's original DEATH WISH novel, as well as the 1974 adaptation by Michael Winner. I've put out articles about vigilante storytelling, and have written a bit of it myself.

I say all this because the idea of an indie project designed specifically to tap into that Garfield/Bronson/Winner-inspired vigilante crime story market was immediately appealing to me. I watched the film DEATH KISS before reading the "Cinexploits!" case study, and while there were portions of the film that I might have criticisms about, I think overall, with the resources available to the director, the overall final product was entertaining - I honestly enjoyed it more than the 2018 remake with Bruce Willis!

And so, having seen the film, I decided to read the DEATH KISS case study. It is an excellent breakdown of the idea behind the film, and how so often in the entertainment industry, the people you know and the connections you make - both "above the line" and below - can make or break the project before it even goes into production. The relationship between Rene Perez and Robert Kovacs - a man with, shall we say, a particular set of skills - allowed the idea of a DEATH WISH-styled independent film to grow from the seed of an idea into a full-bloomed production.

Further, and this is something I especially take to heart as a novelist, Cunningham takes a lot of time to discuss the pragmatic, commercial, *business* of film-making - about making sure that your idea isn't just a good story, but that it is a story you can *sell*, and knowing what markets would be best for your idea, and making sure that you are delivering a product that fits with those markets. Artistic storytelling for the sake of storytelling is a noble concept, but it doesn't pay the rent or the talent. If you are in the *business* of film-making, you must understand first and foremost that your business is commercial in nature, and that you must, above all else, make money from the sale of your product. Period.

Of special note is the breakdown of the ARKOFF Formula. I won't go into the details here, but it is a point-by-point process epitomized by the methodology of Samuel Z. Arkoff, who did great business during the second half of the 20th century producing and distributing commercial theatrical films. I find the ARKOFF Formula worth studying by anyone who has an interest in storytelling designed to - first and foremost - get people to part with their money.

As this review is already fairly lengthy, I will end it by pointing out that the book also includes the DEATH KISS script, as well as a lot of great details about low-budget film production. As part of my day job I regularly interact with faculty and staff that support student film-making, and I have been in many a meeting where people argue for the best film cameras and the best lenses and the most expensive NLE hardware builds and finishing spaces. While more money and resources usually doesn't *hurt*, it often puts people in the mindset that more money is the answer to the practical problems they face during production. However, you don't tell a better story because you don't have the most expensive lens, or because you're only shooting in 1080 vs. 4K. Good stories are still good stories, even if they are produced on non-Hollywood grade production equipment. It is skill, talent, and ingenuity that tells great stories, not the most expensive ARRI rig you can get from a rental house.

If you have an interest in independent film-making, commercial storytelling, or even just the idea of taking a 1970s cult hit and using its gravity to slingshot an idea forty years later, I highly recommend you get your hands on DEATH KISS: The Book of the Movie.

So if you are a fan of low-budget film-making, a fan of vigilante action, or a blend of both, check out both the movie and the book.

Fiction Friday: Paul Bishop Presents Anthologies

Astonishingly, the third post of the week! I'm reserving Fridays for fiction posts, and today's post will be a little shorter than the posts on Monday and Wednesday. I wanted to highlight a series of fiction anthologies being put out by Wolfpack Publishing, and curated/edited by Paul Bishop, a retired LAPD detective and venerable novelist. The first anthology, Pattern of Behavior I read as soon as it was released, and while not every one of the stories was entirely my bag, so to speak, all of them were well-crafted tales from highly-talented authors.

There is a second book in the series out now, Criminal Tendencies, and although I have yet to start reading it, I must humbly mention that I have a story in that volume, one featuring my character Jamie "Hangman" Lynch, the protagonist from my novel SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER. If you liked that novel and want to read some more of the Hangman dealing out some bloody vigilante vengeance, look no further (for now) than Criminal Tendencies.

I do believe there is one more entry forthcoming in Paul's series of crime anthologies, and after that, there is at least one Western anthology on the horizon. All of these are (or will be) available in eBook and trade paperback form, and not only are they priced to move at $0.99 apiece, they are available through Kindle Unlimited as well.

Lastly, I highly encourage anyone interested in crime and mystery fiction to go to Paul's Amazon page and check out the full range of his published works. Paul was one of the authors I connected with early on in my blogging and writing journey, and I am more than happy to promote his publishing ventures whenever and wherever I can.

Revisiting Brian Garfield's DEATH WISH

More than seven years ago, while I was writing KILLER INSTINCTS, I read Brian Garfield's 1972 crime novel DEATH WISH for the first time. I'd seen the Charles Bronson film a couple of times before, but I wanted to read the novel because I'd been told it was significantly different from the film adaptation, and indeed, that is the case. Now, with a remake coming out this weekend starring Bruce Willis (no comment...), I've gone back and read the original novel again.

So I don't repeat myself, you can go here and read my original review of the novel.

Reading the novel now, I am struck by how, forty-six years after it was first released, the conversations that take place about crime and punishment, liberal and conservative politics, the role of the judicial system in criminal reform, the right of the individual to defend themselves versus the role of law enforcement to protect the public - basically every conversation we're having now, in 2018, they were having in 1972.

In fact, although it is closing in on being a half-century old, the novel is an incredible fictional exploration of walking through the transformation of a pacifistic, liberal, "bleeding heart", into a bloody-minded vigilante with a compulsion to stalk the streets, looking for just about any excuse to kill. Paul Benjamin is certainly the sort of guy who, if he was living in 2018, would be donating to GoFundMe campaigns for spree shooting victims, and changing his Facebook profile photo to "stand with" victims of the latest public tragedy. He would certainly vote for gun control, and insist that it is the role of law enforcement to deal with crime, not the private citizen, and he believes, to a degree, that a lot of violent crime in NYC is hyped up, that it is exaggerated by the media and by the conservatives demanding tougher laws - that it is, essentially, "fake news".

But of course, when the violence happens to him, Paul discovers that the system fails him at almost every turn. The police can't find the attackers, have essentially no leads at all, and it is immediately clear that Paul's personal nightmare is just one more file folder in a large stack sitting on the desk of a tired and over-worked police detective. Paul is overcome with helplessness and rage, incredulous at the notion that he's now just another statistic, that his friends and co-workers express just enough shock and sadness to fulfill their social obligation to him, but no more, because his tragedy makes them just too uncomfortable. Those scenes are almost textbook examples of "compassion fatigue", and when viewed from Paul's perspective, you can see how it just makes him even more angry at the situation he's in, and society's inability to, quite simply, do something about crime.

Of course, even more important in his transformation into a vigilante is Paul's all-consuming fear. He is nearly paralyzed by fear every time he leaves his apartment. A perfectly normal stroll down the street to get a newspaper turns into a terrifying experience - every rowdy youth or minority Paul passes by is a potential assailant, ready to turn and attack him at a moment's notice. At one point, Paul crosses the street and discovers himself a few steps from a black man just casually leaning against the side of a building, just chilling out, and Paul becomes a sweating, petrified mess expecting an attack. Only after running in fear from the man, who he later realizes was probably just minding his own business and laughing at the scared white guy, does Paul realize how deep the terror has taken hold of him.

Paul eventually arms himself with a roll of quarters in a sock for self-defense, and when he scares off a youth making a half-assed attempt at robbing him, the sense of power at being able to defend himself is almost a narcotic. Paul winds up buying a gun while on a business trip to Arizona (where all the locals tell him they can roam the streets safely at night because everyone has a gun), and he starts carrying it once back in NYC. Of course, with the gun in his pocket, Paul isn't unafraid - far from it. He is terrified of someone bumping against him and finding the gun. He's terrified of dropping the gun, or being stopped by a cop and having the gun discovered. He carries a wad of cash with the gun that he hops he can bribe the cop with if the gun is ever found, since he doesn't have a permit for it.

In fact, Paul only leaves his fear behind once he starts killing. The first murder is, ostensibly, self-defense, although he does begin wandering the streets and going into areas where he knows there is a high chance he might get mugged. His intentions the first time around aren't necessarily to kill a mugger, but a combination of determination to not let the criminals dictate where he can and cannot go, and a sort of symbolic "whistling past the graveyard". But, after the first shooting, and after he recovers from the initial emotional and psychological shock of shooting and killing another person, he loses his fear, and begins to actively "stalk" and go after criminals.

All in all, Paul kills eight people over the course of the book, and really, the action doesn't even take up eight pages. One of the victims is killed in only a couple of short sentences. All of the violence takes place in the second half of the book, most of it in the last third, really. And, once you reach the end of the novel, it is clear that the book is in no way about the shootings, but rather, Paul's vigilantism is used as the lens through which the author is addressing crime in the modern society. I can't say for sure if an answer to the problem is ever really reached, because while in the novel the police admit that crime is down, the reader can tell that Paul is not really in a mentally stable condition - his drive to punish criminals compels him to go out night after night, and he becomes a sort of junkie seeking a fix, so to speak.

After the success of the novel - and its adaptation into a film that addresses the problematic nature of Paul's vengeance to a much lesser degree than the novel - Brian Garfield wrote DEATH SENTENCE as, according to him, "penance" for the first book and the film, which he didn't really like. I will address the second novel in another post, but it does go a long way towards mitigating the direction that Death Wish seems to be driving us at the story's end.

BOOK REVIEW: William Gibson's NEUROMANCER

There's nothing I can say about NEUROMANCER that hasn't been said ten thousand times in the 34 years since the book was published. I read it first maybe...fifteen years ago? Some time not too long after college, so in the first couple years of the 21st century. At the time, we didn't have a lot of the advancements we had today, such as smart phones with the sort of power we enjoy now, or a lot of the social media available to us, but we had a good idea where things were leading, and a lot of the technical capability was there, we just weren't taking full advantage of it quite yet.

If you have any interest at all in Science Fiction literature, you know something about the Cyberpunk genre, and if you know Cyberpunk, you've either read NEUROMANCER, or you feel somewhat guilty not having read it yet. It was the defining work in the genre, with pretty much every written or visual work coming after it in the genre taking elements from it, and some elements even bled into more traditional science fiction. For example, in THE EXPANSE series, full-sized computers are referred to as "decks", which is the term Gibson uses for the computer systems used to interact with Cyberspace. Point of note: while Gibson didn't invent the term "Cyberpunk", he did invent "Cyberspace", a term that has become almost universally used by people who don't quite know what they're talking about to discuss That Which Is Accessible On The Internet.

Gibson's imagining of Cyberspace, while tremendously evocative, has never caught on, despite decades of computing advances. The idea that you would access the Internet through some kind of neural interface, and "fly" through a vast cyber-space landscape in order to reach and access data is the sort of thing that Hollywood salivates over (see also: Jurassic Park's "Unix System" scenes), but even in the here and now of 2018, it's just easier to tap an icon on our phones, or click on a bookmark. In fact, when it comes to traditional desktop and laptop computing, the way we use computers is, I would argue, not much different than the way we used them in 1983, when Gibson wrote the novel. Computers at the time had all the basic components of the modern desktops of today, some even using very basic Graphical User Interfaces and mice. Indeed, I would imagine that if you took a computer user from 1983 forward in time 35 years to today and set them down in front of your average modern desktop, it'd take them only a short while to understand that you clicked on icons to launch programs rather than type commands, and from there, you used the mouse to select functions and the keyboard to enter data. The difference lies more in what we use the computers for, rather than how we use them.

Of course, I do not in any way fault Gibson for not predicting the future, especially since the world in which NEUROMANCER takes place is probably well over a century from now, some place likely in the mid-2200s. There are references to a dynastic family existing for over two centuries, so depending on when they started, the book could even be set in early 2300s. By that point, it may very well be that the easiest way to access data is through direct neural interfaces. Of course, there are some odd anachronisms in the novel, such as using traditional telephones! Indeed, like may other science fiction writers Gibson didn't anticipate the pervasiveness of wireless connectivity, except on the largest scale, such as satellite transmissions. Decks are carried around and jacked into wall interfaces, often requiring special jack adapters in order to make them compatible. Data is also quite often carried around and transferred physically, either in the form of tiny sliver-like "microsofts" or larger data cartridges. I always enjoy reading older science fiction works (and truly, NEUROMANCER isn't even that old) to see what older technological paradigms they imagine will still exist in the future.

But of course, that's not what people really read this novel for - they read it for the atmosphere. In fact, it's probably got one of the greatest opening lines in the history of science fiction:

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." 

If you can picture that image in your mind's eye, you're most of the way to understanding the aesthetic of the dystopian Cyberpunk setting. The glaring, clashing intermingling of the old world and the new, the gleaming cities of chrome and glass built on the crumbling brick and iron of the old. There's a layer of grime on everything, even new tech, and everyone's got an angle. Anything you eat or drink is recycled from something else, and non-artificial environments are difficult (and expensive) to come by. Weapons are a mix of highly lethal new tech and battered but reliable old tech, and absolutely everything has a price. It is a largely amoral world, where people are simply trying to cling to a life worth living, because if they let go, even for a second, there is no merciful net to catch them, no social welfare program worth giving them the security they need.

So, is there anything NOT to like about this book? Well, to be fair, there are times when Gibson's (usually successful) attempts to be evocative of the setting wander a bit, especially when detailing Cyberspace itself. These moments aren't so much poorly written as they are a bit too lingering, causing breaks in the action, especially at the end of the novel. I suppose this is inevitable in describing something that most people in 1983 couldn't really imagine, so I have no problem with this. The other big pain in my butt with this book is one of my pet peeves in fiction and visual medium - that moment when, in the middle of a climactic moment, the protagonist finds themselves in some kind of idyllic dreamland, where they suddenly are offered paradise, if they just didn't wake up / accept their fate / whatever. I hate this device pretty much every time I encounter it, and there is a moment at the end of this book where that occurs, and it seems to go on forever.

Other than that, and a couple of other quibbles here and there, I enjoyed the novel immensely, and although I don't read a lot of the Cyberpunk genre, it did whet my appetite to go out and find more titles in the genre - specifically, I want to re-read Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH, which is a *great* novel.

BOOK REVIEW: HAWKER #1 Florida Firefight by Randy Wayne White

Full disclosure: I was offered a free copy of this ebook by the publisher in exchange for a review. You can buy Florida Firefight on Amazon by following this link.

I'd never read any of the HAWKER novels back in the day, so the new ebook version was my first exposure to the series, which starts from a premise well-known to anyone who likes vigilante fiction from the '60s through the '80s. Courts are soft on crime, lawyers are all scumbags, and cops are either incompetent administrators gunning for a run on a political ticket in the future, or tough, hard-bitten streetwise crusaders trying to keep the criminal element in check, while constantly being undermined by "the system". Meanwhile, gangs of violent psychopaths and drug dealers roam the city streets like some kind of Tolkien-esque invasion of orcs and goblins.

Enter Hawker, a cop who doesn't play by the rules, blah blah blah. He kills a bad guy against orders and winds up resigning from the force, only to be hired by a reclusive millionaire to become a one-man vigilante army. You know the deal - the Punisher, but with better financing. To start the series off, Hawker goes to Mahogany Bay, a south Florida town where some Colombian drug-running bad guys are pushing around the townsfolk while using their land for smuggling purposes.

Hawker goes down there and purports to be the new owner of the Tarpon Inn, a formerly successful tourist spot which has definitely seen better days. He immediately gets into a fight with some of the Colombians and gets his butt kicked, but then beats up their leader and pulls a gun on them. He soon hooks up with a Native American woman named Winnie Tiger who is a biologist working in Mahogany Bay, and the only one who helps Hawker when he first encounters the Colombians. There is sexual tension from the get-go, and eventually they have sex. Of course.

I don't really need to give the shot-by-shot plot structure of the book - that's easy enough to find and it's a short book anyway, with a quick enough tempo that ensures an engaged reader will zip through it in a couple of evenings or a lazy Sunday. There's a good amount of gun porn and the violence is suitably visceral, with people getting shot, stabbed, punched, blown up, set on fire...even violated with an air tank and inflated to death (more on that later). While the body count isn't extreme, it is substantial enough to satisfy those whose primary reason for reading such fare is the satisfaction of punks and thugs getting their comeuppance.

And, to be fair, the plot did take me a bit by surprise. Hawker doesn't just go to Mahogany Bay and start slaughtering Colombians. Instead, he actually spends a couple of months in the town, working with the locals to bolster both their pride, and the town's economy. One of the more satisfying scenes in the book involves the townsfolk attacking the Colombians' stronghold and giving them a thorough whupping - sans killing, for the most part. Hawker had cautioned the locals against turning into killers, and there is an impressive amount of restraint and moral obligation there. Of course, even in the few moments where Hawker himself tries non-lethal means to deal with his foes, circumstances conveniently force him to proceed otherwise, and he does the lion's share of the killing in the book, aided by the Tarpon Inn's cook and bartender, both of whom are more than they appear.

I also really enjoyed Hawker using a (in 1984 terms) advanced computer system to track down information about the various players in the situation and gain an information advantage over them. Most of the protagonists in these books, if they do computerized information gathering at all, outsource that to some nerdish ally who is a "computer genius". While Hawker was trained by such a genius on how to do this, he does do it all himself, employing some convenient hacking software and an old-school phone modem to search various databases, even planting a false identity at one point to establish his cover. I hope this is something that continues throughout the series.

Unfortunately for readers in 2016, there are a lot of cringe-worthy parts in the book. Without exception, all of the "good guys" are white, while all of the "bad guys" are minorities. Even the alluring ("mystical" of course) Winnie Tiger is secretly in cahoots with the bad guys. There's one white German bodyguard of a bad guy, but Hawker hints that he thinks the guy is gay, calling him "...a candidate for AIDS disease.", a line that was so stunning, it took me a moment to even grasp its full, historical, implications. There's also a "hulking mulatto" named Simio (...really...?), given all the usual apelike descriptive portraiture, who likes to inflict pain as a strongman for the Big Bad Guy of the novel. Hawker kills him in a horrible fashion when Simio's pants split at the backseam during a fight, exposing his buttocks, and Hawker rams the nozzle of an air tank in Simio's backdoor and turns the valve, inflicting horrific trauma upon Simio's insides. I'm sure a Freudian could write a paper on that scene alone.

Setting aside racial and homophobic issues for gendered ones, there are four female characters in the book. Winnie Tiger, the mystical Indian woman who has sex with and then tries to kill Hawker, two large-breasted blondes who both die only after their shirts are ripped open to expose their assets in death, and Hawker's ex-wife, with whom he has dinner with before going to Florida, and who he almost, but I think does not, has sex with. She factors into about three or four pages of the book and is then completely irrelevant, making me wonder why she's even included except as a possible means to make Hawker seem more three-dimensional. Police Sergeant Dee Dee McCall (HUNTER television series, debuting the same year - 1984 - as this book) would not be impressed with the gender politics of Florida Firefight.

If you can get past these usual, rather uncomfortable artifacts (and if you made it past the first chapter, I'm sure you can), this is still a satisfying read for fans of such "serial vigilante" books. The ebook edition is well-formatted and there aren't any OCR typos that I noticed, typical for Open Road Media's products, which are usually very well done.

Book Review: KILL ZONE by Zeke Mitchell

I must admit to feeling rather conflicted about this book. Author Zeke Mitchell clearly loves the "Men's Adventure" genre of fiction made so popular in the '60s through the '80s, as well as '80s action movies such as COBRA or INVASION U.S.A., and every ounce of that love was poured into writing this book. There are a bunch of direct and indirect references, both in tone and otherwise, that show the intent of making Kill Zone a child of its inspiration.

On the other hand, I think this diamond is still just a little too rough. While the author is able to craft a solid action sequence, and the overall plot of the book flows well enough as a series of action set pieces, I think the story definitely needed some more constructive criticism. I'll give a rundown in no particular order of importance:

- The term "kill zone" appears in the body of the book thirty-eight times. While using the title of one's work in the body of said work is fine in a rock ballad, in a novel it is generally frowned upon, and while once or twice is fine (that, "Okay, I get it" moment), several dozen instances are way too many, and immediately jar the reader out of the narrative. After finding multiple uses in the first chapter, I stopped reading to use the Kindle search feature - which gave me the total. If I am that distracted by the over-use of the term to stop reading and do a word search, this is a problem.

- I understand the desire to make the character a lone hero. Many of the best protagonists of the genre are "lone wolves", but when you pay attention to the books and movies in question, the protagonist is always interacting and balanced by a host of secondary, supporting characters. In this book, aside from "interacting" with bad guys by riddling them with bullets, Thorn only makes a couple of phone calls and delivers one or two extremely short bits of interactive dialogue. Without someone to play off against, either a partner or a recurring antagonist, we spend way too much time just reading Thorn's own inner monologue, which got somewhat tedious, especially during the more fast-paced combat sequences. The author really should have just focused on the action-reaction-action-reaction of the fights, rather than the repeated running mental commentary in Thorn's head, which slowed the pace of the text down somewhat.

- The author's writing style isn't going to work for everyone. Many short, clipped sentences, as well as paragraphs separated by other "paragraphs" of extremely short sentences, or even single-word paragraphs. While this device is good for demonstrating a pivotal moment, it's repetition throughout the novel weakens the impact of the device when it is needed most.

- Although it is just playing to the source material, I thought the idea that the government would send a single man - albeit highly successful and well-trained - to dismantle through violence a criminal empire responsible for a *global* drug epidemic a little far-fetched. Yes, I know, the one-man army trope is a classic one, but I feel the hyperbolic nature of the story was a little extreme, especially as this is the first book in the series. I feel like now, there isn't a lot of leverage to up the ante in subsequent stories. This complaint is just personal preference, but I would rather have seen a smaller, more "street level" story - perhaps Thorn being sent to nip in the bud a drug kingpin right on the verge of making it big, rather than one whose drugs are causing a global catastrophe affecting millions upon millions of lives.

All the above being said, I still enjoyed the book a lot. Technically, the ebook was well-formatted, and I only caught a couple of very minor typos, of the sort that always slip through no manner how carefully a book is proofread. The book's cover is absolutely superb, and no doubt has caught the eye of many of the book's buyers, leading to that "one-click" impulse buy, as does the short but very evocative product description. As of right now, Kill Zone's Amazon book ranking is hovering a little above 2,000 in the Kindle Store, which is extremely good for a debut indie novel.

In conclusion, if you're the sort who enjoys '80s action movies starring Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, et al, as well as serial Men's Adventure novels like The Executioner, Able Team, The Death Merchant, and so forth, I think you'll enjoy this book, and you can pick it up on Amazon by clicking here.. There's a ton of action right from the get-go involving fast cars, big guns, explosions, knives to the face, flamethrowers, rocket launchers, more explosions, people's heads being blown off, even bigger guns, and a couple more explosions. While I have been somewhat critical above, I hope the author doesn't take it as discouragement from writing more books in this series, but rather as helpful feedback.

Movie Review: BLACK MASS (2015)

I was able to attend an advance screening of the film BLACK MASS this past Thursday, followed by a question and answer period with Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, the two reporters who wrote the book the movie is based on, and who broke the original story behind the FBI's illegal ties with organized crime in Boston.

Long story short, BLACK MASS follows the twenty-year collusion between James "Whitey" Bulger and FBI agent John Connolly, Bulger and Connolly knew each other growing up in South Boston, and when they find each other on opposite sides of the law, Connolly enlists Bulger's assistance in getting information that'd be used in taking down the Mafia in Boston, and in return Connolly would work to prevent legal obstruction or investigation into Bulger's criminal enterprises.

As can be expected, nothing good comes from any of this.

As a film, BLACK MASS does an effective job of telling the basic bones of this story. Bulger and Connolly make this "devil's deal" and both profit from it, but eventually it becomes too well-known, and it falls apart. As with any historical drama like this, a lot of things get altered, cut, or combined in order to fit a dramatic two-hour cinematic narrative. This got discussed to some degree during the Q&A, where Lehr pointed out that Connolly's supervisor, played by Kevin Bacon in the film, is an amalgam of many supervisors over that twenty-year timeframe, but since constantly changing the characters would be confusing, a decision was made. There are a number of other places where this takes place, of course, and that's of course what happens with any movie of this type, and some of the changes are going to be more contentious than others.

When experiencing the film, the atmosphere throughout is creepy, dark, and highly disturbing. I don't feel it has that same sort of typical gangster movie "rise and fall" story that you see in GOODFELLAS or CASINO, where the crooks make it big, spend spend spend, get sloppy and squabble among each other, and finally cause their own downfall. You see Bulger buy one pair of "nice" shoes and give the shoemaker a generous wad of cash, and that's about it. They all still dress the same, drive the same boring cars, live in the same rather dumpy places, and in general, do not flaunt their wealth or status with parties, drugs, or girls (there is only one "party" scene, and that is a prelude to a murder). In fact, the only character that really conforms to this classic model is Connolly, who begins to "dress fancy" in tailored suits, wears a nice gold watch, and starts acting cocky and sloppy as he becomes more and more entangled with Bulger and his criminal enterprises.

Speaking of Bulger, he comes off more as some kind of slasher movie villain, rather than your average movie gangster. He is utterly cold, diabolical, and ruthless. While he cares for his mother, his brother Billy, and his son, he is more than capable of killing anyone else without any remorse and with only the slightest provocation. He is in no way a flashy, glorified "anti-hero" in any sense, because he displays almost zero human traits and very little of any qualities which one might want to emulate or aspire towards. There is also little indication of *why* Bulger does what he does - he just does it and keeps doing it. There is no goal or endgame, no troubled origin story driving his actions. He's a shark swimming through schools of fish, devouring and moving on without any qualms.

Bulger's portrayal, as well as the lack of any humor or levity whatsoever, works to make this movie emotionally draining. No one cracks a joke, there are no Joe Pesci moments, and the bleak, grimy backdrop of Boston's rather unflattering neighborhoods during some particularly bleak and grimy-looking periods of this city's history make it all the worse. Seriously, Boston isn't exactly a glamorous city, and this is before any of the work done in the last 20 years to make it look nicer and more visually appealing. Even City Hall and the other government buildings downtown add to this, with their miserably institutional appearances. I've been in City Hall several times over the years - it is an *ugly* building - a perfect backdrop for the ugly deals made within its walls during the film.

After the movie, there were more interesting points brought up during the Q&A. For example, when the Boston Globe story was being researched by Lehr and O'Neill, the focus wasn't on Bulger - it was on the corruption within the FBI, particularly as it tied into how the Bureau handled its Confidential Informants. Bulger just happened to be the biggest and boldest example of that corruption, and Connolly the Bureau's most flagrant bad boy. The film doesn't really touch on this at all, and the investigation of the problem seems almost entirely limited to the Bulger-Connolly situation. I don't know if this was done to help limit the scope of the film to something more tightly-focused, or if the filmmakers didn't want to paint the FBI with such a broad brush. Also, the authors, Lehr in particular (he handled most of the Q&A questions, since they were being asked by Boston University students and faculty and Lehr is a BU professor), were greatly concerned/worried that this story *would* go the "Goodfellas" route, and give it an air of glamour and anti-hero-ness, which they both wanted to avoid. But Lehr said after seeing a cut of the film back in May, he was happy to say the "darkness" of the subject matter was left intact.

Overall, I think this movie does a good job of portraying organized crime in the ugly, violent, horrible light it deserves. This isn't a stereotypical crime movie filled with flashy suits, fancy cars, piles of drugs, and lots of loose women. And, almost without exception, the violence isn't "action", but just sudden moments of brutality that make you glance away, feeling unclean for having witnessed the act. Frankly, I don't think it was a "bad" movie, but I am in no rush at all to see it again, if ever.

Book Review: THE GLASSHOUSE GANG by Gordon Landsborough

When I first became interested in this series, I assumed it was another Dirty Dozen ripoff - a team of convicts who are recruited by some semi-mysterious Intelligence Officer and offered the chance of a clean slate in order to take on some (no doubt near-suicidal) Commando-esque mission. This was the basic plot of the Destroyers/Dirty Devils series (see previous reviews of books 1 and 4 below), and there is of course no reason multiple series using the same basic plot premise couldn't be written (see also: every ripoff of The Executioner...).

However, Gordon Landsborough's THE GLASSHOUSE GANG is quite different from the expected plot-line. The story instead revolves around a band of British military prisoners, who've been busted for a variety of crimes - some minor, some completely reprehensible - and are serving time in the notorious (but as best as I can tell, completely fictional) Sharafim Prison in Egypt. The prison is run by officers and staff sergeants who are, at best, criminally lax in maintaining humane conditions at the prison, and are, at worst, vicious sadists who take great pleasure in beating and torturing their charges to within an inch of their lives - and occasionally beyond.

The first scene of the book is just such an example of two "staffs" brutally tormenting John Offer, the main character. Offer was formerly a Territorial Army quartermaster's sergeant, whose black-market dealings caused him to go on the run. He joins the Regular Army under an assumed name and becomes a lieutenant, but gets recognized by someone from his TA days, and Offer eventually gets busted because of it, demoted to private and sent to the "Glasshouse", slang for prison. Being a former officer (even a false one), Offer is constantly beaten and tormented by the staff sergeants who work there, and when he is finally released, Offer decides that something needs to be done to settle the score against the non-coms and officers who run the prison system.

One interesting aspect of Offer's background is that he was originally a stage actor, and once released from prison, Offer puts this background into good use. He gets a local tailor to make him a Captain's uniform, "requisitions" a lorry for his own use, and begins to find and recruit men from the Glasshouse he can trust as they are eventually let out after their sentences are over. Using the power of his assumed role and a cadre of men around him to reinforce the legitimacy of his ruse, Offer and his "Glasshouse Gang" spend the first third of the book slowly building up their numbers, acquiring resources, and taking revenge on a few of the "Screws" (prison guards) who were especially vicious to them.

The second third of the book involves Offer and his G.G.C.U. (Glasshouse Gang Commando Unit) executing a prison break, where they free a couple dozen prisoners from Sharafim, and then set up their temporary camp on the edge of the city, where they feast on stolen food and get drunk off of stolen liquor. Eventually these good times end, and the G.G.C.U. flees the law, taking off into the deep desert and eventually arriving at the Siwa Oasis...just as the Germans are attacking and driving the LRDG (the Long Range Desert Group, a unit of deep desert recon men in the British army) out of Siwa. Offer's gang holes up in a grove on the edge of the Oasis for a few weeks, until they discover some of their men (who they thought dead) as well as some LRDG men, in an outdoor prison encampment in Siwa. The last third of the book involves Offer and his men planning and executing the rescue of these prisoners.

All in all, this was actually a very entertaining read. John Offer reminds me a lot of Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith from the A-Team - a leader who thinks unconventionally and fights dirty when he's forced to fight at all. There's not a lot of action in the book in the traditional military sense, but what there is, is written well and maintains a brisk, exciting pace. The rest of the characters are amusing and flesh out the story nicely, especially the conflict between Offer and McTone, one of the more dastardly prisoners who joins the G.G.C.U. during the Sharafim jailbreak.

I can understand why the series only went four books - it's not really the sort of story that lends itself to a long run without becoming repetitive - but I quite enjoyed the first novel, and as I have acquired the other four books, plan on reading them and reviewing the titles here. If you want British WW2 adventure fare that's a little different, do your best to find and read THE GLASSHOUSE GANG.

My 2015 Prospective Writing Projects

Whenever I have a book idea, one of the things I do for fun is to draft up a simple cover design that conveys the feel of the book. It is both a focusing and motivational technique for me, and although some of the covers will never result in stories - at least in 2015 - I thought I might share a few of them as a sort of "teaser" for the rest of the year. Keep in mind, these are just draft covers, and might change considerably before the titles (maybe, eventually) go to print. Any and all feedback is certainly welcome!

HANGMAN #2: Battle for the Blacktop. The next book in the HANGMAN series. Ex-Green Beret Sergeant Jamie Lynch is hired to provide protection for a long-haul trucking company when attacks by a gang of outlaw bikers threaten to ruin the business. Not only must Lynch take on a roaring pack of chain-swinging, gun-wielding, maniacs, he must figure out who is backing the outlaws and attempting to ruin the trucking company. It'll be death by bullet, blade, and bumper along the highways and back roads of southern California.

KANSAS KILLERS, the sequel to RENEGADE'S REVENGE. Paul and David Miller decide to leave Missouri and head west, but as they ride into Kansas, they find themselves dodging both U.S. Cavalry patrols and packs of roving Jayhawkers, many of whom are now little more than murderous, pillaging outlaws. When the Miller brothers save a young woman from death at the hands of a pair of Jayhawker bandits, they find themselves on the run from a dozen more, as the band's leader seeks revenge for the deaths of his men.

STREET SWEEPER, a vigilante cop novel set in Boston, 1985. Detective Nick Malone used to be a good cop, always playing by the rules. But when Malone makes a move against the Irish mob, the rules set free the gangsters who killed Malone's partner. Unable to find justice while working within the bounds of the law, Malone decides the rules don't just need to be bent, they need to be blown away. Maintaining the facade of a good cop by day, Malone cleans up the streets of Boston at night by sweeping away the filth with a loaded shotgun and a magnum revolver.

KRUEGER #1: Boston Bloodbath. Another Boston-based story, set in 1921. Krueger is a former German storm-trooper who'd fought in the trenches and no-man's land of the Great War for four bloody years. Wounded by bullet, blade, and bomb shell, Krueger survived and returned to the front again and again, a killing machine who just wouldn't die. Now a wandering soldier of fortune, Krueger is hired by a gang of bootleggers fighting to dominate the black-market liquor trade in Boston. But when you hire Krueger to fight your battles, you better be prepared for all-out war..

PANZER ACE: Crushing Poland. Cannons roar and tank treads grind men into pulp as the Blitzkrieg of the Third Reich rolls into Poland. Panzer commander Victor Krieger has no allegiance in his heart for Hitler and his gang of Nazi thugs, but he is a soldier born and bred, and the business of fighting is what he knows best, the razor's edge between life and death the only place he calls home. Krieger pits the armaments and armor of his Panzer against waves of stout-hearted Polish defenders, where quarter is neither asked, nor given. It is war at its ugliest and most savage, just the way Krieger likes it.

DOGFACES: A Day at the Beach. It'll be one hell of a summer's day for Private Jonathan "Jack" Russell and the other men of Dog Company. Along with Captain Collier, Lieutenant Shepherd, Sargent Barker, Corporal Basset, and all the rest, Russell finds himself bobbing around off the Normandy coastline, about to hit the bloody beaches of Fortress Europe and drive back the Germans one hard-fought step at a time. Unfortunately for the men of Dog Company, the same cosmic prankster that put them all together in the same outfit is going to make surviving their day at the beach tougher than a concrete pillbox.

My 2014 Writing in Review

Two years ago, I wrote a piece called "In 2013, Always be Closing". The year after that, I laid down a 2014 Short Story Challenge. This year, I want to take a look at the past twelve months, where it has brought me, and where I'm going from here.

In 2014, I sold a little over 7,600 copies of my various works, roughly half of everything I've ever sold in the past 3 1/2 years, and 800 more than in 2013. That figure averages out to a little under 21 sales a day over the course of the year. Granted, in the third quarter of the year my daily averages dropped to significantly less than that, but I had a strong opening to the year with the release of Operation Cannibal around Thanksgiving of 2013, as well as a couple of really strong Kindle Countdown Sales during the first quarter. In addition, I'm finishing off the year with a very strong past six weeks, thanks to the release of Operation Dervish, which has sold over 460 copies so far.

I lay out all of the above so that people can decide for themselves how successful I am, and do some comparative analysis with their own and others' sales figures. I was glad to see overall sales increase substantially, and royalties increase as well (I made about a thousand dollars more this year than last year), but it certainly wasn't a bowl-me-over sales year. Let's break it down...

The COMMANDO series made up about 81 percent of my total sales this year, utterly dominating all my other titles. With four novels and a short story, that's certainly understandable, but it is important to point out how much my sales figures depend on this series. Without it, I wouldn't be breaking a hundred sales a month on average. In addition, while I used to sell at least twice as many copies in the UK as in the US every month, the ratio is now mostly even, and with my new title in the series so far, I'm selling far more US copies. There are probably a variety of factors at play here, from the much larger Amazon customer base in the US, to what might be a more saturated genre market in the UK (there are several UK-based WW2 series that aren't available as ebooks in the US), the dominance of the UK sales region is now firmly over.

RENEGADE'S REVENGE was a surprise hit for me this year. I sold a little over 700 copies of this title in eight months, accounting for roughly nine percent of my total sales this year. Since a significant number of these were Kindle Unlimited borrows, I actually made pretty good money off of this title, especially given that it was originally written as a project that failed to launch. For many years, publishers and critics considered the Western genre one of the worst-selling, but there seems to be a resurgence in the last few years, both in re-releasing old titles as ebooks, as well as original content. I fully intend to write a sequel to RR at some point in the next year, and maybe a few other standalone Westerns as time goes on - it is certainly a fun genre to write in, with a great blend of action, adventure, and history.

SPIDERS & FLIES was released at the beginning of the year, and has gone nowhere since. It sold 28 copies in 12 months, 18 of those in the first month of its release. The few reviews it received were positive, and people seemed to like the cover art, but the title simply doesn't sell, even when I have tried free giveaways. Considering its poor performance, and that of NANOK, while I'm glad I finally got around to finishing and publishing this piece, I think even if I can write decent fantasy stories, it isn't worth my time or energy. I doubt I'd even write a sequel to this title, but while I do have several NANOK stories in mind, that's where they're going to stay for the foreseeable future, until I have enough "legroom" to take a chance on writing them.

HANGMAN #1: SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER was also well received by both beta readers and those who've written reviews. However, it did not take off like I'd hoped it would. I sold about 130 copies in the six months it's been out, better than S&F but terrible even compared to RR. I have a number of sequels in mind for this series, and perhaps with an additional couple of titles it'll have more appeal, but so far, I'm not that hopeful. Still, I really enjoyed writing the book, especially since it allowed me to ramp up the "mature content" compared to the COMMANDO titles. SFS contains a lot of swearing, a little sex, and some very cruel violence. It is definitely a darker work, and getting out of my morally-cleaner mindspace was definitely interesting.

KILLER INSTINCTS continues to perform terribly. More than a few people still feel my first novel is the best thing I've written, and I certainly believe it is a good, solid story. I did a cover change for the ebook mid-year, and a couple of promotions helped bring in more sales, but of the roughly 350 copies sold in 2014 (~4.5% of my total sales), at least half were during promotions, meaning I made nowhere near the money I could have with those numbers. Next year I would like to get the title into a BookBub promotion, which would be amazing, but I don't have high hopes. In a market choked with thrillers of all stripes, KI goes largely unnoticed. I would still love to write a sequel to this book, but at this point in time, I feel it would fail to thrive just as KI did, a pointless gesture.

In conclusion, I face some tough choices. It is clear that my niche genre titles (WW2 and Westerns) sell much more than my more mainstream genre works (thrillers, crime, fantasy). COMMANDO titles and RENEGADE'S REVENGE make up ninety percent of my sales this year. Clearly, this is where my focus should lie, but on the other hand, I don't want to limit myself in terms of what to write. Writing is not my full-time job, nor will it be for the foreseeable future, meaning I am not as much a slave to the market as I could be were it my only income. And, in addition, I might stumble upon another genre with a title that's more popular than I'd imagined. Certainly, when I wrote both the first COMMANDO title, as well as RR, I never anticipated their degree of success.

In a few days, I hope to follow this column with one discussing my hopes for 2015. Until then, Happy New Year!

HANGMAN #1: San Francisco Slaughter - Available Now

Click the Cover to See on Amazon

My '70s-era Men's Adventure novel SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER is now available on Amazon for the Kindle, with a trade paperback format to follow later this month. I'm copying the Amazon product description below. Thank you again to everyone who gave feedback and support to this project - I couldn't have done it without you!

Amazon Book Description:

California, 1973. Back home after three years in the jungles of Southeast Asia, former Green Beret Jamie “Hangman” Lynch is enjoying the good life, drinking beer and chasing skirts along San Diego’s Mission Beach. But Lynch finds himself growing increasingly restless, and dreaming of getting back into the fight again.
Lynch asks his former commanding officer for guidance, and is offered a chance at some excitement: a private sector job working for the CEO of a San Francisco tech company in need of a man who’s not afraid to get his hands dirty. The assignment? Hunt down a man named Roth, a whiz-kid engineer in debt to the Vegas mob. Roth has stolen an advanced military prototype and is looking to sell it to the highest bidder.
Lynch accepts the job and finds himself working with Richard, an enigmatic Texan mercenary, and Blake, the company’s head of security. The three men face off against Cranston, a murderous ex-cop turned enforcer-for-hire, who’s got an army of ruthless thugs turning San Francisco upside down looking for Roth. If Cranston gets to Roth before Lynch and his partners do, Roth can kiss the prototype - and his life - goodbye.
SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER is a hard-edged action-adventure novel. There's drinking, profanity, and sex. There's fast cars and big guns, sharp knives and loose women. Arson, torture, and murder are just tools in the hands of men who’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done. And while the good guys aren't so great, the bad guys are even worse.

Meet My Main Character - Jamie "Hangman" Lynch

My friend and fellow author Justin Aucoin has asked me to carry the torch for another leg in a great "Meet My Main Character" blog-hop. This is an opportunity for writers to introduce to readers the main character of a work in progress or soon-to-be-published work. So, I'm picking Jamie Lynch, the MC of my current work in progress.

Before reading more, be sure to check out Justin's blog post, where we meet his main character, Jake Hawking.

1) What is the name of your character? Is he/she fictional or a historic person?

My character's name is Jamie "Hangman" Lynch. He's a fictional character, part of my "Lynch Family Legacy" of characters featured in my other books, such as KILLER INSTINCTS and my COMMANDO series of WW2 novels. Jamie is the son of COMMANDO's Tommy Lynch and uncle to KI's William Lynch.

2) When and where is the story set?

The story is set in 1973, and starts in San Diego, California. The story quickly moves up the coast to San Francisco, where events take place all over the Bay area, from Palo Alto to Bodega Bay.

3) What should we know about him/her?
 
Jamie's 24 years old in 1973. He's a former sergeant in the United States Army, 5th Special Forces Group, and from 1970-72, served in the top-secret Military Assistance Command, Vietnam - Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG). Previous to that, he was a corporal in the 101st Airborne Division, and fought in the Battle of Hamburger Hill in 1969, where he was wounded. In 1973, Jamie has been out of the military for about nine months, living above a surf shop along Mission Beach in San Diego.

4) What is the main conflict? What messes up his/her life?

Jamie made it back from Vietnam in fairly good shape, both physically and mentally. He suffered a few minor wounds, but he's in prime physical condition. Mentally he's doing okay, although he has recurring dreams and nightmares about the war. Most recently, his dreams have involved going back to the war, and even though in some of his dreams he gets killed, the overall sense in his dreams is that Jamie is happy to be back "home" in the war. He's self-aware enough to realize that the hum-drum civilian life isn't for him; he's spent his entire adult life so far in the military, training for and fighting in a war, and now he's basically a beach bum, living off some money set aside and working a part-time job in the surf shop he lives above.  Jamie begins to feel like "a tiger in a cage, restless and confined", and worries that one day he'll channel that aggression and confined feeling in a way that will wind up with him in jail, dead, or some other unfortunate outcome.

So, Jamie gets in touch with General Carson, an officer who used to be Jamie's CO back in Vietnam. He confesses his problems and asks Carson for help. Carson tells Jamie he knows of a businessman up in San Francisco, the head of a tech company with strong ties to military technology research, who is in need of someone with Jamie's skill set to "solve a problem". Jamie, not caring much what the problem is and only knowing it'd give him an escape from his cage of inactivity and boredom, accepts the job. A great deal of violent conflict ensues shortly thereafter.

5) What is the personal goal of the character?

Jamie's primary motivation throughout the story is to find purpose in his civilian life. Like many veterans, he's come back to the "real world" after being in the military for over five years, and the Army is the only adult life he's ever known, and his skills-set is, at the very least, pretty specific. He can't picture himself living the life of a 9-to-5 office dweller, driving to work every morning in a station wagon, typing up reports and sitting in meetings, then going home at the end of the day to a house surrounded by a white picket fence, containing a darling wife and two perfect children. Even at the young age of 24, Jamie firmly believes there's no way that kind of life is his destiny.

On the other hand, Jamie understands that selling his lethal skills in the private sector is a dangerous game. As the story unfolds, and the events begin to spiral out of control, with more and more collateral damage and unforeseen consequences, Jamie realizes he's essentially a murderous criminal, and there's a good chance his actions might get him killed or sent to prison for the rest of his life - exactly the sort of outcome he was trying to avoid in the first place. On the other hand, he's got several other characters in the story, especially the mysterious gun-for-hire named Richard, affirming that this is the life for him. It becomes a tug-of-war between Jamie's moral character, and his belief in his ultimate place in the world outside of the Army.

6) Is there a working title for this novel, and can we read more about it?
 
The book is titled HANGMAN: SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER. I hope this will be the first in a series of short novels featuring Jamie as he goes on further adventures, all under the HANGMAN series title. I wrote a teaser blog post regarding the book here.

7) When can we expect the book to be published?

I hope to have the first draft completed by the beginning of May, and off to a small cadre of interested Beta readers. Depending on their feedback, and the amount of rewriting I have to do nor not do, I hope to have the novel out on Amazon for the Kindle and Trade Paperback formats some time in June.

UPDATE: Author Mark Allen is the next stop on this blog-hop - you can meet his main character, Travis Kain, here on his page.

MOVIE REVIEW: Sabotage (2014)

When I first saw the trailers for Sabotage, I was enthused but otherwise wasn't expecting much. I've been happy to see Schwarzenegger making a Hollywood comeback, because even in his "retirement" years, he's still a badass. I really enjoyed The Last Stand, and even Escape Plan was a lot of fun, if somewhat goofy.

So, this latest action flick looked to be more of the same. Dudes with guns running around killing other dudes with guns, some chases, some revenge, some shots of Arnold glowering menacingly. Pretty standard stuff, really. Right?

Wrong.

This movie is brutal. I don't mean brutal as in Commando-era Arnold running around hosing down countless pissant soldiers who pirouette and drop to the ground when shot. I mean gruesomely, unrelentingly violent. This is easily the most graphically violent movie Schwarzenegger has ever done, and I don't say that lightly. While his movies have high body counts, and some (like Total Recall) have some messy bits, the graphic, in-your-face nature of the violence in Sabotage is unique to his career. While I can get icked out by torture scenes in movies, graphic violence usually doesn't phase me much...but I was uncomfortable at times with this film, and that's saying something.

Furthermore, this is Arnold like we've never seen him before. There has always been at least a hint that Schwarzenegger is winking to the audience in his movies. The "I'll be back" line, the posing with the guns a la Commando, the corny one-liners, and so forth. We've come to expect it, to the point where we don't even notice it until it's gone. But in Sabotage, there's none of that Schwarzenegger self-referentialism. I won't say he's "acting" better than ever, but he is able to, more than I've ever seen him, put away his Hollywood MegaStar-ness and just play a role as straight as possible, without any mugging or otherwise playing "Arnold".

As for the movie itself, there's nothing truly original or jaw-dropping here. Schwarzenegger plays "Breacher" Wharton, an old, grizzled DEA door-kicker (thus, the "Breacher" moniker) who leads an undercover team of agents who infiltrate drug organizations, then tear them apart. These guys are the DEA version of Delta Force and Seal Team Six, unconventional warfare types who roll with lots of tattoos and facial hair and highly customized kit loadouts. As the movie opens, they're taking down some drug cartel and they hide ten million dollars in cash on the premises, hoping to steal the money for themselves, but when they return for the money, someone's taken it. Whoops.

Come to find out, the FBI was running an operation in parallel with theirs, and knew how much money was in the place, so the fact that ten million dollars is missing doesn't go unnoticed, either by the DEA or the Cartel, who doesn't like losing their money to the government, but likes having it stolen by government agents for their own personal use even less. But of course, the thieves can't tell anyone it was stolen from them without admitting they stole it in the first place. Six months of investigation and interrogation by the DEA, and none of the members breaks, and they're finally - begrudgingly - put back on the job.

I don't want to give away any spoilers, because this movie does have a few twists and turns that are definitely worth keeping hidden. Suffice to say, some members of the team start getting killed. Breacher and the surviving members begin to turn on each other, assuming that the Cartel is coming after their money, and they all begin to suspect that someone on the team beat the rest to the money and took it for themselves. We also begin to learn some dark aspects of Breacher's past, as well as seeing the tensions and conflicts within the team. Operators who always live on the ragged edge of right and wrong can lose track of where the line is drawn, and that becomes a very scary place to live.

Badass Digest, one of my favorite film and television websites, wrote a really good review of this film, one that I more or less agree with. This isn't a "great movie", but it is one of the best Schwarzenegger movies, and if you're a fan of his films, you really need to see this. Even after more than 30 years of movie stardom, the big guy can still surprise us.

BOOK REVIEW: Bronson - Street Vigilante: Switchblade

My original assessment of the three BRONSON books was off somewhat. While they are written by three different authors, the third book in the series does not start a new character or storyline - it follows the Richard Bronson of STREETS OF BLOOD. This leads me to wonder if the "reboot" of the second book is a reaction to BLIND RAGE and it's less than sympathetic protagonist, and that this was, in fact, originally intended as a long-running series that simply never got off the ground.

In SWITCHBLADE, the story starts off with Bronson and Jenkins hot on the trail of the Unholy Three, a team of punks that have been performing rapes and stabbings and robberies over the last few months. Jenkins is the detective from STREETS OF BLOOD who agreed to help out Bronson as long as he stuck to just killing violent criminals, and as we saw at the end of the second book, Jenkins has gone from passive observer to someone actively helping Bronson.

Bronson tracks the three punks to a shoe store, and arrives just a little too late. One of the punks is in the process of raping the woman who owns the store, and her husband, a paraplegic Vietnam vet in a wheelchair, has been brutally beaten and threatened. This time around, Bronson comes armed not with a shotgun or his Browning, but with a custom-made switchblade, and he kills two of the punks with it in just a few seconds, then runs down and strangles the last punk, a spoiled rich kid named Herbert Vincent Mardin III. "Herbie" is a rich little turd who gets off on power and violence, and he's recruited a couple other youths, one black, one Hispanic, to commit crimes. In stereotypically racist fashion, the black kid is described as only wanting to rape white women, and the Hispanic is only looking to get cash so he can buy pot and get high. Herbie, of course, is in it for the violence.

So, Bronson bumps off Herbie and friends, then goes home only to discover that Nora, his dead wife's sister, is in town and came by for a visit. Nora bears an uncanny resemblance to Bronson's dead wife, and she is clearly looking to sleep with Bronson, who initially protests before giving in, rationalizing it because his usual lay, the model next door, is out of the country on a photo shoot for a month. Nora is savvy enough to not "fall" for Bronson, but the two do fill emotional holes in each other's lives. Bronson finds Nora similar enough to his dead wife to enjoy her company, and Nora finds Bronson interesting and sexy, estranged as she is from her husband, from whom she is seeking a divorce.

Meanwhile, Herbert Vincent Mardin II, Herbie's father, is in a complete state of denial over the circumstances surrounding his son's death. Rather than accepting that Herbie was a violent psychopath, he considers him an "unfortunate victim of today's society" or some other nonsense. He begins digging to find the vigilante who killed Herbie, and when the police (who are tacitly helping Bronson) don't offer much help, Mardin calls in a few favors (He's a top-level executive in an International Bank) from the CIA, who put him in touch with Matthews, a former CIA operative who's been in the world of cloak-and-dagger operations since the days of the OSS. Matthews shows up with a team of other ex-Agency men, and they agree to track down the vigilante killer for a price.

I don't want to go any further into the plot of this book, but I will say the turns the story took were pretty interesting. Bronson finds himself pitted against not only a rogue cop, but these former CIA agents, as well as a trained assassin. There's a lot of move and counter-move as each side tries to get the best of the other, and overall it's a pretty enjoyable read. There's not quite as much over-the-top violence as in the previous two books, but I think the story works well without it, and there's still a good body count for the action junkie readers. There's also quite a bit of sex, as we follow Bronson, Mardin, and even Detective Harper, the rogue cop, into the bedroom with their respective mates.

One plot thread I did find unnecessary involved a diplomat from some "South American Banana Republic" who is portrayed as a violent, woman-beating, murderous lunatic. A number of comments are made regarding how the diplomat is little better than a "primitive savage who doesn't belong in the civilized world" or some such, giving a really racist slant to a story that didn't need to be in the book to begin with. Bronson and Nora run into this creep at the opera, where the diplomat's bodyguards are physically abusing anyone who gets in his way, and Bronson winds up decking one when the bodyguard shoves Nora. This gets blown up in the media to be an "attempted assault" on the diplomat, although no one knows the identity of the assailant. We later learn the diplomat beats up and abandons a girl along the side of the road after an attempted rape, and later kills and wounds a number of people in a drunk driving incident. Of course, due to "diplomatic immunity" (one of the most oft-abused plot devices ever, in my opinion) no one can do anything to the guy. No one, of course, except a Vigilante. Hmmm...

Overall, SWITCHBLADE was pretty good. I don't know if I enjoyed it as much as the second book, but it was certainly enjoyable. I think the author, whoever he was, tried emulating a lot of Len Levinson's style from book 2, but doesn't quite pull it off. Still, it is something of a shame that, after two books of creating a cast of characters, the series ended.

BOOK REVIEW: Dirty Harry #1 - Duel for Cannons

The first three Dirty Harry movies came out between 1971 and 1976. Then, there was a hiatus of seven years, until 1983's Sudden Impact. With the franchise dead going into the '80s, Warner Books decided to begin a series of media tie-in novels (although I doubt they were called that at the time) featuring the eponymous maverick cop and his Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum. The series ran from 1981 to March of 1983, nine months before Sudden Impact was released. The series was written by two authors; Ric Meyers (who wrote the Ninja Master books) and Leslie Alan Horvitz, a writer I'm unfamiliar with. Meyers apparently wrote #'s 1, 3, 5, 8, 9, and 11.

The first book in the series, Duel for Cannons, opens with the line, "Boopsie's head exploded". The unfortunate Boopsie is a guy in a cartoon-figure suit at a knockoff Disney World-esque theme park in California. Boopsie is killed by a gunman who then gets chased by an off-duty San Antonio sheriff visiting the amusement park with his family. The sheriff gets drawn into a running gun battle with the shooter, and is eventually killed. Of course, the deceased is an old friend of Harry Callahan's, and Callahan doesn't take kindly to his friends being killed, even less so when the killer makes it look like the death was actually the sheriff pulling off a mass murder/suicide.

Although everyone else almost immediately dismisses the inconsistencies in the case, Harry pursues the evidence, and eventually uncovers a shadowy killer who seems to be trying to draw Harry to San Antonio. Eventually Harry goes there, and discovers that H. A. Striker, a wealthy business magnate, essentially runs the city, owns the cops, and gets to do whatever he wants. Striker had been opposed by the Sheriff, and one of his underlings, a tactically brilliant investigator named Nash. Harry teams up with Nash to try and bring down Striker, who is actually furious that the assassin - a .44 Magnum-loving killer named Sweetboy Williams -  lured Harry to San Antonio. Striker tries to get Harry arrested or driven off several times, only to get foiled on every occasion.

The story culminates with a ton of gunplay, as Striker tries to use a captured Nash as bait to lure Harry into a place where his bought cops - or Williams - can kill Harry. There's a ridiculous amount of gunfire and stuff getting smashed / shot / blown up, and although the killing isn't too gratuitous, at least one bad guy gets his head "blown clean off". I don't want to give away the details - there are a few twists and turns - but the ending is pretty satisfying, although the middle third of the book does sag a bit, and I found the whole plot a little hard to believe. With the police corruption looking SO blatant and rampant in San Antonio, and with the amount of evidence Nash gathers on Striker's doings, I don't see how he couldn't have just passed the information on to the FBI or some other, larger agency.

But overall, I found Duel for Cannons to be great fun. I've recently re-watched the first three Dirty Harry movies, and this book definitely references his filmic adventures extensively. One minor deviation is that DiGiorgio, an inspector who appears in all three earlier movies, is alive in this book, while (SPOILER) he's killed midway through The Enforcer. I suppose he was too good a secondary character to leave dead and buried, since his chubby, laid-back persona is a great counterpoint to Harry's belligerent, wound-up personality. There's also enough time spent in San Francisco dealing with punks and criminals there, that I'm looking forward to later stories taking place in the city itself. Meyers is able to capture and reproduce a lot of Harry's personality, and I can easily hear Eastwood speaking the dialogue in the book with Harry's typical laconic delivery.

It looks like Amazon has most, if not all of these books available for a somewhat reasonable price used, assuming you're not looking for mint condition specimens. I've already ordered the second book in the series, and I'll review it as soon as I can.

Len Levinson Comments on BRONSON - STREETS OF BLOOD

After reading my review of his entry in the BRONSON series, author Len Levinson was kind enough to write me regarding his experiences writing the novel. I asked if he minded writing me a few comments I could use as a blog post, and he was happy to share the experience with my readers. So, without further ado...

Len Levinson on STREETS OF BLOOD

STREETS OF BLOOD came about through the following chain of events.  One day I received a phone call from an editor at Manor.  He asked me to come to his office and discuss a project.  I knew him when he was an editor at Belmont-Tower, don’t remember his name now.

 

When I arrived in his office, he explained they were developing a series based on the popular movie DEATH WISH starring Charles Bronson, and wanted me to write one of the novels.  Naturally I said yes due to my constant need for money.  So a contract was drawn up and I signed it.

 

The DEATH WISH movie was very controversial at the time.  I’d never seen it but had read about it in many publications.  The story was of a self-appointed vigilante killing criminals in New York City.  Many people thought that vigilantism was horrible.  Others thought it was a great idea, because NYC was a high crime city back then, and the NYPD seemed ineffective.

 

I really got into the novel because I’d been a crime victim numerous times, mugged in front of a bar in the East 60s, mugged on the subway, held up at knife point in the East Village, and a few of my apartments had been burglarized.  It was a great pleasure to kill criminals in my imagination, like I was getting even at last.  Regarding the plot, mine was entirely original except for the basic vigilante premise.

 

I’m very grateful for Jack’s insightful review.  I especially appreciated his comments on sex in novels.  Some writers go the straight porno route with lots of anatomical details.  Others try to rip-off PLAYBOY or James Bond.  I tried to be true to life.  I’m glad Jack thought I was successful.

BOOK REVIEW: Bronson - Street Vigilante: Streets of Blood

As can be read in my review of the first BRONSON book, BLIND RAGE, I was somewhat disappointed with the first of this weird, unconnected, three-book series. I found BLIND RAGE to possess a main character who was not only unsympathetic, but downright loathsome, and there were tones of strong racism and homophobia that went beyond mere character PoV.

However, I knew that Len Levinson - a veteran writer of more than 80 books under countless pen names - wrote STREETS OF BLOOD, and so I gave this second volume a try. None of the three BRONSON books are related in any way beyond the premise that a guy named Bronson becomes a vigilante after his family is killed by criminal scum. In SoB, Bronson is a high-powered businessman living in a penthouse apartment in Manhattan, after moving his business to New York several years ago, when his wife and children were killed by muggers.

Unlike the Bronson of the first book, this Bronson is a war hero, a former Captain in the Green Berets who'd served with distinction in Vietnam. He's smart and capable and ruthless to his enemies, but he also fights to protect and defend the other innocents out there. While the first Bronson really didn't care about anyone else, and was fine with collateral damage, SoB's Bronson hunts criminals not for revenge, but to clean the scum from the streets so they can't harm anyone else. This change in characterization goes a long way towards making him a more sympathetic character while still maintaining a badass attitude.

Also unlike the first book in the series, the point of view shifts between Bronson, Jenkins - the detective who first suspects Bronson of being a vigilante - and several other minor characters, such as Rinaldi, a crooked cop, as well as various victims and criminals. Some readers dislike this kind of PoV switching, and I think it can be handled badly at times, but here it works pretty well, and I think it is a trademark of many Levinson novels. It works best, in my mind, to build the rich atmosphere of the seedy 1970s New York City that the story is set in, a place Levinson knows very well. You can smell the exhaust, taste the cheap liquor and greasy food, and feel the gritty pavement underneath your feet. It goes a long way towards immersing the reader in the story.

As for the plot, it is pretty straightforward. Bronson kills four rapists in Central Park with a sawn-off shotgun, then eacapes, but is stopped by Jenkins. He's questioned, but since Bronson looks like a well-to-do businessman, Jenkins lets him go, figuring this guy couldn't possibly be a vigilante killer. But when the victim of the rape describes her savior as someone who matches Bronson's description, and later changes her story after Bronson visits her in the hospital and asks her to help conceal his identity, Jenkins becomes suspicious. As Bronson continues to kill and Jenkins closes in, he has a change of heart - Bronson is skillful and disciplined, and he doesn't harm innocents. Jenkins makes the decision to just let Bronson do his thing, as long as no one gets hurt who doesn't deserve it. While this does sound ludicrous, consider that the original DEATH WISH has a similar outcome - both the book and the movie - where the cops tacitly agree to look the other way, to one degree or another.

However, things go sour when one of the hoodlums Bronson kills is the nephew of Scarlotti, a mob boss with a lot of weight. Scarlotti's sister demands justice, so he begins to hunt down the vigilante, and eventually learns of Bronson's identity. There are some attacks and counter-attacks, and as things come to a head, Jenkins actually teams up with Bronson to take out Scarlotti, after the mob boss has a cop killed. This was a pretty cool, unforeseen turn of events, since before, Jenkins came off as something of a jerk. But when he goes "rogue", he develops a lot more of a backbone.

I also can't review this book without talking about the sexual content that pervades the novel. Levinson is great at maintaining a semi-sleazy vibe throughout the book, but it is never gratuitous or offensive. Characters have sexual drives, and sometimes those drives influence their behaviors. Bronson gets seduced by his next-door neighbor, a young woman who is a professional model. Bronson is reluctant at first, having remained faithful to the memory of his dead wife for years, but he finally comes to the conclusion that she wouldn't want him living alone and lonely for the rest of his life. Jenkins also has a brief extra-marital affair with a woman who tends bar at one of Scarlotti's joints, and we learn a little about the mob boss' own sexual appetites. Levinson's characters live in a world where both the bad guys and the good guys check out women, and occasionally get checked out themselves, and that's okay. I find it adds a layer of reality that's often missing in Men's Adventure novels, where the characters are either bizarrely chaste or outrageously promiscuous.

In conclusion, this was a fun read, and a welcome change of pace from the first BRONSON title. The third and final book, SWITCHBLADE, is on its way to me as I type this, and I'll be sure to review it as soon as possible.