This is the second book in the long-running men’s adventure series The Butcher. Thanks to Ennis Willie, we now know that the first book in the series was written by James Dockery under the house-name Stuart Jason, and after reading COME WATCH HIM DIE, I’m convinced that it was written by Dockery as well, as the style in both books is identical.COME WATCH HIM DIE finds Bucher, the Syndicate overlord who quit the Mafia, still working for the mysterious government agency White Hat. For most of the book, the plot seems to be a hopelessly muddled mess involving a Syndicate plan to kidnap important politicians and substitute look-alikes in their place, a Mafia flunky with a photographic memory who’s hiding from his former bosses, mysterious mass deaths in Mexico, vengeance-crazed Nazis, assorted beautiful women, an albino dwarf, and a Mike Fink-like character from the Louisiana swamps who calls himself the Bull Bassoon, whose showdown with the Butcher provides the best scenes. Somewhat surprisingly, by the end Dockery manages to tie all those elements together into a reasonably coherent plot, providing along the way a number of wild, over-the-top action scenes and lines the like of which you won’t read anywhere else. For example:
Everything else you could doubt, including fingerprints, but man, you didn’t argue with a politician’s foreskin. It wasn’t the vogue this season.
They prowled the city’s night with blood-lustful eagerness to kill; hot-eyed, nerves taut, trigger fingers itchy and palms aching to know the assuaging backjolts of death. Through the mind of both a single urge throbbed in rhythm: “Kill the Butcher! Kill the Butcher! Kill the Butcher!”
Love it or hate it, Dockery’s prose is like nothing else. And as far as I’m concerned, even though I recognize its excesses and wouldn’t want a steady diet of it, I’d rather read a book like this with a distinctive voice than any of a dozen bland, by-the-numbers thrillers that all sound like they were written by the same person, no matter who the author is.
2 comments:
I agree, James. Now I wish I'd bought more of those books back when they were being published.
Sounds very interesting. Based on the character name Bull Bassoon I know I've read this, but can't remember a single detail about it. Must get back to these - it seems now that Dockery is behind the Buchers that were translated in Finnish in the early eighties.
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