I hadn't read one of these books in a while, so when a couple of comments about the series cropped up on Rara-Avis recently, I was prompted to dig out the next one in the stack. I don't own a copy of #3, so I'm skipping to #4 -- not that it really matters.
The Butcher, as I'm sure you'll remember, is a former crime boss named Bucher -- "the only man to quit the Syndicate and live!" (Well, with the exceptions of Ennis Willie's Sand and Peter Rabe's Daniel Port, of course.) After leaving the Mafia he becomes a secret agent working for a mysterious government organization called White Hat. His assignment this time around is to find out who's using guided missiles in a gigantic extortion scheme. All he knows is that the sinister mastermind behind the plot calls himself the King of Spades. Bucher's assignment takes him from Miami to Paris to Morocco and finally back to New York, where he has his final showdown with the King of Spades. Along the way he has to deal with the usual bewildering array of plot elements that finally come together to make sense, sort of.
Like the other early books in the series, this one was written by James Dockery. His bizarre, melodramatic style is unmistakable. But to be honest, the charm of his over-the-top prose is starting to wear a little thin for me, or maybe this just isn't one of the better entries in the series. It isn't helped by the fact that for long sections of the book, not much happens, especially in Bucher's Moroccan trip which seems endless. Despite that, I enjoyed the book because, just like the others I've read by Dockery, it's like nothing else you'll ever encounter in fiction. I'll definitely read more of them . . . but if you give the series a try, it's a good idea to space them out.
4 comments:
I read them years ago. If I remember correctly, it always annoyed me that, in a dangerous situation, he was constantly holstering his gun and drawing every time he needed to use it. It was like a wild west gun fight . It has been so long ago that I may be confusing it with another series though.
James, I saw quite a few of The Butcher books in a Half Price Books store I was in today, but not #3 . I debated whether to buy the first in the series, but ended up not getting it. I have several other series that I am trying to read.
Danny
These series of books seem very exciting. Although it fells in very obvious cliches that appears in most of the pulp fictions. But precisely those are the things that we love of pulps. Buy Viagra Viagra
I like very much this author and all his works. I hope to get this in some place but I think that it would be a kind of difficult. Thanks for posting it.
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