The Butcher #4: Blood Debt -- Stuart Jason

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.

Mystery Solved, Thanks to Ennis Willie

So I get up this morning and check my email, and there's a message from none other than Ennis Willie, the author of the Sand novels and many other great hardboiled crime novels from the Sixties. Once I calmed down my Inner Fanboy ("I got an email from Ennis Willie? How cool is that?"), I realized that he had given me the answer to a question I asked the other day in my post about the first novel in the Butcher series. Here are Ennis Willie's comments, posted here with his kind permission.

As a faithful follower of your Blog my interest was especially captured by your discussion about who wrote the first Butcher novel "Kill Quick or Die".

The author was an old friend of mine named James "Doc" Dockery, who had been writing novels for Lancer Books under the name Stuart Jason. I don't know how many books he wrote in the Butcher series or how Stuart Jason became a house name, but I can verify the first book. I recall sitting in his apartment here in Atlanta while he discussed his plot for a spy novel. The novel was going to start with his spy landing in Cairo, Egypt and taking a cab to the Shepherd Hotel. I said a name like the Shepherd Hotel didn't sound much like Egypt to me, and he explained that the hotel was real, that he had spent a lot of time in the area and had stayed at the hotel and was familiar with it and other local landmarks. I will add that the character at the time owed more allegiance to James Bond and Matt Helm than to Sand.

I've been out of touch with Doc for a long time, but a more likable guy would be hard to find. He used to spend long stretches of time in Mexico, then rush back to the U.S. to catch up on what was going on. He was always trying to drag me down there with him, and looking back on it now I'm surprised I never found time for at least one trip. With this in mind, I just tackled my filing system (old stuff on bottom / new stuff on top) looking for something on paper from the period. What I found was a letter he wrote me from Mexico about a year before the first Butcher Novel. The first paragraph gives a good picture of him I think.

"Dear Ennis:I just finished another masterpiece for posterity and am spending the day writing letters, and since your name is at the top of the list, you're one of the first to be afflicted by my devastating wit and sagacious pearls of wisdom. Seriously, I just want to talk to a friend who can answer me in English. Here in Tuxpan I am one lone gringo amongst sixty-five thousand Mexicans and it gets real hairy sometimes for lack of a familiar word."

I'm not familiar with James Dockery and haven't been able to find anything about him on the Internet, but the books Ennis mentions that Dockery was writing for Lancer as Stuart Jason must be a series of plantation novels that came out in 1969 and 1970: BLACK LORD, BLACK MASTER, BLACK HERCULES, and BLACK REBEL. They were reprinted by Manor Books about ten years later, still under the Stuart Jason name but with some of the titles changed. I have only one of them, the Manor edition DELTA STUD, which was originally BLACK HERCULES, and I've never read it.

Flipping through the Butcher novels I have, the style in most (but not all) of them seems to match Dockery's style in the first book, KILL QUICK OR DIE. I'm confident that he was the main author on the series until Mike Avallone took it over with #27. But I plan to read some of the others just to make sure.

In the meantime, if any of you know anything else about James Dockery, speak up. And many, many thanks to Ennis Willie for the information he's provided.