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.

Come Watch Him Die -- Stuart Jason

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.

Kill Quick or Die -- Stuart Jason

This is the first book in the Butcher series, one of the many men’s adventure series that sprang into being following the success of the Nick Carter and Executioner novels. The Butcher ran from 1970 to 1982, with a total of 35 books over that dozen years. The only ones from the series I’d ever read were the final nine, which were written by Michael Avallone under the Stuart Jason house-name. Avallone and I were corresponding regularly at the time, and there’s even a mention of me and my first novel TEXAS WIND in one of his later Butcher novels.

The origins of this series seem to owe something to the Daniel Port novels by Peter Rabe and the Sand novels by Ennis Willie. Bucher (I don’t think we ever get a first name for the character) is an orphan who is raised in a foundling home in Knoxville, Tennessee, becomes a member of the Mob as a young man, rises through the ranks to become a Syndicate big shot – then turns his back on his fellow gangsters and walks away, like Port and Sand. Naturally, the Mob vows vengeance on him and puts a bounty on his head, leading to numerous attempts on Bucher’s life and setting him up for a war against the Mafia. (Hmm, where have we heard that phrase before?) Whoever created the Butcher series doesn’t stop there, though. Not content to write a Mack Bolan clone, the author has Bucher recruited by a top-secret government organization known as White Hat. He receives the code name Iceman and is sent out on all sorts of secret agent-type missions. So what we have here is a deliberate cross between the Executioner and Nick Carter, and obviously the blend was a success, at least for a while.

All that back-story takes place before the first novel in the series, KILL QUICK OR DIE. In this one Bucher is sent to bring in a defecting Chinese Communist scientist named Dr. Fong who has invented some new super-duper gizmo. The actual gadget is purely a McGuffin and has nothing else to do with the plot. The Chinese don’t want Fong defecting to the West, though, so instead of sending agents of their own to track him down, they hire the Mafia to kill him. (You can’t worry too much about logic in a book like this.) In the course of trying to find Dr. Fong and save him from being assassinated, Bucher encounters a couple of other evil Syndicate plots and sets out to put the kibosh on them, too. We get some globe-trotting – from Atlanta to Cairo to Tel Aviv and back to Atlanta – and lots of politically incorrect, over-the-top action scenes. It’s all extremely goofy and written in a very distinctive style. I wouldn’t exactly call this book good, but I will say that I had a lot of fun reading it and I might even read some more of the series.

The authorship of the non-Avallone Butcher books is open to debate. The veteran Western author Lee Floren is supposed to have written at least two of them (#10 THE DEADLY DOCTOR and #11 VALLEY OF DEATH, according to the listing of Floren’s novels in TWENTIETH CENTURY WESTERN WRITERS), and some bibliographers attribute all the non-Avallone titles to him. I suppose it’s possible, but KILL QUICK OR DIE doesn’t read at all like Floren’s work to me. The style in some of the later books is different, leading me to believe that at least two authors besides Avallone worked on this series. I’d like to know who wrote this one, because it’s really like nothing else I’ve ever read before.