Vintage sleaze on the way from Lawrence Block & Donald E. Westlake!

In October, Subterranean Press will publish an omnibus containing the three "adults only" novels jointly written by Lawrence Block & Donald E. Westlake. Titled Hellcats and Honeygirls, this 400-page collection will include A Girl Called Honey (Midwood, 1960) and So Willing (Midwood, 1960) -- written by "Sheldon Lord" (Block) and "Alan Marshall" (Westlake) -- as well as Sin Hellcat (Nightstand, 1962), which was credited to "Andrew Shaw." All three have been out of print for nearly five decades.


Hellcats and Honeygirls
by Lawrence Block & Donald E. Westlake
(pre-order for October 2010)

Dust Jacket Illustration by Glenn Orbik

Trade: $30
ISBN: 978-1-59606-303-7
Length: 400 pages


Meanwhile, one of Westlake's sexy solo quickies from the same period has recently resurfaced in a digital format. The novel is called Campus Doll (Monarch, 1961), it was originally credited to "Edwin West," and if you have an Amazon Kindle reader it's available for download HERE for only $5.99.

HUNT AT THE WELL OF ETERNITY -- A Tall & Uncharted Peaks Reek-View

Here’s Tomb Gabriel Hunt, Adventurer, Explorer & Archaeology Whiz Kid!

Hunt At the Well of Eternity -- A Tall & Uncharted Peaks Reek-View

by

The Keeper of the Pit

Ah yes, so yet an udder, I SAID another day ghouls “B,” dangit, goes by as I sit in reektirement down here on the beach in Boo!-muda, trying to hide out from the mold lady. What, fear reader, you never knew the Keep even HAD a mold lady, or that there ever was such a scumly creature? Yeah, smell, glad to slay, there is undead a Keeper-eccch! And there’s tombs, er, times I wish I never even nude her.

Big butt, it’s a boo!-tiful day: cloudy, rainy, the eeek!-caisonal scream of some stuPit tourist Snarky, my trained shark, is putting the bite on before he drags it down to the big fin-ish.

And spooking of big finishes, howl about a big begin ish? The reason? Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime has come up with a new line of books, a continuing adventure series he invented his own self, called “Hunt For Adventure.” I have the first one, Hunt At the Well of Eternity, fright here in sandy hand. Promised paperbacks will be ghost hosted under the Gabriel Hunt house name, and actually, definitely not hackually, written by such fine creative typers as, for starters, James Reasoner, Nicholas Kaufmann and Raymond Benson. Not to mention Hard Case Crimette Christa Faust giving it the ole Money Shot, meaning of curse David J. Schow can’t be too far behind in Gun Work-ing one up of eeek!-qually high calibre. Way I get it, Charles created the swashbuckly treasure-Hunter, outlined the way in, and found the awe-prose-priate authors who more than know what it means to do Ardai.

Then again, maybe I shoulda said “awe prose pirates.” What we have here is a return to the glory days of pulp adventurers like Doc Savage taking on mortal villains, such as pirates to be Pacific, and/gore sinister supernatural types, often Oriental, working their Majii eck, or fighting off The Monsters by finding lost lands of terror full of gigantic prehistoric beasts made to set any young boy’s adventurous heart to dinosauring…


In fact, the Keep himself was there when Bantam Books of the ‘60’s began reprinting the original Doc run. Still got ‘em all, and believe me, I haunt going political atall when I look at those covers and go “Oh, Bama!”


As to covers, all’s Well with Hunt’s first adventure, with art by Hard Case Crimer Glen Orbik, and the GH website features his work on the next six, check ‘em out. Then run to yer loco bookstore and pick up GH #1. The cover, in true pulp fashion, has: a) aeorodynamically towering cliffs in the distance, b) jungle below through witch to bungle, see!) a scantily clad babe surely to be at some point, ahem, bound for adventure, d) a river below to witch our e) f)ighting hero wishes to send our bad guy by two fistily cuffing the g)oonly villain gazing down fearfully at said river from on h)igh. All this, naturally, is happening upon a i) yi yi! chasmly rope bridge. Butte of curse there is, cuz in this kinda tale, be it manned byDoc Savage, Indy Jones or Edgar Rice jungle heroes who’d never live in mere burrows, there’s gotta be a rope bridge. It’s, like, a pulp or pulp Weird Hero impersonator’s major hang-up!

Okay, so I was wuh-wuh-wrong about our hero being two-fisted. He is that, but as scene here and throughout, he’s also tomb-fisted. Guy loves smashing into tombs like he loved his very Mummy. Plus, like Doc Savage, he is also independently wealthy, in that young Gabe is of the globe-hoppin’ Hunt Foundation in a family way. As of this book, though, we have of as yet no idea if said big buck$ has led Hunt, like some of his illustrious fellow adventurers, to build himself this huge money bin that he can dive into and throw golden plunder up in the air and watch it rain upon his head as he savagely cries “Mayan, all Mayan!”

As opposed to Clark Savage, Jr., our man Hunt is not only an international man of mystery but also a feller who knows his way aROWLnd women. And they seem to like him, lick thighs. Hey, so what if he’s a Doc S. in modern garb or naughty, who sez Gabe Hunt has to live like a Monk? Bedsides, he’s a man of the Double O’decade, and he dresses to the nines.

This tomb out, Gabe’s adventure is ghosted by James Reasoner, he of many a Mike Shayne mystery, Westerns and Civil War histories, and that’s a shy low count, I’ll Grant you. Have no fear, though, for lack of leers…by page four a menacing waiter is, uh, pointing his, er, pistol directly between a girl’s “ample breasts,” and any perv who thought along those lines back in Doc’s day woulda soon found himself in a little establishment in upstate New York. Although afterward it might only be as a citizen he’d be UP standing.

Book one, page one we have Hunt at a swanky function in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wherein he spies one of the most beautiful women he’s ever seen heading his way. Or, at lust, he thinks his way. Turns out she’s beaming in on Gabe’s more timidly-inclined brother. Okay, Gabe’s new to us all. But his brother? We’ve all hung with him. Oh no? Wait till I tell ya his name. It’s Hunt, Michael Hunt. Yep, Mike Hunt, the hairy guy we all knew in thigh drool. And despite the unfurtunate name, the guy could come in handy in, say, Adventure #8 if it’s the “Hunt Fur The Golden Fleece.”


One thing ‘bout the Hunt boys, round them things happen fast. ‘Pears the gal in quest-in’ bares, I SAID bears a wrapped bundle that quickly becomes the McGuffin for a pitchered battle between ruffians in waiterly disguise and our forces of good and true. Woman’s named Mariella Montez, she looks the parts, and what she’s got on her formation for the Hunts’ Foundation is really a mysterious whiskey bottle wrapped in rather old cloth. Bad guys, of curse, know hexactly howl old it all is, it’s from the American War between the States, and they intend to treat its bearer none too Civil Lee. Meaning in no short time there’s fights and gunplay and the subsequent kidnapping of Maria M. before either of the Hunt boys ever get to know her, hardly. And it haunt just their hearts, it’s also the bottle that gets shattered.

Whatever reekmains in the broken bottle isn’t whiskey, and that’s the alcohol truth. Fact, it doesn’t seem to be much of anything. About here’s where we learn Mike H. lives up and down to his name: he’s there for scientific explanation AND X position.. As in, he’ll do the research while Gabe does the dames in danger bit. And sure enough, unlike the “whiskey,” Gabe in no squirt odor:

Has a car crash and burnfest on the Queensboro Bridge, witch doesn’t cause him all that much spanic. Guess he already knows traffic to the airport can be just plane terrible.

Has a down in Flori-DUH airboat ride become a blast of a gun battle, if that’s alright bayou.

Engages in even more gun blazing once he gets to the site of a Civil War battlefield. You see, that cloth of Maria’s? It’s going to eeek!-ventually be seen as what it is, a map to untold wonders of, perhaps, plunder. And it will be worthy of much rebel yellin’, of that any civil or uncivil warrior can be Sher, man!

Along the lay, Hunt comes upon a museumly maiden named Cierra, and about the time they’ve started to, uh, figure things out the violence gets even more Cierra-ous. Oh, and there’s more chases. And romance leading to places wild and forbidden as if on thigh Sierra’s. Hunt may be a man of his and our time, but I get the feeling he has this sordid thing down to a fine Bogart, X-actly.

Where do Hunt and Cierra moistly, uh, end up? Guatemala, as pursued by the master villain who arranged Maria’s kidnapping and knows what that bottle Kongtained, and he has the divine, perhaps never dyin’ Miss MM to help him find the source before Hunt does. And while the villain’s rich, he’s the mad ass Midas type wants to be richer than Goldfinger, by gold and sonny Croesus. Ah, gunbutt does he reckon with the mighty Hunt’s Colt finger? And what does all this have to hoodoo witch a batcha Civil War hold-outs who fled from Georgia to south of the border and whatever they discovered in the gorges, ya? Hey, I gotta hold some stuff back, ya don’t wanna know everything that happens all that approximately, I SAID Appomattox Lee!

So here’s hoping Hunt At the Well is but the first of many trips down time-lost trails to unknown, now found lands. Book was simply purr fit fur on such a fine lay on the beach day. Why, fright now, even as we spook, I’m watchin’ sweet and lovely beachbathers every bite as lovely as Maria and Cierra stroll by with a thong in their parts. Find myself thinkin’ upon finding myself my own lust land full’a Shamballadies all bustin’ out with treasured chests and….

Oh hell, I know that yell! Howl did she ever find me? It’s the friggin’ Keeper-eccch charging down the beach at me, scattering babes every witch way, ground trembling as sandcastles fall like forbidden temples in far off lands of rich and plenty to her bitchin’ plenty! Bitch reekminds me, fear reader, I gotta Hunt anudder place to hide! Just my Shangri-luck, dammit, the ole Keep’s gotta fly from She Who Must Be Ugggggh Splayed. (She? IT! Even those time-tossed Civil War guys would rather say the H. with it than ride her haggard!)

Gabriel Hunt will return in...

Jerry recommends a few pulp paperbacks

Death Takes a Coffee Break

Kiss the Blood Off My Neck

The Corpse Came Gift Wrapped

The Haunted Fallout Shelter

The Nose Comb Caper

The Case of the Homicidal Homing Pigeon

The Bulletproof Bikini

from IT'$ ONLY MONEY (1962)

MURDER ON LOCATION by "George Kennedy"

George Kennedy won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1968 for COOL HAND LUKE and was the only actor to appear in all four of the popular, star-studded AIRPORT thrillers of the 1970s, but today he’s probably best known for playing Captain Ed Hocken alongside Leslie Nielsen and O.J. Simpson in THE NAKED GUN comedies. An amiable guy in interviews, with a reputation as a hard-working and dependable actor, I’ve always found him a welcome addition to any motion picture or TV show, even when he’s taking bear-sized bites out of the scenery (FOOLS’ PARADE, anyone? How about that dual role in HOTWIRE?). An avid reader for years, Kennedy supposedly turned novelist in the early ‘80s and penned two paperback mysteries that were published by Avon, Murder on Location (1983) and Murder on High (1984). Casting himself in the lead role as amateur sleuth and setting the action against the backdrop of the movie industry, Kennedy came up with a pair of entertaining celebrity whodunits and even peppered them with well known actors in supporting roles and cameos.

Kennedy actually leaves most of the detective work in Murder on Location to his good friend Mike Corby, an ex-New York City cop whose investigation and eventual capture of the dreaded “Park Avenue Rapist” back in the ‘70s was the basis for the Al Pacino smash hit BADGE OF HONOR; like his real-life counterparts Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, whose high-profile drug busts inspired THE FRENCH CONNECTION, the fictional Corby successfully parlayed his years in the NYPD into a second career as a technical advisor and character actor in Hollywood. Murder on Location puts Kennedy and Corby in Mexico for the filming of THE GODLESS, a $30 million Western starring newcomers Blossom Foster and Alex Keglmeyer and a slew of veterans ranging from Dean Martin, Glenn Ford and Mariette Hartley to Raquel Welch, Genevieve Bujold and special guest Yul Brynner. The production has Oscar written all over it, but when crew members start turning up dead -- either killed in mysterious "accidents" or murdered outright -- it becomes apparent that someone doesn't want THE GODLESS to ever get finished. The bodies pile up quickly, as do the suspects: the snotty TV gossip show host, the Texas oil millionaire who's signing the checks, the uncooperative local police chief, the gay matador, the mother of teen glamour girl Blossom Foster, Corby's new flame Meredy -- practically anyone who set foot on the set could be the killer, Kennedy and Corby included. When both the producer and director die and Kennedy is recruited by the studio to take over the picture, Corby tries to lure the killer out of hiding by calling a phony press conference to announce the killer's identity.

It ain't Agatha Christie but it certainly is a lot of fun, especially if you're a movie buff who grew up watching Kennedy in action during his peak years (Fans of THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT will get a charge out of Clint Eastwood's cameo appearance). And just like Crime on My Hands and Stranger at Home -- the two mysteries credited to actor George Sanders but ghost written by others (Craig Rice and Leigh Bracket, respectively) -- Kennedy's celebrity mysteries weren't written by him at all. The general consensus is that mystery novelist Walter J. Sheldon penned both of them. He did a great job, because I really believed I was inside the mind of George Kennedy for most of Murder on Location, especially during passages like this one:

When we arrived at the location area the caterers already had the breakfast fires burning in the big truck, and we lined up and gave our orders -- for me, a bacon and egg sandwich with lots of onions. The onions were an indulgence; they unsettle my stomach, but I love them and, what the hell, on location one tends to be a little reckless.

Onions so early in the morning, George? I hope you packed your Breath Asure!

SUMMER CAMP by Richard Woodley

Richard Woodley is the go-to writer for paperback adaptations of sports-related movies -- he’s novelized the BAD NEWS BEARS series, SLAP SHOT, BLUE CHIPS, and THE FISH THAT SAVED PITTSBURGH, among others -- so I shouldn’t have been too surprised to learn that his young adult novel Summer Camp is also a novelization. Unlike all the others he’s written over the years, however, this one was adapted from a script that never got filmed. With the Bill Murray star vehicle MEATBALLS cleaning up at the box-office and LITTLE DARLINGS, GORP, STUCKEY’S LAST STAND and the R-rated Chuck Vincent effort SUMMER CAMP picking clean whatever was left, the last thing anyone needed during the 1979-‘80 movie season was another comedy set in a summer camp. Based on a screenplay by former actor Michael Norell (Captain Stanley on Emergency!) and published by Dell in April of 1979 -- two months before MEATBALLS hit theaters -- Summer Camp is aimed more at younger kids, relying on swirlies, snuggies and bad breath jokes for its laughs instead of sex, drugs and bathroom humor. Why it never got made is anyone’s guess, although I suspect the producer(s) took one look at the overcrowded playing field and decided to forfeit (Golan & Globus of Cannon Films killed their proposed camp comedy SUMMER SCORE around the same time). Summer camps would soon become the preferred mise-en-scène for massacres rather than mirth thanks to FRIDAY THE 13TH.

Camp Smilin’ Through, celebrating its thirty-third -- and possibly last -- summer of operation, has been losing more and more of its clientele each year to the larger, more modern and affluent camps in the area. In order to show the late owner’s greedy son that Smilin’ Through can still turn a profit (and prevent him from selling the land to condo developers), camp director Jack "Steamboat" Scarborough and his wife Annie "Tugboat" invite twenty tough, rowdy, mostly minority orphans to stay at the camp on the state’s dime. “My name is Luscious Moncrief, and I can whup any honky in this camp,” snarls the first orphan off the bus. White flight reduces the number of original kids to twenty by the next morning, creating two equal factions of children who are at each other’s throats until they settle their differences during the expected “Field Day” sports competitions (the camp equivalent of the “senior prom” climax in high school movies) and ultimately learn to respect one another. Myriad subplots include the search for a missing youngster, Steamboat’s awkward relationship with his teenage son Chet, a budding romance between two kids chosen to edit the camp’s newspaper, and “Crazy Wilson and his Hound of Death,” ghosts that supposedly haunt the surrounding woods but are actually a wise old Native American and his friendly dog, who live in a nearby cave. Two snuggies and a prolonged swirlie go to anyone who hasn’t already guessed whose land deed saves the camp at the end.

The target audience in 1979 would’ve enjoyed Summer Camp as a movie, but Woodley’s adaptation is hampered by the same flaw that plagues most comedy novelizations: it takes too many words to set up and execute what is visually a two-second cutaway or sight gag, so by the time the readers get to the end of the paragraph, they’ve already guessed the punchline. On top of that, Woodley’s saddled with wayyyyy too many characters from the first page on. It’s hard to take Steamboat seriously when he complains about having only thirty-three kids staying at the camp; at least he doesn’t have to slog through three chapters of backstory for all thirty-three of them, plus every single camp counselor! In a book that’s barely 175 pages long, it takes the first thirty to get everyone to the camp, and when the orphans arrive at the halfway point we get introduced to twenty more kids. And like summer camps themselves, the book is a breeding ground for nicknames, so the reader has a dozen or more of those to contend with as well. In a film this wouldn't even be an issue, but for what’s supposed to be a quick-read YA novel it’s a pain in the ass. To Norell’s credit, he handles the racial aspects of the story honestly, openly and fairly by giving the orphans as much humor, depth and intelligence as the other kids. I also like the fact that Steamboat is a likable, three-dimensional character when too often the camp directors in these movies are either tyrants or buffoons. Summer Camp had the potential to be a pretty good movie -- certainly no worse than MEATBALLS, and a good deal better than the others. File this one under “m” for missed opportunity.

THE ICEMAN #1: BILLION DOLLAR DEATH

Last month I tore apart the first book in the Black Cop series by Holloway House hack Joseph Nazel (writing under the pseudonym “Dom Gober”), so I had pretty low expectations when I sat down the other day to slog through Billion Dollar Death, number one in his Iceman series, published the same year (1974) under his real name. It’s better plotted and more imaginative than Black Cop, but ultimately witless garbage more offensive than any so-called blaxploitation movie of the period; instead of a Green Beret, cop or private investigator, Nazel’s action hero is a Harlem pimp who operates a high-tech whorehouse in the desert fifty miles outside Las Vegas. Since prostitution isn’t a crime in Nevada, the Iceman was considered an ”entrepreneur” and these books passed with a clean bill of health while movies like THE MACK and WILLIE DYNAMITE (in which the criminal protagonists are served heaping portions of humble pie at the end) sparked public outrage and a backlash from the NAACP.

Henry Highland West is “The Iceman,” who went from being the youngest and most successful pimp in New York to the owner and operator of The Oasis, a multimillion dollar adult fantasyland of pleasure and recreation that’s equal parts Caesar’s Palace casino, Disney World hotel and Bunny Ranch brothel. Because he’s an arrogant s.o.b. who every criminal in the country would love to cut down to size, the Iceman has equipped The Oasis with more security than Fort Knox and even has the whores he employs doing double duty as his private army of martial arts-trained guards! But even with the guards, dogs, closed-circuit TV, electronic sensors, radar, electrified fences and patrolling helicopters supposedly keeping the place safe, someone still manages to detonate a half ton of TNT under the bed of Mafia chieftain Mario Valducci as he enjoys the services of the Iceman’s favorite employee, the luscious Beverly [insert “bang” joke here]. Super pissed that his super security has been super breached, Super Henry – er, I mean The Iceman – sets out to nab the ones responsible for making him look like a chump and, um, for blowing up a fine piece of moneymaking tail like Beverly. Main suspects are Johnny Palermo, Valducci’s injured bodyguard, and Angelo Pettreno, next in line behind Valducci to take over the west coast Mafia operations. Next is J.J. Brown, a friend of the Iceman’s from back in New York, who is working off gambling debts by singing in The Oasis lounge, and his dizzy girlfriend Gloria, one of the Iceman’s former whores who blew the stable for the “straight life.” Let’s not forget Umoto, the prime minister of a small African nation, who’s a guest at the Oasis and has a diamonds-for-weapons exchange going with a seedy U.S. senator.

At first glance, Billion Dollar Death seems to be an attempt by Holloway House to create the black equivalent of Pinnacle’s adventure paperbacks, but it’s too shallow and clumsily written to be of much interest to fans of the Destroyer or Penetrator novels. I have the strange suspicion that Nazel never bothered to read or even pick up one of the Pinnacle books before banging out this tripe, and instead based his series on the Mego toy commercials that were on TV at the time. The description of the Iceman’s subterranean surveillance control room – called The Brain Center – reminded me of the deck of the Starship Enterprise, only not the one from the TV series but the Mego toy version that one of my friends owned (I went for the Little Rascals clubhouse instead). Holloway House most likely had plans for an Iceman movie, but as pictured on the front and back covers, the character resembles a Mego doll of Jim Brown rather than Jim Brown himself. When a few Mafia gunmen get into a helicopter dogfight with the Iceman, the overlong setpiece is so poorly staged and unbelievable that I kept hoping Nazel would reveal it to be the playacting of two 8-year-old boys running around a backyard with toy helicopters in their hands. Even the cover art is more suitable for Mego or Matchbox toys than the front of an action paperback. Makes you wonder what the series would be like if a couple of kids had created it and not a committee of jaded publishing house editors. Maybe the Iceman would’ve been a real hero instead of a cold-hearted pimp.

DEATH HAS MANY DOORS

Reviewed by Evan C. Price

Ed Hunter was just a teenager when he tracked his father’s killer through Chicago, aided by ex-carny Uncle Ambrose in the Edgar Award-winning Fabulous Clipjoint (1947). Fredric Brown’s Ed and Am Hunter series follows Ed’s development as a professional detective and his transition to adulthood. In The Dead Ringer (1948) uncle and nephew are employed in a traveling carnival and investigate a bizarre series of murders; the heart of the story, however, is Ed’s failed relationship with a young dancer. In The Bloody Moonlight (1949) Ed and Am find work as operatives, and Ed is sent to a small town in southern Illinois to solve his first case without Am’s help. In Compliments of a Fiend (1950) the uncle disappears and Ed is on his own again, searching for Am and trying to determine if he was kidnapped.

Death Has Many Doors (1951) is the fifth novel and the first in which Ed and Am are in business for themselves, as co-owners of Hunter & Hunter Detective Agency. The two are spending a lot of time reading and playing cards when they’re not finding numskulls who skip town in cars that haven't been paid for. Then beautiful young Sally Doerr arrives with a humdinger: she claims Martians are plotting to kill her.

Thinking he's been put on by an associate, Am declines and advises the young woman to see a shrink. Ed, however, is attracted to Sally and after conversation over drinks concludes she’s pretty stable outside of delusions involving little green men. Ed agrees to spend an evening in the woman's apartment for her protection. Following a troubled night on the couch, Ed awakens to find the woman dead - victim of a weak heart. The detective suspects Sally’s heart attack and her fear of being stalked by Martians are connected. Someone (probably human) scared her to death. Then Sally’s sister, Dorothy, shows up at Hunter & Hunter looking for help, claiming she’s had a premonition she will die that evening....

In earlier novels Ed was flawed in interesting ways. Any long-time mystery reader will guess the identity of Am’s kidnapper in Compliments of a Fiend, but it is fun seeing the young operative make mistakes and work under pressure to put it all together. His behavior seemed reasonable considering age and experience.

Why, then, does Ed become a total moron in this book? Haunted by Sally’s death, guilt-ridden even as Am assures him it was beyond his control, Ed allows Dorothy to place both of them in danger after taking so many precautions over the long evening to protect her. When Dorothy finally (predictably) perishes during a midnight swim, I had trouble getting behind a detective so sloppy and stupid.

Brown once told an interviewer that he penned mysteries only to pay the bills, preferring to write science fiction. Though Brown’s whodunits are usually excellent -- including some of the Ed and Am titles -- Death Has Many Doors seems like it was written in a state of boredom. The author’s distinctive conflict of fantasy versus logic has nothing compelling to offer. An extraterrestrial angle isn’t developed beyond creepy phone calls and Ed’s surprise by someone in a Halloween mask. The addition of a hypnotist is a cheat. Even worse, Ed’s theories as to how Sally might have been frightened are smarter and more believable than the actual solution! Small wonder there wouldn't be another Ed and Am novel for eight years.

In 2002 Stewart Masters Publishers issued an anthology collecting the first four books. A second volume never surfaced, and remaining titles -- Death Has Many Doors, The Late Lamented (1959), and Mrs. Murphy’s Underpants (1963) -- are still out of print.

HARRY AND THE BIKINI BANDITS

The title and the Robert McGinnis artwork hooked me, but what made the sale final was the fact that Harry -- as pictured on the cover -- bears more than a passing resemblance to tough guy actor William Smith. Indeed if this had been produced as a movie in the early 1970s, Smith would’ve been perfectly cast as the macho, carefree and conniving Harry Bullmore, a.k.a. Captain Harry Hook, who makes the national press when he sets sail from New York with an all-girl crew in an old bucket called the Jezebel, destination the Bahamas. The news reaches all the way to Peckinpaugh, Nebraska and the eyes of his 17-year-old nephew Clayton Bullmore III. Hungry for action of any kind -- but preferably the female kind -- Clayton leaves home against his father’s wishes and meets up with the Jezebel in Miami, only to find that the five-girl crew has been whittled down to one: his Uncle Harry’s foxy Chinese bedmate, Miss Wong. Luckily, the broken-down Jezebel is such a conversation piece (and aging beach bum Harry a natural chick magnet) that Clayton is soon playing footsy with Charity Smeeton, a blonde British beauty they find adrift in a rubber life raft, and sepia stunner Elvira McGee, the kept woman of a U.S. senator. Meanwhile, Harry is cuckolding the millionaire owner of a hugely popular hamburger franchise, who trails behind the Jezebel in his fully-equipped yacht Charisma.

Author Basil Heatter settles into a relaxed, humorous R-rated groove for the first act, but switches gears around page 60 when Harry’s shady, diminutive business partner Grogan arrives in Nassau and Clayton finds out the two are planning to rip off the new Paradise Island Casino by replacing the freon tanks in the building’s air conditioning unit with nitrous oxide! Heatter is a decent writer but I suspect his real strength was in the pitch; fully cognizant of what was selling books for publisher Fawcett Gold Medal in 1970, he gleefully crammed everything he could into Harry and the Bikini Bandits. Building upon the marina milieu of John D. MacDonald’s popular Travis McGee mysteries, the story is told first-person by a horny 17-year-old, exactly what Lawrence Block had done successfully the same year with his first two pseudonymous Chip Harrison books. The heist is straight out of a Richard Stark novel -- Parker and Grofield had ripped off an island casino a few years earlier in The Handle -- and all the other bells and whistles (beatniks/hippies/dropouts, pot smoking, exotic beauties, interracial sex) had been staples of trash fiction for years. The result is the paperback equivalent of a late ‘60s drive-in movie from American International Pictures, which is pretty much all I wanted from a book titled Harry and the Bikini Bandits in the first place.

THE DESTROYERS

Knowing that I’m a big Walter Hill fan, my buddy Matt Kiernan gave me a battered copy of A.W. Miller’s The Destroyers (Leisure Books, 1980) a few years ago, along with the solid thumbs-up endorsement that it was “like a Walter Hill movie that never got made!” I was skeptical -- the cover art made it look more like a Joe Gage porn flick -- but I smiled and very nicely accepted the generous gift. I was deep into the Ed McBain 87th Precinct books at the time, so The Destroyers was mentally stamped “someday” and then promptly lost in a sea of about three million other paperbacks waiting to be read. Well, “someday” arrived last week, and although I’m not sure I agree with the Walter Hill pitch (“It’s LAST MAN STANDING with Michael Ironside’s mercenaries from EXTREME PREJUDICE!” was the best I could come up with myself), I will say that The Destroyers is never boring.

For veteran San Francisco vice detective Buddy Wells, it started as a missing person case: find the college-age daughter of millionaire land developer Michael Conover, but for God’s sake, keep it as low-profile as possible. Wells tracks her to the Mission District, where he finds the girl strung out on smack and turning tricks. Her outraged father, impressed with Wells’ understanding of the illegal drug influx from Mexico, offers the jaded cop the once-in-a-lifetime chance to take the war against drugs to its source. With unlimited funds at his disposal and no irritants like the U.S. justice system, the U.N. or basic human rights tying his hands, Wells assembles a six-man team of frustrated law enforcement types (ranging from a brilliant FBI surveillance expert and a former Green Beret-turned “Officer Friendly” classroom lecturer to a crazy mountain man of a border agent) to cross into Mexico, infiltrate the drug capital of Culiacán, identify the crime families that have been flooding the U.S. with heroin, destroy their operations and kill as many bad guys as possible.

If there were any copy editors employed by Leisure Books in 1980, it’s safe to say none of them showed up for work the week The Destroyers passed through; I don't think I've seen so many transposed letters, misspellings and other typos together in one mass market paperback in my life. Miller’s a competent hack who never strays from cliché (the sexy senorita who falls in love with one of the Destroyers is named Consuela -- imagine that) or wastes too much brain power on storytelling, to the point where one incredibly lazy bit of plotting produces a very obvious threat to the entire mission that wouldn’t go unnoticed by one halfway intelligent cop, let alone six. There’s no shortage of gunfire, explosions or bullet-riddled bodies, but the rest of The Destroyers is surprisingly PG-rated, confirming my belief that 12-year-old boys were the target audience. The typical Pinnacle action series reader wouldn’t get past the cover anyway.

BLACK COP

The late Joseph Nazel wrote 60 black experience paperbacks for the Holloway House Publishing Company without achieving anything close to the legendary status of their two best-selling authors, Iceberg Slim (Pimp, Trick Baby) and Donald Goines (Never Die Alone, Dopefiend). In 1974, the same year he cranked out The Black Exorcist and six of the seven books in his popular Iceman series under his own name, Nazel penned the first of four novels about L.A. cop James Rhodes under the pseudonym "Dom Gober." The decision to assume an alias for Black Cop could’ve been Holloway House’s due to Nazel’s increased output that year (the reason Goines’ Cry Revenge! and Kenyatta series were published under the "Al C. Clark" sobriquet), but it’s possible that he didn’t want his name anywhere near Black Cop to begin with; it’s a piss-poor effort on just about every level imaginable.

Detective James Rhodes is the titular protagonist, as well as an unmitigated moron. Let’s, for the next several paragraphs, put ourselves in the shoes of this breathtakingly stupid human being and try to understand the pea-brained, round-about way he conducts an investigation. Ready? Here we go.

We are James Rhodes, angry black L.A. cop saddled with a racist white partner, Larry Turner, who hates our guts. We’re on our way to a big drug bust when all of a sudden Turner nervously asks us to pull over to a payphone because he wants to make a call to his wife. So we pull over and let him make the call, and when he gets back in the car he seems even more nervous than he was when he got out. A moment later, as we carefully approach the site of the scheduled drug transaction, we see the three guys we were planning to bust heading for the hills. Hey, ya think someone tipped them off? Before we can rub our chins, frown and go "hmmmm," a gun battle erupts and two of the perps are killed. We take the third perp alive but as we are marching him over to the squad car, that good-for-nothing honky Turner shoots him twice, killing him. "I thought he had a gun," Turner explains clumsily. "I thought he was going to draw down on you. Didn’t you see him move?"

Honestly, no, we didn’t see the perp try anything of the sort -- this unarmed perp, don’t forget, who would’ve revealed not only the name of his supplier but the mole who blew the whistle on the bust -- but it’s comforting to know that at least our racist redneck partner’s got us covered, isn’t it? A few pages later we’re at the station house and on the carpet in front of Captain Graebo (also white and a bigot, but at least he’s honest), who’s apparently seen SHAFT once or twice because he has no problem playing Charles Cioffi to our Richard Roundtree.

"It does look like these dope smugglers are tuned in on us," Graebo says, like the truly swift police captain that he is.

"Yeah," we say, trying not to choke on our own saliva. "I can’t figure it. There’s no way that they were supposed to know that we were on to them. Maybe, it was just a lucky guess on their part."

"I can’t buy that," Graebo tells us. "We’ve got a leak somewhere. A leak that we can’t seem to plug. Every time we get ready to make a raid, they know it. Every time we get ready to so much as sneeze at them, they know it. We might as well throw in the towel and let them have the whole damn city!"

OK, enough of the role-playing. At this point, Rhodes and Graebo -- if they had half a brain between them -- would start going over every single drug bust that went south to see if there are any questionable patterns (like maybe the same rotten cop’s been calling his wife five minutes before all of the raids?). But that’s too much to ask of these knuckleheads. Instead, Graebo decides to send Rhodes into the ghetto under cover to locate the main drug supplier, with the hope that (fingers crossed) he will lead them to the mole inside the department. And Rhodes goes along with this plan, because he never once suspects that Turner is the one who keeps mucking up the drug busts!

As inept as Nazel is in setting up an even halfway believable police procedural, he at least knows that his target audience understands the hardships of inner-city African-Americans. Once the dim-witted investigation relocates to the meanest L.A. streets, with Rhodes (now codenamed "Dark Alley") trying his best to play an average Joe, one or two supporting characters with real-life problems turn up to hold our interest. Rhodes immediately falls for the lovely but troubled Sue, whose brother Roger is a hopeless junkie in debt to Wilson, a flashy local dealer. Wilson is obsessed with Sue and thinks he can parlay Roger’s habit into a roll in the hay with his fine sister. Rhodes and Wilson tangle, as expected, with Rhodes coming out of it the victor; Wilson ends up hiring him as one of his henchmen. Turner, meanwhile, is in cahoots with white syndicate honcho Morrie Slater, who is planning to knock off Wilson and seize control of the ghetto drug trade. From there it’s connect-the-dots, and because the reader knows more than Rhodes every step of the way, none of it is even remotely suspenseful. Beyond the terrible plotting and often embarrassingly bad prose ("He puffed vicariously at the ever-present cigar"), I can't see where Rhodes is a character worthy of one book let alone four. And being the fool who follows the fool, I'm now determined to read the other three!

The DARK ANGEL series - by James D. Lawrence

Starting with the publication of The Bastard in 1974, the incredibly popular “Kent Family Chronicles” by John Jakes was without a doubt the most famous and lucrative deal made by legendary book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel. What started out as something tossed together to capitalize on the approaching U.S. Bicentennial ended up a huge success; eight books were written, three made-for-TV movies were made, and Jakes became the first author to have three bestsellers on the New York Times Book Review lists within a single year. Your public library probably has the whole series...

...reason enough for us to now shift our focus to one of Engel’s less reputable projects from the same time: Dark Angel.

Just as The Baroness series was Engel’s dirt-encrusted knock-off of Modesty Blaise, the Dark Angel was his smutty grab at the box-office success of CLEOPATRA JONES and Pam Grier movies like COFFY and FOXY BROWN. The Dark Angel is sexy private eye Angela Harpe, “one soul sister who made it out of the ghetto” according to the back cover of The Dream Girl Caper, the first of her four adventures “produced” by Engel, written by James D. Lawrence and published by Pyramid Books in 1975. I suspect that Lawrence created this series after spending a weekend on 42nd Street watching blaxploitation flicks and Lee Frost/Bob Cresse sex roughies. If you have any DVDs from Something Weird or Vinegar Syndrome in your collection, I can pretty much guarantee that you will not feel cheated after reading a Dark Angel novel.

As if graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Cambridge wasn’t enough of a ticket out of the ghetto, 25-year-old Angela also studied aikido under the mysterious Master Ichi and -- prior to getting her P.I. license -- was a high fashion model, a thousand dollar a night call girl, and a beat cop for the NYPD! Her successful handling of numerous high profile cases quickly earned her a rep as the best in the business, and the payoffs from the insurance companies have made it possible for her to lounge naked in a Charles Eames chair re-reading Huxley’s After the Fireworks “for the umpteenth time” and listening to Bach fugues while waiting for the next case to stroll through the door of her swank Turtle Bay apartment (What other '70s action paperback series so casually drops names ranging from Felicien Rops, Georges Feydeau and Richard von Krafft-Ebing to Linda Lovelace, Tina Turner and Mort Drucker?).

Although The Dream Girl Caper opens with Angie seducing and then assaulting a Mafia hitman posing as a magazine reporter, the story really kicks into gear at the start of chapter three with the arrival of handsome advertising executive Garth Trent. The rising star at a hot Madison Avenue agency and recently assigned to their important Colt Cigarettes account, Trent is the brain behind the Colt Cash Cache Contest, a $3 million dollar treasure hunt with a quickly approaching deadline for payoff. The only snag in the otherwise successful contest is Trent’s wife Vale, a former super model plagued by nightmares that may or may not be premonitions. Vale seems to know a little too much about the island where the $3 million treasure is to be hidden -- details only Trent and his boss, Quentin Wise, know about -- so Trent hires the Dark Angel to find out if Vale is up to something.

Lawrence started his professional career writing educational short films for the Jam Handy Organization, then moved on to scripting radio shows such as Challenge of the Yukon, Sky King, The Silver Eagle and The Green Hornet before switching to daily comic strips and novels. Although he’s best known as the writer of the James Bond comic strip, a gig he held for almost 20 years, he also penned pseudonymous novels for the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift series, and even came up with two series of his own:

Christopher Cool/TEEN Agent (Grosset & Dunlap, 1967-1969), six hardcover spy adventures for young adults, which he wrote as “Jack Lancer,” and The Man from Planet-X (Pinnacle, 1975-1977), an erotic sci-fi paperback trilogy written by “Hunter Adams.”

More importantly, Lawrence created the nationally syndicated comic strip Friday Foster (Chicago Tribune Syndicate, 1970-1974), in which a bright, beautiful, career-minded African-American woman enters the fashion industry as an assistant to a world-renowned photographer and eventually becomes a globetrotting supermodel.

The physical similarities between Angela and Friday are anything but coincidental, since Lawrence’s collaborator on almost all of the Friday Foster strips, Barcelona-born artist Jorge Longarón, was commissioned by the author to create cover art for the Dark Angel series.

Lawrence has gone on record as saying he preferred the more permissive British daily comic strips to their G-rated American counterparts, and the Dark Angel books read like an author trying to overcompensate with an endless barrage of torture, rape, kinky hardcore sex and racially inflammatory dialogue.

Los Angeles Times - March 18, 1973

He may also have been reacting to the cancellation of the Friday Foster strip and the news that an R-rated FRIDAY FOSTER movie was being made, without his involvement, as a vehicle for Pam Grier.

Whatever the reason, Lawrence came out the winner in the end, since his Dark Angel books are more memorable and much better plotted than Arthur Marks’ disappointing FRIDAY FOSTER adaptation.

Two months after the publication of The Dream Girl Caper in January 1975, the Dark Angel returned in The Emerald Oil Caper (Dark Angel #2). The story begins with Angela being lured into the backseat of a limo by elderly Iranian oil millionaire Xerxes Zagrevi, who first pays her a thousand dollars to sniff her panties and then hires her to break into the hotel room of wildcatter Laidlaw Pike to confirm the existence of oil prospecting maps from Colombia that may or may not be in Pike’s possession. While searching the room later that evening, Angela is interrupted by a man she assumes to be Pike and, pretending to be a prostitute, exhausts him with a quickie before making her escape. The next day she discovers the man she banged in Pike’s room wasn’t Pike at all (“Jesus, Hogie – I think I’ve been raped!”) but someone named Jack Bristol, who was searching the room for different reasons: his father, a petroleum geologist for the Emerald Oil Company, was murdered eight months earlier under mysterious circumstances, and he believes Pike is somehow involved. Bristol hires the Dark Angel to help him get to the bottom of his father's death, while he gets to the Dark Angel's luscious bottom as often as possible. She dons her prostie duds at one point to get closer to a few oil execs, which leads to a lesbian encounter with another call girl and a harrowing torture session at the hands of her former pimp, Longdong Strong. Corrupt NYPD detectives, telefactor robot technology, a wheelchair-bound nature enthusiast, and a hulking manservant named Nemo also figure into this hardboiled-meets-hardcore whodunit.

Published in May of ’75, The Gilded Snitch Caper (Dark Angel #3) opens with Angela being accosted in a crowded midtown elevator by a deliveryman carrying a gun and a potted plant. She easily overpowers him by pulling out his package and squeezing his balls until he spills – er, reveals that he was paid $100 to deliver the Dark Angel to an address in Greenwich Village. Angie finds a key inside the potted plant (after smashing the pot over the hapless deliveryman’s head), then goes downtown to the address where she discovers a mannequin wearing a 24k gold necklace engraved to “Bryony” inside an otherwise vacant apartment. "Bryony" is Bryony Cargill, the missing daughter of newspaper owner/publisher Royce Cargill. Because the Dark Angel’s calling card was mailed to the Cargills and now the Dark Angel herself has arrived at the family’s estate with Bryony’s necklace in her possession, Royce is convinced that Angela is somehow involved in his daughter’s disappearance. When a ransom note shows up demanding $500,000 for Bryony’s safe return -- with a single dyed gold pubic hair included as proof of the kidnapping (Bryony’s boyfriend Derek blushingly confirms to daddy that his little girl did indeed dye the hair down there) -- Royce reluctantly hires Angela to retrieve his daughter under the proviso that if she doesn’t succeed within five days, he’ll turn her over to the FBI as the number one suspect. The second proviso: To ensure that she’s not in cahoots with the kidnappers, Derek must accompany Angela wherever she goes, a caveat that results in many highly descriptive sex passages. Along the way she gets help from her Asian friend Wun Good Fook, bumps heads with a black private eye named James Crow, and in what could be the book’s most offensive sequence -- it’s hard to tell, there are so many -- makes the three imported hit men (a German, a Belgian, and a Rhodesian) who are about to gang rape her draw from a deck of cards to determine their starting positions.

The fourth and final Dark Angel adventure, The Godmother Caper, appeared on bookstore shelves in July 1975. The most convoluted of the series, it begins with a woman named Marilyn Johnson offering $5,000 to Angela if she’ll exact revenge on Carlo Fosca, the mafia soldier who raped her niece. Angela reluctantly accepts and goes to Fosca’s place to beat his ass, only to discover Fosca’s testicles nailed to a wall and the rest of Fosca nowhere in sight. Three button men from the Licata crime family show up looking for Fosca and end up mincemeat after messing with the Dark Angel, who escapes naked down the fire escape and catches a ride home with Jeff, a young man who just happens to be hanging around the alley outside Fosca’s building. It turns out Jeff’s uncle is an art dealer who imported a statue of Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon, for one of the biggest crooks in New York City, Steve Kurgan. Jeff followed Kurgan to a bar where he met with the three Licata thugs, who Jeff then tailed to Fosca’s place. Angie and Jeff soon realize that the statue is missing, and a lot of people seem to be interested in recovering whatever got smuggled into the country inside of it -- including art collector and Wall Street sleaze Roscoe Tazewell, who gives Angie a tour of his ritzy apartment during one amusing sequence. As she admires a den decorated with “canvases ranging from a Perugino madonna to a Jasper Johns, and objects as varied as a bronze horse of the Late Chou Dynasty and a Tiahuanacan ceremonial urn,” Lawrence goes beyond the usual name-dropping into the realm of inside joke:

His den walls were ablaze with a frescoed erotic mural depicting ecdysiast housewives ravaged by satyrs, teen-age debauchery in cars and schools, lust running wild in business offices – obviously the work of one of the brilliant, modern, Spanish school of comic book artists.

“Jorge Longaron?” guessed Angie.

Tazewell beamed. “Right on, my dear!”

The caper ends with Angie collecting a hefty fee from the Columbia Insurance Underwriters, but there's no indication that this would be the final installment in the series.

I could argue some of the points raised in the three paragraphs Kathleen Gregory Klein dedicates to the Dark Angel series in The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre, including her claim that the books “reduce the protagonist to a sexual machine who cooperates in her own objectification,” but when it becomes apparent that research has taken the backseat to a superficial feminist thesis, I yawn and move on. We’re talking about four sleazy paperback originals that were put out during the height of the porno chic era as gritty S&M alternatives to Cleopatra Jones, Coffy and Christy Love. Long out of print, they’ve never been reissued by a mystery press or marketed as mainstream middlebrow reading, and probably never will. They had a target audience, and I'm pretty sure someone writing about gender issues for a university press wasn't it.

More worthy of discussion than the so-called objectification of Angela Harpe (we never forget that she is an extremely intelligent, strong, funny human being) is the backstory Lawrence comes up with to explain her sexual freakiness: Angela was raped repeatedly from age six until well into adolescence by several of her junkie mother’s boyfriends, and then gang-raped on a rooftop as part of a gang initiation when she was ten. This is supposedly why she either shuts down when being sexually assaulted, or feigns enjoyment until an opportunity to gain the upper hand arises.

Complicating the issue is the fact that she also vigorously indulges in consensual sex with a variety of different men and women, some she actually has romantic feelings for. The Dark Angel books go beyond objectification into the realm of sexual psychosis, which makes Angela a fully-drawn character -- also an occasionally unpleasant, deeply disturbed one. In The Dream Girl Caper she urinates on one of her captors after turning the tables on him, while in The Emerald Oil Caper she knocks two of her tormentors unconscious, dresses them in women's underwear and leaves them in an alleyway tied together in a sexual position with soiled sanitary napkins stuffed into their mouths. These moments and others reveal the ugly damage that exists just below the sparkling facade. Dark indeed.

INSIDE BLACK HOLLYWOOD by Carol Speed

"My friends admit I am black, beautiful and sometimes bitchy, but only when the situation calls for it. If like were a painting I'd be in the middle with a cynical little smile on my face and Hollywood in the background. My name is Dorothy Jean Dickerson. If the name isn't familiar to you, my face and figure probably are. I've appeared in a number of 'black' motion pictures -- blaxploitation films some people call them -- and my star is definitely on the rise." So begins Inside Black Hollywood, the first published novel by actress Carol Speed, who starred in THE MACK and a half-dozen other B-movies back in the early '70s, but is mostly known these days for being mentioned in a Quentin Tarantino script (TRUE ROMANCE).

Like so many other African-American actresses of the period, she never got the chance to nab a really good role in a quality motion picture; take away the cool soundtrack, the strong performances, and all the hip dialogue, and THE MACK is a big, fat, funky lemon -- but as a wise man once said, "When you're given a lemon, make lemonade," and Speed really stirs up an icy cold pitcher of the stuff in Inside Black Hollywood. A fictionalized account of the making of THE MACK -- it's called THE CHANCE here, with Ms. Speed telling the whole sordid story through her Dorothy Jean Dickerson persona -- Inside Black Hollywood drops its readers headfirst into the mire of the '70s exploitation movie scene and makes them swim with the sharks for 250 pages. Sure, all the names have been changed to protect the innocent (as well as the guilty, the stoned, and the just-plain-stupid), but you won't need more than your two eyes and a copy of THE MACK to figure out who's who. First and foremost, there's arrogant leading man Henry Worth (Max Julien?), a borderline sociopath scheming to get Dorothy Jean fired from the film so his girlfriend -- bitchy actress Lisa McLaine (Vonetta McGee?) -- can get the role instead. Next on Speed's shit list is producer Gerald Goldfarb (Harvey Bernhard?), who overestimates Worth's box-office worth and insists on kissing his ass instead of Dorothy Jean's (Bernhard also produced Julien and McGee's THOMASINE AND BUSHROD a year later). Then there's the director, Mark Katz (Michael Campus?), who'd rather bone every actress on the set than make a halfway coherent film. Oh, and let's not forget the pathetic, self-pitying starlet Tanya Stevens (Annazette Chase?), who screwed Mark to get a part in the movie -- a part that's getting smaller and smaller with every passing day -- and out-of-control comedian Bubba Johnson (Richard Pryor?), who's on the skids because he told one too many "big dick" jokes in front of little old white ladies in Las Vegas and got his ass kicked out of town by the Mob.

And in the middle of it all is Dorothy Jean Dickerson, our lovely heroine and God's gift to bargain basement cinema, who proves to be almost as obnoxious and egomaniacal as the others. When she isn't fussing over her wardrobe and fighting with her costars, she's either shoveling coke up her nose by the kilo or bitching endlessly about her shitty personal life and alienating everybody around her. Somehow, she manages to tear herself away from the mirror long enough to hook up with Fred Sullivan -- underworld figure, player extraordinaire, and one of the shady Sullivan brothers, who are putting up the money to make the film. Fred's character is based on Frank D. Ward, one of the Ward brothers, who financed most or all of THE MACK; he even appears in the film as himself, during the Players' Ball scene (he's the first runner-up after Goldie for the "Player of the Year" award). Speed obviously fell head over heels in love with Frank Ward, judging by the way Dorothy Jean literally (and repeatedly) soaks her panties at the mere mention of Fred Sullivan's name. If you remember the dedication that appears at the beginning of THE MACK ("In memory of a MAN -- Frank D. Ward"), you'll know exactly where their relationship is headed.

"Write about what you know" is the advice every well-established author hands out free of charge to the next generation of aspiring writers, and Speed wisely chose the world of blaxploitation moviemaking as the backdrop for her first writing effort. It's unfortunate, though, that she didn't shoot for a straight "making-of" book instead of a novel. There simply isn't enough story here (or a strong enough conclusion) to make for a satisfying 250-page work of fiction – which is understandable, since this isn't fiction at all. It's the truth, reported seven years later from inside the Hall of Mirrors – a broadcast from a parallel universe – a costume ball at Carol Speed's pad – a painful part of her life, presented as supermarket pulp fiction – but above all else, it's therapy.

"When I came to Hollywood everything began to happen for me almost immediately," Speed told Black Stars magazine in 1980. "I was doing one film after the other and my career was moving forward at an extremely fast pace. Then all of a sudden this all ended. I must confess that much of it was my fault, because I committed several acts that contributed greatly to it." Dorothy Jean's behavior during the shooting of THE CHANCE certainly backs this up, but the loss of Frank D. Ward -- more than any bridge burning that may have occurred during the making of THE MACK -- was most likely what led Speed to start writing Inside Black Hollywood in 1974, under the title Dorothy Jean Dickerson – I Thought You Knew! That same year, she had starring roles in ABBY and BLACK SAMSON, and then… nothing. She dropped out of the business and moved in with fading rocker Sly Stone, bringing only the clothes on her back and her unfinished manuscript. "For the most part, we stayed high from one day to the other," she admitted to Black Stars when asked about this period in her life. "Time was of little importance, because one day was like the next one. I did absolutely nothing." She eventually wandered out of Sly's compound and found her way back to her parents' home in San Jose, where she sobered up and got her head together before returning to Los Angeles to finish her novel (probably in late 1978, since Dorothy Jean mentions Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman" at one point). Around this time, she also appeared in her last film to date, the Rudy Ray Moore jaw-dropper DISCO GODFATHER (1979).

Speed may have been a star on the rise when she made THE MACK in 1973, but by the time Holloway House published her book seven years later, her acting career was finished and the "Black Hollywood" of the title was just a memory. A rumor in early 1997 had her joining two of her costars from THE BIG BIRD CAGE -- Pam Grier and Sid Haig -- in JACKIE BROWN, but the reunion never happened. She did contribute to the Tarantino-backed What It Is! What It Was! blaxploitation book in 1998, but was noticeably absent from the special edition DVD of THE MACK a few years later. The whacked-out, paranoid bulletins that were emanating daily from her MySpace page earlier this year seemed to be written by a person who either takes too much of the wrong kind of medication or not enough of the right. That's a shame, because Speed's a strong writer, and Inside Black Hollywood -- when recognized as a work of nonfiction -- is a fascinating and important contribution to B-movie history.