Dirty Harry #3: The Long Death by Dane Hartman

(pb; 1981: third novel in the twelve-book Dirty Harry movie tie-in series. Sequel to Dirty Harry #2: Death on the Docks.)

From the back cover

“Someone is grabbing young women from the bars, campuses, and streets of San Francisco and doing unspeakable things to their minds and bodies. Someone is setting up cops against black nationalistsin a violent inter-city war, playing both sides for bloody fools. Someone is looking for deadly trouble when a gorgeous policewoman baits ‘Dirty Harry’ Callahan into a showdown that can only be settled by bare firsts and Magnum lead!”

Review

Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films (numbering five, 1971-88) are not known for their subtlety or cultural sensitivity, although they sneak in brief scenes where Harry Callahan shows humor, understanding and tenderness, between his shooting of odious criminals. The Long Death is no exception to that setup.That said, the patient cruelty of Long’s villains─who are pompous, sadistic or both─is noteworthy, even for a work centering around a dry-wit, San Francisco police officer and his meting out of rough justice. 

Long sports a giallo influence (e.g., its dread-drenched, bizarre, twenty-two-page opening, where a beautiful coed is stalked, raped─mostly in euphemistic phrasing─and further set up for Saw-like torture sessions). Dario Argento’s 1975 film Deep Red is shown in a college classroom while Harry and his partner, Fatso Devlin, fend off a multi-assassin assault, and Wes Craven gets a mention as well (think The Last House on the Left, 1972).

Hartman’s** writing is lean and thrilling, his dialogue sharp and his characters’ backstories effectively sketched out, with over-the-top gunplay and pursuit sequences making up most of its 163 pages. Characters from the first three Dirty Harry films are mentioned (past police partners and his dead wife, Elizabeth). This further, effectively links Long to its source works (Dirty Harry, 1971; Magnum Force, 1973; and The Enforcer, 1976). And I loved Harry’s interactions with his friend, ex-black militant “Big Ed” Mohamid, despite how Hartman─plot-wise─short-changed Mohamid’s character.

The book’s climactic shootout in a gothic, Angel Island mansion is a great capper to a barebones horror flick of a cop novel.

As I noted earlier, Long─published by Men of Action Books─is not a sensitive read (although Harry, fair-minded, shows empathy toward the victimized and the innocent). Long wasn’t a sensitive offering when it was published in 1981, and its brutal worldview could be viewed as more egregious today, although it’s more pre-now “ignorant” than mean-spirited than, say, many of the works of Mickey Spillane. (Beware blind presentism.)

Long is worth reading, if you’re looking for a burn-through, blast-‘em-up-Dirty-Harry book. 

Followed by Dirty Harry #4: Mexico Kill.

[**According to Wikipedia, Dane Hartman is the pen name of “several writers. . . [including] martial arts expert Ric Meyers and Leslie Alan Horvitz.” ]

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

(hb; 2013)

From the inside flap

“On a damp October night, beautiful young Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding Ashley’s life and death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of her father: the legendary, reclusive cult-horror-film director Stanislas Cordova─a man who hasn’t been seen in public for more than thirty years.

“For McGrath, another death connected to this seemingly cursed family dynasty seems more than just a coincidence. Though much has been written about Cordova’s dark and unsettling films, very little is known about the man himself.

“Driven by revenge, curiosity, and a need for the truth, McGrath, with the aid of two strangers, is drawn deeper and deeper into Cordova’s eerie, hypnotic world. . .”

Review

Night Film is one of my favorite reads of 2019. It is highly recommended for fans of Dario Argento, as it is a dark, funny and twisted love letter to the writer/director’s works, with its creepy imagery, symbology, and themes that read like one of Argento’s better, more disturbing works. Night’s structure, with its deeper-into-the-terrifying-labyrinth progressions and characters, also reminded me─in a better-written way─of Arturo Pérez Reverte’s novel The Club Dumas, later the basis for the 1999 Roman Polanski film The Ninth Gate. 

Night’s ending─perhaps a comment on the enduring permutations and perceptions of mystery and legend─may prove too low-key for some readers, but I was fine with it. This book is worth owning.

Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, by Maitland McDonagh

(pb; 1991, 1994, 2010: non-fiction)

From the back cover:

"The horror films of Italian filmmaker Dario Argento have been described as a blend of Alfred Hitchcock and George Romero - psychologically rich, colorful, and at times garish, taking the best elements of the splatter and exploitation genres and laying them over a dark undercurrent of human emotions and psyches. Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds, which dissects such Argento cult films as Two Evil Eyes, The Bird with the Crystal Plummage, Suspiria, and Deep Red, includes a new introduction discussing Argento's most recent films, from The Stendahl Syndrome to Mother of Tears; an updated filmography; and an interview with Argento.

Review:

Excellent and interesting analytical study of Argento's oeuvre - his great, not so great and in-between works: a must-read for Argento fans.

Worth owning, this.

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Argento's influence found its way into this poem I wrote and published in 2010: Rotten tooth blues (Dario Argento mix).

The Safety of Unknown Cities, by Lucy Taylor

(pb; 1995, 1999)

Review:

Val Petrillo, a jet-set serial fornicatress, seeks "the City," a legendary, mystical location where all forms of carnality and perversions are indulged in. Unbeknownst to her, she's being pursued by a suitor she abandoned - Arthur Quentin Breen, who "alternate[s] back and forth between convivial killer and misanthropic recluse."

When Val meets Majeed, a hermaphroditic (primarily male) prostitute, and becomes his lover, she figures she's found a way into the City. But Majeed is reluctant to take her to the City - not only because of what he says he experienced and saw there, but because he's being stalked by Dominick Filakis, aka the Turk, to whom Majeed owes a nebulous, potentially flesh-riving debt.

As dangerous and perverse as Val, Arthur and Majeed are, they've got nothing on the City-linked Turk, whose powers seem limitless.

Safety is a sexually and horrifically subversive novel that recalls the horror works of Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite and Lucifer Fulci, rammed home with over-the-top Dario Argento-esque/snuff splatter scenes.


Check it out, if you've got a strong constitution and a love for true horror.