The Hitchcock Project-Henry Slesar Part Fifteen: "The Money" [6.9]

by Jack Seabrook


Nearly 30 years old, Larry Fabrizio wants to marry his girlfriend Angie, but she doubts his ability to make money. This is the setup for Henry Slesar's short story, "Trust Me, Mr. Paschetti," which was first published in the June 1959 issue of the men's adventure pulp, Man's World. Larry quits his job working for Patsy's wire joint, which pays $150 a week, and visits the offices of Paschetti Import Co. in downtown Manhattan, where he meets Mr. Paschetti, who had come to America years before with Larry's father, Tony.

Tony lived an honest life while Mr. Paschetti made it big in the import business. Larry is hired at a salary of $75 an hour, which surprises Angie. Larry assures her that he is "thinking about the future" and plans to bide his time before robbing Paschetti and leaving the country with Angie at his side. Larry works for Mr. Paschetti and begins to earn his trust. Eventually, when a big deal comes along, Larry telephones both Paschetti and his business partner and tricks them into making a change in plans by imitating their voices on the telephone.

Robert Loggia

Paschetti gives Larry $30,000 in an envelope to deliver and tells him that he had been engaged to Larry's mother back in Milan, before she had met Larry's father. He tells Larry, "'Your Pop was the best guy on earth. Stupid, but the best.'" Larry shows Angie the money and, for the first time, begins to boss her around. That evening, he goes to Paschetti's apartment and confesses, earning the old man's forgiveness. Back at Angie's apartment, Larry tells her that, now that he has gained the old man's trust, he is ready for the big payoff.

Is Paschetti truly fooled by Larry's telephone call or is he testing the young man's loyalty? Slesar's story is subtle enough that one could read it either way. Is it a coincidence that, when Paschetti gives Larry the envelope with the money to take on his own, he makes a speech about Larry's mother and says a kind word about his father? A reader of Slesar's tricky tale could believe that it is an elaborate game of cross and double-cross, with Paschetti setting Larry up at the same time that Larry thinks he is tricking Paschetti. Does Larry intend to take the money back before Paschetti makes his surprising confession about his relationship to Larry's mother? These questions add depth to what is, on the surface, a straightforward crime story with a twist at the end.

One may assume that Slesar's agent had trouble selling this story, since his stories were, by 1959, appearing regularly in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, the premiere digests for mystery and crime fiction of the day. "Trust Me, Mr. Paschetti" appeared instead in Man's World,  one of the lurid men's adventure pulps that were prevalent from the late 1950s into the 1970s. A review of the table of contents shows the sort of fare that accompanied Slesar's story in the June 1959 issue: "Col. Kennedy's Half-Nude Half-Caste Nanny" and "The Girl in Private Devereux' Combat Boots" were two of the titles.

Slesar's track record with the producers of Alfred Hitchcock Presents must have led to this story's being been sold to the show for adaptation, since it is doubtful that Joan Harrison often looked to publications such as Man's World for material. Slesar adapted his own story and retitled it "The Money"; it was first broadcast on NBC on Tuesday, November 29, 1960, right before "The Fatal Impulse" on Thriller that same evening.

Will Kuluva and Wolfe Barzell (Miklos)

"The Money" follows the source story closely and has two particularly notable elements. The first has to do with the heritage of the main characters. In "Trust Me, Mr. Paschetti," Larry Fabrizio, his late father Tony, and Mr. Paschetti are all Italian-Americans. Paschetti and Tony came to the United States from Italy together and Paschetti had been engaged to Larry's mother in Milan. In "The Money," Larry's last name is Chetnik, Paschetti becomes Stephen Bregornick, and even Paschetti's business partner becomes "Miklos." Why were all of the surnames changed from Italian to something else and what do the new names represent?

The most likely reason for the change has to do with the popular TV series, The Untouchables, which had started airing regularly a year before and which was in its second season when "The Money" premiered. The Untouchables, set in the Great Depression, portrayed numerous mobsters as being of Italian-American descent and was met with howls of protest from Italian-American groups, who did not like its depiction of their group in a negative light. One may assume that the producers of Alfred Hitchcock Presents asked Slesar to change the heritage of his characters so as not to cause additional offense to a large cohort of viewers.

The Chetnik flag

Slesar's choice of new surnames is interesting and not likely to be unintentional. Chetnik, Larry's surname in the teleplay, is the name of a Serbian paramilitary organization of the first half of the twentieth century. Bregornick sounds similarly eastern European, and Miklos is a Hungarian name. Slesar thus suggests a vague foreign minority group operating on the fringes of the law without resorting to stereotypes of Italian Americans.

The other item of interest in "The Money" is the direction by Alan Crosland, Jr. (1918-2001), the busy director who did a great deal of work in episodic TV from the 1950s to the 1970s and who was the son of director Alan Crosland, who directed Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (1927). Alan Crosland, Jr., directed 16 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and three of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, along with episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.

Four shot with Larry in foreground

In "The Money," Crosland's direction is impressive, with extensive camera movement and careful thought given to placement of characters within the frame to express unspoken thoughts and relationships. The show opens with a shot where the camera is placed behind the sofa in Angie's apartment. Angie gets up after having been lying on top of Larry, and the camera swings around to the left as Larry sits up, ending in a shot with him in the foreground and her in the rear. She is also reflected in a mirror, and her two faces are above his, showing her place as the dominant partner in the relationship. Crosland's mobile camera follows Larry across the room and the director does not just rely on the usual series of close-ups and two-shots that mark the standard progression of a TV show of this era.

The camera looks up at Larry

The camera placement continues to be unusual: when Larry arrives at Paschetti's office, the camera starts out low, behind the secretary's typewriter, then glides right and up into a two-shot. Larry drives the story, and Crosland's camera is at its most fluid when following his movements. Another unusual feature is the elaborate set for Paschetti's ornate apartment, which Crosland films in a medium long shot that allows the viewer to see all four characters together in one scene, with Larry in the foreground. Placing him closest to the viewer allows us to see him listening to the older men talk business; Larry is silently learning from them.

In the second scene set in Angie's apartment, Angie initially towers over Larry in the frame until he barks at her to "shut up and sit down." The dynamic between the characters changes as Larry begins to assert his power and now he is placed higher than she is in the frame. This scene is followed by the scene where Bregornick confesses his relationship to Larry's mother; in this scene, the shots of Bregornick are straight-on while the shots of Larry are taken from a camera placed on a lower plane, looking up at the young man.

Larry now has the upper hand

The next scene in Angie's apartment demonstrates the development of Larry's self-confidence and the change it has wrought in his relationship with his girlfriend; he tells her to "sit down" and is clearly in charge, filled with his own sense of power. In one shot, he walks toward the camera as it slowly backs away, almost as if it feels threatened by the newly empowered Larry. When Larry visits Bregornick and gives back the money, he turns to leave and Crosland sets up another fine shot with Larry in the foreground and the two older men small in the rear distance. Once again, the balance of power is shifting. The final scene in Angie's apartment reverses the one that opened the episode--now, Larry is on top, looming above Angie as she lies on the sofa.

Doris Dowling

"The Money" is a good example of an episode where the teleplay is a run of the mill melodrama but the direction and camerawork are exciting and give it more depth than it would otherwise possess. The show could as easily be called "The Power," since its main theme deals with Larry's developing sense of his own abilities. The twist ending, so important to the Hitchcock series as a whole, is almost unnecessary here, since the story that comes before it is satisfying without the about-face.

Robert Loggia (1930- ), who plays Larry, has been acting on TV and in movies since the 1950s. He starred in four short-lived series, including T.H.E. Cat (1966-67), and was featured in four episodes of the Hitchcock series.

Doris Dowling (1923-2004) plays Angie; she was the seventh wife of big band leader Artie Shaw and appeared on the Hitchcock series only once. Her nearly four-decade long career included roles in The Lost Weekend (1945) and The Blue Dahlia (1946).

Will Kuluva

Will Kuluva (1917-1990) turns in the episode's most complex and emotional performance as Bregornick. He was in movies from 1932 and on TV from 1949. He only appeared in this episode of the Hitchcock series but he was also on The Twilight Zone once.

Alan Crosland Jr.'s other episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents include "The Gloating Place" and "The Big Kick."

"The Money" is not yet available on DVD (the release of the season six boxed set is pending at Amazon) but it may be viewed online for free here.

Sources:

Grams, Martin, and Patrik Wikstrom. The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion. Churchville, MD: OTR Pub., 2001. Print.

IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2013.

"The Money." Alfred Hitchcock Presents. NBC. 29 Nov. 1960. Television.

Slesar, Henry. ""Trust Me, Mr. Paschetti"" Clean Crimes and Neat Murders: Alfred Hitchcock's Hand Picked Selection of Stories by Henry Slesar. New York: Avon, 1960. 30-41. Print.

Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2013.

Sharpshooter Part Three!!!

Welcome to the third in a series of four articles exploring the sick and twisted world of Johnny Rock, the Sharpshooter! If you missed Peter's second installment of The Sharpshooter, you can read it here.

#8: No Quarter Given (July 1974)

Heading into Virginia, Rock finds corruption in the Navy spearheaded by, you guessed it, the Mafia. Drugs, booze, and other bounty heading into the local piers are given free passage thanks to the steel grip of one Joey “Niente” Barbagallo. Niente has something on several of the ranking officers (usually photos of the men in compromising positions) and their accountants. Enter the beautiful teenaged Mimi Nieholtz, a stripper forced into prostitution by Barbagallo. Mimi’s father sits rotting in prison, a victim of a set-up perpetrated by Barbagallo, and Mimi finds a sympathetic ear in the volcanic Johnny Rock. Together, the two mow down thousands in their search for truth, justice and outstanding porno clubs.

The worst of the early Sharps, No Quarter is devoid of any style, good writing (it’s our nameless “Magellan” author again), or an original plot. Rock’s adventure this time out is a patchwork of his earlier exploits. The only wrinkle added is that not only is Rock a cold-blooded, mass-murderer, he’s also into jailbait with several sex scenes with little Mimi as evidence.

GRADE: F

#9: Stiletto (August 1974)

As I was reading Stiletto, the ninth jaw-dropping chapter of Johnny Rock’s descent into genocide, the Leisure formula finally became crystal clear to me (bear with me, I’m slow sometimes). It’s obvious now that what the publisher was doing was farming these books out to several writers (perhaps three) at a time and publishing the damn things as they got them, with no thought to continuity.

This would explain why Mimi, the “one person in the world that Rock truly loved” from No Quarter Given, is nowhere to be found and instead we welcome back the long lost Iris Toscano (introduced way back in the Rock’s premiere). The mercurial Mimi probably wouldn’t be that happy if she overheard Rock say to Iris: “Nothing is going to get in the way of the thing we two have for each other.”

As for the plot this time: Johnny decides to take on two mighty tasks: destroy the one million gallons of illegal gasoline stashed on Tony Famollini’s farm and break up the distribution of machine guns by a rival Don across town. Rock’s got his hands full, so he visits his Uncle Vito to convince the older man that a life of murder and mayhem is much better than the humdrum of a happy marriage, job and household. Uncle Vito initially resists, but by the end of the cheery conversation, Vito’s wife has been shot dead by Mafia scum on the hunt for Johnny Rock. Uncle has a change of heart and joins the team.

Unfortunately, for Iris, the trio soon becomes a duo:

Iris screamed but her screams were cut short by several well placed rounds. One eyeball popped out with the pressure of tunneling bullets. Blood spurted from her mouth. Several teeth flew from the cavern her mouth had become, followed by chips of naked bone. One slug tore off her right ear and spattered her dark hair with bright blood. More blood gushed from her nostrils, ears, and eyes. She fell forward, struck the back of the front seat and slipped to the floor.

Vito and Rock escape the ambush that kills Iris, but Johnny misses Iris so much that he wonders if it’s all worth it:

“…it saddens me to think that the last time I was here, Iris was with me. And now I’m here alone. It feels strange."

“Cheer up. I know it’ll be hard at first…You were there and saw her die in a most horrible way…At first you’ll suffer. Then one day you’ll sit up and see the sun and say, hey, it’s a beautiful day. That’s the way it should be. You’re young. This is your time. Enjoy it to the full!”

With Stiletto, Dr Phil has once more been reinstated as Leisure’s Moral Compass. We read heartfelt emotion like the above or the passage in which Rock convinces Vito they should not kill a wounded Mafioso because it wouldn’t be morally right (but butchering unarmed hookers somehow makes the grade). To his credit, Vito looks sideways at Rock and, speaking for the reader, gives him a “What the Fuck?”

Stilleto has some of the earliest product placement I’ve encountered. Johnny doesn’t just smoke cigarettes, he smokes Kent 100s (whose company just happens to advertise in the Leisure men’s adventure books) In fact, the single most enjoyable paragraph in a sea of crap is when, returning from mowing down hundreds of Mafia pigs, Rock unwinds in his hotel room, not with Scotch, not with a beer, but with “a glass of chilled Boone’s Farm Apple Wine.”

To take one more swing at this dog, it’s way too long (about 50 pages more than the usual Sharpshooter), but that may be due to all the flashbacks. Well, you say, that’s for the readers just tuning into the Rock’s big blow. No, these flashbacks happen throughout the book and refer to incidents within the same novel (Vito pauses, during a fight involving cannons, to remind Rock, in minute detail, about an incident that happened fifty pages before). Maybe Leisure suddenly started paying by the word?

GRADE: D

#10: Hit Man (November 1974)

The Rock gets back from a well-deserved vacation to find a month-old letter waiting for him. The letter is from Mike Reid, an old buddy who’d saved Rocetti’s life back in his Green Beret days, now a successful businessman under pressure from the Mob. Having read of Johnny’s exploits in a true crime magazine, he begs John to come to Los Angeles to help. When John gets there, Reid tells him that it was all a mistake and that he had jumped the gun writing to him. John smells a rat and investigates, discovering that Reid’s wife Ginny and daughter Nancy have been kidnapped by one of the two local dons in an attempt to force the man to sign over his laundering business to the Mob.

The two men plan to rescue the girls family by playing the two rival syndicates against each other. While Rock is making his daring rescue attempt, Reid is kidnapped and tortured until he gives up the plan. Rock makes good his rescue and getaway but, after dropping the girls off at the airport, is unprepared for a big surprise. Turns out Ginny is just as bloodthirsty and maniacal as Rock and wants in on any revenge Johnny has planned.

Perhaps forgetting his previous adventures, Rock informs Ginny that “this will be the first time I have ever used somebody else in a raid,” and trains the woman in the use of several weapons not commonly found in the kitchen. The raid goes off without a hitch and several dozen more Mob employees are laid to waste. Ginny discovers (after killing twenty of the bad guys) that murder ain’t her bag and heads back to motherhood, leaving Rock to ponder “which town next?”

Not a lot of excitement here (but at least it’s a nice compacted bore at 156 pages) and, again, the continuity between novels is non-existent (Uncle Vito is nowhere to be seen), but there is that dialogue:

(While Rock is arming Ginny to the gills just before they hit the Mafia compound)

“Jesus,” she whispered, “I feel like a Christmas tree.” “Shut up,” he explained.

GRADE: C-

#11: Triggerman (January 1975)

After two years in the can, Mafia Don Ricardo Tattilo is released, swearing death to Johnny Rock. Coincidentally, the Rock (aka, according to this version of "Bruno Rossi,” Magellan and Philip Rock), tired of Mafia Dons being released early for good behavior, is waiting for Tattilo. Rock sets up shop in a hotel located right behind Tattilo’s den of iniquity, an old Quaker’s building where the Don can manage his drug and prostitution business. In an amusing subplot, Johnny Rock discovers a treehouse located between his hotel and the Quaker building. Rock makes the fort his dumping ground for dead mafia goons. Author Rossi literally spends chapters describing how Johnny can shimmy down the rope, blow off a henchman’s face with his Beretta, carry the corpse back up the tree, and stack him with his fellow thugs like cords of wood.

Triggerman isn’t the worst written of the Rock sagas, but it is the most boring. What’s more, the cover copy promises: “The mob’s top killer thought he could handle Johnny Rock.” Sounds like a different book than the one I read.

Want great writing? How about these examples:

Almost daily these Mafia leeches’ names could be found in the newspapers, in magazine accounts of their notoriety that almost amounted to hero worship by the countless thousands of readers who fed hungrily on tidbits of information unearthed by police reporters and assignment writers who diligently followed the pursuits of the Cosa Nostra. He returned from the refrigerator with a cold beer. He sat at a small table that faced the two windows overlooking the street. He removed his 9mm Beretta Parabellum from its holster under his left armpit. He placed the gun on the table. He stared at it a long, long time as he sipped from the can.

And my personal favorite, a new description of what a firearm sounds like:

He emptied all eight shots in the Beretta’s magazine into the three bodies, the eight successive “whoofs” of the Luger-type automatic sounding like one long fart!

GRADE: F


The Sharpshooter will return...

SHARPSHOOTER Part Two!!

Picking up right where he left off... if you missed Peter's first installment of The Sharpshooter, you can read it here.

#5: Night of the Assassins (March 1974)

Johnny Rock heads to Florida to straighten out the Miami Mafia. There’s really no plotline to this, so I won’t try to fake it: Rock kills lots of people. He’s dispensed with make-up and resorts to simply barging in on crowds of bad guys and mowing them all down without drawing any of his own blood. Obligatory “not such a bad guy” death scene: Two hookers who hang with the mob are brutally gunned down by a Rock in a motel room. The girls are unarmed and Rock bears no guilty conscience for the act. Could Bruce Willis pull this off?

GRADE: C-

#6: Muzzle Blast (April 1974)

I picture Dr. Phil taking over as Men’s Adventure Series editor at Leisure Books in early 1974, reading the first five books in the "Sharpshooter" saga, crying, and then proclaiming that this violence must come to an end…or at least has to become a “happier kind of bloodshed.” That’s the only reasoning I can conjure up for the relatively bloodless Muzzle Blast.

In the opening chapter, Rock finds himself involved with the New England Mafia. Posing as a drug dealer, he infiltrates the second-hand store run by O yi-Po, a heroin importer helped along in his trade by the beautiful but deadly Mai-Lin. We know she’s Rock’s kind of girl because she never wears undergarments (“Many eyes at the bar followed the attractive Chinese girl’s cute wiggle, admiring the saucy bouncing of her ripe breasts naked under a soft white sweater.”) and because she can handle herself in a fight (“…Mai-Lin wasn’t at all unaccustomed to sexual attack or rape itself… probably she welcomed it.”). Rock finds himself doing something he’s not done in his previous five adventures: getting to know someone without killing them. That’s not necessarily a good thing, we come to find out. Long, tedious expository scenes lead to… even longer, more tedious expository scenes until the reader looks up from his copy of Muzzle Blast and screeches: “HOLY CHRIST, I’M A DEMOCRAT AND LOVING FATHER OF TWO, BUT I WANT TO SEE SOMEONE DIE ALREADY!!”

There’s not a lot going for this particular entry. The violence is fairly tame until the obligatory “climactic showdown.” If you’re looking for sex, you’re out of luck. What you’re left with is the unique writing style of “Bruno Rossi” (this particular Rossi has to be the same ghost who penned Blood Oath as he continually makes the same mistake of calling Rock “Magellan”):

And now, as Rock planned the next skirmish in his most sacred and private crusade against the unholy New England Mafia, 73 men, all dues-paying members of the conventioneering North American Alliance For Explorative Computer Ideology (NAAECI) were feasting their pop eyes on an extravaganza of debauchery, so wanton, so bawdy, so vulgar, obscene, perverse, corrupt and depraved that the riotous and licentious carryings-on of the sex circus on the wide stage was embarrassing to even Nick Kang’s wife who produced and directed the wicked spectacle.

I didn’t miss any periods in that sentence, by the way.

Try this one on:

Quite close by and puncturing the ear drums of all assembled, came an excructiating, reverberating blast! As if pandemonium meant a cage of angry lions and famished jungle panthers sprung lose (sic), the above described participants were literally lifted out of their seats and some flung bodily across the table they surrounded. A second ferocious, even colossal explosion followed the first. Men were lurching, staggering, pitching forward, gasping for air, tipping over and rolling on the carpeted floor. All the lights blew out. The brute force of the second bellowing detonation sounded like two thousand tons of TNT earthquaking in a vacuum!

Both passages are perfect examples of what I call the “Mad-Lib style of 1970s Executioner-style Series Writing” (or M-LSo1E-SSW for short). Writer has hit a brick wall, and presents his wife with a manuscript chock-full of “fill-it-ins” and asks her for help. Example:

Rock hit the man with a large __________(noun), after which his nose ___________(verb). Seeing four other Mafia hit men approaching, Rock fed his _____________(weapon) with lots of ____________(pl. noun). The men died a _____________(adjective) death. Rock smiled a(n) __________________(adjective) smile.

GRADE: D-

#7: Headcrusher (June 1974)

Johnny Rock heads back to New York, where he receives info on Don Salvatore, who contracted the hit on Rock’s family. Going undercover as “Mafia bastard hitman” Burt Laganello, Rock infiltrates and gains the trust of the family and does what he does best. With glee, he takes on assignments to murder rival gangmen, killing two birds with one stone” gaining trust and killing “Mafia bastards” at the same time. The man, literally, is a pig rolling in shit.

Where to begin? I’m not an optimist, so I don’t picture a behind-the-scenes board meeting at Leisure where the CEO demands a marked increase in the quality of “The Sharpshooter” series, and yet that’s exactly what we get. Headcrusher is so obviously better than any of its predecessors that I have to believe it was penned by a new ghost-writer. Sure, there are the usual lapses in logic (Rock, sprayed with machine-gun fire, lives to tell the tale) and editing (at one point, one of the Don’s henchmen addresses the undercover hitman as “Rock” rather than Burt), but the gripping narrative more than makes up for it.

But for the final chapter, Rock’s tale this time almost seems to be a wrap-up, as though the series would be winding down. At one point, Rock contacts his lawyer and draws up a will, believing that he may not survive the final hit. When Rock undergoes his transformation into “Mafia scum,” he realizes, not without some remorse, that he’s beginning to like these guys. This plot twist would show up years later in Stephen Cannell’s excellent TV series, Wise Guy, in which undercover cop Ken Wahl would ease himself into a Mob family and befriend a vicious mobster.

The evidence that this is indeed still our old friend Johnny Rock comes at the climactic showdown with Don Salvatore. Believing “Burt Laganello” to be a dedicated (and very productive) henchman, Salvatore invites him to dinner. There, Rock is introduced to the Don’s wife and beautiful granddaughter (who makes no bones about her affection for Rock). The four sit down to a pre-dinner chat when, abruptly, Rock stands and emptied his clip into the Don and his wife. He then turns to the petrified girl, proclaims that she’s about the age of Rock’s sister when Gramps sanctioned her kill and pops her in cold blood. A nasty scene even for this nasty series.

GRADE: A-

SHARPSHOOTER! Part 1

It took me two years but I finally made it back to the wonderland known as Men's Adventure. Back in the mid-70s, the paperback racks (an alien concept now, but paperbacks used to be stuffed in a spinning rack for the brave to sift through) were packed with such series titles as Death Merchant, Soldano, The Lone Wolf, The Hunter, The Penetrator, The Revenger, as well as the two titans The Destroyer and The Executioner. I'll be getting to several of these eventually but for now let's get to SHARPSHOOTER!!!

#1: The Killing Machine (August 1973)

When his entire family is murdered by the Mafia, millionaire John Rocetti becomes the one-man killing machine known as Johnny Rock. Armed with state-of-the-art weaponry, Rock drives a wedge between two Mob families, systematically eliminating key figures in each gang. Along the way, he meets up with Iris Toscano, widow of former mob figure Dominick Toscano, who desires to mete out the same justice on the scum who took her husband’s life. The two vigilantes manage to rack up an impressive number of Italian corpses on their way to the big finale, a showdown with the biggest Dons in the syndicate.

Granted, The Killing Machine is not the most original of concepts, but it never gets boring and chugs right along to its anti-climax (we’re promised by Iris and Johnny that their work can never be truly finished as long as there remains Italo-scum in the free world). Leisure Books, to my knowledge, never adapted to the 20th Century oddity known as proofreading and The Killing Machine is no exception. Commas are dropped into sentences randomly and rapidly. The Killing Machine is rough, but it gets the job done.

GRADE: B-

#2: Blood Oath (October 1973)

With the second book in the series, Rossi dispatches with such niceties as mercy and fair play (becoming the antithesis of my favorite bad/good guy, Richard Stark’s Parker, who mellowed with each new novel). Moving far beyond the “this tough guy takes no shit from the bad guys” mentality to another level I’d call “this tough guy takes NUTTIN from NOBODY,” John (The Rock) Rocetti continues his all-out war on the Mafia. Without a doubt, the change in Rock’s demeanor has a lot to do with his chronicler, not the same ghost writer responsible for writing #1: The Killing Machine who, evidently, wasn’t too impressed with his predecessor’s hanging plotlines. It would appear that this writer was juggling a few too many series characters at the time as, several times throughout the novel, Rocetti is re-named Magellan, which just happens to be the aka of another of Leisure’s Mafia Vigilante characters, The Marksman (stop me if you’re heard this one before: When his entire family is murdered by the Mafia, Philip Magellan becomes the one-man killing machine known as The Marksman).

When Blood Oath opens (and it’s a very well-written opening chapter, by the way), Rock is hiding out in the small Eastern town of Xenia (Population, at least in Chapter One, is 309) after another mob massacre forces him to head for the hills. Obviously, his latest escapade was a doozie, as his picture is now in all the true-detective rags and everyone knows him as an avenger of the people. Iris Toscano is nowhere to be found, not even a hint of her whereabouts is dropped. In fact, the author doesn’t even get Rock’s real name right (re-christening him John Roccoletti!). The biggest drawback to Rock’s second low-budget adventure is its climax, or lack thereof, actually. Johnny Rock’s temper has been pushed way past its limits and early in the book we’re treated to an incredibly graphic scene where Johnny takes out two mafia henchmen who have done nothing more than talk nasty to an old lady and possibly run stolen goods. But that’s only a warm-up to the massive carnage wrought in the last few chapters. Not that I object. We could use a few Johnny Rocks here in Arizona, as a matter of fact.

GRADE: B

#3: Blood Bath (November 1973)

Johnny Rock’s newfound love of spattered blood and shattered bone escalates in his third adventure. Taking a page from the “shudder pulps,” Rock is kidnapping important figures in the Torielly family, including the Don’s daughter and chauffeur, chaining them naked to a stone wall and letting rats have at them. With Blood Bath, Rock officially has become more of a murderous menace than the mob he fights, executing simple bar bouncers with bad manners for the hell of it. Definitely too violent and homophobic for today’s PC crowd (in one scene, the owner of a gay bar is said to “cater exclusively to the interests of sexual deviates”). By the way, Rock resembles a crazed Rod Taylor in artist Ken Barr’s blood-filled cover painting (one mobster has been shot through the pearly whites and is geysering all over his beautiful tux).

GRADE: C+

#4: The Worst Way to Die (January 1974)

By its fourth volume a series that ranged from fairly enjoyable to downright hysterical becomes downright crud. This time Rock targets the Labrizi Brothers, two particularly despicable Dons who seemingly do nothing more than eat in expensive Italian restaurants. The new wrinkle added to Rock’s repertoire with this adventure is Johnny’s newfound love for donning make-up and disguises. After Rock is beaten and almost offed by a couple of thugs, he decides that maybe his mug has become too familiar (ostensibly forgetting that, back in Blood Oath, he had become the centerfold for vigilantes worldwide) and learns the art of prosthetics and greasepaint.

The “mafia mowdown scene” of this snoozer takes place, of course, in an Italian restaurant and I kinda hoped I’d see the Bruno Rossi version of Mrs. Doubtfire: While Johnny Rock surveys the Labrizis from a corner table, he is horrified to learn that his prosthetic nose has slid into his linguine and clam sauce. By the climax of The Worst Way to Die, the reader will become convinced that Johnny Rock, The Sharpshooter, has finally plummeted from his steep precipice of sanity when he murders the father, mother, and one of the younger brothers of the Labrizis in cold blood. It’s a chilling scene, two pages that pack more punch than the 170 that precede them.

GRADE: D

SHARPSHOOTER!!!

#1: The Killing Machine (August 1973)

When his entire family is murdered by the Mafia, millionaire John Rocetti becomes the one-man killing machine known as Johnny Rock. Armed with state-of-the-art weaponry, Rock drives a wedge between two Mob families, systematically eliminating key figures in each gang. Along the way, he meets up with Iris Toscano, widow of former mob figure Dominick Toscano, who desires to mete out the same justice on the scum who took her husband’s life. The two vigilantes manage to rack up an impressive number of Italian corpses on their way to the big finale, a showdown with the biggest Dons in the syndicate.

Granted, THE KILLING MACHINE is not the most original of concepts, but it never gets boring and chugs right along to its anti-climax (we’re promised by Iris and Johnny that their work can never be truly finished as long as there remains Italo-scum in the free world. Leisure Books, to my knowledge, never adapted to the 20th Century oddity known as proofreading and THE KILLING MACHINE is no exception. Commas are dropped into sentences randomly and rapidly. THE KILLING MACHINE is rough, but it gets the job done.

GRADE: B-