Death of a Citizen by Donald Hamilton

I sampled most of the great thriller series as a kid, Doc Savage, Tarzan, James Bond, Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Travis McGee, The Executioner and so on. I saw Matt Helms around the used book store too and even wound up with a couple of Donald Hamilton volumes, but I never delved into the series.

Happily the ebooks were on sale the other day, and someone told me it's best to begin at the beginning with the Helm books. This is an experience from the Kindle and not the book boxes in the attic.

I'd always known they were more serious than the Dean Martin movies, which I did watch on TV as a kid, but I didn't realize quite how crisp and grim the books would be.

While his focus is espionage, Hamilton delivers in the tough-edged style of Fawcett Gold Medal heroes of the day, though Matt Helm may be the most pragmatic, ruthless and relentless of the lot.

It's 15 years after World War II, and while he was a fierce operative during the war years, Helm has settled into the comfortable life of a writer of Western novels and occasional travel articles. He's living in New Mexico and is part of a comfortable suburban circle of friends. Things open with him carrying a Martini at a party.

But Tina, a wartime co-worker turns up, a co-worker who's never left the game. Almost in the blink of an eye Helm has a body in his study and this ruthless former girlfriend/partner in assassination on his doorstep. She has her current husband in tow, a formidable figure with little love for Helm.

The dead woman is a young writer who'd asked Helm for assistance, but she was also an enemy operative who had her sights trained on his physicist friend Amos Darrell, Helm is told.

He drawn into disposing of the body and soon on the run across the Southwest along with Tina because others are following.

Possibly enemies have to be identified and eluded, and as they travel the situation grows increasingly complicated. Helm's old boss is still at work, and a complicated web of twists and betrayals begins to unravel.

Matt's family doesn't exist by accident in this tale. Ultimately they're placed in peril, and he's forced to re-channel all of his wartime cunning and unflinching amoral outlook and abilities.

Sure, they're called spies here, but this is a tough, noir-tinged crime thriller with pages to be turned rapidly at the end and a final, blood-stained confrontation to wrap things up.

I see now why Helm books have ranked among the other thriller greats with many fans. I'll definitely stick with the series now that's it's finally caught my attention.

Death Sentence by Brian Garfield

I bought and read a movie tie-in edition of Death Wish around the time the film was in theaters in '74, but I was unaware of the book sequel until I ran across the paperback edition of 1975's Death Sentence on a display rack in a department store. This must have been '76 or so.

I picked it up because I'd liked the first and had read interviews with Brian Garfield by then about his disillusionment with the film version. I was too young yet to appreciate his point.

But he stated he'd seen his protagonist, Paul Benjamin, as disturbed, not quite the gunslinger hero Charles Bronson played as Paul Kersey.

I've read initially a film adaptation was planned with Jack Lemon in the lead, which probably would have been closer to the book.

By the beginning of Death Sentence Benjamin has made his way to Chicago following the death of his daughter who was traumatized in the events of the first novel.

He picks up where he left off in his vigilante ways, targeting street toughs in the midst of preying on school girls and other dark characters, but soon a love affair begins to refocus Benjamin.

There's a sense that the book is a bit of atonement from Garfield who was disturbed by the movie's glorification of the protagonist's activities. In an interviews around the time of the film, he talked about the real life slashed convertible roof that made him think of striking back but that action vs. fantasy are two different things. He'd been to a friend's in Manhattan and came out to find his roof in ribbons, and that made him angry enough to want to hunt the culprit in the moment. He turned the feeling into the novel.

The Chicago cop chasing Benjamin's vigilante expresses similar thoughts on deed vs. fantasy down to the slashed car top in a TV interview in the novel, and soon the plotline begins to focus on the dangers of Benjamin's ways.

A copycat a tad more wanton and a tad less introspective begins to work the streets as well. Benjamin's mission turns from hunting down street denizens to dealing with his doppelgänger, and the story begins to move toward an inevitable showdown.

I actually found this novel a little more engaging than the first, and it has interesting moments focused on Benjamin's pragmatic planning from acquiring weapons to doing things like smearing grease on license plates to obscure the numbers.

It's thematic texture, while perhaps a little more heavy handed, makes it a layered and thoughtful thriller. A bit of that theme about the impact of revenge on the avenger is perhaps the common element between the book and the 2007 James Wan film adaptation with Kevin Bacon which otherwise creates a whole new story of a father tracking down gang members who've put his son in a coma.

One point that stood out for me in the book was that Benjamin purchased and was shown how to use a Centennial revolver with a safety grip in the handle. My dad actually owned a gun like that, so it helped me understand what the book was talking about.

All in all it's a good read and a good entry in Garfield's output of '70s thrillers which included Hopscotch and Recoil.

Impulse buy

361 By Donald E. Westlake

This is a story that catches Donald E. Westlake more closely aligned to his Richard Start pseudonym under which he wrote the Parker series. It's not so much a signpost for his lighter John Dortmunder series.

361 is a 1962 tale,  a mystery, perhaps even a whodunit in thriller clothing when all is said and done.

I discovered its existence recently in a Facebook group when someone posted a vintage edition he'd discovered at a used book sale. I was happy to learn Hard Case Crime had republished it along with an audio version which I soon downloaded for a listen.

At the outset, we're told .361, according to Roget's Thesaurus means "Destruction of life; violent death. Killing."

First-person narrator Ray Kelly's in for plenty of that as the story moves forward. His dad seems a little nervous about picking up in New York City after he concludes a stint in the Air Force.  Ray dismisses the nerves until a tan-and-cream Chrysler pulls alongside them on a roadway and guns blaze.

Dad's killed, and Ray's injuries include irreparable damage to one eye. He gets a glass one as he recuperates, a process that begins with his brother, Bill, at his side but becomes a solo journey when his brother stops showing up for visits.  Soon he learns Bill's wife, who he's never met, has been killed as well in a car accident. Coincidence?

When recovery's over, Ray decides it's time to look for answers, and those begin with a visit from an old friend of his dad's who owed Pop one. He suggests Ray keep his head down. Not satisfied with a cryptic warning, Ray and Bill try beating a few answers out of the pal. He's so fearful he'll only let a few details slip.

So Ray and Bill set off to research just what their father might have been party to. Bill favors a private investigator, while Ray wants to do things on his own and digs into enough newspaper clippings to discover Dad was once a mob lawyer.

That's the tip of the iceberg, and each move takes Ray further along the road to dark truths about his family's past and his own identity. Deaths and gunplay, ensue along with revelations,  and there's no question this deserves a hard-boiled label as important players die and Ray sets out on a path that has him wondering who he'll be if he comes out the other side.

That will only come after several twists and believable maneuvers that wrap up the action, reveal the truths and set the book on the road to a satisfying conclusion that's at a place the reader can accept in this grim universe.

Woven around the story is a bit of mob history. It's interesting to get a taste of early sixties perception of the mob, making the book almost a prelude to the revenge tales that would come a few years later in the action-adventure era.

There's one set-up phase involving meetings of mobsters and other necessary exposition that seemed to drag a bit to me, but otherwise the tale is tough and taut and a great experience.

It's truly a hidden gem recovered by Hard Case for contemporary readers after years of the book being out of print.

Impulse buy

The End of the Night by John D. MacDonald

The synopsis made me hesitate a bit. 

As a kid, I always had better luck finding John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books than in locating the non-series tales. I ran across A Bullet for Cinderella on a spinner rack while visiting relatives in Camden, Arkansas, but that was the exception.

The rest of the long list of non-series books you'd find in the front of McGee titles eluded me, though I was intrigued by titles such as One Monday We Killed Them All, The Last One Left and Dead Low Tide.

I've worked at acquiring the stand-alone books for a while now, right after my love for MacDonald's work was re-activated when I was living in Texas and ran across The Crossroads in a shop mostly devoted to collectible hardcovers.

When I stumbled on an article mentioning Stephen King's praise of The End of the Night (1960) recently, I was happy to find it was among MacDonald Bookmooch acquisitions waiting on my shelf. Then, as mentioned above: that synopsis.

"Four drug-crazed young sadists--a world of damage. Driven by random, violent lusts they could barely articulate and understand, they embarked on a cross-country terror spree that left a trail of victims in its wake."

I don't shy away from grim tales, but I wasn't sure it was what I was in the mood for a criminal-focused tale with dark results.

Still, I figured there must be something to King's assertion that it was "one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century." I cracked the cover and read the opening passage, a missive from a prison guard recounting the executions of said drug-crazed young sadists.

That's a bold opening move, telling us how things end before falling back to reveal how events converged to drive everything to that point. I kept reading and discovered the piece never lacked for suspense despite the early reveal.

I read on and was drawn in, because the MacDonald magic took over, mesmerizing with a collection of well-drawn characters plus trial memos, death house diary entries and outside accounts that reveal the dark happenstance that connect killers and victims.

Riker Deems Owen, attorney for the four, perhaps defending his courtroom loss, defines their relationships and prepares the way for a framing and engrossing account of Helen Wister, a young woman trying to let an infatuated suitor down as she plans for her marriage to another, a young architect.

Then we drop into the eloquent journal of Kirby Stassen, college dropout turned participant in the crime spree, and we learn of his long path from New York and brushes with show business to Acapulco and a misguided romance with an older woman that primed him for his soul-dead excursion with the Sander Golden who's manipulating brutish Robert Hernandez and Nanette Koslov. Perhaps his diary is too eloquent and perceptive for his years, but that's a bit of license worth granting this novel.

Once connected the four are dubbed the Wolf Pack by the press, and their spree gains national notoriety with reverberations of Charles Starkweather's spree and the Richard Hickcock/Perry Smith In Cold Blood murder case.

Stassen recounts their humiliation and murder of a tile salesman but chooses not to delve into even more brutal events in Nashville where even he admits things were woefully out of hand.

Objectively the story continues via a never-named narrator who details the FBI dragnet and the fateful encounter between Wister and the band, building toward a culmination and epilogue that reveals tiniest glimmer of affirmation.

Its power is in both its exploration of the random, circuitous paths that lead to destruction, and its glimpse into at least a part of what drives random killers even beyond drug-induced dissociation.

Given King's affection for the work and his friendship with and admiration for MacDonald, I suspect it was an influence on the complexly-structured It, which features an architect protagonist as well.)

The End of the Night is a dark ride, but I'm glad I pushed past the synopsis because it's not as nihilistic as the cover might suggest. Don't judge a book by it's back cover.

Impulse buy