Showing posts with label Dakota. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dakota. Show all posts

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Dakota #5: Chain Reaction


Dakota #5: Chain Reaction, by Gilbert Ralston
November, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Chain Reaction is so dull that I could hardly finish it. Really, I spent the last chapter and a half speed-reading, even though this is where the allegedly thrilling climax occurred. It lacks excitement and mystery, the cast of characters is ridiculously and confusingly large, and many scenes exist of filler dialogue telling us stuff we either already know or don't care about. Sort of if a writer was trying to stretch a 50-minute screenplay to a 180-page manuscript.Marty McKee

Man, first they cancelled ALF and now this! It’s the last volume of Dakota, friends, so I’m sure you all are shedding just as many tears as I am. 

Once again Marty McKee has succinctly captured my own thoughts – as mentioned before, Marty sent me his Dakota books, so I’m reading the same copy that he read. Like it’s a holy relic or something! Marty’s comment that “the cast of characters is ridiculously and confusingly large” pretty much sums up my major problem with Dakota. I sort of get what Gilbert Ralston was trying to do, like a family saga mixed with a hardboiled American Indian detective in “today’s West” sort of thing, but I don’t think it worked. As it is, Dakota comes off like a guy who needs to bring a few buddies along with him to the restroom when he takes a leak, and then calls his mom afterward to let her know how it all went. It’s like I wrote in my review of the first volume: Dakota is the only men’s adventure protagonist who regularly calls his mother, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the character and the series. 

The helluva it is, there’s material here for a good yarn…it’s just that Ralston’s insistence on straddling Dakota with legions of clingers-on robs the character of any ass-kicker potential. I’m not so much sure if Ralston was trying a different spin on the lone wolf ‘70s paperback action hero ethic than it was he just didn’t understand it. As Marty also noted, and I concured with, it seems evident that Ralston intended Dakota as the springboard for a TV series. It just seems very clear, given Ralston’s Hollywood background, the large group of characters, the lack of much violence and zero sex at all…I mean it’s not too hard to believe that’s what this series was intended as. After all, fellow Hollywood vet Paul Petersen attempted the same thing, around the same time, with The Smuggler, and that too failed to gain any traction outside of the paperback field. 

As Marty also noted in his review of Dakota #3 (here’s my review if you are super bored – and that installment of the series was mostly interesting because it seemed to be a rewrite of Ralston’s concurrent The Deadly, Deadly Art), Dakota is like “McCloud meets Nakia,” and again it’s not hard to see this might have been Gilbert Ralston’s exact intention. Nakia was a 1974 TV crime show with Robert Foster as an American Indian cop, and McCloud was a ‘70s crime show starring Dennis Weaver as a Nevada marshall assigned to the big city of New York…hey, what if you combined the two concepts into a series and hoped it got picked up for a TV deal? This would explain the tepid thrills, the “ridiculously large cast of characters,” the focus on Dakota’s home town as a central facet of the storyline, etc. 

Unfortunately, it still doesn’t make the series any good. Dakota is a far cry from the ‘70s-mandated lone wolf vigilante hero, though the potential is there for him to be one. We’re often told of how he’s packing a pistol, but rarely if ever does the guy actually use it. Instead, he’s more likely to let one of his many, many friends do the job for him. I mean like a fool I got my hopes up several times in the course of Chain Reaction; like we’re told at the start that Dakota has a .38 hidden in his “new Chevrolet,” same as he had one hidden in his original car back in the first volume…but it’s not really used. Later on he arms himself with a .357 Magnum, but again it’s his buddies who do the brunt of the fighting, one of them using a carbine Dakota has loaned him. 

So it seems clear Ralston was aware of the market he was writing for, he just couldn’t be bothered to do the job right. Once again the editors at Pinnacle understood what the series was supposed to be: the memorable cover art and the back cover copy all illustrate the novel’s most memorable sequence, of a naked American Indian woman hung by her thumbs while a pair of thugs torture her to death. “Hung By The Thumbs” is even emblazoned as the slugline on the back cover, like this was a grimy crime paperback from Leisure Books. But this scene is only vaguely brought to life in the very opening pages, Ralston cutting to brief sequences of this undescribed woman hanging by the thumbs, nude, and some guys passing a flame over her body – all very grim indeed, but hardly exploitative. 

Instead, the big focus of the opening pages is…Dakota’s buddy Joe Redbeard getting married!! Friends I kid you not. While the poor “Indian woman” is hung by her goddamn thumbs and being torture-killed, Ralston keeps cutting away from the scene, back to Dakota…who waits at the airport for his girlfriend Alicia (whom he still keeps begging to marry him – again, pretty much says all you could say about Dakota), and then he goes back to his overpopulated home to shoot the breeze with his many, many hangers-on. Hell there’s even a part where the Indian woman’s daughter has come here to Dakota’s ranch, unknowing that her mother is being tortured to death that very minute, and Dakota literally tells her to wait because first he has to attend Redeard’s wedding! In like a dozen pages you learn everything that is wrong about Dakota. You can almost hear the editors at Pinnacle sighing in exasperation. Like I said before, there’s no mystery why this was the last volume. 

Well anyway, it’s a few months after the previous volume; it’s Spring now, as we learn via some evocative word-painting that again indicates Ralston was attempting his own sort of Spoon River Anthology for the paperback crimefighter set. Dakota’s latest private eye job is courtesy the aforementioned daughter, a teenager from San Francisco whose dad was mysteriously killed and now she has this key in an envelope that was given to her by her mother – who, we readers know, is also now murdered. Dakota, forever putting off Alicia (it might be implied they have off-page sex, but you have to really use your own fevered imagination), takes the job and assembles his unwieldy cast of clingers-on and hangers-on to look into the mystery – and, like the previous volume, that’s pretty much all Chain Reaction is: a mystery novel. 

The opening “sweat mag” vibe is lost…and again Ralston blows his own potential with his refusal to cater to what we want. Those two torture-killing thugs? Dakota doesn’t even deal with either of them. Either of them!! Indeed they are pretty much red herrings on that front, and instead the narrative plays out as more of a mystery: Dakota gradually unravels a plot that connects these two thugs with the crime world guy who has been plaguing Dakota for volumes. The same guy who hired Guy Marten, the ineffectual professional assassin who first appeared in Cat Trap. Luckily Ralston goes back to the Marten subplot here in final installment Chain Reaction, but we don’t get any resolution on it (indeed, Marten by novel’s end is geared to becoming even more of a menace in Dakota’s life, given his advancement up the crime world chain), which indicates Gilbert Ralston did not plan to end Dakota here. 

Dakota gets some pals from previous volumes together and they head off to San Francisco – that is, after Dakota’s let his mommy know. (Not joking, either.) Here they follow the leads on the two thugs and gradually figure out it has to do with Dakota’s old archenemy. There’s occasional action, but again it’s Dakota’s buddies doing the shooting and stuff; Dakota just drives the car during one such scene. There’s another part where Dakota and his mini-army are jumped by some stooges and they get in a protracted fight, but Ralston again proves his lack of mettle in this field by writing so much of it passively, ie “Dakota was handling two of them,” and the like. Dakota does knock out one dude with a “savate kick,” at least, but even in the finale there isn’t much in the gun-blazing action you’d expect from this publisher; it’s more of a taut suspense-thriller vibe. 

But even here it lacks much bite. So without any spoilers, the deal is Dakota’s girlfriend is abducted by Guy Marten, working under the auspices of the aforementioned crime boss, Marvin Kintner. But since Alicia’s hardly been in the novel, this event doesn’t have much impact. Also, she’s not mistreated in any way, so there isn’t much impact in that regard, either. So to get the upper hand Dakota puts together a team (can you believe it??) to kidnap Kintner, and use him as a bargaining chip. It’s written like a heist, with the group breaking into the high-tech defenses of the guy’s place, getting him while he’s in bed with his floozie, etc. It’s an okay scene but again the thrill factor is undermined by the amount of people Dakota has working with him, plus there’s confusion because the names of all these people blend together and you often forget who is who. 

Spoiler alert, but there is no confrontation between Dakota and Guy Marten; the two don’t even meet face to face. As mentioned though Ralston clearly intended Marten to be a continnuing threat, as by novel’s end some crime-world bigwigs discuss moving Marten up the totem pole. Instead, as with the previous volume, the “climax” is more on a mystery tip, with Dakota putting pieces of the puzzle together and getting justice for the orphaned teen Indian girl who hired him. Speaking of whom, I thought she was going to be added to the menagerie of supporting characters, but Ralston indicates at the end of Chain Reaction that she might be moving away with other relatives…I doubt it, though. I bet if there’d been a Dakota #6 she would’ve been in it, probably getting married to Dakota’s young helper Louis Threetrees (marriages being another recurring gimmick of the series, btw…another indication of how Ralston just didn’t get it). 

So this was it for Dakota, and to tell the truth it’s a miracle it even lasted this long. Thanks again to Marty for sending me the books all those years ago (along with tons of others I’m still working through!), but if anything I found Dakota interesting as a failed genre experiment. But then, maybe Ralston didn’t even know it was an experiment. Regardless, now that I’ve read the series I really think Marty is correct – as theorized in the comment he left on my review of Dakota #2 – that the series was Ralston’s attempt at farming out a concept he’d failed to get produced in Hollywood.

Monday, July 25, 2022

Dakota #4: Murder’s Money


Dakota #4: Murders Money, by Gilbert Ralston
March, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Wake up, everyone, it’s time for another volume of Dakota! Yet another blood-soaked tale of fast-moving action and mayhem with tons of explicit sleaze to spare! Actually all of that’s a total lie; I was just trying to be as misleading as the art and back cover copy. For in reality Murder’s Money is even more slow-moving than the previous three installments, as hard as that is to believe. But at the very least Gilert Ralston himself is honest this time; he has removed all pretensions toward writing “men’s adventure,” and this one’s really just a mystery novel. 

At this point I’m more interested in what was going on behind the scenes at Pinnacle. I think it’s very impressive that they tried to package Dakota as an action series. This took some very creative thought from the marketing department, or whoever wrote the back cover copy. The plot promised on the back cover squashes all hopes of an action extravaganza, though; we’re told Dakota is hired to figure out who murdered someone. I mean we aren’t exactly talking The Executioner. But then this is what paperback publishers were doing in the ‘70s; take a look at the similarly-boring Hardy series, which was also misleadingly packaged as a sex and violence thriller, where in reality it was more focused on what Hardy ate or watched on TV. Same goes for Renegade Roe, another “action” series low on thrills that featured an American Indian P.I., much like Dakota

One interesting thing is that Murder’s Money picks up immediately after the previous volume; as we’ll recall, Cat Trap ended with an assault on Dakota’s Nevada ranch, led by a professional assassin who worshpped an ancient Egyptian god. This one opens the morning after that assault, with Dakota and his many friends cleaning up the frozen corpses. One frozen corpse not here is that of the professional assassin, Guy Marten, who as we’ll also recall was lamely allowed to get away in the climax of the previous book. Dakota will often ponder this throughout Murder’s Money, “knowing” that he will once again encounter Marten. We readers know this is true, given occasional cutovers to Guy Marten and his plan to get revenge on Dakota. Given that there was only one more volume to follow, I wonder if we will see this plan come to fruition. 

The periodic ruminations on Marten and his possible return seem to be Ralston’s attempt to cater to Pinnacle’s “action” mandate, because otherwise Murder’s Money is deadly dull, and has more in common with Agathie Christie than Don Pendleton. Let me give you an example of this. After handling corpse patrol, ie removing the frozen bodies from around his ranch, Dakota is informed by one of his friends: “Your mother says come to breakfast.” Folks this line basically encapsulates Dakota. It’s a wonder Ralston didn’t go all the way with it and saddle Dakota with a nagging wife: “You better forget about working on another case, Mister – we’re going to The Home Depot!”

Even though it’s just a few hours after he fended off a commando attack in the middle of a snowswept night, Dakota heads on into town to look into his latest case: basically, he’s been hired to find out who killed a local named Jack Bray. The accused is Henry Bray, wheelchair-bound brother of Jack, an eccentric millionaire who pays people in gold coins. We learn later in the book (though the back cover copy gives it away) that Henry Bray is wheelchair-bound because his brother Jack ran over him years before, which of course gives him motive. Henry Bray has hired Dakota to clear his name, insisting he is innocent, and paying Dakota in those gold coins: “The wallpaper we call money is a mortuary bill for a dying economy.” How prescient

So Dakota drives around Nevada and on into California as he tracks various clues. There is a lot of driving and clue-tracking in Murder’s Money. One can’t help but feel that Ralston has run out of steam…and he didn’t have much to begin with. A few more off-page murders occur, like that of an ex-Marine who works at the curio shop where Bray would get his gold coins. Ralston also works in an allusion to the notorious Lindbergh baby kidnapping with a subplot about “the Gerber kidnapping,” an equally notorious event in the world of Dakota. Long story short, the coins Henry Bray have been using were involved in the payoff for the long-ago Gerber kidnapping scheme, leading to a complex conspiracy Dakota tries to work his way through. 

And also Dakota’s still planning to marry Alicia, the woman he met in the first volume. She again appears in this book, not adding much except to tell Dakota to be careful and to hurry back to her. See, the nagging is already starting! But the main female character in Murder’s Money is Melissa Bray, stepdaughter of Jack Bray; she too hires Dakota’s services. She also features with him in an extended sequence that does nothing more than pad out the pages; Melissa, a pilot, flies Dakota in her private plane, but sabotage causes them to crash, stranding them in the desolate expanse of a forest. It goes on forever as Dakota tries to take care of an injured Melissa, while a group of “mountaineers” navigate through the thick snow to find the two of them. If I wanted something like this I’d just read Jack London’s “To Build A Fire.” 

Once all that is out of the way, Ralston decides around page 135 to make Dakota a badass. When a friend of his is shotgunned in California, Dakota starts busting heads when he tries to get some answers. He punches and kicks a couple people, causing another friend to tell him, “You’re two people. This one scares hell out of me.” Well, too bad we readers didn’t see more of “this one.” Soon enough Dakota’s going around with a group of criminals, among them a Japanese guy who is impressed with Dakota’s martial skills, and there’s a bit more bad-assery when they get info from a stooge by threatening to blow him away. But Dakota himself shoots no one, despite the misleading cover, and the novel’s biggest action scene occurs at the very end, where four motorcyclists give chase to Dakota’s car as he drives to Nevada. Unbelievably, Ralston charges through this entire action scene in a single paragraph that goes on for a page and a half…and that’s it. One can only imagine how a more confident action writer would’ve played out this sequence. 

Staying true to its mystery credentials, Murder’s Money instead “climaxes” with a long dialog exchange in which Dakota and his too-many friends baldly exposit on who might have killed Jack Bray. I mean up to and including listing the same characters over and over in different capacities so far as their awareness and involvement in the scheme would go. It’s very clear that Ralston at this point is on an empty tank and is praying to hit his word count asap. Not helping matters is that he (or perhaps a Pinnacle copyeditor) has neglected to put any white spaces in the book for scene transitions, meaning that we jump all over the place in the narrative with no warning. 

By novel’s end the promise is there that Guy Marten will be coming after Dakota for his revenge, but as mentioned there was only one more volume so we’ll see if it happens. There’s also I would say no mystery whatsoever why there was only one more volume in this series.

Monday, April 26, 2021

Dakota #3: Cat Trap


Dakota #3: Cat Trap, by Gilbert Ralston
September, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Conventional plotting and characterizations take precedence over the action and sleaze factors, which barely exist. -- Marty McKee

I think one thing we can all agree on though is that the Dakota series is graced with some of the finer covers in the men’s adventure genre. This one, with its lysergic green cat statuette, is especially nice. The artwork is signed, but I can’t make out the signature. There seems to be an “S” and a “V” in there. I was wondering if it was either John or Marie Severin, but I’m not familiar enough with their art or signature styles to say. Anyway, it’s too bad Pinncale didn’t credit the artist on the copyright page. 

I have been somewhat looking forward to this volume of the series if only to get some clarity on the plot and its similarity to a standalone novel Gilbert Ralston published through Pinnacle at this time: The Deadly, Deadly Art, which came out in November of ’74. Both it and Cat Trap feature an assassin who worships ancient Egyptian feline god Bastet. It seems very strange that an author would devote two books to the same thing in such a short span of time. It turns out though that the whole Bastet thing factors much more heavily into The Deadly, Deadly Art than it does in Cat Trap, so perhaps Ralston didn’t feel he had explored the concept sufficiently here and thus decided to devote another novel to it. Because Marty was right on the money in his review when he commented that Cat Trap suffers from “a waste of a potentially memorable villain.” 

What’s very curious is that the plots for Cat Trap and The Deadly, Deadly Art are practically identical: a Bastet-worshipping hit man takes out his victims with a special poison that mimics heart attacks. Only a telltale red dot on the victim’s back is evidence of the poison injection. But the killer is given more narrative space in The Deadly, Deadly Art, and the whole Bastet worship thing is more elaborated upon. In Cat Trap it comes off as an afterthought, introduced as a compelling subplot but ultimately dropped and not really explained. Even more curious is that there was potential to make Cat Trap a sequel to The Deadly, Deadly Art, as the Bastet worshipper Dakota goes up against is almost a clone of the villain in the other book. 

Marty in his review also notes that Dakota “has a very large supporting cast,” and that’s once again made clear within the first few pages of Cat Trap (how much you wanna bet Ralston had a different title in mind – another word for “Cat?”). As with the previous books in the series it’s clear Ralston wants to write a sort of family epic; he seems much more interested in the various supporting characters and their interactions than the action and whatnot the men’s adventure genre demands. Whereas the previous volume at least had a memorable sort of climax, this one’s comes off as perfunctory…and the few other action scenes throughout are over and done with in the blink of an eye. Well anyway, pages 2 through 4 are a nightmare of info-dumping, Ralston telling us the names of all the various people involved with Dakota near his family ranch in Carson Valley, Nevada, even up to and including “Caruso, Dakota’s pet raven.” And the damn bird isn’t even mentioned again. 

Indeed, Dakota’s personal entourage has gotten even more unwieldy. His father died at the end of the previous book, so now he lives with his mom, former local cop Bennedetti (plus Bennedetti’s wife and kids), young punk Louis Threetrees, and ‘Nam pal Joe Redbear, who figured in the memorable action climax of the previous book. In addition Dakota has a girlfriend named Alicia, introduced in the previous book and appearing again this time – Dakota’s such a “different” sort of men’s adventure hero that he even proposes to Alicia in the course of Cat Trap (she tells him “Not yet”), and hell there’s a part where he takes some other woman out on a date, just to get some info from her, and then drops her off back at her home so he can head back to his hotel and brood. And now that I think of it, there’s another part where Dakota stumbles onto a porn shoot, and the “actress” basically propositions him, and Dakota replies that he’d rather screw “a water buffalo.” 

Ralston piles on one-off characters and subplots in the first few chapters, making for a demanding read. What it boils down to is that two seemingly-unrelated men die of a heart attack on the same day in Reno, and Dakota is hired to look into it. In one subplot it’s an old ‘Nam commander who wants to find his son, and in another it’s a gambling casino that hires Dakota to find out what happened to one of its executives. But again all of this is very similar to The Deadly, Deadly Art, to the point that it’s humorous Ralston was able to sell Pinnacle practically the same book twice in the same year. I guess you could argue that Cat Trap has more action, comparatively speaking, but then again as mentioned as least The Deadly, Deadly Art had a better-developed villain. 

But in this book the villain is almost an afterthought. One of the heart attack victims died on a crowded street, and a witness overheard someone mutter something like “Bastet;” gradually (very gradually) Dakota will learn the whole connection with the ancient god. But as with the other book, ultimately we have here a professional assassin who pledges his kills to Bastet and uses a curare-tipped rapier to do his assassinating. As Marty notes, though, the villain is left so much in the background that he only appears twice, and the potential is not reaped in the least. Instead Dakota tassles with a couple low-level thugs over the plodding course of the novel. 

But Dakota is a private eye, and that’s really the vibe Ralston goes for…that is when he isn’t focused on the family and friends dynamics. Dakota flies around the country a good deal this time, meeting a host of characters who spout memorable dialog…which is another bone of contention I have with the series. Every single character delivers annoyingly glib dialog; Ralston had a Hollwyood background, which is very clear. But it’s too much of a good thing. I mean if one or two characters had some nice snappy dialog that would be fine. But when every character talks like they’re mugging for the camera it gets to be annoying – like for example the phrase “To hear is to obey,” which is uttered by two separate characters in the course of the book. Dakota himself continues to dole out the glib rejoinders; my favorite in that regard is when a hippie girl asks him if he’s an Indian and Dakota responds, “You want to see my tomahawk?”

Really though Dakota spends most of his time calling colleagues and flying to meet them to research on the ground. Here’s where that “sequel” potential is. One of Dakota’s contacts is a former New York cop named Cochran, who now works in San Francicso. He is familiar with a case in New York from a few years back where random people were dying of heart attacks, and it turned out to be the work of a professional killer named Guy Boyle Marten…who just happened to be a highfalutin snobbish type who worshipped Bastet. Yes, exactly like the art professor-professional killer who worshipped Bastet in The Deadly, Deadly Art…a novel which featured a New York cop as its hero. Man, all Ralston had to do was make that New York cop, Mack Bennett, the character Dakota works with in Cat Trap

It even works with the Marten connection; The Deadly, Deadly Art climaxes with what appears to be a random act of fate taking care of the villain, Brian Sattler…and we learn here that Guy Marten too is supposedly dead, victim of a random house fire. Marten even works for a sort of hitman staffing agency, same as Sattler did. And guess what – both Marten and Sattler live in Connecticut, where they work as teachers. It would seem clear then that these are the same characters, but Ralston never makes the connection. All he had to do was replace Cochran with Mack Bennet, and Marten with Sattler, and he would’ve had a fine sequel to The Deadly, Deadly Art. Of course that book was published two months after this one, but such things are a regular occurrence in the world of paperback originals. 

Well anyway, Dakota ventures to San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Connecticut in the course of his investigation, finding the opportunity to hook up with Alicia again in SanFran. There’s zero hanky-pankery this time; more focus is placed on Alicia’s lingerie store being ransacked with “chemicals,” a note left on the scene for Dakota to “go home.” Dakota instead sends Alicia back to the ranch in New Mexico and continues his investigation, getting in a couple scrapes. There’s a humorous amount of “kicking” this time; both Dakota and the one-off thugs are prone to launching high kicks to the head, as if inspired by Black Belt Theater or something. But this isn’t an action-heavy series by any means. I mean honestly Dakota is at one point hooked up with a pistol…and he never uses it, instead giving it back to his contact and telling him to hang on to it. 

Ralston’s writing is fine; I mean he’s clearly invested in the characters and has a gift for dialog. But he seems to be writing more of a James Michener sort of novel than about “a modern Indian lawman in today’s West.” Also the glibness extends to the narrative. There are so many short, direct sentences that at times it takes on the vibe of a hardboiled parody. But in his focus upon characters and introspection Ralston overlooks the more racy demands of this genre. I mean even Jon Messmann stories move, despite the inordinate introspection and philosophising. 

This is especially clear in the climax. After shuttling around the country to follow leads, in particular a sort of hitman hirer named Gordo (not to be conused with Greedo), Dakota finally has a personal confrontation with Marten…who makes zero impression on the reader, and instead just escapes. So Dakota heads on home to the ranch…and meanwhile Marten closes in on the ranch with a few thugs, each armed with “machine pistols.” Their orders are to kill everyone in the ranch. Taking place at night during a snow storm, this sequence has the opportunity to be very memorable…a sort of prefigure of Prairie Fire. But instead Ralston barrels through the action in just a few pages, having wasted so much time on the pondering and the glib-dialoging. That said, at least Dakota shoots someone here – and so does his mom, toting a gun she gets out of the pantry! 

What’s worse, the ending is wholly unsatisfactory, with a certain character straight-up escaping…Dakota even giving him a thirty minute head start to get away! Of course this sets up the potential that The Deadly, Deadly Art could be viewed as the sequel to Cat Trap, but then that one takes place in New York and all the stuff with New York and Guy Marten took place before the events of Cat Trap. Still though, it’s pretty lame, sort of like the average Marc Olden novel, where the villain escapes and you know they’ll never be mentioned again. I mean I demand to see the villain’s head exploding in the finale of a men’s adventure novel! 

That’s pretty much it for Cat Trap. Two more volumes were to follow, and I’m going to suspect they will be more of the same. Still, I do really like the covers. And I’m thinking more and more that Marty’s correct and Dakota started life as scripts Ralston worked on for a proposed TV series. The ensemble cast, leisurely plotting, and lack of sex and violence are all pretty much in-line with a TV production of the era. We’ll just assume Lalo Schifrin would’ve done the soundtrack.

Monday, July 29, 2019

Dakota #2: Red Revenge


Dakota #2: Red Revenge, by Gilbert Ralston
March, 1974  Pinnacle Books

I dreaded returning to the Dakota series; the first volume really disappointed me so I just bided my time until I moved on to this second installment. Actually I was going to read it the other year, but ended up reading Ralston’s The Deadly, Deadly Art instead…which was enough of a reminder why I really don’t dig this guy’s work. I mean he’s a good author and all, especially when it comes to character and dialog, but so far as being an action writer…I’ve still gotta agree with Marty McKee, who deemed the series “dull.”

I mention Marty in my Dakota reviews because he hooked me up with the series years ago; this one and tons of other series books, for which I’ll always be grateful to the guy. (That sounds sarcastic but I really mean it!) However Marty didn’t have this volume (hence no review of it on his blog), so I sought out a copy, hoping it would be an improvement over #1: Warpath. And luckily it is, though once again Ralston makes some very “interesting” authorial decisions.

Another thing Marty mentions in his reviews is the large cast of supporting characters in the Dakota series, much more than the genre average. I mean Red Revenge opens with Dakota riding his horse Bunky around his place in New Mexico and Ralston introduces all these characters sitting around and waving at him or being introduced in various ways, usually not even reminding us who they are. As if this were the Spoon River Anthology of men’s adventure or something.

It’s not that long after the first volume, as Dakota’s father is still on his deathbed and Dakota’s still mourning the people he lost in that introductory installment. One thing I’m happy to report is that Ralston whittles down on the musings and ponderings I seem to recall Warpath being saddled with. Dakota’s taken a course in bad-assery between volumes, doling out glib retorts and kicking ass when needed. In fact a quarter of the way through I started to think I was actually enjoying Red Revenge, given the increased pace and better focus on action, and halfway through the book I was flat-out loving it, which really threw me for a loop. Then I got to the last quarter…but more on that anon.

Par for the men’s adventure course some random babe throws herself at Dakota within the first few pages; her name’s Alicia and she’s in town on vacation. She bluntly announces herself as single and has “model” looks, though as ever Gilbert Ralston is not one to exploit the ample charms of his female characters. Dakota spends the majority of the text sending Alicia off or having her stay with random people to help them out. Setting up this recurring joke posthaste, Alicia immediately tells Dakota that one of the innumerable supporting characters has a message for him.

Turns out Dakota’s secretary has just been contacted by Martha Peavey, whose husband is a wealthy executive, and Martha wants Dakota over at her Lake Tahoe place quick. She’s waiting there with other wealthy women whose husbands are execs at the same company; in some arbitrary backstory we learn that Dakota had an affair with one of these women, pretty and younger than the rest, years before. Anyway all of the executive husbands were off on a fishing trip but they’ve been kidnapped; Martha doesn’t want the cops to find out about it, due to the demands of the kidnappers, so she’s hiring Dakota, and grudgingly he takes the case.

Already we have more tension and suspense than anything in the previous book. And speaking of which Dakota’s young Indian sidekick Louis Threetrees returns from the previous volume, driving the now-purple “sedan” Dakota gave him. (For some maddening reason Ralston refuses to tell us what make and model the car is…I assume we were told this in the first book and he figures we remember, or hell maybe he himself forgot.) Together Dakota and Louis drive around looking for clues, and again we get more action than previously when Dakota kicks some hapless guard’s ass at the harbor, tracking down the boat the men were kidnapped on.

When Dakota’s pal, a sheriff named Bennedetti, is gunned down (off page), Dakota realizes something serious is going on. Bennedeti lives, by the way, though he’s alternately paralyzed and in a coma during the narrative, before recovering in the final pages; Dakota is unusual among men’s adventure protagonists in that he’s always checking up on injured friends, visiting their wives, and also of course going to visit his mother and father frequently. The more I think of it, Ralston really is trying to do this sort of soap operatic men’s adventure private eye thing, and I can’t think of anything else like it in the genre.

And when it’s good, it’s good – Dakota and Louis find themselves tailed by a car around town, and we readers know the driver is a hotstuff babe named Margo. Ralston as ever POV-hops like crazy in the narrative, writing in a pseudo-omniscient style; we’ll be reading about Dakota and Louis and then next paragraph we’re being told something like, “Unkown to them, Margo was behind the wheel of the other car,” and such. This sort of thing is annoying because there are too many characters in the novel, and the abrupt POV-switching gets to be confusing and egregious. Damn egregious!

The absoulte highlight of the novel – and possibly the entire series, I suspect – occurs a little past the halfway point. Dakota’s already gotten in some action, from a few fights to shooting at that car that’s been tailing him – and only later does he learn he’s killed a woman – but here he has a very cool Rambo-esque moment. He’s deduced that the captured executives (who have their own running subplots, again giving the novel the unwieldy vibe of an epic) are being held in a remote valley. So he calls up some “blood brothers” from ‘Nam, baby!

This is Joe Redbear and Johnny Pius, two guys Dakota commanded back in the war; they were part of an “all-Indian group, trained for close combat.” Dakota figures the kidnappers are going to kill the hostages when they get their three million ransom, so he works against time to free them before the cops can move in and blow everything. He’s already scouted out the site and here the narrative has the rugged nature survival vibe of similar sequences in Soldato #1. Dakota and his blood brothers get some knives, some revolvers, and a bow and arrow, and work their way onto the site in the darkness.

This is a great sequence and at this point I was fully caught up in the novel. Finally Dakota was what I’d been waiting for it to be. Ralston’s not much for violence but the action is still fairly bloody, with subgun-toting guards getting impaled by arrows and their throats slit by knives. The cover illustration comes into play when Dakota uses a flare gun, taking out one guy with the flare and crunching another’s skull like an eggshell when he hurls the empty gun at him. Oh yeah and one of the guards is named Binky, not to be confused with Dakota’s horse Bunky. I was certain that had to be an in-joke.

And here’s where all those bad memories of Warpath came back to me in full sensurround. The novel pretty much ends here, on page 152: Dakota has killed the bad guys and freed the hostages. But Ralston keeps the narrative going for another 32 pages. We get belabored stuff like Dakota’s father dying and pages and pages devoted to his funeral, complete with long quotes from prayer books, complete with asterisked footnotes telling us where the quotes are taken from! And Dakota visiting his now-widowed mom, and checking in on old friends, and getting a new car…I mean it’s the sort of stuff that happens after the credits roll, not before.

Oh, and Dakota gets laid (by Alicia), but it’s not just off-page, it’s actually off-book; Alicia offers herself to Dakota at the bottom of the page, and at the top of the next page it’s an abrupt cut to the next morning. She’s now become his “sits-beside-him woman,” or some other such “Indian” thing, but regardless she takes off at the end of the book, going back to her lingerie store in San Francicso. Marty implies that she returns.

It just keeps going and going…and what’s most hilarious is that, on the last friggin’ page, Dakota gets in a quick fight with the person he’s suddenly realized was the true mastermind behind the kidnapping. I mean you’d think this is the sort of thing that could’ve been elaborated over those 32 pages, but whatever, Ralston has his own way of handling the men’s adventure genre, and he’s stubbornly determined to see it through. Hell, maybe he was going for a Spoon River Anthology thing.

But still, I enjoyed the majority of Red Revenge (certainly the title would be frowned upon today, at the very least). I’m looking forward to the next volume, mostly because it features a villain who worships the Ancient Egyptian feline deity Bastet, same as in The Deadly, Deadly Art.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Dakota #1: Warpath


Dakota #1: Warpath, by Gilbert A Ralston
November, 1973  Pinnacle Books

As Marty McKee notes, Gilbert Ralston was a TV writer, most known for the creation of The Wild Wild West, and his five-volume Dakota series bears all the hallmarks of a made-for-TV mindset. Indeed, it’s interesting that Pinnacle even published this, let alone labeled it as “adventure” on the spine; it has more in common with the low-rent private eye thrills of Hardy.

You know you’re in trouble when the back cover and first-page preview both spotlight the same action scene – and that’s because it’s the only action scene, really. Also curious that Pinnacle doesn’t inform us who Ralston is anywhere on the book; you’d think they would play up the fact that the dude was a successful TV writer. But anyway I have to agree with Marty, who waded through three of the Dakota novels, that the series was likely envisioned as a potential TV series. But if it had ever come to be it doubtless would’ve been one of the more boring shows in the annals of TV detectives.

Our series protagonist is Clay Dakota, an American Indian somewhere in his 30s who was a Force Recon Marine in ‘Nam, where he sustained a leg injury that sometimes still gives him trouble. After that he served as a “one-man police force” in some town in upstate New York, and then he opened his own “Pinkerton’s agency” in Carson Valley, Nevada. Dakota lives on a ranch in Genoa and does various private eye jobs; he’s been deputized by his buddy, Sheriff Al Bennedetti, and works closely with him. Dakota drives an old Chevy that has an auxilary fuel tank in the trunk and a .38 revolver hidden beneath the dash.

Dakota is perhaps the only men’s adventure protagonist to regularly call home to his mother. This should tell you all you need to know about the guy’s qualities as a kick-ass action hero.

Ralston goes for a slooow-burn approach; the cover art and slugline actually makes the book sound like a Western, and maybe that’s the vibe Ralston was attempting. This is not a frantically-paced tale by any means, and the central plot, of Dakota visiting an old mining town ruled by a millionaire despot, is also straight out of a Western. Dakota as an Indian hero is in for the same amount of racism, harrassment, and bullying as in a Western; there are too many parts where slackjawed yokels will amble over to his table and try to stir up shit over his heritage.

I’m too lazy to look up how old Ralston was when he wrote this, but I’m betting he was on in years, as he imbues Dakota with the wisdom of an old man. Maybe this is a play on the old “wise Indian” cliché, but Dakota is so patient and pragmatic as to be inhuman, like a Vulcan men’s adventure hero. Much of the narrative is given over to his ruminations on this or that, particularly on the foibles of people. It has the cumulative effect that you start to picture the guy as a geriatric rather than a tough-as-nails ‘Nam vet with an occasionally game leg.

Well anyway, Warpath gets the ball rolling for the series. Dakota’s called into the store owned by his old Chinese pal Sam Lew; Sam thinks he has a case for Dakota. It’s a young woman who won’t give her name or where she’s from, but she says her husband was killed and she wants Dakota to find out who did it: “Find the men who killed my husband. Barbecue them.” Dakota requests time to mull over if he wants to take the case, but then Sam and the young woman are killed by a car bomb. Dakota is now determined to see justice is served.

With Bennedetti’s help he discovers that the murdered woman was named Amy Rainey, and her husband was named Jack. They owned a bar in Poison Springs, Nevada, an old mining town owned by Burton Ashley. Dakota goes undercover as a cattle purchaser. The majority of the novel is focused on Dakota’s run-ins with the locals and the local law enforcement. He makes enemies with a trio of toughs (whom he beats up in a bar fight – this scene being the source of those front and back cover excerpts) and makes friends with a deputy named Phillips. He gets in the hair of Sheriff Hanna, and also becomes cozy with an attractive bank teller named Janet Hartley.

Suprisingly, Ralston actually writes a sex scene between the two. Here it is in its entirety: “He plunged into her.” That’s it! But Janet might as well be dating Charles Death Wish Bronson, as it becomes clearly obvious what fate is in store for her, given that she’s dating the only stranger in town, a stranger who is hiding ulterior motives and who has already run afoul of various people. There are a few muddled attempts on Dakota’s life, but he brushes it all off, gathering intel from drunken reporter Clifford Spring, a man who has long suspected Burton Ashley of being an evil bastard.

When Janet meets her expected fate Dakota takes the expected route – a peyote trip with a local tribe. Meanwhile he gets shot in the arm but he’s feeling practically brand new when Bennedetti shows up, helping Dakota work the case here in Poison Spring. But to tell the truth it’s all pretty bland, only salvaged by a very late moment where Dakota is stranded in the desert and five men come after him. This sequence plays off more on his “Indian skills” of sneaking up on people and also on his survivalist instincts, like how he knows that high ridge desert sand is very combustible.

The climax itself is more along the lines of a mystery thriller; after a nice sequence where Dakota and Bennedetti scale the electric fence surrounding Burton Ashley’s mansion and tranquilize his guard dogs, it instead devolves into lots of dialog as Ashley tries to barter for his freedom with Dakota. We also get an 11th hour reveal where one of Dakota’s pals turns out to be a sadistic killer, but it’s pretty hard to buy. But don’t worry, Dakota solves the case and arrests Ashley just in time to get home for dinner with mom and dad!!

Four more volumes were to follow, and if Marty’s comments are any indication, they become progressively more bland, so I’m in no hurry to get to them.