Showing posts with label Gary Blumberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gary Blumberg. Show all posts

Thursday, June 10, 2021

Adrano For Hire #3: The Swiss Shot


Adrano For Hire #3: The Swiss Shot, by Michael Bradley
April, 1974  Warner Books

The third volume of Adrano For Hire picks up a month after the previous volume; Johnny Adrano is still in the jungles of Mexico, and he’s in a bad way, suffering from dissentery and barely able to move. We learn he’s been staying here at the behest of his local friends, as this might be the one place in the world where the Mafia won’t be able to find him; as we’ll recall, there’s a contract out on Johnny from his actions in the first volume, and a psycho capo named Rizzo in particular wants him dead. 

Where the previous installments have been ensemble pieces along the lines of Mafia: Operation, The Swiss Shot keeps Adrano in center stage a little more than previously. However there are many sequences that cut away to other characters. More importantly though, if I didn’t know “Michael Bradley” was a pseudonym for Gary Blumberg, I’d figure with this volume that it was Adam Diment. There are sections of this novel that could’ve come right out of the Philip McAlpine novels (only in third-person, not first), with that same cynical vibe and all-knowing, all-annoying protagonist. Blumberg even works in a total Diment-ism with Adrano frequently musing over how he’s now “old,” given that the novel opens on his thirtieth birthday. 

The schtick of this series is that Adrano is a lone wolf in the Mafia who uses his gift for disguise and languages to pull cons and capers in the criminal world. At least that seems to be the schtick. But in this one Adrano falls on his face time after time; he spends the majority of the narrative being traded from one captor to another, and is knocked out so many times that you figure the dude’s going to have a permanent concussion. What makes this all the more amusing is that his arrogance remains unchecked. But honestly he is incredibly ineffectual in this one. The “disguise” angle is lost, as is the “caper” angle, and Adrano’s such a chump on the action front that he’s constantly dropping whatever gun he gets his hand on, or having a gun taken from him. That being said, he does kill one guy just by hitting him hard with his fist. 

We get our first indication of our protagonist’s buffoonery when he finally decides to leave the hovel he’s been living in, deep in the jungle, and ventures to Mexico City…where he’s promptly captured by a pair of mobsters who work for Rizzo. This after Blumberg has also given us an indication of the time-wasting he’ll treat us to throughout the novel; Adrano’s just sitting there, as ever mulling over his “old age” (as I say a recurring gimmick that gets real old real quick), and a pretty local chick with perfect English comes over, starts talking to him…then invites herself up to his room so she can change into her bikini and go swimming with him! She leaves to get her bikini and then the mobsters show up, and she’s never mentioned again, nor even the possibility that she was like a honey trap for the two mobsters. 

But at any rate this will be just the first of several times in which Adrano is whisked away by a couple of armed thugs. Meanwhile as mentioned the cutovers to other characters aren’t as excessive this time, but they’re still there. A la previous volumes there’s a lot of treachery afoot in the mob world: so there’s “old fart” Don Gaspar Rinaldi, Rizzo’s boss, but Rizzo wants the old man out of the way, and to this end has cooked up a scheme with Gaspar’s nutcase son, Michael. The belabored plan has it that Gaspar, in Geneva to visit a clinic for various ailments, is kidnapped and held in the clinic, with his doctor being forced to inject Gaspar with rabies if he doesn’t hand over the reigns of his empire to Michael by a certain date. However Michael and Rizzo are also plotting against one another, each of them planning to get that power for themselves. 

The plotting gets more complex; Adrano finds himself with a new pair of abductors, these ones Corsicans. This time he’s knocked out (again) and put on a plane, where he’s knocked out via drugs frequently. When he comes to he finds himself in the presence of Jean Paoli, the heroin kingpin from the first volume who lives in Marseilles and became uneasy allies with Adrano. Paoli explains that Gaspar Rinaldi is crucial for his network to succeed, thus Adrano is ordered to go rescue him from that clinic. After a little arm-pulling Adrano agrees, asking for papers and a gun. But don’t worry, friends, ultimately he won’t even use either of them, as the dude blunders through the novel and makes one mistake after another, to the point that it’s no great shock why there was only one more volume after this one. 

Blumberg does a pretty good job of bringing the Swiss locale to life, but truth be told the book was a little hard-going for me and I had to work to drum up any enthusiasm for it. This time the “sub-Adam Diment” stuff was the problem; there’s a part where Adrano visits an actual psychedelic club in Switzerland, but instead of bringing the place to life Blumberg has Adrano sneering over how it’s “ten years out of date.” This entire sequence could’ve come out of any of the Philip McAlpine novels, particularly when some nameless local girl appears at Adrano’s table and starts coming on to him. Blumberg, a la Diment, doesn’t even bother to tell us what she looks like, let alone exploit her any, and Adrano for his part refers to her as a “female-person,” which is such jaded hipsterism bullshit that I almost wished I could transport myself into the book and punch him. Luckily the sex scene isn’t a fade to black (I mean why do writers fade to black when it comes to what surely must be the most fun scenes to write??), but the girl turns out to be a honey trap, and Adrano, believe it or not, is captured again! 

This time Adrano’s forced to dig his own grave while the two captors watch him with guns; more Diment-isms as Adrano chafes at the affrontery of this and goes bashing with his shovel. Somehow Adrano manages to escape and find Gaspar Rinaldi, which leads to a bit where he’s almost captured yet again. But the rabies injection factors into the climax, being used on an unexpected character in the novel’s most memorable moment. For Blumberg here is not writing an action-centric saga by any means; Adrano, when he even has a gun, only occasionally shoots anyone, and the violence is not exaggerated at all. But his sendoff of a villain here is pretty memorable, given that a bullet to the head is considered mercy in comparison to the rabies injection. 

The finale of The Swiss Shot sees Adrano fifty thousand bucks richer, as reward for successfully completing the job, and last we see of him he’s planning to stay in Jean Paoli’s opulent pad and read the man’s original editions of Machiavelli. In the original Italian. Let’s not forget, Adrano is a genius and all. Not that you’d know it from the way he handles himself in any of these books. As mentioned, there was one more volume of the series to go, and I will assume it will turn out to be as lackluster as the first three.

Thursday, July 5, 2018

Adrano For Hire #2: Kill The Hack!


Adrano For Hire #2: Kill The Hack!, by Michael Bradley
March, 1974  Warner Books

It’s been so long since I read the first volume of Adrano For Hire that I had to go back and read my review to familiarize myself with this short-lived series; I’d honestly forgotten pretty much everything about it, other than I hadn’t enjoyed that first installment very much. Sadly I must say the same about this second volume, again turned out by Gary Blumberg posing as “Michael Bradley.” Like the first one it is stuffed with too many characters, lacks much action or bite, and indeed even misses the sort of arrogant drive of the first volume, for this time “hero” Johnny Adrano is “for hire” to save his life, not for reasons of arrogance.

But to tell the truth, Adrano is sort of lost this time around. In my review of the first volume I compared this series to Narc, but a more apt comparison might be Mafia: Operation. Just like that four-volume series, Adrano For Hire is more of an ensemble piece, featuring too many criminal underworld types vying for the reader’s attention. But unlike Mafia: Operation, this series has a recurring character in titular Adrano, who as we’ll recall is a conceited young punk looking to use his fancy Ivory Tower college degree to strike it big in the world of the Mafia. In the first volume he successfully screwed over his old mobster pals, making a deal with an overseas heroin dealer.

It appears that this second volume opens up soon after the first volume – Adrano is holed up in some dive in New York after the fallout of an attempted hit in New Jersey a few hours before. The Mafia is after him for screwing them over, and in particular a capo named Steve Rizzo is out for his blood. (Any relation to Frank Rizzo??) We get lots of scenes of Rizzo screaming at fellow mobsters about getting Adrano. Meanwhile a hirsute freak by the name of Louis Cerelli – who by the way was castrated in Vietnam – is hiding way down in Mexico and pulling off contract kills. Nicknamed “The Hack,” Cerelli gets overly excited on his kills and is known for hacking and slashing his victims to bloody pieces.

These various plots unsteadily unite in a single thread in some of the more lazy plotting I’ve yet encountered; okay, first Rizzo wants Adrano dead, and he’s all fired up about it. But then Rizzo gets word that the Hack is operating down in Mexico – the novel opens with Cerelli killing an Indian anthropolgist, in a subplot which itself will lazily be threaded in – and abruptly Rizzo changes his focus: now he wants Cerelli dead. Why? Because many years ago Rizzo hired Cerelli to kill a rival capo, and Cerelli did the deed, but as was the Hack’s wont he also hacked up the busty babe the capo happened to be in bed with at the time – complete with lurid descriptions of her breasts being lopped off and the machete rammed up a certain part of her anatomy. Well, the babe in question happened to be Rizzo’s fiance(!?), so now the Hack Cerelli is #1 on Rizzo’s shit list. 

Here comes the lazy thread-combining: Rizzo decides to sent Adrano down to Mexico to kill Cerelli. Huh?? To this end he hires some black thugs to round up Adrano, who happens to be hiding out with an old Harvard pal named Arturo Zamora, who now works as a people’s lawyer in Harlem. Given the financial status of his clients, Zamora is poor, and thus had to represent criminals so as to get money for his brother, an anthropologist looking to work in Mexico. And yes, folks, you got it – the very same anthopologist who was killed by Cerelli in the opening pages! All the plot threads so lazily connected!

Now mind you folks, I’m informing you of all this due to the omniscient power of hindsight, because the honest fact of the matter is that, for a good fifty percent of Kill The Hack!, I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Blumberg is a capable writer, but damn does he just drop you into the deep end and let you fend for yourself. Newly-introduced characters refer to other new characters in passing, or past events with little elaboration, and there’s hardly any setup or development of anything. But hey, at least the cover’s cool, and Adrano For Hire is similar to the Smuggler series in that the cover art is the best thing about it…and, also like the art on The Smuggler, you get double bang for your buck, with an additional painting on the back.

Well anyway since I’m in full admission mode, here’s another one – I’ve never been much interested in stories set in Mexico or stories about Mexican village life (save of course for One Hundred Years Of Solitude), which made Kill The Hack! even more of an unenjoyable read for me, as the second half occurs in, you guessed it, Mexico, deep in the jungle. I mean, unless it’s Predator we’re talking about, I’m just not interested, so sue me. But we’re very much on that tip here, with Mexican natives engaged in their own subplots…there’s some shit about up-and-comer Mexican crook Ramon, who hired Cerelli to kill Zamora (the anthropologist), because Zamora was screwing Ramon’s girlfriend Consuelo. And yep, if you didn’t noitce, this is the exact same plot as the Rizzo backstory. Ten points to Blumberg for ripping himself off in the same novel.

Adrano and Atruro Zamora (the lawyer, not the murdered anthropologist) are sent down to Mexico. They bicker and fight the whole way, and not in a fun Razoni and Jackson way. It gets to be annoying. Action is infrequent, and when it happens it’s over in flash, like when Adrano discovers he’s being followed by would-be assassins, ones hired by Cerelli (WTF? I mean Cerelli himself is an assassin, righ??). He guns ‘em down with his .38 and goes back to bitch at Zamora for bringing the villains onto their trail or something. Meanwhile we have more fussing between Ramon and Consuelo, and Cerelli sweating bullets because he realizes the Mafia, in particular Rizzo, has tracked him down.

The finale is almost maddeningly boring. The action having moved down to Veracruz, our characters engage in a loong standoff, Cerelli hiding in the jungle and waiting to take out our heroes. Meanwhile Consuelo is on her way down here, I guess because Blumberg feels he’s padded so many pages with her subplot that he should have her, you know, maybe be integral to the plot in some fashion. Well, she is…she sees Zamora, in particular how he’s identical to his murdered brother, and the two promptly fall in love. Meanwhile after a lot of “tension” Adrano’s able to get the drop on Cerelli and shoots him. That’s it.

This one was really a mess…just a long-simmer, disjointed affair with too many characters and too little “good stuff” to at least make it worth your while. Cerelli’s gruesome backstory and modus operandi are about the only memorable elements…I mean it’s like he just walked out of one of those sicko Men’s Detective Magazines of the day. But his lurid star is also tarnished by the general vibe of malaise which settles over the novel. Really hoping the next one is better.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Adrano For Hire #1: The Corsican Cross


Adrano For Hire #1: The Corsican Cross, by Michael Bradley
February, 1974  Warner Paperback Library

This is the first of four volumes about Johnny Adrano, a 29 year-old mobster with a Harvard education who wants to carve out his own piece of the criminal underworld. It would appear that author Gary Blumberg (aka “Michael Bradley”) was trying to go for a Richard Stark/Parker sort of thing here, serving up a protagonist who is in no way a hero. Indeed, Adrano’s gambit in The Corsican Cross is to kidnap a heroin manufacturer, play one don against another, “and come out of the action in control of a juicy one-third of the heroin trade!”

Adrano is in fact a pretty unlikable protagonist. One problem I had with this book is that Adrano’s impetus is based solely upon arrogance. There’s no revenge story here, or anything else which would engender reader sympathy; Adrano merely believes that, due to his good looks and heavy education, he deserves to be at the top of the New York mafia chain, and so he decides to break out on his own and screw everyone. But the biggest miss here is that Adrano’s Harvard education was funded by those very same NYC mobsters he now looks to con! (In a barely-described backstory, we learn that Adrano, an orphan, was raised by a mobster who put him through college, but the mobster later died, so that now Adrano has no one in “the Family” who looks out for him.)

However Adrano himself takes forever to appear in this slim, 174-page novel. Like Marc Olden’s Narc books, The Corsican Cross is more of an ensemble piece, author Blumberg juggling a huge cast of underworld figures, with our protagonist sometimes lost in the fray. Also I should mention here that Blumberg is an irredeemable POV-hopper; I mean, we switch perspectives from one paragraph to the next, and this makes for a bumpy read when you consider how many characters are on display. Seriously, just give us a line break or something! Instead we go from say a mobster’s perspective straight into Adrano’s, and then into someone else’s, all in the space of three paragraphs, and all this does is confuse the reader and pull him out of the reading experience.

Anyway, at first we have to get through a lot of backstory about the dog-eat-dog world of New York-area mobsters in 1971 (the specific date in which The Corsican Cross occurs). Long story short, a don named Sam Benucci in the “redneck” woodlands of New Jersey has enjoyed the full US distribution control of the 90% pure heroin imported from Jean Paoli, a Corsican who lives in Marseilles, France. Now the dons in New York have combined to take this way from Benucci; leading them is Don Tirizzi, the most powerful mafioso in NYC.

Johnny Adranno is a low-tier “button man” in Tirizzi’s family; we learn that Adrano “made his bones” when he was still a teen, and due to his Ivy League education, his lawyer status, and his general ego, he believes that he should serve as Tirizzi’s consigliere, not Mike Sicardo…aka the brother of the guy who raised Adrano and put him through school. Adrano hatches a scheme; he approaches Benucci and tells him that, in exchange for funding the caper and cutting him in on the eventual profits, Adrano will go to France, kidnap Leon Di Bianci (the Corsican who manufactures that pure heroin and is also the best of friends with Paoli), and bring him back to the States before Tirizzi’s goons can go over there and work a deal with Paoli. The Corsican’s monopoly depends wholly upon Di Bianci’s manufactured heroin.

So begins a caper that reminded me a little of the Mission: Impossible TV series (which is actually referred to in passing in the narrative: Adrano scoffs at a “stupid spy show on TV” where the heroes easily infiltrate a gang and con them). Adrano makes use of disguises and cunning to pull a caper on Paoli, Di Bianci, and Tirizzi, posing as “Joseph Abel,” a French-speaking American seller of antiquarian books. To this end The Corsican Cross is heavier on suspense than action, though it does have an appropriately action-filled climax.

Blumberg, like Olden, seems to get the most enjoyment in writing about his villains (a meaningless term here, given that every character is a criminal). Paoli takes center stage, coming off like a heroic man among men; he fought in the Resistance and now lives in splendor with his young mistress Suzanne, chronically worrying over the failing health of his best friend Di Bianci, who despite not being a heroin user is gradually dying due to breathing the vapors as he creates the drug. That these men are selling the heroin to mobsters who then disperse it to junkies across the States, thus ruining lives and society, is something that Paoli never once considers – indeed, he envies Tirizzi and his fellow visiting mobsters over the fact that he has such avid customers in America.

The novel is more in the “trash fiction” category than men’s adventure. Again I’d say the closest comparison would be the Parker novels, only with a Godfather overlay. Blumberg ably captures the posh life of Paoli, who like Di Bianci is a compulsive collector of antiquarian books (hence Adrano’s scheme). Whereas Di Bianci is at death’s door, Paoli has the health of a younger man, and thus we get a few scenes of him dallying with Suzanne (nothing too explicit). Meanwhile Blumberg takes his time building up the characters and narrative, with Adrano posing as Joseph Abel on the flight to Paris (where he manages to pick up a French stewardess and score with her that very night; has anything like this happened to anyone outside of characters in trash fiction??). He slowly infiltrates Di Bianci’s world, claiming to have 16th century copies of Dante for sale.

Paoli and Di Bianci take an instant liking to Joseph Abel, and Paoli invites him to stay at his villa; Blumberg increases the suspense factor here by having Tirizzi and Mike Sicardo visiting at the same time. Now Adrano is afraid that his ruse might be uncovered by both parties. Blumberg also increases the sleaze angle with an arbitrary sequence in which Suzanne is raped by Marcel, a Frenchman in charge of Paoli’s heroin distribution; the way Paoli deals with Marcel is suitably gruesome (though not described), but the whole incident does nothing to forward the plot. When everything does comes to a broil, it’s all through a fluke, as Di Bianci gets sick at dinner and Adrano/Abel offers to drive him home!

Blumberg delivers a taut action scene as Adrano, exposed thanks to a dropped contact lens, escapes on a yacht with both Di Bianci and Suzanne as hostages, Sicardo and other Tirizzi goons in pursuit. Adrano proves handy with pistol and rifle, even taking on a helicopter. The action is nothing too over the top, even on the emotional front; when Adrano has the inevitable confrontation with Sicardo, it’s over in a flash and Adrano has no compunction over blowing away the brother of the man who raised him. But then, Adrano is pretty despicable throughout, arrogant to a fault, disrespectful to everyone, concerned only with himself and making money. Thus when he gets back to New York and it turns out Benucci planned to double cross him all along, the reader fills little of the concern Blumberg intends.

I figure it will be hard going dealing with this same self-centered protagonist for another three volumes, but Blumberg’s writing is compelling enough to keep the reader engaged. It looks like ensuing installments all follow this caper angle, with Adrano using his gift for disguise and foreign languages to further swindle the mob. Blumberg also ends The Coriscan Cross on an interesting, unexpected note, with Jean Paoli so impressed with Adrano’s con that he offers him a job! Whether or not Adrano accepts is something Blumberg leaves a mystery, but I’m assuming we’ll find out next time.