Books of 2024 - Week 35: Dirty Harry: Hatchet Men

The eighth book in the Dirty Harry series.

DIRTY HARRY #8: HATCHET MEN by Dane Hartman

When Ric Meyers and Leslie Alan Horvitz were tasked with delivering a series of twelve books based on the cinematic character “Dirty” Harry Callahan, a San Francisco Inspector played by Clint Eastwood on the big screen, the ideas they had frequently seemed to be based around taking Harry out of San Francisco. So far in this series, I’ve read about Harry taking trips to San Antonio, Texas; Mexico; Boston, Massachusetts; a small town called Russian River, and now Chicago, Illinois. You’d think investigating homicides in San Francisco would keep him busy enough, but these writers liked to give him a change of scenery every other story or so.

As I’ve gone through this series, I have tried to figure out which author was writing which book. That has not been an easy mystery to crack – but I think the eighth book, Hatchet Men, has to have been written by Ric Meyers. Meyers is known to have become a samurai and martial arts movie super-fan after being properly introduced to those type of films by comic book artist/writer Larry Hama in 1978, and not only does Hatchet Men include an acknowledgement of Hama, but there’s also an Asian movie vibe to the story it drops Harry into.

With one of the best opening lines since the first book started with “Boopsie’s head exploded,” this one begins, “By all rights, Jay Kuong Chien should have died with the rest of them.” The first chapter is set in San Francisco’s Chinatown and introduces us to the idea that there are factions of the Japanese underworld that are at war with each other, but will also branch out and attack their Chinese counterparts. It shows that through an extended sequence involving a group of Japanese criminals committing a massacre in Chinatown. Harry gets swept up in this mess through his connection to his neighbor and occasional lover Sunny, who was played by Adele Yoshioka in the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force. Sunny sort of made an appearance in the second Dirty Harry book, Death on the Docks, as well, but there the author(s) decided to call her Keiko, for some reason. In Hatchet Men, she’s back to being Sunny, but it’s spelled Suni – and she and Harry are about to have another casual hook-up when a bunch of heavily-armed Japanese men show up in their apartment building and abduct her.

Harry follows Suni’s trail to Chicago, where he’s informed by Sergeant Terry Inagaki that there are two Japanese gangs, the Seppuku Swords and Kozure Ronin, battling for control of the underworld. The Kozure Ronin are the more prominent ones in the story, and they’re run by a man who has his underlings commit seppuku when they’ve failed him – and he’ll help them out in the end by lopping off their head with his own sword. You know, the sort of stuff Ric Meyers learned from watching those samurai movies Larry Hama encouraged him to watch.

Hatchet Men is an interesting read, telling an action-packed story that moves along at a fast pace. A fine addition to this series that has been quite fun to read throughout the year.