Dirty Harry gets dropped into war zones.
DIRTY HARRY #10: THE BLOOD OF STRANGERS by Dane Hartman
Between the release of the third and fourth films in the Dirty Harry franchise, there were twelve Dirty Harry novels published, written by a team of at least two writers under the pen name Dane Hartman... and the authors of these novels rarely kept Harry Callahan, an Inspector with the San Francisco Police Department, in his home base of San Francisco. Books sent him off to locations like San Antonio, Texas; Mexico; Boston, Massachusetts; a small town called Russian River, and Chicago, Illinois. The tenth book in the series, The Blood of Strangers, even sends him off to war-torn Beirut (then caught up in the Lebanese Civil War) and El Salvador (in the midst of the Salvadoran Civil War).
The story begins with a bomb being set off in the San Francisco International Airport, a terrorist attack carried out by an organization called The Alpha Group. The opening line: “He was a small man with nothing to distinguish him, so when he wandered into the international terminal at four-thirty in the morning, no one paid him the least bit of attention.” Definitely not a contender for the best opening line in one of these books. The first one, Duel for Cannons, still has the best opening line: “Boopsie’s head exploded.” The bombing is just the first in a wave of terrorist activities that hit San Francisco, so the FBI and CIA get involved with the investigation – and it’s a CIA agent who suggests that Harry should be the local detective to shadow a man named Gamal Abd’el Kayyim, who is believed to be giving financial aids to the terrorists targeting the city.
This is the job that takes Harry from San Francisco to Beirut, then branches out with a visit to El Salvador. Also caught up in the story is San Francisco-based TV news reporter Ellie Winston, who is introduced to Harry early in the story and ends up following him as he sticks closely to Kayyim. And since Harry’s life is put in danger on multiple occasions as things play out, Ellie’s life is also frequently put in danger.
On the surface, The Blood of Strangers is quite different from the average Dirty Harry story, with terrorist attacks going on and Harry making his way through war zones, but it’s written in the same way as the other novels, with action sequences coming up frequently and Harry usually blasting away bad guys with his .44 Magnum (he does lose that gun for a while in this one). It all builds up to an action sequence that’s reminiscent of Die Hard, except Harry gets the situation wrapped up very quickly.
In the end, this was another good read in a very entertaining series.
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