Cody got 2024 started by reading a Dirty Harry novel.
DIRTY HARRY #1: DUEL FOR CANNONS by Dane Hartman
After playing San Francisco-based Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan in three films – Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, and The Enforcer – Clint Eastwood said he was stepping away from the character, leaving the franchise as a trilogy. But Warner Bros. wasn’t finished trying to make money off of Harry, so they decided to bring the character back in a series of books. Ric Meyers and Leslie Alan Horvitz were hired to write these books under the pen name Dane Hartman, and were able to churn out twelve of them from August of 1981 through March of 1983. The book series came to an end when Eastwood agreed to do another Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact. That was followed a few years later by The Dead Pool – and it’s a shame that Eastwood didn’t continue to do more Dirty Harry movies through the ‘90s and ‘00s.
I don’t know if the first Dirty Harry novel, Duel for Cannons, was written by Meyers or Horvitz, but whoever it was, they definitely understood the assignment. Duel for Cannons is a hell of a book that reads exactly like a Dirty Harry movie plays.
The first line is brilliant: “Boopsie’s head exploded.” From there we're off and running, with the first chapter consisting of a seventeen page chase and shootout sequence in which vacationing policeman Boris Tucker faces off with a mysterious, .44-toting assassin in a Western Ghost Town amusement park in Fullerton, California. The sequence ends with Tucker getting most of his head blown off... but the assassin has made a terrible mistake, because Tucker happened to be friends with Harry Callahan. Harry looks into the case and ends up tracking the assassin back to his hometown of San Antonio, Texas, where Tucker was the Sheriff. There he learns that the assassin was working for criminal kingpin H. A. Striker, who has plenty more henchmen for Harry to blast his way through on his way to his confrontation with his friend’s killer. A fellow who happens to be named Sweetboy Williams. Yes, Sweetboy is the name on his birth certificate.
Most of the book involves Harry cleaning up San Antonio, but during the brief section where he’s still in San Francisco we get appearances by the characters Lieutenant Al Bressler (from Dirty Harry and The Enforcer) and Frank De Georgio (from Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, and The Enforcer). The author also works in other references to the three Dirty Harry films that existed at that time, with events shown in Magnum Force being said to have had an effect on how Harry approaches his job... and how many bullets he carries on him. The author includes a cheeky nod to Every Which Way But Loose as well.
It’s easy to imagine this story being brought to the screen exactly as is, with Eastwood in the lead. (Back in ‘81, of course. Not in 2024.) Although one element that might have needed to be toned down is the violence, as the author didn’t hold back in their description of what happens to people who get killed along the way. There are shootouts throughout the book, both Sweetboy and Harry are given multiple opportunities to use their .44s, and Boopsie and Tucker aren’t the only people to get their heads blown apart. When one guy gets killed in a brewery, in the room where the beer is bottled and capped, the author even takes a moment to let us know, “His brains were bottled, capped, and labeled ‘Double Brewed, Double Delicious!’” This is a Dirty Harry story with special effects by Tom Savini.
I didn’t know the Dirty Harry book series existed until very recently, and Duel for Cannons was enough to make me glad it does exist. I had a blast reading this book.
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