Cody checks out the third book in the Dirty Harry series.
DIRTY HARRY #3: THE LONG DEATH by Dane Hartman
Duel for Cannons, the first book in the series of Dirty Harry novels that Warner Bros. ordered when it looked like Clint Eastwood was done with the Dirty Harry films (he would eventually come back for two more movies after this twelve-book series ran its course), had one of the all-time great opening lines: “Boopsie’s head exploded.” It’s clear that everyone involved knew that line couldn’t be topped, because so far neither of the following books I’ve read have even attempted to reach the level of “Boopsie’s head exploded.” Book 2, Death on the Docks, opened with talk of a Dodge pulling into a driveway. Now Book 3, The Long Death, begins with the line, “She had always been proud of her feet.”
That may not be the most gripping opening line for an action book, but it kicks off a first chapter that is a harrowing read. The woman who’s proud of her feet is a college student named Barbara, who gets abducted by a couple of mysterious attackers. The chapter doesn’t end with her getting bound and loaded into their vehicle, though. Nor does it end when two young men pick her up, battered and drugged, when she’s walking down the road and they nearly hit her in their Firebird. Instead, a lengthy car chase ensues, during which the author makes sure we’re desperately rooting for Barbara and her rescuers to get away from their relentless pursuers. Things don’t turn out well for them... and yet the chapter still doesn’t even end when the Firebird crashes off the road. No, the person who wrote this book wanted to make sure the first chapter would have a really disturbing, gut punch of an ending. And they succeeded.
Barbara’s ordeal comes to the attention of San Francisco-based Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan when her corpse is discovered – and the story gets tied in with the third Dirty Harry movie, The Enforcer, in a big way due to the fact that her corpse is found in the basement of a place that belongs to Big Ed, the leader of a militant group who was played by Albert Popwell in The Enforcer. Oddly, Ed’s last name has been changed from Mustapha to Mohamid for this book, much like Sunny, Harry’s neighbor / love interest from Magnum Force, was renamed Keiko when she showed up in the second book. The other books also featured Lieutenant Al Bressler (from Dirty Harry and The Enforcer) and Frank De Georgio (from Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, and The Enforcer), but they got to keep their names. Bressler is still present for this book, but De Georgio is on vacation. Also back for this one is Captain Avery from Magnum Force.
The Long Death follows Harry as he investigates Barbara’s death and tries to prove Big Ed’s innocence, and every once in a while heavily-armed henchmen will come along to try to deter Harry from the case. This never works. Harry is able to dig up information on a white slavery operation, and it all builds up to a shootout in a nightclub that was easy to imagine playing out on screen in a Dirty Harry movie and a climactic confrontation on an island that would have been very different from anything we ever saw in a Dirty Harry movie.
Warner hired two authors to write the Dirty Harry movies under the shared pseudonym of Dane Hartman: Ric Meyers and Leslie Alan Horvitz. I couldn’t tell you which author wrote which books, but while reading The Long Death I did get the impression that it was written by a different author than Duel for Cannons and Death on the Docks had been. The dialogue and characters felt different this time around, with Harry coming off like an out-of-touch old man at times. For example, we don’t need moments like the one where our cool hero is appalled by the dancing youngsters on American Bandstand. This is also a darker, rougher book than its predecessors, with plenty of off-putting lines and moments, as well as some questionable descriptions of people.
The subject matter is quite troubling, which is a big reason why it comes off as being rougher than the previous two books, despite the fact that the descriptions of violent acts aren’t quite as over-the-top as what came before. The other author had a knack for describing violence that made every shooting sound like Tom Savini was doing the FX work. This writer does drop in some gross stuff – like a villain being said to puke his brains out when Harry shoots him in the top of the head, plus a shootout in a morgue than had me thinking of an episode of Ash vs. Evil Dead – but the descriptions fall short of what can be read in Duel for Cannons and Death on the Docks. Which is surprising, because this author is the one who actually name-checks slashers like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Mother’s Day, as well as some Dario Argento movies. He even has Harry watch the ending of Deep Red in one scene.
I didn’t enjoy The Long Death as much as the first two books, but it was still a good, action-packed read, and I’m still hyped to be making my way through a series of Dirty Harry books.
No comments:
Post a Comment