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Post by ripper on Dec 4, 2016 11:09:29 GMT
Super Cop Joe Blaze 3 : The Thrill Killers by Robert Novak (Belmont-Tower, 1974)
Blurb:
THE THRILL KILLERS
Nurses were being brutally raped and then slowly - professionally - carved to ribbons by a pair of psychopaths looking for kicks.
Detective Joe Blaze knew who the killers were. So did the law But the law was handcuffed by regulations and Blaze was a free agent of Justice. He swore to hunt down and kill the degenerate scum - on his own time. BIG JOE BLAZE is the best and the worst cop in New York City He gets results - and hell from his superiors. Blaze hates his job, but not as much as he hates the criminal perverts he hunts through Manhattan's concrete jungle. They'd kick him off the force, but then who'd take his place
Printed
in U.S.A.
I don't have many mid-70s men's adventure titles in my collection, mainly due to price and availability, so when I saw this one at a reasonable cost I thought I would give it a go.
Well, the blurb tells you all you need to know about the straightforward, linear plot. A pair of sex killers preying on nurses in NYC are hunted down by Blaze and his hispanic partner, though the partner disappears for much of the book, leaving Blaze to do his thing with no-one to hold him back. As well as the main plot strand, there are episodes where Blaze beats up muggers, kills a robbery suspect and so forth. There is a rather curious strand where a bomb goes off in Blaze's police station, but this goes nowhere at all.
Joe Blaze is obviously in the mould of Dirty Harry, though his one-liners are not as good. The two main bad guys are very nasty pieces of work and it is satisfying to see them get their just desserts. There is an almost obligatory narrative of the law being on the side of criminals, which was very prevalent at the time, with crooked lawyers being able to get their obviously guilty clients off the hook by any means possible. I thought it was a little on the long side at 200 pages and could have been tightened up to cut down on several lengthy scenes, a courtroom trial and a go-go dancer's work in a club springing to mind. The Thrill Killers will never win any literary awards, but it was never written to do so, and its intended readership probably got what they were wanting and expecting from it. It's brutal at times with several semi-graphic sex scenes and Blaze being the kind of no-nonsense cop who gets things done and doesn't give a damn for the niceties of the law and rights of criminals. Overall, with my reservations about its length, I enjoyed the book and read it in two sittings. It always kept my interest and I always wanted to turn the page to see what Blaze would get up to next.
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Post by pulphack on Dec 4, 2016 17:13:48 GMT
Rip, I would direct you to this, if you are not already aware of Joe Kenney's excellent site... By synchronicity! He only wrote about this very title in the past week. And it's a Len Levinson - Len is one of the great 70's pulp paperbackers in my eyes, whose work is still well worth reading beyond curiosity and completeness (as befits most of that era, really). Hope the link works... glorioustrash.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/super-cop-joe-blaze-3-thrill-killers.html |
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Post by ripper on Dec 4, 2016 19:25:50 GMT
author=" pulphack" source="/post/49663/thread" timestamp="1480871628"]Rip, I would direct you to this, if you are not already aware of Joe Kenney's excellent site... By synchronicity! He only wrote about this very title in the past week. And it's a Len Levinson - Len is one of the great 70's pulp paperbackers in my eyes, whose work is still well worth reading beyond curiosity and completeness (as befits most of that era, really). Hope the link works... glorioustrash.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/super-cop-joe-blaze-3-thrill-killers.html [/quote] Hi PulpHack. Thanks very much for the link. That's an extremely interesting site. Seems there were only 3 outings for Joe Blaze, which is a shame, but there were so many short-lived series back then, with occasional novels being shoehorned into a series by changing names. I would collect more of these 70s books from Manor, Belmont-Tower etc, but they often command prices that I just can't justify paying. I am not aware of many being published in the UK, so it's usually a case of buying them from the USA with the attendant hefty airmail cost. Still, I occasionally spot one at a reasonable price, as was the case with The Thrill Killers and this was being sold in the UK to boot. |
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