Showing posts with label Kirby Carr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kirby Carr. Show all posts

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Hitman #4: They're Coming To Kill You, Jane!


Hitman #4: They're Coming To Kill You, Jane!, by Kirby Carr
No month stated, 1975  Canyon Books

I had a hard time tracking down this particular installment of the Hitman series; this and the fifth volume must’ve had very scarce printings. Unfortunately, the actual contents of They’re Coming To Kill You, Jane! don’t justify the overblown prices this volume goes for – and also, per earlier installments, the title and back cover copy don’t have much to do with the actual book.

While there is at least a character named “Jane” in the book, the back cover is very misleading, having it that this time Mike “Hitman” Ross goes up against the Scorpions, a gang who has created a drug that turns its victims into mindless zombies. There’s nothing like that in the novel. The Scorpions exist, but the drug, created by boss Frank Scorpio, is a life-extension deal made from various exotic ingredients (including “bat balls”) that Scorpio uses to blackmail old millionaires.

Ross ventures over to San Francisco for this case, summoned there by Betty Stone, an attractive narcotics agent Ross has worked with in the past. But he finds her mauled and seconds from death on her house boat, the woman obviously raped and tortured, with cigarette burns all over her body. She groans the word “scorpions” and dies in Ross’s arms. Figuring it’s the right thing to do, Ross decides to inform Betty’s dad, 70 year-old former police captain Dave Stone, that his daughter is dead.

You’ll seldom read a more blasé reaction to a child’s death, as Captain Stone, who also lives on a houseboat, is like, “huh, she’s dead, how about that.” Ross decides to hang out with the old man for a while, especially when some thugs show up that night to kill him. As usual, Ross makes short work of them, killing them before he can ask questions. Finally someone reprimands him for his “kill first, ask questions later” mindset, Stone telling Ross that he needs to cool it a little if he wants answers.

Ross has discovered that these thugs have light blue scorpion tatttoos on their inner left wrists, and Betty Stone’s dying word was “scorpions,” so Ross knows something is up. But Dave Stone claims the only similar thing he can think of is Frank Scorpio, an old-time gangster who was shot down years before. Ross bullishly insists that Scorpio must still be alive, hence why the thugs went after Betty, as well as Dave himself, as the old captain was Scorpio’s biggest enemy back in the day.

Unfortunately, Ross turns out to be correct – so much for the bizarre plot hinted at by the back cover. In fact, Frank Scorpio turns out to be just your regular crime boss, and his “Scorpion gang” is no different from any other pulp fiction criminal gang. Thus, all the bizarre charms of the back cover copy are lost, and the novel ultimately lacks even the strange feel of the preceding three volumes.

Kin Platt (aka “Kirby Carr”) continues to remind me of Russell Smith in how he so obviously wings his way through his manuscripts, making it up as he goes along without once intending to go back and fix anything in the edit. He also continues to spin out the Dean Ballenger-style tough-guy patter, much of which could come right out of Gannon. But his style and plotting lack the memorable quality of those two authors, and you somewhat wish Canyon Books had hired another ghostwriter to come up with a book based off of that cover and back-cover copy.

As in the previous volume, Platt fills a bunch of pages through the perspective of the lead villain, cutting over to Frank Scorpio, who is indeed live and well. And at seventy he looks more so fifty, thanks to “scorpion stew,” a family recipe cooked up for him by Wu, a Chinese man who claims to be nearly two hundred years old. Made up of a disgusting assortment of ingredients, including of course scorpions, the stew provides longevity – both of the health and sexual varieties. In fact Wu happily recounts how he must have “three pieces-a ass” per day.

Shot by the cops years ago and discovered by Wu, Scorpio was nursed back to health and indeed emerged better than ever, thanks to the stew. Now he blackmails rich men who want to get younger. If they don’t pay he kills them, and it turns out at length that he killed Betty Stone because she happened to see Scorpio in the course of her work, and thus could’ve blown the secret that he didn’t die all those years ago.

Meanwhile Hitman pulls on his “black nylon suit with eye slits and cowl” and goes around killing off mobsters. He gets in a skirmish with a few of them on Angel’s Island, near Alcatraz, and a few others here and there, however the novel doesn’t nearly have as much action as earlier books. But then, when Platt does write action, he almost comes off like a prefigure of David Alexander:

Not fifty yards away, across the blanket of sulphurous fog, he heard men screaming their guts out as his lead ripped into them and the tremendous shock waves of the army M-16 churned their vital organs into offal paste.

He swung the rifle quickly to the opposite side where the fire was steady now and began squeezing off quick bursts into the dark figures he saw through the hot red light of the infra-red scope. He saw them through the smoke and fire as they were knocked down like ten-pins, gaping holes in their bodies as the lethal automatic gobbled away at their lives and took their flesh and blood away in great sweeping chunks of pulverized, scorched flesh.

For once Ross does try to reign in his “kill first” instincts, but he’s still kind of dumb. Like when he easily gets captured by Dr. Gunther Deli, Scorpio’s right-hand man. This entire section seems to come from another novel – Deli is a much more interesting villain than Scorpio – and is another indication of Platt’s first-draft mentality. Tracing the Scorpion gang to a meat-packing building that serves as their cover, Ross kills a few goons and then is promptly caught and knocked out.

He wakes to find himself strapped to a chair, with a robotic voice grilling him with questions. When he reveals himself to be Hitman, the voice says he must be killed, and a laser beam lights up, about to fry Ross. He escapes, to find the reedy little scientist behind the device, Dr. Deli. Then Ross sees the rubber stamp which puts the scorpion tattoo on the gangsters. Deli shows Ross how “harmless” it is, and stamps him…and suddenly Ross is under Deli’s power.

Now we have weird stuff like Ross still escaping, but Deli phoning him later to tell him that Ross is fully under Deli’s control. And he even has a tracer in Ross’s shoe, hence Deli’s locating Ross in this “secret” hotel room. But all this stuff is quickly dropped, despite being heavily built up, that Ross is now under Deli’s complete control, and must do whatever the evil doctor commands. Instead we get more detail about Deli’s high-tech computer system, through which he’s able to run tables and figures on people to see how they might react to a given situation.

All the “mind control” pretty much forgotten, Ross next moves on to researching recent mysterious deaths of wealthy men. This leads him to Jane Bond, “well stacked with a curvaceous figure that wouldn’t quit,” the twenty-three-year-old socialite daughter of John Bigger Bond, who has just died in an accident. Platt doesn’t bother even working up this angle, as Bond and others were clearly murdered, as in each case the men received threatening phone calls, and after telling the caller to go to hell, each of them suddenly turned up dead.

But the first meeting between Ross and Jane comes off like something out of a men’s detective magazine. Receiving a call late one night from the dude who called her father before his death (Jane having eavesdropped on the call – and of course it’s Frank Scorpio), Jane hangs up…and begins fondling her jawdropping breasts. Then Ross steps out of the shadows, having lurked there in her bedroom, dressed in his Hitman costume…and Jane, sure she’s about to be raped and murdered, pulls off her see-through nightie and begs Ross to screw her!

Platt doesn’t elaborate much on the dirty stuff, but needless to say Ross takes the girl up on her offer, figuring he’s got nothing much to lose. But I suspect Platt added all this just so he could justify the “Jane” in the (likely Canyon Books-created) title, because she disappears from the narrative immediately thereafter, and Ross goes back to bullying Wu, who is now Scorpio’s overworked and underappreciated employee, churning out vats of his scorpion stew.

And since he’s spent so many pages detailing Scorpio’s various blackmailing schemes, Platt actually finds himself without enough room to deliver a fulfilling climax. Instead, after really egging us on with detail about all the heavy armament Ross gathers together for his assault on Scorpio’s stronghold in Las Vegas, Platt instead has Wu, who has tagged along with Ross for bullshit reasons, get pissed over how he’s treated and literally stab his boss in the back!

Scorpio dead, and Wu no longer interested in selling the scorpion stew, Ross figures the gang will eventually fall apart…and that’s that! Not a single shot is fired in Hitman’s assault on the Las Vegas meeting of Scorpio’s top men. To say it’s anticlimactic would be an understatement. Meanwhile Ross heads back to SanFran to bump uglies some more with Jane Bond; the end.

This was the last volume published by Canyon Books, after which the series went over to Major; hopefully with the switch the books will improve. It’s unfortunate that this series leaves so much to be desired, as it has so much potential. However there’s always the much superior series of the same name, which is everything this one should’ve been.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Hitman #3: The Girls Who Came To Murder


Hitman #3: The Girls Who Came To Murder, by Kirby Carr
No month stated, 1974  Canyon Books

Things get a bit more lurid with the third installment of the Hitman series; a bit more lurid, but also a lot more messy. According to the Catalog of Coypright Entries this volume was also written by Kin Platt (aka “Kirby Carr”), but the prose style isn’t much like that in the previous two volumes. So if it really was Platt, he was either A.) Rushing to meet a deadline, B.) Drunk, or C.) Drunk and rushing to meet a deadline.

In fact the plot is practically a rerun of that in the previous volume: a group of hippies are going around California, randomly murdering people in the most sadistic of ways. In other words, The Girls Who Came To Murder plays on the Manson fears of the time (and as for that exploitative title, the back cover has it that young women in “miniskirts” are behind all of the killings, but really it’s both male and female hippies). But whereas the previous volume at least stuck to its main plot, this one jumps around to all sorts of arbitrary stuff.

Action scenes are also drastically reduced, with what few of them there are doled out quickly, Mike “Hitman” Ross blowing away knife-wiedling hippies with his Mauser and Luger. But as mentioned the lurid element is much increased here; for example there are many unsettling instances in those “action” scenes in which Ross will blow away a female hippie, and Platt will describe how her face blows off or her eyes pop out. The lurid factor is even more increased in the sex scenes, which are given greater focus this time out.

But as mentioned this novel is just incredibly messy, and Platt obviously made it up as he went along. For one thing, the hippie threat when the novel begins is widespread, with murders happening all over the country, and Ross is concerned that there are too many of the hippie killers to find. But by novel’s end, the hippie killers are reduced to a mere ten or twenty people, and they’re just hiding out in the canyons outside of Los Angeles! Not only that, but Platt isn’t above wasting your time with redundant and repetitive scenes, the most egregious example being a long subplot about an Indian “guru” which turns out to have no bearing whatsoever on the novel.

Ross himself doesn’t do much this time around, other than stalk hippies, debate with himself if they’re “good ones” or “bad ones,” and if they’re the latter he waits to see if they’ll try to murder someone…and when they do, he kills them before they can! No mention of his ninja training or varied arsenal this time, and even his pulp superhero-esque costume (ie the “cowl with eye-slits) is rarely mentioned. One thing that remains though is Ross’s stupidity in certain areas, namely how he just straight up kills every hippie murderer he encounters…and then wonders later if he’ll ever be able to figure out where they all are hiding or who their leader is! I mean, never once does the guy spare one of them for later interrogation!

More narrative space is given over to hippie loser Harvey Keller, who turns out to be the “leader” of the hippie murderers. You’d figure Keller would be a Charles Manson-type, molding his acolytes into wild-eyed killers via drugs and sex, but Platt’s imagination is a lot more lazy…no, we are informed that Keller, due to his boyish good looks, has always been able to get women to go for him, and over time women started coming to him for advice. Soon he had a flock of followers, including men, who’d come to hear his mystical blatherings, which Keller made up on the spot. Then one day he made a random statement about killing “the man,” and two of his girls went out and did that very thing!

Now we’re told that some of the women in his flock will carve a “Z” on their forehead (for how they’ve “zapped” the enemy – seriously!), and also how the females are more violent than the males. But even this shit is soon forgotten, as Platt spends more time focusing on 14 year-old Raj Bab, who is taken from his home in Calcutta by shyster Sri Jildi and turned into a Maharishi-esque guru, who soon becomes globally famous for spouting off mystical blatherings, most of which he comes up with on the spot.

Yes my friends, Kin Platt writes the same exact story twice in this novel! Keller’s story and Raj Bab’s story are basically the same. And as if this in’t enough indication of how disinterested Platt is in writing the book, he repeats himself throughout the text…like for example, a middling sequence late in the novel where Raj Bab gives a conference in LA. We read on as Keller, Ross, and one of Ross’s girls each attend the conference separately, and Platt writes practically the same descriptions each time.

Even the lurid stuff is repetitive, like an explicit sequence where that young hippie girl, Fran, leaves Raj Bab’s conference and gives a random college guy a blowjob; just a page or two later, we read as Keller himself is given a blowjob by Mara, the young Indian courtesan who has been brought along to keep Raj Bab happy. (Ross himself by the way goes celibate this time – but then, the last time we read about him having sex, back in the first volume, he strangled the chick!)

Indeed the Raj Bab stuff takes central stance in the narrative, with Platt serving up long sequences in which he meets with the press and delivers pages of mystical blather for their pleasure. We’re told how the wealthy soon flock to Raj Bab, and how Sri Jildi gets very rich as a result. Meanwhile the hippie killers are for the most part forgotten, save for a scene or two where Ross will stalk a few of them, witness them about to kill someone, and then promptly blow them away…and then go home and wonder how he can find out where they’re coming from or who is commanding them!

Platt also page-fills with lots of arbitrary flashbacks to Ross’s time in ‘Nam, and also he opens up the character a bit with Ross getting into these soul-baring dialogues with himself, like how can it be right for him to murder, but wrong for the hippies to do the same thing, and etc. To Platt’s credit this does actually lead to an unexpected finale, where Ross just happens to see Fran murder that aforementioned college guy on the beach (apparently the first person she’s murdered, as Platt states that Fran is a “new” girl in Keller’s “Family” and not one of the murderers) and follows after her.

Rather than a gun-blazing climax, it all plays out on more of a melodramatic level, with Fran literally stabbing Keller in the back after Keller tells her he’s leaving the Family and going to work with Raj Bab. Then Ross shows up, gets all the answers from Fran in a long dialog exchange (at least he’s finally learned to interrogate his enemies, I guess)…and then puts her on a plane for London! Apparently Ross feels bad for the girl, realizing she’s had some bad knocks in life and got involved with the wrong people. I guess the murdered college kid was just collateral damage.

And the kicker here is that ultimately the Raj Bab/Sri Jildi stuff has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the novel! This is probably the biggest red herring of a “subplot” I’ve ever read in a book. But seriously, all those pages devoted to Raj Bab have zero payoff or resolution…Platt makes a small attempt to make it that Keller’s master plan in the final pages is to record an album for Raj Bab(!), but even this is so lazily developed that it makes the waste of the reader’s time all the more obvious. 

But how about that cover? Jimmy Page and Golgo 13!!

Monday, April 8, 2013

Hitman #2: Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart!


Hitman #2: Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart!, by Kirby Carr
No month stated, 1974  Canyon Books

Mike Hitman Ross once again dons his “black nylon suit” and “cowl with eye slits” and prowls the streets of Los Angeles in the second entry of this obscure series. Whereas the first volume uneasily traded between goofy humor and lurid sleaze, Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart! has a firmer grip on its tone, and comes off like a horror-tinged installment of say The Sharpshooter or The Marksman, with less focus on the goofy humor and more on the violence and sleaze.

Ross as we’ll recall is a veteran of both Korea and ‘Nam and just friggin’ loves to kill, so as the novel opens he’s chomping at the bit to take on whoever is behind the recent wave of cop killings going on across the country. Once again there’s the absurd element that the cops know that Ross is Hitman (no “the” in his title, by the way), yet somehow they don’t know where he lives and they don’t arrest him as soon as he steps foot inside a police department. One thing this volume picks up from the previous volume then is its pulpish tone, with Ross like a ‘70s equivalent of The Spider or some other ‘30s pulp hero.

The cop killers are an army of hippies, much like the one in Len Levinson’s The Terrorists. Ross gets lucky and comes across a few of them while they’re attempting to waste some cops, and he kills them all, thus discovering that they appear to be made up of mostly minorities and women; Ross surmises that this army is comprised, then, of anyone who’s ever “been hassled by the Man.” The women appear to work in cells of three and consider themselves Furies, no doubt part of the army to gain revenge for loved ones, brothers, or even sons who have been arrested or killed by the cops.

Author Kirby Carr (aka Kin Platt) also adds a bit of the occult movement that was so big in the early 1970s, with covens of witches and groups of satanists who are lead by an Anton LeVay type. Ross gradually deduces that the mob is controlling the leaders of these occult groups, having them exhort their masses to revolt against society while at the same time asking money from them, for the movement. In LA the groups are controlled by a mafioso named Tooey, but the tentacles spread across the US and Ross is certain there’s one man behind the entire thing.

Early chapters seem to build up this nationwide syndicate of satan worshippers and witches working against the government, but Carr sort of blows it. Instead Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart! becomes a repetitive ordeal where Ross stalks after a witch or some minor thug, beats them for info, then tries to find out who is in charge of them. The previous volume, despite being uncertain in tone, at least offered more fun, jumping all over the place. This installment just sort of plods along until it reaches a predictable end. Even promising material set up early in the novel, like the Furies, is quickly forgotten and never mentioned again.

In fact Carr page-fills with abandon at times, giving us lots of detail on witch practices, most of it likely gleaned from something published by Llewellyn Books. He also finds the time to throw in a budding relationship between a satan worshipper and a witch, both of whom are indentured speech-givers for Tooey (who himself works for a shadowy presence who calls himself De Groot). Ross himself takes back seat for long portions of the novel, and when he does appear his powers are so godlike that his victory is never in doubt.

Tension and thrills sort of evaporate as the novel settles into the same pace: Ross will find some Tooey stooge, beat the person up (in the event it’s a woman he will slap her around), make them call Tooey and say they’re going to quit, and then wait for Tooey’s goons, whom Ross is certain will be on their way posthaste. And once the goons arrive, Ross kills them all quickly and with ease. Indeed Ross seems to lack intelligence here, as despite the fact that he’s trying to track down who is behind this national cop-killing spree, he straight up just kills these guys instead of sparing one of them for interrogation!

Again Ross enjoys killing and fighting, but the ninja stuff of the previous volume is gone, as are the weapons Ross used last time out. Here he still deals mostly with handguns, from a Magnum revolver to a 9mm semi-automatic, and he also uses something called a Baby Ermma. At one point he uses a “burp gun,” but the action scenes are brief and are moreso Ross just blowing people away with little challenge. And the gore factor is there but nothing major; in fact a sort of blandness prevails over everything.

I said earlier that the corny element was toned down this time, and for the most part that’s true. But there’s still goofy stuff, like a nonsensical scene where Ross goes back to a building from which mobsters were operating, only to find a naked porn actress there who thinks this is the location of a new film and wonders if Ross is doing the scene with her! Once the punchline finally arrives it turns out the girl has the wrong address…but it’s just too goofy to be funny. And speaking of which Ross doesn’t see any bedroom action in this volume, a far cry from the last one, where he strangled a woman while he had sex with her. That being said Carr offers up lots of sleazy stuff, in particular the under-the-desk duties Tooey expects of his secretary.

Also the supernatural element from the previous volume is gone, only hinted at by the characters. The witches speak of demons as if they really exist, and Ross wonders often if they actually do. But unlike the last time where he met vampires, Ross only squares off against regular humans here, and in fact the entire occult conspiracy deal fizzles out into a Scooby-Doo sort of reveal where it’s just some regular schmoe behind the various hippie terrorist factions…actually a loser who poses no threat at all to Ross.

Carr’s writing reminds me of a combo of Russell Smith and Dean Ballenger; Smith because Carr writes with little regard to the rules of reality or common sense, and Ballenger due to the goofy banter he creates for his mobster characters. However Carr lacks the graphic gore of either author, though his action scenes are reminiscent of Smith’s in that there’s not much “action” at play, with Ross basically murdering his opponents with one skilled shot before they’re able to even fire at him. Ross is also a bit too superhuman, able to defeat several men at once with his bare hands and never being concerned about danger or death – but then this only gives the series more of a “modern pulp” feel.

Well, I actually have the full run of the Hitman series, which is quite a feat as some of these books are absurdly obscure and overpriced, in particular the fourth and fifth volumes. They each have lurid titles and covers, but so far there’s been little meat between the pages to back them up (let alone the overblown prices), so let’s hope things improve soon.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Hitman #1: Who Killed You, Cindy Castle?


Hitman #1: Who Killed You, Cindy Castle?, by Kirby Carr
No month stated, 1974 Canyon Books

This was the start of an obscure 7-volume series* by Kirby Carr, who was actually noted young adult/etc author Kin Platt. Published by Canyon Books (before moving over to Major Books after Canyon's demise), the Hitman series (only this first volume has a "the" in the series title) clumsily melds the men's adventure genre with masked crimefighter pulp and hardboiled prose, all with a sort of parodic/tongue-in-cheek vibe. Be warned, though: some of the books in this series go for insane prices, and I'm not sure if it's because they're so rare or if it's because they were by Platt, who appears to be quite popular, although I've never read any of his other books.

Our hero is Mike Ross, a veteran of both Korea and 'Nam, who apparently is a lawyer by day. At night he becomes "Hitman," putting on a "black nylon commando suit" and a "cowl with slitted eyes" (not the hockey mask shown on that awesome grindhouse-esque cover painting). Carr generally refers to Ross as "Hitman" in the narrative while he's in costume, as if he has become a different character. He drives around the streets of LA in his "warwagon," a customized van, dishing out double-fisted death with a Mauser and a MAB PA-15 pistol. Ross just loves killing; this isn't inferred but outright stated in the narrative. This is why he went back for more in 'Nam, so crazy about killing the enemy that even his superior officers got worried. Now he wages a one-man war against the mob and crooks and basically anyone else who pisses him off. Did I mention he's also a ninja?

Like Batman -- and again like the '30s pulps that are part of the inspiration for this series -- Hitman is notorious in the underworld, and also looked upon with a sort of awe by the cops. What's really strange though is that everyone seems to know that Hitman is Mike Ross! Carr apparently can't figure this part out; we're told that Ross lives in a sprawling house high in the hills outside of LA, a veritable fortress that's not only hard to reach but only known to just a few. Yet the cops are on a first-name basis with Ross, knowing without question he's Hitman; in one intended comedic bit, a goon actually calls the cops to set up Hitman, and the cops are like, "Oh, that's Mike Ross." Obviously Carr is trying to spoof the whole "secret identity" nature of superheroes, but it just doesn't work because it comes off as too goofy.

Adding to the unsure tone is the horror element. Hitman's latest case involves a slew of blood-drained bodies, and after some research (ie, killing hoodlums) he starts to suspect vampires are at play. Really though there's a lot going on in Who Killed You, Cindy Castle? (each volume features a memorable title), so much so that the center never holds. In addition to the main case -- Hitman's search for Cindy Castle, whose roommate reported Cindy missing shortly before the roommate herself became a blood-drained corpse -- there's also a small army of mobsters with their own personal vendetta against Hitman, plus a transcendental meditation place filled with gorgeous gals, one of whom is a raven-haired beauty who keeps running into Ross while she's naked and high. (Yes, sex ensues.)

Ross is deadly and kills his enemies with no compunction, but Carr mostly plays up the laughs. I'm not saying the novel is a comedy, but there's a definite goofy tone to it, mostly thanks to the scenes from the perspectives of the gangsters. As expected they're all for the most part idiots, particularly Herbie, a hapless gunman Ross chooses to spare (after wasting the rest of Herbie's gang, boss included). There's a lot of stuff from Herbie's perspective, and Carr fills up the 190 pages of big print with lots of white space and dialog. The book is a very quick read. More comedy ensues via the character of Ross's "Oriental" martial arts teacher, a wizened and ancient dude whom Ross brought back with him from 'Nam and who runs a dojo in LA; in between bouts of non-PC pidgin English he beats the shit out of a few mobsters on his own.

Carr doesn't play up the graphic quotient, though Ross kills many people, shooting them or blowing them up or even slicing them with shurikens and other ninja weaponry. The sex scenes are a bit more graphic, and this has to be the only novel I know of that ends with the hero having sex with a gorgeous villainess and strangling her to death while he's having sex with her. Ah, the lurid joys of '70s pulp. Actually there is a nice lurid quotient at work throughout, but nothing as sleazy as the cover would imply (though strangely enough everything shown on the cover actually happens in the novel).

But again it's the minimal plot and lack of cohesion that brings the novel down. Ross basically drives around and bumps off the mobsters who are coming for him, while trying to figure out who's stealing blood from various LA clinics. This leads him to the appropriately-named yacht Dracula Doll, where Carr delivers another good action scene. The finale is the highlight, with Ross captured and chained in a dungeon, where the "high priestess" of a cult has her way with him. There's also the mother of the priestess, who claims to be a few hundred years old.

While it's all fun, it just lacks a certain something, as if Carr wasn't sure of his footing. Glancing through future volumes I see that things get a bit more sordid and graphic in time -- I opened up the sixth novel, Don't Bet On Living, Alice, right on a scene in which a hooker was pleasuring what I presume was the villain of the tale, all rendered in a super-sleazy extreme. Like the sort of stuff Manor Books would've published. (Given that this sixth volume was published by Major Books and not Canyon, maybe the publisher changeup resulted in a tone-change for the series; I'll have to wait and see.)

*Many sources state that the Kirby Carr novel The Impossible Spy, published by Major Books in 1975, is the eighth and final volume of the Hitman series. Having bought this book I can state that it is actually a standalone novel, unrelated to the series, about a Uri Geller-type psychic. This means then that the seventh volume, You're Hired, You're Dead, was actually the final installment of the Hitman.