Showing posts with label Super Cop Joe Blaze. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Super Cop Joe Blaze. Show all posts

Thursday, May 11, 2023

New title from Tocsin Press

Just wanted to let you all know that there’s a new book out from Tocsin PressSuper Cop Joe Blitz: The Maimer, by Nelson T. Novak. Here’s the cover: 

Sgt. Joe Blitz, that tough 1970s New York cop who featured in The Psycho Killers, is back in another sordid tale which sees him up against a Satanic snuff-flick cult. 

You can check out the back cover copy and read the first few pages of the book here

And let’s not forget the other books currently available at Tocsin Press… 




The Undertaker #2: Black Lives Murder, which was another of the best books I read last year – I mean if you get the first one you should get this one, too! 


If you like thigh-boot wearing Nazi she-devil vixens, and you like John Eagle Expeditor, then you’ll certainly enjoy John Falcon Infiltrator: The Hollow Earth


The Triggerman: Brains For Brunch, in which Johnny Larock, the Triggerman (who is of course not to be confused with The Sharpshooter or The Marksman), satiates his hunger for Mafia blood!


Mentioned above, Super Cop Joe Blitz: The Psycho Killers is the previously-published adventure with Joe Blitz...one involving a rather grisly rape case.

And like the old Pinnacle house ads said, there’s more to come…

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

New Book Available At Tocsin Press

Just wanted to let you all know that a new book is listed at Tocsin Press – Super Cop Joe Blitz: The Psycho Killers, by Nelson T. Novak. Here’s the cover: 


Joe Blitz is a tough cop in 1970s New York who totally shouldn’t be confused with Joe RykerJoe Keller, or Joe Blaze! In The Psycho Killers Blitz deals with a rather grisly rape case. 

This one’s uber-sleazy and should come with a warning on the back cover, a la Gannon or Death List. As an Amazon reviewer aptly put it: “This was so disgusting…it almost made me vomit!” I couldn’t think of a better blurb than that…  

Please head over to Tocsin Press for more details!

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Super Cop Joe Blaze #1: The Big Payoff


Super Cop Joe Blaze #1: The Big Payoff, by Robert Novak
February, 1974  Belmont Tower Books

I forgot that I even had this first volume of  Super Cop Joe Blaze. A little over three years ago I read the third one, which was by Len Levinson, and three years before that I read  the second volume, which was by some unknown author. It’s been too long since I read that one, so I can’t say if The Big Payoff is courtesy the same author. It seems to be, at least judging from what I wrote about the second volume. The same style is here, a rather bland police procedural only livened up when it comes to the exploitative description of the mauled female corpses detective Joe Blaze encounters in the line of duty.

First though a pedantic note – I think this is the novel I was confusing Trouble Is My Business with. In my review of that one I mentioned I had been under the impression it was about a “knife-wielding sex killer,” and figured that I “must’ve confused it with some other sleazy ‘70s cop novel.” As I read the lurid cover slugline of The Big Payoff (“The girl had been pretty before a sex killer worked her over with a knife”), I had the belated realization that this was the book I’d been thinking of when I read Trouble Is My Business back in 2013. How sad that I would remember something so trivial seven years later, but that’s just how my mind works. Anyway the editor of The Big Payoff (aka Peter McCurtin) liked that “sex killer” line so much it’s also repeated on the back cover.

And as with The Concrete Cage this novel is truly lurid when it comes to the copious descriptions of murdered and violated female bodies. In this regard I suspect it probably was the same author. Whoever it is has a pretty humdrum narrative style, with a lot of pages padded with incidental dialog and arbitrary plot digressions. Unlike The Concrete Cage, there are also random action scenes, just stupid stuff clearly put there to actually have something happen, like when Blaze goes into a bar to ask some questions and two guys storm in and try to knock the place over. The author was likely one of the Belmont Tower/Leisure regulars, and if I had to guess I’d say it might have been J.C. Conaway – who I still think was the mystery author of The Savage Women.

The novel opens with a feel for cop-world realism, a la William Crawford; we meet Joe Blaze while he’s on the take, picking up his illicit pay. We’re bluntly informed that some cops “just live with” being on the pad, and Blaze is one of those cops. Only later in the novel will we learn that he’s using the money for vaguely Robin Hood-esque purposes. This serves up a subplot which eventually ties into the main plot; Blaze goes to his precinct, where he’s told by his boss, Lt. Danny Coogan, that one of Blaze’s pad, a hooker named Doris, has given some guy at the U.N. the clap and needs to be brought in for questioning. Coogan advises Blaze to personally handle it, given that she pays Blaze for protection thus could get pissed off to suddenly find herself arrested…and turn Blaze in for collecting bogus “protection” pay from her.

Also appearing is Blaze’s partner, Ed Nuthall; both he and Coogan were also in The Concrete Cage, which might be another indication it’s by the same author. And unlike Nelson De Mille’s Ryker, Blaze has a friendly rapport with his colleagues, even referring to the Lt. as “Danny” in their frequent dialog exchanges. Indeed, Coogan is aware of Blaze’s pad, even though he isn’t supposed to be, given that it’s illegal and all, and goes out of his way to protect him. As for Nuthall, he doesn’t do much to gain the reader’s awareness, and thinking back on the book I can’t even recall a single thing he does. For the most part, Coogan acts more as Blaze’s partner, the one who brainstorms the case with him.

I almost thought some stuff had been cut out of the text, because Coogan tells Blaze to round up Doris at the bottom of one page, then at the top of the very next page Blaze is suddenly at an upscale apartment building on 69th Street…and finds a bunch of patrol cars outside of it…and goes in to investigate the murder scene within! And the murdered young lady is not Doris, and Doris isn’t even mentioned for several more pages, so the reader is really confused for a while…because it gradually develops that, as coincidental as can be, some other woman has been killed in Doris’s building and Blaze just takes over the case, completely forgetting that his original task here was to collect Doris. This will have repercussions later.

Here we have the first of what will be a few murdered young women, Blaze casually inspecting the mutilated and no doubt raped corpse, the killer using a knife to slash the poor young girl’s throat. Here’s where it detours from the other cheap Belmont/Leisure cop thrillers, because Blaze doesn’t go by the book and we don’t just get a dry procedural. First he tracks down a notorious pimp who works 69th Street, cornering him in a subway station on 42nd Street, and proceeds to beat the shit out of him for info. Immediately after this Blaze is almost mugged, and proceeds to beat the shit out of his would-be mugger. This is the first of the random action scenes Novak will use to spruce up the otherwise-boring narrative.

Blaze isn’t done slapping people around. From the pimp he learns of a moving van that was outside the building on 69th Street before the murder. Before Blaze can research there’s another body found, in an apartment building on East 51st between Lexington and Third. After viewing the latest mauled female corpse (in which the girl’s eye has popped out, nearly causing Coogan to barf), Blaze finds out one of the tenants discovered the body…and starts slapping the witness around for info. But it’s okay, because the guy’s a heroin addict and was in the process of preparing a fix. Getting into it, Blaze also slaps around the guy’s girlfriend and, apropos of nothing, says she might be the next victim of the mysterious killer! He gets more info from them on the possible perpetrator of the crimes.

“Talking, talking talking – half [Blaze’s] time seemed to be wasted in talking,” rants the narrative, and the reader can only respond, “No shit!” There’s too much talking in The Big Payoff. Blaze visits crime scenes, engages witnesses in interminable conversations. He goes back to the precinct, engages Coogan in interminable conversations. And things only pick up when there’s an arbitary action scene, like when Blaze – at the expense of more pages-filling dialog – gets a lead on the moving van at the scene of the kills, and finds it abandoned in the city. He goes into a nearby bar to see if anyone inside glimpsed the driver of the van…only for a black guy and a Hispanic guy to storm in with guns drawn and attempt to rob the bar. Blaze pulls his service .38 and takes them both down, shooting one in the leg and the other in the gut, getting winged in the shoulder in the process.

This serves to make Blaze a hero, with his story in the paper and the other cops at the precinct applauding him. It also serves to protect him from the shoe that’s about to drop; Doris, the whore Blaze was supposed to round up at the start of the book, got hauled in by some other cop and immediately threw Blaze under the bus – she pays him for “protection” so as to keep her out of jail for her whoring, and what good did it do her? Now Blaze is under investigation, and Coogan hopes the heroic act will play in his favor. Unfortunately it doesn’t, and Blaze is suspended for being a pig on the pad. Meanwhile we readers have learned, via another of those arbitrary scenes that seemingly exist only to fill pages, that Blaze gives his pad collections to widows of cops.

In his review, Marty McKee complained that there was no titular “big payoff” in the book, but what I think it might refer to is that Blaze “pays off” his debt to Doris. But again it’s handled as arbitrarily as can be. First Blaze captures the killer, a slim moving company guy named Jerry Laughlin, who per Blaze’s suspicion already has a mile-long record of assault and rape charges, yet has been let go due to slimy liberal lawyers. Blaze and Nuthall engage Laughlin in a massive, nigh-endless car and foot chase that spans along the East River and outside of Manhattan, with a few civilians and cops killed in the process. When Blaze finally gets Laughlin he beats him to a pulp…and that’s that, the novel’s ended. But it’s only page 129 and the book’s 173 pages!

So as to that titular payoff…right after collaring the killer Blaze is suspended due to his pad activities. And what’s worse, Laughlin’s been let off the hook, again due to liberal lawyers. So Blaze is walking along in desolation, and finds himself outside that building on 69th Street, where this whole sordid mess began – not just the kills, but also Doris, who has gotten Blaze fired. Blaze starts to get the vibe that something’s wrong in there, and bullshits his way past the door guard…and up to Doris’s floor, where he hears screaming in her room. Yes, folks, Jerry Laughlin, for no apparent reason, just happens to be in Doris’s room and is trying to kill her!

This leads to another pages-filling action scene that has zero spark despite the amount of words poured into it. Laughlin, even though he’s meek and thin, gets the better of Blaze, beating him up and almost throwing him out the window to the pavement 60-some floors below. Blaze finally remembers he’s supposed to be savage and both bites Laughlin and pokes his eye out, then throws him out the window…and a rescued Doris of course drops her charges against Blaze. Thus I propose that “The Big Payoff” refers to this climactic action scene.

Not that it much matters – The Big Payoff is fairly boring and slow-moving, and definitely lacks the lurid fun of Len’s contribution to the series. And this was just the first volume!! You’d think McCurtin and Leisure would’ve come out of the gate with something a little more entertaining. I didn’t dislike the book as much as Marty did – I always enjoy a look at sleazy ‘70s New York City – but there certainly was room for some improvement. You can see already why the series only lasted three volumes, because I don’t remember The Concrete Cage being much better.

Anyway, no idea who actually wrote it, but I’ll stick with my J.C. Conaway theory (another guess would be Ralph Hayes). The knowledge of Manhattan and its sleazier environs is one clue, as is the page-filling dialog. Not much is known about Conaway, but I did read – from an Ebay listing many years ago, where someone was selling all of Conaway’s personal author copies, shortly after Conaway died – that he never learned to type, and thus dictated all of his books. I find this image very funny…I can just see a grizzled pulp writer reclining in his Archie Bunker chair with a can of Schlitz and a cheap cigar and shouting lurid copy for some poor female typist to take down: “‘The girl had been pretty before a sex killer worked her over with a knife.’ Ya got that, toots?”

Monday, November 28, 2016

Super Cop Joe Blaze #3: The Thrill Killers


Super Cop Joe Blaze #3: The Thrill Killers, by Robert Novak
August, 1974  Belmont-Tower Books

The Super Cop Joe Blaze series ends with an installment courtesy the one and only Len Levinson. When I met with Len back in June, he didn’t seem to recall this book; he thought I was referring to his Ryker novel, The Terrorists. Later on he recalled it, and was nice enough to do a writeup with his current thoughts on the novel (below), but I have to say I really enjoyed The Thrill Killers, which offers everything one could want in a piece of tough cop pulp fiction.

Joe Blaze, unsurprisingly, is basically a Ryker clone, and Len’s version of the character is the same as his version of Ryker. He’s a tough cop, gets in a lot of scrapes, doesn’t like it when people run their mouths about “dirty cops.” He even has an ex-wife, same as Len’s version of Ryker. But technically this is Joe Blaze, who already had two previous “adventures” courtesy some unknown author(s). I’ve only read the second one, #2: The Concrete Cage, and in that one Blaze was just a regular cop, not prone to any of the outrageous sentiments of Nelson De Mille’s original version of Ryker. At any rate, per Len’s comments below, The Thrill Killers likely started as a Ryker novel, before editor Peter McCurtin had Len change it to a Joe Blaze.

Len ignores the title character of the previous two volumes and makes Joe Blaze more of a supercop; he carries a Browning 9mm and, while he uses his wits in his role as a homicide detective, he’s still prone to getting into shootouts, brawls, and the pants of eager women. What I found interesting was that Len was pretty left-wing in his views when he wrote this novel, but there’s no anti-cop sentiment to The Thrill Killers. Blaze is the hero, straight up, and in addition to the titular criminals he must also contend with various armed thugs, cop-haters, the corrupt local government, and liberal lawyers. 

This one’s more of a police procedural than The Terrorists, with Blaze using his detective smarts to collar a pair of rapist-murderers, but Len keeps things moving with arbitrary action and sex scenes. Which is to say, The Thrill Killers retains the spirit of the Dirty Harry movies and doesn’t become a slow-moving procedural like other Leisure/BT cop thrillers, ie The Slasher.

The titular villains are a pair of creeps who, just for kicks, abduct a pretty young nurse off the streets of Manhattan, drug her, rape her, and then slash her throat. Len doesn’t tell us their identities, leaving the reader to discover who they are when Blaze himself does. Speaking of whom, Len provides Blaze with an action intro as our hero guns down a perp who happens to be in bed with a woman. This is just the first of many “did you have to kill him, Blaze??” moments between Blaze and his boss, Lt. Jenkins, who to Len’s credit isn’t the “stupid chief” common in most tough cop yarns.

Blaze lives in an apartment on the East River which provides a view of Brooklyn (“Why would anyone want to look at Brooklyn?” asks a floozy Blaze picks up later on). His ex-wife Amy left him six years ago, incapable of dealing with being married to a cop. One can see why, as Blaze stays in action throughout; posthaste he’s handling a holdup in the Bowery, where a cop has been shot and a bunch of bums are being held hostage. Blaze talks the Commisioner no less into a plan in which Blaze will hide in the trunk of the car the robbers demand, and the Commissioner gives Blaze his .45!

Len even gives Blaze is own Dirty Harry-esque dialog; when Blaze guns down the two robbers, after he’s promised them he won’t shoot them, he sneers, “You gave up too late, punk,” before blowing the last one away. Meanwhile Blaze is handed the thrill killer case, and another nurse has been snatched off the street, raped, and killed. Len handles these scenes so that you feel very badly for the unfortunate women, and while the sequences are certainly lurid they aren’t sleazy. That being said Blaze has two sexual adventures in the novel, and these parts are a bit more graphic, but nothing compared to Len’s outright sleaze novels, ie Where The Action Is.

While researching suspects Blaze bumps into would-be muggers and even hippie terrorists bomb his precinct, this apparently being a common occurrence, not to mention recalling the plot of The Terrorists. While out for a beer with Lt. Jenkins Blaze even goes to the trouble of beating the shit out of a loudmouth drunk who bitches about the police – while Jenkins meanwhile frets that one day Blaze is “going to go too far.”

Probably the best sequence in the novel concerns a coke-sniffing go-go dancer at a topless bar; while just a few pages long, this scene is both reminiscent of and superior to the final quarter of The Lonely Lady. Chosen as the latest target of the thrill killers, the coke-soaring babe manages to turn the tables on them, given that she walks the dangerous streets of New York with a hidden .22. She ends up killing one of the sadists and winging the other in the leg, but for her troubles she herself is slashed in the stomach and sent to the emergency ward.

By this point Blaze has already determined that the thrill killers are a pair of young interns who were notorious for getting in trouble in medical school and who even attended classes with the two murdered nurses. When the dead one proves to be one of Blaze’s suspects, he heads to the posh home of the other with a warrant…and ends up arresting the guy’s father, too, after beating him up. But thanks to a shady, Mafia-aligned lawyer, the killer, Stevens, gets off scot free during the trial four months later.

Len takes us into the homestretch with more action: turns out the mobster had his Mafia pals kidnap the child of one of the jurors, ensuring her duplicity. Blaze dispenses justice in his own brutal way, then leads an assault on a Queens bar where the kid’s being held. But given that throughout he’s had no evidence, the DA refuses another trial. So The Thrill Killers ends with Blaze pulling his own abduction – tossing young Stevens into his car and driving him to his place of execution, where he’s given a sendoff inspired by his own murders (only minus the rape part, of course). Here Len ends the novel, on a bleak but fulfilling image of justice bloodily served.

Well anyway, I really enjoyed this one. Too bad this and The Terrorists were the only two cop thrillers Len wrote for Leisure/BT. Here are his current thoughts on the novel:

All my Belmont-Tower books began with an informal discussion with either Peter McCurtin or Milburn Smith at BT’s editorial offices at Park Avenue South and 33rd Street in midtown Manhattan. After I delivered a new completed manuscript to one or the other, I sat beside his desk and received my next assignment.

THE THRILL KILLERS followed this pattern. I sat beside Peter’s desk and he asked me to write a novel for one of their cop series, don’t remember the name now 40 years later because the name was changed as explained below. Peter either gave me one or more books in the series or just described it to me, I don’t remember. 

After the meeting I walked home to my pad on West 55th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, wondering along the way what the plot would be. There were so many possibilities. 

Around that time I’d done some reading about the sensational Leopold-Loeb murder case in Chicago during the 1920s. Two young college students at the University of Chicago named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb decided that they were Nietzsche-style supermen beyond good and evil, and plotted the perfect murder to prove their thesis. So they killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks but weren’t as superior as they’d thought because soon they were arrested and went to trial, defended by the legendary Clarence Darrow who argued not for their innocence, because the evidence was overwhelming against them, but Darrow successfully saved them from the death penalty. 

The Leopold-Loeb murder definitely influenced the plot of THE THRILL KILLERS. My detective’s character profile followed the guidelines of what Peter told me in his office, a real badass cop obsessed with justice and who couldn’t care less about administrative procedures and laws that seem more concerned with protecting criminals than catching, prosecuting and punishing them. The detective is not above administering the death penalty himself to murderers, often using their own methods against them. 

After working on the novel for several days, I received a call from Peter. He said something like, “We’re spinning off a new cop series about a Detective named Joe Blaze. So change the detective’s name to Joe Blaze.” 

I replied, “But his character and personality are based on (the name of the detective in the series I had been working on).” 

Peter said, “Don’t worry about that. Just change his name to Joe Blaze and keep on going.” 

(I wrote a fictionalized version of this discussion with Peter into my semi-autobiographical novel about an action-adventure writer THE LAST BUFFOON by Leonard Jordan, because it was one of the stranger experiences of my strange so-called literary career.) 

I read THE THRILL KILLERS yesterday for the first time in 40 years. I had forgotten it almost completely and as usual when reading one of my old books, it seemed to have been written by someone else. 

At the risk of sounding immodest, I thought the book was pretty good mainly because narrative tension held steady all the way through and Detective Joe Blaze was a believable character, his anger about crime reflecting my own anger as resident of Manhattan during the high crime era before Rudy Giuliani became Mayor and Bill Bratton became Commissioner of Police. 

The novel presents a brutal view of the world which reflected what I read daily in the New York newspapers and in true crime novels. Murderers by definition don’t care about laws or rules of civility. They have monstrous minds and some are sadistic like the murderers in THE THRILL KILLERS. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if we all loved each other or at least treated each other respectfully? But we don’t, the human race never has, and this justifiably cynical viewpoint was the philosophical foundation for the novel. 

New York City crime is increasing again according to news reports. Where is Joe Blaze now that we really need him again?

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Super Cop Joe Blaze #2: The Concrete Cage


Super Cop Joe Blaze #2: The Concrete Cage, by Robert Novak
March, 1974  Belmont-Tower Books

Another men’s adventure “series” in only the loosest sense, Super Cop Joe Blaze ran for three volumes and might have had a different author for each installment. Credited to house name “Robert Novak,” all that’s known for certain is that Len Levinson wrote the third volume. Content-wise the series is pretty much identical to Ryker.

Marty McKee in his review of Joe Blaze #1 complains about how bad and boring the novel is, which leads me to expect that the same Robert Novak wrote this second volume. Blaze is referred to as “Blaze” throughout (meaning there are no half-assed editorial changes to the protagonists’s name), but regardless he’s basically the same as Ryker, a hardnosed cop who doesn’t take crap and doesn’t mind bending the rules. At least, that’s how the back cover has it; as the narrative itself plays out, Blaze is just a regular cop, nothing “super” about him at all.

The back cover, with its huge logo proclaiming “WHITE SLAVERS,” also has you expecting a lurid thrill ride, but sadly The Concrete Cage doesn’t deliver on this either. In fact, the book is pretty much a routine and mundane police procedural, only sporadically sleazed up with quick descriptions of the mauled female corpses Blaze comes upon in his investigation. Other than that, it’s all very bland. I mean, Blaze doesn’t even kill anyone in the novel! There’s something I never thought I’d write about a ‘70s men’s adventure protagonist.

The Concrete Cage opens with a bang, though. An ambulance pulls up in front of a department store in busy Manhattan and a group of masked guys hop out and, at gunpoint, corral several pretty young women into the ambulance. One of the women refuses to go with them and they shoot her dead. The women taken captive, the ambulance roars off, and several minutes later the cops arrive to find a bunch of shocked witnesses stumbling around.

Blaze is on the case, assisted by his partner Ed Nuthall. Blaze gets very little background and is just presented as your typical New York cop, but really there’s nothing outrageous about him and he doesn’t fight with his superiors and fellow cops like De Mille’s version of Ryker does. In fact Blaze appears to be well-respected; there are laughable scenes here where the Commissioner will gape helplessly and ask, “Joe, what do you think we should do?”

Despite the shocking nature of the kidnapping, the crooks turn out to be pretty stupid. Blaze manages to track them down within a day, though it is pretty much a narrative cop-out; after “asking around” for several hours, Blaze ends up in a bar where some drunk claims he overheard someone asking how they could go about renting an ambulance!

From there Blaze follows an easier trail than you’d expect, getting the lockdown on the kidnappers in no time flat. Turns out they’re a small gang lead by a career con named Jack Tunney; Blaze learns this from pimp Homer Chase, who was part of the aduction. There follows a long, long sequence where Blaze and the Commissioner offer Chase immunity if he’ll rat on where the girls are being kept, but at the expense of many, many pages of repetitious dialog Chase finally refuses the offer, afraid Tunney would have him killed anyway.

Meanwhile the gang begins issuing demands to the cops: they want a few million and they’ll let the girls go. Initially their plan, according to the info Blaze unearths, was to sell the girls to hardcore sadists who wanted “fresh meat” to abuse and torture! Now that Blaze has figured out who they are, the gang instead turns to a straight kidnapping scheme, and they aren’t playing around; they begin leaving mauled and mutilated corpses around Manhattan and the Bronx, as warnings that if their demads aren’t met they will murder all of the girls.

This is where the book’s scant lurid quotient comes into play – Blaze as acting investigator is called to the locations where the corpses have been discovered, and Novak (whoever he was) provides all the gruesome details of how the poor women have been hacked up and disfigured. Other than that though the sleaze element is downplayed, without even a single sex scene. In fact the book is pretty bland and padded mostly with go-nowhere dialog exchanges.

Novak finally gets around to providing some action at the very end, when the cops find out where the gang is hiding out with the girls. Blaze convinces the Commissioner to allow him to go in solo and, as stupid as ever, the Commissioner agrees. This is a nice and tense scene where Blaze sneaks into the darkened building, but again it’s ruined in that it goes on too long and everything works out exactly per Blaze’s plan – he finds the girls, gets them out of the house, and then corners the two gang members while the rest of the cops move in on the front of the house.

The ensuing firefight is also bland and played out along the lines of a ‘70s TV cop show, with lots of ducking and running and no one getting killed. It all leads to an overlong car chase straight out of Bullit as Tunney makes off in a stolen car and Blaze pursues. And that’s that, the crooks are caught and the girls are free and everyone’s happy (everyone apparently forgetting about the ones who were mauled, mutilated, and murdered).

The most interesting thing about The Concrete Cage is where the cover art was sourced from; through a complete fluke I happened to discover that it was taken from the March 1968 issue of the men's adventure magazine Male -- and don’t you love how in the original painting this shades-wearing dude, who on the cover of The Concrete Cage is supposedly Blaze himself, is holding a pistol to the head of a cop?