A Bullet For The Bride

 
A Bullet For The Bride, by Jon Messman

No month stated, 2022  Brash Books

(Original Pyramid Books edition 1972)

Big thanks to Lee Goldberg and Brash Books for sending me a review copy of this, a trade paperback reprint of a novel Jon Messmann published under his own name through Pyramid Books in 1972. Just missing the men’s adventure series glut by one year, A Bullet For The Bride does seem to be Messmann’s attempt at starting a new series, and bears some similarities to his later Jefferson Boone, Handyman. (Which has also been reprinted by Brash Books, by the way, along with most all of Messmann’s ‘70s output.) 

But hero Ed Steel did not cause much stir in the publishing world – indeed, his name is misspelled as “Ed Steele” on the back cover and in the Afterword (by Roy Nguyen) of this Brash Books edition, so the poor guy still hasn’t made much of a stir. It’s not hard to see why, as A Bullet For The Bride is not the most auspicious beginning for any series; the plot hinges around Steel working for a spoiled little rich girl who has Daddy Issues. So far as character motivation for a series opener goes, it’s not exactly up there with the Mafia killing your kid. 

Steel is essentially Jefferson Boone meets Travis McGee…or perhaps that should be Jedediah Killinger, if we want to stick to a purely men’s adventure comparison. He’s a vet of Korea who has done odd jobs for the Agency and now he lives on a boat, and when we meet him he’s lazing in the sun along the Florida coast. Here’s where the spoiled brat comes in: her name is Cam Parnell, she’s in her early 20s with “small, high breasts,” and Messmann will annoyingly refer to her by her full name, “Cam Parnell,” over and over again, through the course of the novel. But then Messmann does the same with his hero; it’s frequently “Ed Steel said this,” or “Ed Steel said that,” and the reader’s like, “I know the hero’s name, I’m not stupid!” 

But then, Messmann has his recurring quirks. Namely, poor treatment of female characters. Messmann’s protagonists are complete and total dicks with women; it’s one of the author’s most notable quirks, to the extent that you wonder if he had some sort of latent anger toward them. The typical scenario will have the hero baiting the girl, talking down to her, mocking her, occasionally even slapping her…and then bedding her when he has sufficiently tamed the shrew. The scenario with Cam here in A Bullet For The Bride is the same as in every other Messmann novel I’ve read: Steel treats her like shit from the moment he meets her, essentially telling her to take off when she asks to hire him, and then going on to talk down to her and constantly criticize her. 

But then again, Messmann’s female characters kind of deserve it, for the most part. We aren’t talking strong, sassy female characters like you’d get in a George Harmon Smith novel. A Messmann female character is usually kind of dumb (which I guess again factors into that “latent anger” angle), and Cam for example angrily tosses a bucket of chum on Steel when he sends her off in the opening sequence. Actually this whole part seems to be a riff on the finale of It Happened One Night, where Clarke Cable goes off to the wealthy father of Claudette Colbert with an itemized list of petty things he’s owed payment for; Steel cleans himself up and heads to the home of Cam’s super-wealthy father with an itemized list of petty things he’s owed payment for (cleaning the boat of chum, the cost for “lost business” during this time, etc). 

After this “meet cute” Steel of course begins working for Cam. Sorry, for “Cam Parnell,” as Messmann refers to her again and again in the narrative. And so begins the mean-spirited bickering and bantering between the two. There’s a lot of it throughout the novel; Messmann’s protagonists are also unusual in that they maintain their hostile tone even after having sex with the girl in question. But then, Messmann’s characters always tend to be an argumentative and unpleasant bunch, with Messmann doling out his usual dialog modifiers like “he bit off” or “he threw out” and the like, to the extent that it sounds like these people aren’t having a conversation so much as they are a food fight. 

Steel is into boats and whatnot, which means that a lot of A Bullet For The Bride reads like nautical fiction. This is proven posthaste as Cam gets Steel to compete in a boat race against the woman Cam is certain is trying to pull a fast one on her father: Grace White, a lovely brunette in her 30s who has moved in quick on the wealthy Parnell. Messmann either did a fair bit of research or was just a boating enthusiast, and so he really brings a lot of veracity to the race…but for me personally, it just seemed to go on and on. One gets the suspicion that if Ed Steel’s adventures had continued beyond this novel, the “boat stuff” would’ve become a part of the series schtick. 

Surprisingly, Grace White – and yes, Messmann constantly refers to her as “Grace White” in the narrative – does not factor into the novel as much as one might expect. Rather, it is her older sister Betty who does. Just kidding. Grace is sort of a peripheral character, and Cam does the heavy lifting as the novel’s main female character. However Grace is the titular “bride,” as she becomes engaged to Parnell and Cam wants to stop the wedding before it’s too late. As mentioned the entire thing hinges around Cam’s “female intiuition” that Grace is up to something nefarious, but the issue is she’s cried wolf about all of her father’s previous female interests, so no one really believes her. 

And boy, do we learn all about this. I couldn’t believe it, but Messmann devotes a goodly portion of the opening half to Steel researching Cam’s past accusations, even up to and including the women who were involved with Parnell before breaking it off due to Cam’s interference. Steel’s research leads him to conclude the girl is nuts, a comment which of course infuriates Cam and leads to their initial sex scene. Messmann does remember to properly exploit his female characters, and while his raunchy scenes are usually more metaphorical than explicit, he at least lets us know something is happening instead of fading to black. 

Not that this makes Cam and Steel much more of a working team. The bickering and bantering only increases, though we’re to understand that Cam is developing feelings for Steel…and perhaps vice versa. But Cam sort of goes away and Steel’s co-star for the second half is Domino, a Hispanic dude who has done some work for Steel in the past. This entails more nautical stuff; Cam swears Grace meets with an unmarked boat on certain nights, and so Steel and Domino go on a stakeout. Action, by the way, is infrequent; other than an early part where Steel walks into a honey trap and is nearly beaten to death on the docks, A Bullet For The Bride for the most part operates as a mystery novel…the same that can be said of Messmann’s later Handyman series.

The only difference is that Ed Steel is a bit more brutal than any other Messmann character I’ve yet read, though you’d never get that idea until the very final pages of A Bullet For The Bride. Without venturing into spoilers, or the overly-comprehensive vibe of some of my earlier reviews, it develops that Cam’s suspicions were, of course, on the money – otherwise, this really wouldn’t have been an auspicious opening to the series. The plot is fairly preposterous and seems more out of one of Messmann’s earlier  Nick Carter: Killmaster installments, but long story short it involves a mysterious island that is run by Commie villains. There is a crazy part toward the very end where Steel slices the throats of several guards, killing them in their sleep, and Messmann conveys an effective image of a gore-covered and grim-faced Steel going from cabin to cabin with a blade as Cam watches in horror. 

So in other words, all the action occurs in the final pages of A Bullet For The Bride, and this climax seems to come out of a contemporary men’s adventure magazine. It’s a taut, brutal sequence that sees Steel and Cam captured and condemned to a dawn execution, before Steel manages to turn the tables and go on a kill-spree to even the odds. If the entire novel had maintained this pace, perhaps A Bullet For The Bride would’ve been the start of a series, and not just an obscure one-shot in the prolific career of Jon Messmann. 

It’s super cool that Brash Books has brought this and other Messmann books back into print. They all look great and are professionally packaged, but as I stated before, I think it would be so much better if these reprints were done to the dimensions of a 1970s mass market paperback, which is how Tocsin Press does it. I mean, I love men’s adventure books more than anything, but they should never be made to look “upmarket.” That said, the Brash Books cover is certainly better than the Pyramid Books original, which was downright lame – and certainly had to play a little part in the lack of this “series” going past one volume. I mean who in 1972 would’ve grabbed a book with this cover off the rack and headed for the cash register?

The Spider #30: Green Globes Of Death

The Spider #30: Green Globes Of Death, by Grant Stockbridge

March, 1936  Popular Publications

I was under the impression this volume of The Spider was the third part of a trilogy that started with The Mayor Of Hell and continued into Slaves Of The Murder Syndicate, but that doesn’t turn out to be the case. Green Globes Of Death is for the most part self-contained, with only infrequent mentions of those previous two volumes. The volume it is really the sequel to is Prince Of The Red Looters, as it features the return of that one’s main villain: The Fly. This is quite puzzling for Richard “The Spider” Wentworth, as he’s certain he killed the Fly in that previous book – he impaled him in the heart with a rapier and then the Fly fell many stories to his supposed death. 

To be honest, the Fly is not one of the more interesting villains in The Spider, at least not to me, but either Norvell “Grant Stockbridge” Page liked him, or the readers demanded he return. Who knows. To me, the rapier-carrying character in monk’s robes is quite boring when compared to the average Spider villain. Also I don’t know how “Fly” equals a Medieval monk’s robes for a costume. I was thinking the guy would at least have antennae on his costume. But at any rate, as we know from the final moments of the previous book, the Fly is back – and what’s more he has killed the mayor. 

This was how Slaves Of The Murder Syndicate ended, and as a reminder the bigger deal here was that Wentworth was notified of the Fly’s return moments before walking down the aisle with long-suffering girlfriend Nita Van Sloan. This was one of the most emotionally-resonate moments in The Spider, as it was Nita herself who told Wentworth to go after the Fly, and to skp the wedding…this after an entire novel in which she’d nagged Wetnworth to stop being the Spider and marry her. So then, one might be under the impression that Green Globes Of Death would open immediately thereafter. 

As it turns out, that is not the case. As typical with the series, it opens on an action scene, with Wentworth in his Spider costume (demonic face with fangs and a hunched back) attending a costume ball in the hopes of rooting out the Fly. It’s two weeks after the previous volume, the events of which are not much dwelt upon. As is also typical, a reset has occurred and we’re back to the status quo, and there’s no real pickup on the emotional finale of the previous book. What’s even more curious is that Norvell Page doubles down on the alternate front, this time: the main subplot of Green Globes Of Death concerns Nita hobknobbing with one of the men Wentworth suspects of being the Fly, to the point that Wentworth kicks her out of his home and tells his companions that Nita is no longer their ally! 

Wentworth suspects a few men of being the Fly; another recurring schtick of the series being the various red herrings Wentworth busies himself with. But I’m happy to note that Green Globes Of Death throttles back on the endless, arbitrary action scenes of previous books and goes for more of a suspense angle. To be sure, there is quite a bit of action, but this time Page balances it with characterization and plot, and he doesn’t seem to just be coming up with stuff to meet his word count. There’s also a bit more care put into the mystery of who the Fly is – Wentworth is certain he killed the original, so this new one must be an imposter – so for once the outing of the villain’s identity isn’t arbitrarily shoehorned into the climax. 

Another cool change is that Nita is becoming more of the “adventuress” that she would be in later volumes, like Satan’s Murder Machines. A recurring motif is that Nita is always abducted by the villain’s people – because everyone and their brother knows that the Spider is really Richard Wentworth – but this time she has a surprise for her would-be captors, blowing one of them away with her own gun. She even makes an action-heroine quip afterwards. Of course, Nita is still abducted, but it’s cool to see the emerging action-heroine characterization for her. But this too picks up from the previous volume’s climax, in which Nita put on the costume of the Spider and went into action with guns blazing. 

Nita is saved off-page by a sort of alt-Wentworth, a “criminologist” who is not suspected of being the Spider, per Wentworth’s best friend-worst enemy Commissoner Kirkpatrick. Soon Nita is hanging out with this guy, and there follows “high melodrama” where Wentworth pretends to be outraged that Nita went off with another man, desperately hoping that Nita can see through his charade but spending the rest of the novel afraid that she hasn’t. So there’s a lot of melodramatic stuff here where he will see the two together and feign anger, not sure if the tears in Nita’s eyes are genuine or not, even telling erstwhile butler Jenkyns to mind his own business. As I’ve mentioned before, a reader can easily detect that Richard Wentworth is nuts; there’s an unintentionally(?) humorous part where, after sending Nita off in feigned anger, Wentworth looks at himself in the mirror and starts laughing…and just keeps laughing. 

The apocalyptic tones typical of the series are way whittled down here. In fact, I think this was true of the previous Fly yarn. In this one, the Fly’s minions hit the occasional bank and get in shootouts, but there’s none of the “New York is nearly destroyed” catastrophes of earlier books. The titular “green globes” are glass balls that are hurled by the Fly’s men; they contain an acidic gas that essentially melt guts. These things don’t even appear until near the end of the novel, and Page well captures the horror of them when they are hurled at victims during the Fly’s various robberies. Mostly though the Fly does his fighting with a rapier, and there are numerous parts where Wentworth engages the Fly – or another guy he suspects of being the Fly – in a fencing match. 

We’re often told that the Fly is the most dangerous, most cunning villain Wentworth has ever faced, but a mere perusal of earlier books will prove that is not true. But hell, Wentworth thinks that of every single villain, every single volume. The Fly also has a greatly reduced force compared to previous villains. Instead of an army, he just has a bunch of random hoods. All of which is to say that Green Globes Of Death operates on a smaller scale than its predecessors…which really isn’t a bad thing, because Page focuses more on internal turmoil than endless action. But the rift with Nita is a little tough to buy after the events of the previous book, in which her devotion to Wentworth was made clear. Then again, this is why Page does a reset each volume, so he doesn’t get bogged down by what came before. 

Another plus for Green Globes Of Death is that Wentworth wears his Spider costume a lot more than he usually does; in most books, he’ll appear as the Spider for a scant page or two. This time, though, he is often donning the garb and going out with fangs and hunchback to blow away the bad guys with his dual .45s. That said, he just as often fights without a costume, and Norvell Page once again points out that Commissioner Kirkpatrick is quite aware that Wentworth is really the Spider. Indeed, pretty much everyone knows Wentworth is the Spider, which lends the series a little unintentional camp value…as if everyone is going along with Wentworth’s charade that he’s just a wealthy gadabout. 

An interesting thing I wanted to note – there’s a part early on where Wentworth acquires the palmprint of a man he suspects might be the Fly. Wentworth has a cast made of the palmprint, even though we are informed crime labs haven’t yet been able to figure out how to use palmprints to identify a suspect. Ultimately Wentworth is able to use it to prove an identification, but it was cool to see how novel this technique was in 1936. Years ago I cut my cable, and if you cut cable and get a digital antenna you automatically become an armchair homicide investigator. This is because there are about ten thousand true crime networks on over-the-air television. I’ve seen several episodes of Forensic Files, for example, which hinged around identifying someone by a palmprint. I could only imagine how much better the show would be if, instead of a cop or a crime-lab technician relaying the story, it was a millionaire playboy “criminologist” in cape and fangs. “I knew he was The Fly!” 

Despite the more smallscale setup, Green Globes Of Death really entertained me, and kept my attention more than the average Spider novel, mostly because everything flowed so well in the story. Norvell Page this time does a great job juggling action, character, and introspection; the only setback is the villain, but Page does pull a cool surprise twist at the end concerning the Fly that has a horror vibe. It just happens so quickly that the reader doesn’t have sufficient time to realize it, meaning that Wentworth must exposit everything for us in the final paragraphs. The “rift” with Nita is also unsatisfactorily resolved in some quick, expository dialog, but still, overall Green Globes Of Death was one of my favorite Spider yarns yet.

MIA Hunter #13: L.A. Gang War

MIA Hunter 13: L.A. Gang War, by Jack Buchanan

January, 1990  Jove Books

Stephen Mertz turns in one of the better volumes of the MIA Hunter series, which sees Martin “MIA Hunter” Stone and his erstwhile colleagues Hog Wiley and Terrence Louglin fully transformed into a government-sanctioned commando squad that handles any type of action, not just ‘Nam POW rescues. In this way they are now along the lines of the innumerable men’s adventure teams of the ‘80s and ‘90s, but what’s interesting is that Mertz, who created and edited the series, injects more background and character development into the tale than you would encounter in those other ghostwriter-written men’s adventure series. 

To wit, L.A. Gang War opens with a flashback to 1965, with Martin Stone 21 years old and a new Green Beret on his first patrol. Mertz well captures a greener, much-less-experienced Stone in this prologue; while he is not the experienced commando of the series proper, he still has the same determination. This opening also establishes characters who will factor into the novel, like Master Sergeant Chug Brown, “a big black bear of a man” who serves as Stone’s commanding officer, as well as the villain of the piece: Lou Conte, a turncoat Green Beret who, when we meet him, is working with some drug-running Cambodians to ambush Stone’s patrol. With a birthmark running across his face, Conte is easily the most memorable villain we’ve yet had in the series. 

Stone gets his trial by combat, one of the survivors of Conte’s ambush – and also Stone takes a shot at Conte, but sees him get away. We will learn that this has long been a sore spot for Martin Stone…and, of course, here in L.A. Gang War he will get his decades-delayed revenge. We cut to 1989, and Stone and team have just flown in to San Clemente, California, having just completed another mission in South America. Stone has his first post-‘Nam reunion with Chug, who works now as an anti-gang cop here in California. Stone’s team has been brought in by the Feds to rescue a reporter who has been taken hostage by a drug lord he was investigating – and the reporter is Chavez, another of Stone’s buddies (and who also was introduced in the 1965 prologue). 

This is a crafty way to stay true to the original series concept – rescuing prisoners of war – while expanding on it a little, and the action scene here could have come out of a contemporary action film, with Stone and comrades blasting away at Hispanic drug-runners on full auto. Mertz also captures the long-running banter between Louglin and Wiley, with even more of that background stuff thrown in; we’re told here that the two were partners back in ‘Nam, which is a tidbit I had forgotten. But there is a lot of bantering between the two, and Mertz does a good job of making the two characters memorable (I enjoyed the little note that Loughlin reads Robert Ludlum novels). 

Perhaps the best part of this sequence is the introduction of a sexy young black woman named Silky Brown: her first appearance has her in the passenger seat of a Mercedes (with none other than Lou Conte behind the wheel) as it escapes the drug lord’s place in San Clemente. Later we learn that Silky is undercover, merely posing as Conte’s latest girl for some unspecified reason. From her name to her looks, Silky seems to be a clear nod to Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation flicks, particularly Foxy Brown. I was hoping for some Coffy-esque “This is the end of your rotten life, you motherfuckin’ dope pusher!” shotgun-toting sass, but unfortunately – spoiler alert – it was not to be. While Silky is indeed a great character, probably one of my favorite ever in the MIA Hunter series, she does not turn out to be a Foxy Brown type. Hell, her name isn’t really even “Silky Brown,” and she’s just a wanna-be reporter who is trying to investigate the drug-running in the area, due to her involvement with the much-older Chavez. 

Those taking notes will realize of course that this means there will be no Stone-Silky conjugation, which would have been par for the course if this novel had been published two decades before (as hard as it is to believe, we’re in the ‘90s now, even though the novel is stated as taking place in 1989). This is because Stone has a steady girlfriend, something that would have been anathema in a ‘70s men’s adventure series; this of course would be April, who has been with the series from the start, and who has slowly integrated herself into the team in proto-DEI fashion. Even here Mertz gives us more background than is typical of most men’s adventure, with the note that Stone has been with April for a while, and that she still turns him on (in other words, they aren’t married). But as is typical of this series (or ‘90s men’s adventure in general), any sort of hanky-panky between the two must be a product of the reader’s own fevered imagination. 

For the most part, Mertz here delivers a crime thriller that has no parallels with the early volumes of the series; the closest point of comparison, men’s adventure-wise, would be G.H. Frost’s Army Of Devils, only without the drug-fueled zombies. Otherwise there are frequent scenes of Stone, Hog, and Loughlin suiting up and blasting away crack dealers in inner-city shitholes; one part, quite similar to Army Of Devils, has them trapped in a building as both the Crips and the Bloods set in on them. While not nearly as gory as Army Of Devils, we do get good word-painting like “reddish-gray mud” to describe blasted-out brains sitting on the street. 

Oh, and another “modern” intrusion here is the introduction of comlink-type headsets Stone and team wear on missions: “earsets” that allow them to stay in contact while in the field. Certainly this was novel in 1990, but here in 2025 I can’t tell you how sick I am of seeing action movies with commandos touching their ears and talking into their comlink headsets, or whatever the hell they’re called. It’s become just as much of a cliché as the ass-kicking girl who is a better shot and a better fighter than all of the guys put together. 

Well anyway, I sort of lost the plot there. Mertz also pays tribute to his writing mentor, with the mention of a top cop named “Pendleton.” And in many ways L.A. Gang War is sort of a “modern” take on a ‘70s Executioner novel, what with its cast of squabbling criminal gangs who prove absolutely no match for a hardened commando team. The only difference is, instead of Mafia goons, it’s black crack dealers. However Lou Conte emerges as the main villain, and Mertz delivers several scenes from his perspective; another similarity to Pendleton’s Executioner novels is that L.A. Gang War hops around a fairly large cast of characters, not just staying focused on Martin Stone. 

Overall, this one was an entertaining read, and to tell the truth I prefer urban action to the jungle exploits of the earlier MIA Hunter books. But speaking of which, the final sentence of L.A. Gang War informs us that Stone and team will in fact be heading back to ‘Nam, as new POWs have just been discovered. Like they said in the old NBC ads, “Be there!”