Edge: 01 The Loner (George Gilman)

Rating: 3/5
Year: 1971
Genre: Western
Read again? Maybe.

"The Loner" is the first in the Edge series.

It's June of 1885. The Civil War is over. Captain Josiah Hedges is a Union officer who comes back home to his Iowa farm to find his younger brother tortured and murdered. He takes the time for a proper burial and heads out to demolish the men who did it.

This is a straightforward revenge story, and man-o-man is it massive violent! The kid brother--Jamie--is the second to die (the dog was first). The bad guys tie him to an oak tree--all but his right arm, which they secure by long nails hammered between and then bent over the fingers. This brings us to a good line:

"You got four fingers and a thumb on that right hand, boy. You also got another hand and we got lots of nails."

Bad guy has already told Jamie that his big brother ain't comin' home, that he's dead and owed the bad guys money. They've already ransacked the house and barn, stolen most of the horses, and set Jamie up for a little talkin'.
He says there's no money. *BLAM* There goes his thumb.
Now he's too busy screaming to answer properly. *BLAM* there goes his index finger.
One of the other men takes a shot, making a cut on Jamie's cheek. Jamie wets himself.
Then the drunk one tosses his empty whiskey bottle aside, pulls out his pistol, shoots from the hip, and plugs Jamie right between the eyes.
The gang leader blows off the drunk's junk and leaves him there to die.
Then he and the remaining baddies burn the place and high-tail it out of there.

Josiah shows up the next day and buries his little brother. After a preamble about parents and religion, the eulogy is simple, straightforward:
"Rest easy, brother. I'll settle your score. Whoever they are and wherever they run, I'll find them and I'll kill them. I've learned some special ways of killin' people and I'll avenge you good."

They did leave their junkless drunk behind for Hedges to find; he knows these men. They served with him a 'way down South, kickin' Dixie's ass. And he knows pretty much where they're headed.

This sounds promising--you've got the senseless murder, greedy outlaws, and a reason for revenge. But much of the rest of the book seems to be written with an eye toward getting Edge into situations where he kills someone: a fake preacher, a nervous kid, a dancing girl. We find out he's half-Mexican when he educates a sheriff in race relations. He doesn't kill everyone he meets, but he spends so much time glowering that Clint Eastwood should sue for infringement.

Another great exchange:
"You wouldn't shoot an unarmed man!"
Edge: "They're the easiest kind to kill."

Gilman's style is adequate, if clunky and wordy and irritatingly passive in voice, but we're not talking Shakespearean sonnets or flowing streams of prose, here. This book and its brothers are about men who need killin', and the man who kills 'em. There's not really much character development. Edge is homicidal right out of the box and all the other people are just sketches from Central Casting. No twists in the plot, either--Edge goes to [blank], he encounters [blank], he kills [blank], he leaves [blank]. Then he travels a chapter or two to reach the next [blank]. Everything's a straight line, and it's not like that's a bad thing. I do hope that Gilman develops the character in the later books. If not, there's not really much point in writing more books.

Without Remorse (Tom Clancy)

Rating: 4.5/5
Year: 1993
Genre: Manly stuff
Read again? Yes
Warnings: You'll need wrist support. Damn book is heavy, even in paperback.

This is two, two, two books in one! Not because of the daunting 750-page count, but because of the double life of the main man, John Kelly, and the events that ultimately turn him into CIA agent John Clark. This is a sort of prequel to Clancy's Jack Ryan books, though Jack is only a supporting character here.

John Kelly is a trouble-shooter. In 'Nam his job was infiltration and extraction--if you had a pilot down in enemy territory, you sent Kelly in to get him back. If you needed something blown up, you sent Kelly to do it.

That wasn't very long ago, in the book's timeline--a couple of years, at most. It's never spelled out, but it's early in Tricky Dick's administration. Kelly retired from the Navy at a young age (he's in his late 20's), and now, back in the States, he works in demolitions. Stick with what you know, right? This is better because no one's shooting at him.

As the story opens, Kelly's just finishing up a job on a derelict oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, sending it to the bottom and garnering him a fat bonus. At about the same time as he's starting back ashore, his wife is killed in a horrible car crash.

Half a year goes by in the flick of a page. Kelly picks up a hitchhiker named Pam. She's pretty much what he needs at the moment--a warm body, someone to help him get past the memory of his wife's death. Eventually he finds out that Pam ran away from some really bad men running a drug and prostitution ring. He wants to help her put the baddies behind bars...but things go terribly wrong. She dies and he goes on a revenge kick that makes Steven Seagal look like Michael Jackson in a cage-match slap-fight with The Punisher. Actually, that's not saying much, because Seagal got asswhipped by an old man he picked a fight with on a movie set.

Kelly sticks with what he knows, using his Navy SEAL skills to gather intelligence on the enemy, infiltrate their area of operations, and kill the hell out of them till they're dead. And the bad men do die. One bad man dies very slowly and painfully after his interrogation in a decompression tank. The best thing is that there's none of that Hollywood crap where the Hero kills a bad guy and says some dumb-shit line. Killed him in a decompression chamber? "Crushing." Electricity? "Shocking." No, Kelly's more like Thomas Jane's "Punisher." Kill them and move on.

And this is all just the first half of two inches of novel.

The second half is where John Kelly becomes John Clark. The CIA and some some Pentagon guys have a mission of their own for him--another sneak-in-and-rescue job in North Vietnam. It'll be his job (as "Mr. Clark") to get into position, scope out the enemy camp, and call in the Marines. Twenty American pilots are depending on them. Everything goes to plan right up to Kelly giving the go-ahead for the assault. The Marines are minutes away from landing...and enemy reinforcements arrive. Kelly is forced to abort the plan and call for evac.

By simple stupid good luck, Kelly captures the Russian who's been interrogating those American pilots, picking their brains for military secrets. The Russian has considerately brought all his notes along.

Clancy makes this an easy--if long--read. Seven hundred and fifty pages. I've read a lot of long damn books recently, so maybe that's why the book seems to drag. I only took a half point, though, because of the great amusement I got from reading this uber-violent novel in several restaurants that had x-mas music playing.

Shipkiller, The (Justin Scott)

Rating: 5/5
Year: 1978
Genre: Thriller/Drama
Read again? Yes

It was only supposed to be a three-week tour, a three-week...okay, no. Wrong shipwreck.

Peter and Carolyn Hardin are crossing the Atlantic aboard their sailboat, the Siren. About 100 miles southwest of the southern tip of England, Siren is shattered and scattered to the seas by Leviathan, an enormous supertanker a third of a mile long and loaded with a million tons of crude oil.

Carolyn is lost.

Hardin wakes up in a hospital in Fowey, Cornwall, on the south end of England, but his nightmare is far from over. There is no justice to be found anywhere: there is no proof that Leviathan ran him down--no body, no wreckage. All official avenues quickly close to him. Driven by grief and fury, Hardin embarks on a vendetta: destroy the monster that killed his wife. Sink Leviathan.

Is he evil? Insane? Certainly many of the other characters think so, but Scott doesn't spend time trying to make us wonder about it. He does pause at points to show us that there is a human being in there, when Hardin is reminded of his dead wife, or when he has nightmares of a great black steel wall coming for him. One touching moment has Hardin realizing that he can't even remember what Carolyn looked like. He reaches for his wallet, seeking a picture of his wife before realizing that there is no picture. His wallet, his pants, these are all things he had to buy after Leviathan killed her. It's only been a few weeks.

I like Scott's style--short, direct sentences that take you where you need to be without a lot of fuss and side trips. He uses dialog for talking rather than explaining, and it has the choppy feel of actual conversation. The writing flows like ocean waves; we are drawn into Hardin's obsession, we see how it drives him to sail all the way into the Persian Gulf for just one shot at his enemy.