The Fraudulent Broad (1958)

Dan Slick is a big lug who works a miserable 9 to 5 as a vacuum cleaner salesman. He has his eye on the soon to be vacant manager's position and the cute front office lady, but laments his lot in life and wonders if he'll ever get ahead financially. Things take a turn when Dan somehow manages to sell one of his cleaners to Cleo, the young wife of the chairman of the entire company. Taking more than a passing interest in Dan and his plucky charms, the chairman hires Dan for a very special job: fucking the living daylights out of his wife with a photographer hiding in the bushes so he can divorce the gold digging hussy and leave her with nothing! The only catch? Dan seems to have fallen in love with Cleo, and the only way out for them as a couple with the chairman's millions intact is for the chairman to die...

James L. Rubel, who also wrote under a plethora of pen names, produced a decent amount of novels ranging from crime to westerns during the heyday of pulp between the 1930's to 1950's. Unfortunately, his name doesn't seem to be talked about as much as some of the luminaries of the genre and the majority of his work existed for decades only in used bookshops, but perhaps that can change with some recent reprints from publisher Cutting Edge Books. One of these reprints is The Fraudulent Broad from 1958, a sleazy sex and murder tale with more than a hint of Double Indemnity in the mix.

While the press for this book warns the reader it's for "adults only" and there's some loose, adulterous women and themes of cuckoldry abound, Rubel never actually ventures into true erotica here. Beyond some scenes of heavy making out and implied sex off-screen, The Fraudulent Broad is actually rather tame by today's standards.

What the novel does have going for it is its sleaze factor. If this were a movie it would have been made in the 1970's on super 8 with that greasy, muddy hue of the cheapest film stock at the time. Every single character in this novel - from the lughead main character to the conniving chairman to the drunken money hungry wife to the flamboyant family attorney with his own agenda - they are all complete slimeballs. Even the minor characters like Dan's office rival and the police officers who show up towards the tail-end of the story are still dripping with sleaze. I honestly struggled to find a likeable character throughout the entire novel.

However, I don't necessarily see the lack of likeable characters as a drawback in a story that's intended to be this dark and salacious. As a treatise on greed and what the pursuit of easy money will do to already damaged people, The Fraudulent Broad is a home run. It doesn't have anywhere near the hypnotic poetry of something like a Chandler novel, but I still found Rubel to be a competent wordsmith who seemed to have a knack for pacing that the likes of Elmore Leonard would perfect to a science in the decades that followed.

And like any crime novel of this era, there's also plenty of twists and double-crossing to be had. Some you'll see coming, some you may not...

Recommended.

The Punisher (2004)

In the quaint, sun-drenched town of Pastryville, Frank Castle, once known to the public as the notorious "Punisher", has hung up his guns for an apron and traded in the skull and kevlar armor for a smile and a rolling pin. After a life-altering incident involving a misadventure with a down on his luck pastry chef, Frank unexpectedly finds himself the owner of "Castle's Cakes", a bakery that becomes the very soul of the community. Gone are the days of vengeance - now Frank's only 'war' is the war within himself to bake the perfect croissant...

...or not. I mean, I'd probably put down money before you could blink an eye to see a story where my favorite comic book character did something as ridiculous as become a pastry chef, but alas, we're actually here today to talk about author D.A. Stern's novelization of the 2004 film The Punisher starring Tom Jane as the eponymous gun enthusiast himself. The actual plot of this story is every single Punisher origin you've ever known about: bad guys kill Frank Castle's family - Frank Castle goes on murderous rampage against any and all bad guys - the end. For the 2004 film, screenwriter/director Jonathan Hensleigh made some... changes to the lore and the overall setting, including moving the action from the gritty streets of New York City to... Tampa. Yeaaah. Tell me your film project is trying to save money without telling me your film project is trying to save money.

Hensleigh also made sure to exclude characters like Microchip and Jigsaw because he saw them as "lacking the spirit of the urban vigilante". This tells me Hensleigh didn't actually 'get' fuck-all about the comics, because while the Punisher's roots are undoubtedly part of that 1970's Mack Bolan/Death Wish stew, there's just as much of a place for high-tech Bond style gadgets and over the top supervillains in the Punisher's universe. It is a comic book property, after all. As such, the 2004 film suffered from being turned into a mostly by-the-numbers 1970's style revenger flick. Tom Jane, who actually *is* a fan of the Punisher character, does his damnedest to give his performance as much of a tortured soul pathos as possible, but ultimately, the Punisher versus a fruitier than usual John Travolta as the bad guy is missing something and it's no surprise the proposed sequel was turned into Punisher: War Zone with a completely different director, writer, and lead actor several years later.

What's interesting about the novelization of The Punisher is that author D.A. Stern (aka Dave Stern) appears to be a legitimate fan of the character. If he's not a fan, he certainly fooled me, but there are enough little tweaks to what we saw on screen to convince me he's down for some Marvel style street justice. I'm not suggesting the author went beyond his mandate here in adopting the screenplay to novel format, but I get the feeling nobody was really paying too much attention to some of the flourishes Stern added to this version of the story. From minor lore things, like the acknowledgment that Castle's family are actually the Castiglione clan, to an obvious foreshadowing of Microchip about halfway through the novel:

A shame, but the contents of this particular bin would probably end up on Saint's cigarette boats later today. Envisioning this morning's operation, Castle had originally thought to deactivate the bay's sprinkler system and burn the money, but he found he didn't have the necessary computer skills. A weakness, a chink in his armor: he would have to address it at some point.

The fact that the film's director hated Frank's sidekick enough to exclude him entirely from his film tells me he probably didn't find the time to read Stern's novelization and catch the above moment. But what really convinces me this novelization flew under the radar and was simply pushed out by the publishers for an attempt at a quick buck is THIS piece of beautifully batshit nonsense early in the novel where the author is describing some of Castle's escapades as a ruthless special ops guy long before the murder of his family takes place:

Buccaneer Bay was an Orlando tourist attraction that featured the Jose Gasparilla-the world's only remaining fully rigged pirate sailing ship. Six members of Sato X, a Japanese terrorist organization, had somehow snuck weapons onto the boat, which they then used to take sixty-five innocent tourists hostage.

The group they captured, however, included a sixty-sixth person, Frank Castle, who escaped during the terrorists' assault. He'd then donned a pirate's outfit, complete with skull mask (courtesy of one of the animatronic attractions on the ride) and set about rescuing the hostages. Within an hour, the terrorists were all dead, the tourists safe and sound, and their anonymous rescuer had mysteriously vanished.

I can assure you, nothing quite so gut-bustingly AWESOME made its way into the mostly drab film version of this property.

To me, these little flourishes are enough to make the novelization of The Punisher shine and might actually make it one of those somewhat rare instances where the film novelization outshines the big screen version of the same story. I figured going into this book that it would be a curio for hardcore fans of the comic books only, but I can see a greater appeal here. I won't pretend this is anything close to high literature, but Stern's novelization ends up reading very much like one of the Bolan novels with lots of action and goons getting exactly what's coming to them, so if that's your jam, this ain't a bad read at all. Recommended.

The Man Called Noon (1969)

Ruble Noon awakens laying on the dirt with a broken window above him, a wound from a bullet that just grazed his noggin, and no memory whatsoever of how he ended up in this predicament or the bad hombres that appear to be after him. Unsure if he's supposed to be a lawman being chased by outlaws or an outlaw being chased by lawmen, Noon crawls his way out of Dodge and ends up hitching a ride on the next train out of town, eventually making his way to a ranch with a pretty lady proprietress and a stable of unsavory hands. Every time Noon tries to lay low and wait for his memory to come back, trouble seems to find him. But Noon will quickly discover that he's not so bad at shooting his way out of trouble...

I'd seen a few western movies based off works by Louis L'Amour (there seemed to be a steady supply of them that appeared as TV movies in the 90's into the early 2000's) and of course I was familiar with the name, but I'd never actually read one of his hundred or so novels... until now. Given my love of pulp, spaghetti westerns, and Old West history in general, it's surprising I'd passed by L'Amour for so long: he's like the Elvis Presley of western fiction in terms of name recognition and his novels continue to sell a tremendous amount of copies even today as reprints. The dude lived one hell of a life and also seemed to be insanely humble about his own literary prowess ("I'm just now getting to be a good writer" he said... when he was 80 years old.)

The Man Called Noon (which was made into a euro western film - Hombre llamado Noon in 1973) starts off with pure action and the pace never seems to let up. One of the more remarkable things I found in this novel was L'Amour's pacing as a writer. This is lean, pulpy fare that doesn't have time for wasted words and unnecessary distractions. Because of this, I breezed through the book in record time. Even the dialogue kept up with the constant forward momentum of the writing: 

"You should have listened when you had the chance," she said. "Now you have no chance."

"That's a matter of opinion," he said cooly.

"There are five of us," she said.

"But only one that's you," he replied calmly, "and that needs only one bullet."

"You'd shoot a woman?"

He smiled. "You've chosen to play games with the boys, and when you do that, you accept the penalties. I see here only four men and one cold, treacherous wench who would betray her best friend for a dollar."

Oh, did I mention the character Ruble Noon is BASED as fuck too?

This is a dude who gets shot I don't know how many times throughout the course of the novel and is still up the next day to drink black coffee and show off his five o'clock shadow. Of course, Noon was played by a different actor in the film version, but the way he reads in this novel kept making me think of a Charles Bronson type of man's man in the role. The manner in which the amnesia plot surrounding Noon unravels is also highly satisfying, with one particular gut-punch twist that forced me to put the damn book down for about twenty minutes and take a walk. Don't you love when a book throws you like that?

The other characters are your usual assortment of outlaws and bad men, along with a friendly maiden, the treacherous wench quoted above, and a helpful Mexican bandito that Noon busts out of jail because at a certain point the odds are so stacked against him he needs another gun on his side. Some might scoff at how cliched the romance between Noon and the ranch owner Fan is given how quickly they appear to be falling in love with one another, but I accepted it as believable considering Fan has recently lost her father and is surrounded by mostly scumbag ranch hands on her property. When another decent fellow finally comes into her orbit, it's unsurprising she'd be interested in him.

The Man Called Noon culminates in a frenzied search for long-hidden gold somewhere in or around Fan's ranch with more than one set of players vying to get their hands on it first. I won't spoil the finale, but it goes without saying that the lure of gold and riches really does bring out the worst in certain people.

Recommended.