Death Flight (Airport Cop #3)

Death Flight, by Charles Miron
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

Charles Miron wraps up the Airport Cop series with this third volume; while the previous volume was a lurid murder yarn which often lost sight of its titular protagonist, Death Flight sees Miron apparently attempting to refashion the series into a sort of Airport thing (both Airport and Airport 75 are namedropped on the back cover), with a large group of characters going about their own adventures around Kennedy Airport.

At least I think I’ve figured out what kind of a cop main character Verban is; looks like I was correct in my assumption, last time, that he’s an NYPD detective assigned the Kennedy airport detail. But again Miron does nothing to bring Verban to life or to explain anything about his world, let alone what Verban’s first name is. There isn’t even any pickup from the previous book, with nothing mentioned on how long ago it was or anything. The reader is just thrust into the story, which to tell the truth isn’t that memorable…and by the way the title is as misleading as can be, as there’s no damn “death flight” to be found anywhere in the book!

Miron’s prose continues to be nearly psychedelic in how fractured and strange it is, with mindbending phrases like, “Verban sat between the two of them like some Buddha with a hernia,” or even “Everybody loved humility. Like lozenges for the soul.” And though Miron’s dialog has a natural ring to it, most of the time you have no idea what anyone’s talking about – as in The Twilight Strangler, Miron just sort of drops us in on the proceedings, as if were a fly on the wall. He at least maintains a healthy sleaze level, though like last time it’s rather awkwardly shoehorned in via flashbacks – though there is an “I’m gonna barf!” bit where a female character pleasures herself (quite explicitly) with a banana…

Anyway, Death Flight at least opens on an in-jokey moment, as Verban and his latest girlfriend, a psychiactric student named Alix who likes to psychoanalyze everything, are watching an Airport-type aviation disaster movie on TV at the home of Freddie Karp, Verban’s partner, and his wife, Ruth. Here Verban berates the over-the-hill star of the movie, Glenn Gibbons (a sort of John Wayne/Charlton Heston type), calling him a “screaming faggot,” much to Ruth’s dismay – she tends to believe Glenn Gibbons really is a hero, even though he only plays one on TV.

This bit with Glenn Gibbons might seem like a joke at first…but the dude actually turns out to be a character in the book. In fact, he’ll get what seems to be more narrative space than Verban himself, who sits out long portions of Death Flight. He’s a larger-than-life blowhard type of nitwit who confuses reality with the movies he’s made, but he’s fallen on hard times. Considered too old to star in the action movies that were once his forte, Gibbons’s idea for his latest film is rejected by the studio. To come up with money to fund it himself (at least, I think this is his plan – Miron’s kind of murky with the details), Gibbons plans to smuggle millions of dollars of heroin into the country. 

Perhaps this is what the “death flight” refers to (though no one dies on the flight); late in the book Gibbons flies an airline from France to America, the heroin with him. But there’s no action on this flight…other that is than a dual handjob/blowjob Gibbons gets from a stewardess and the ever-horny blonde traveling with him. Her name is Leona Bing and she’s the publicity person for a film festival being thrown in France; she’s hounded Gibbons for months to appear and provide commentary on a marathon of his movies, and he’s decided to take advantage of this opportunity for a free trip to France, where he can hook up with the underworld drug-smuggling contacts and pitch them his offer – for who will search the luggage of world-famous Glenn Gibbons?

Meanwhile Verban gets in completely-arbitrary action scenes, starting with a random trip to a black bar in the opening pages, where he and Alix run into racist patrons who resent Verban’s whiteness. Verban beats up three of them, but his biggest action scene is saved for midway through; Verban gets in a long chase with a triple-jointed conman the “Airport Cop” has run into before – this guy swindles people by staging falls, throwing his joints out of whack and pretending grave injury. This guy almost gets the better of Verban, kicking him so savagely in the balls that our hero is in the hospital with a “bleeding crotch,” uncertain if his equipment still works. For this Verban shoots the triple-jointed freak in the throat, something his “stupid chief” boss Captain Kinsella complains about.

Miron seems to want to expand upon Verban’s world, with more scenes focusing on Kinsella and the other cops in his aiport detail, among them the lovely Candance Reuscher, who we’ll recall worked with Verban last time (and also occasionally slept with him, though none of that here). This time she’s on canine patrol with a black cop named Crockett, and Miron fills pages with abitrary background details on the dude. We also get lots of stuff from the perspectives of Glenn Gibbons and Leona Bing, who by the way is the character who pleasures herself with a banana, and also, apropos of nothing, flashes back to one time she was screwed in high school. She also has lots of sex with hero Gibbons, though Miron doesn’t go into it too much, just relaying from Gibbons’s perspective that he’s “balled” her.

The separate plots have nothing to do with one another for the most part; Verban’s tangle with the conman turns out to be his major setpiece, and his and Karp’s investigation of a suspected heister doesn’t pan out, though it does feature an entertaining bit where they run into a group of young bikers outside a diner. Candace and Crockett get the brunt of the action, running into a pair of Hispanic theives who try to make off with some cargo, leading to a shootout which climaxes with poor Crockett being gutted by a knife-wielding crook. As with The Twilight Stranger, this leads to a hilariously rushed finale in which Verban tracks down the Hispanic thieves, corners them in a gym frequented by gays, and after a hasty firefight decides to just arrest and not kill them.

Meanwhile there’s Glenn Gibbons on a flight back to the US, where he manages to get a stewardess to feel him up while Leona Bing goes down on him. He’s made a deal with a French drug kingpin to deliver some horse to a California-based mobster, but unknown to Gibbons a New York mobster has plans to intercept. Indeed, Miron as ever is so haphazard in his plotting that Glenn Gibbons, a primary character throughout most of the book, is dispensed with in such a casual, uncaring manner that I actually had to go back and re-read the part again. But there’s no part where his plot connects with Verban’s or anyone elses’s.

Overall I found Death Flight to be pretty muddled and dispirited, as if Miron had gotten the contract to turn his novel Airport Cop (which I don’t have and don’t plan to seek out) into a series, and just barely managed to eke out a second installment before giving up entirely with this third one. Indeed one can easily see why the series ended here. I have some standalone crime novels Miron published with Manor around the same time, so I’ll check those out next – here’s hoping they’ll be more enjoyable.

The Twilight Strangler (Airport Cop #2)

The Twilight Strangler, by Charles Miron
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

First of all, thanks to Justin Marriott for bringing this obscure, three-volume series to my attention. But then, judging from the dearth of information and reviews on the web, it doesn’t look like too many people have heard of it. All I know is that Charles Miron was a real person and published a handful of novels through Manor Books, this being the only series.

Typical of other Manor series books of the day (like Kill Squad), there are no volume numbers: Airport Cop was the first one, The Twilight Strangler was the second, and Death Flight was the third and final volume. I don’t have the first volume, but if this second one’s any indication Airport Cop is one weird “action series” indeed.

My friends, I may have found another Gannon here, at least so far as the bizarre writing style goes. To be sure, The Twilight Strangler is nowhere as nutzoid, violent, or extreme as anything in the Gannon novels, but it is written in a somewhat-similar screwed-up style. As with Dean W. Ballenger, you wonder if Miron was writing this way purposefully, sort of how Ballenger proved he could write straight narrative in his standalone WWII novels and his men's adventure magazine work.

But then, if this is the way Miron naturally writes, the guy is definitely on a different wavelength. The Twilight Strangler reminded me mostly of that psychedelic “crime thriller” I reviewed a while back, Mystery, only without the fantastical elements. But style-wise it’s very similar, with the characters seeming to exist in a world that is only tangentially related to the book itself. The reader is thrown in and must fend for himself as the author hopscotches perspectives, situations, settings, even time periods, sometimes within the span of a sentence.

For example, I read the entire novel and I still don’t know if the titular airport cop, Verban, even has a first name, let alone what sort of cop he is. The back cover states he’s “chief of airport security,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case in the book itself. In fact it seems like he’s a regular cop, one who possibly specializes in airport crimes. For that matter, it wasn’t until page 60 that I got confirmation that Verban was based out of New York; before that I honestly couldn’t tell if it was Los Angeles or NYC. Actually Verban is identical to the type of cop protagonist you’d meet in one of William Crawford’s novels, and the novel is just as mired in police-world details.

But The Twilight Strangler is almost psychedelic in how it hopscotches across perspectives and situations, Miron never bothering to set up or explain anything; it’s almost the men’s adventure equivalent of Rudolph Wurlitzers’s Nog. I’ve complained before about “POV-hopping,” where an author changes character perspectives without warning the reader through a chapter break or a few lines of white space: Charles Miron takes this to a whole different level, with POVs sometimes changing within the same sentence. Before I read this novel I would’ve said such a thing would be impossible, that every writer would know not to do this. But Miron proved me wrong.

So anyway, Verban, sometimes called “Verb” by his partners, is a New York cop who apparently works the airports. There’s absolutely no description of the character, so I guess the cover painting will have to suffice. When we meet him he’s already on the case; in the first of the novel’s brief murder scenes, a highfalutin model is strangled while shooting a commercial in an airport (I think it’s at JFK, but I never could figure out for sure). Verban is put on the case by his superior, Captain Kinsella, and works it with his new partner, a black cop named Reggie Wasson who is trying to fill the shoes of Verban’s regular parner, Freddie Karp, who is on vacation but returns later in the novel.

There’s also a “policewoman” in the crew, Candace Reuscher, and she serves more as Verban’s partner (both on the streets and in bed) than any of the other characters. Also it must be mentioned that Miron has no qualms with referring to his characters by multiple names in the narrative; it took me a few pages to realize that Wasson’s first name was Reggie, for example. Just like in a William Crawford novel we get a lot of immaterial stuff where these cops brainstorm who the killer might be, going out and tracking down leads, even checking their files for potential suspects.

All this stuff is pointless because we readers already know who the killer is, and he’s not on any of Verban’s lists. His name is Milo Kline, and he is a reclusive sadist who reminded me for all the world of Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy Of Dunces. He has the same pretentious, stentorian tone and everything. However I couldn’t figure out if Milo was skinny or heavyset, or ugly or handsome; he seemed to be described either way. Why he gets his jollies strangling women is never explained, but he does have the arrogance of Ignatius, thinking of his victims as “immoral women” and etc, so I guess we’re to infer he’s just wiping them out for the betterment of the world or something.

Milo also likes to strangle with antique tools – a barber chair strop, an old hemp cord, even the antenna of a ‘40s television set. This is something which eventually has Verban hitting the antique stores in Manhattan, tracking the guy. A yet another unexplained subplot has Milo calling Captain Kinsella to taunt him before each kill. The murders aren’t limited to New York, with Milo flying around to different aiports to murder various women, among them a lesbian fashion designer, a stewardess, and even a teenager. In almost each case we get several pages from each woman’s perspective, hopscotching around their thoughts with no concern over plot or narrative structure. All of it of course rendered moot when the woman is dead and never mentioned again.

After the “twilight strangler” (so called by the cops due to his penchant for killing at this time) taunts Kinsella that he’s going ot kill someone at Chicago’s O’Hare aiport, Verban goes “off duty” and flies there on his own time, Candace accompanying. Miron builds up a rapport between the two which takes the expected route, though our author is very shy when it comes to actual sex scenes (nevertheless, characters will often reflect back on whopping orgasms they’ve had, in those wily-nily flashback POV sequences). They butt heads with the O’Hare chief cop and, worse yet, find that the Strangler’s struck again, despite their efforts. This gets Verban thrown on a week’s unpaid leave; he uses the time to scout out those antique shops.

The novel gets even more bizarre when Milo goes on vacation(!?) in the Caribbean, where he’s hit on by this hotstuff divorcee who has become a millionaire thanks to her ex-husband; her name is Elyse and she talks like a Bringing Up Baby-era Katherine Hepburn. She takes an immediate sexual interest in Milo, demands he come back to her hotel with her, and further announces they’re to be married(!?). Milo acts again like Ignatius Reilly throughout, fending off her advances and protesting how forward she is. She sticks around for a long time and, surprisingly, does not get killed by Milo, who instead finally manages to “escape” from her several weeks later.

But this is another of those pulp novels where so much time is wasted on inconsequential stuff that the climax is hurried. For example, we could’ve done without a lot of the stuff in the middle half, like Milo’s ordeals with Elyse, or the arbitrary part where Verban just happens to stumble upon an auto theft ring (mirrored in a later scene where Candace stumbles upon a pickpocket). These parts do offer a little action – and Miron doesn’t exploit the violence at all, in fact I don’t think you even read about a single drop of blood in the entire novel – but they ultimately come off as chaff, especially when you consider how abrupt the finale is.

In short, the “climax” occurs over the span of a mere two pages; using Candace as strangler bait, Verban and team scout JFK airport and manage to put the hammer down on Milo just as he’s knocked out the girl and shoved her into back of a Jaguar. Milo slams into Verban’s partner Karp as he speeds away (we never do learn if Karp lives or dies) and Verban gives chase in a Dodge Charger. Half a page is left. Comedically, without the event even being described, Verban is somehow magically able to teleport himself out of his car and onto the hood of Milo’s Jaguar! Like a regular TJ Hooker he manages to pull Candace free as the Jaguar plunges into the Hudson.

And that’s that! We’re informed Milo’s corpse is eventually fished out of the river, but there’s no wrapup or anything. We never learn why he was on his kill-spree or how he even knew who Captain Kinsella was. But while the writing style was unusual and the action sporadic and flimsy, I can’t say The Twilight Strangler was terrible. It had a weird sort of appeal, like an ugly dog you can’t help but keep staring at.

Also Miron has a definite gift for dialog, with the characters trading banter with aplomb. The minor characters sort of spring to life, in particular a kid calling himself “The Big E” who shows up for a single page and steals the entire novel; he offers legal counsel when Milo falls while running along a beach on vaction. I could’ve read an entire book about that kid. Anyway, I have Death Flight, which appears to be about hijackers, so eventually we’ll find out if it’s written in the same sort of impenetrable style.