Barca

Barca, by Lou Cameron

July, 1974  Berkley Medallion

The first of a handful of paperback originals Lou Cameron published with Berkley in the mid-late ‘70s, Barca is like the later The Closing Circle in how it clearly seems to take the work of Lawrence Sanders as inspiration. Indeed, Cameron is at such pains to produce a “legitimate crime novel” that, again like The Closing Circle, he undermines his own pulpy premise and turns in a tale that is much too staid for its own good. As it is, Barca is a slog of a read, a 256-page, small-print slog that is more focused on dialog than it is on thrills. 

Reading the back cover copy of Barca, the reader is promised a tale in which the titular tough-guy cop is shot in the head but survives, and now is on a trail of revenge. The reader will be frustrated to discover that this is not the novel he actually gets. 

Rather, the reader gets a lot of talking in Barca. A lot of talking. Hell, folks, even after waking up in the hospital bed with a bullet in his friggin’ brain, even here Barca gets in a pages-long conversation with his partner, Crane, and his boss, Lt. Genero. And they aren’t just talking about the bullet in the brain, either! It’s almost like a proto-Seinfeld in how their conversation just roams all over the place. 

And this is how it will go through Barca. It was the same thing in The Closing Circle, of course, and it occurs to me now that this was the same thing Herbert Kastle was doing in his own contemporary crime novels – lots of “salty, realistic chatter from jaundiced cops” stuff. I’ve only read a few novels by Lawrence Sanders – and I’m ready to rank The Tomorrow File as my favorite novel ever, these days, surpassing even my old top favorite Boy Wonder – but from what I’ve read, his novels too were dialog heavy. And yet, at least from the ones I’ve read, they didn’t come off as stultifying chores, like these two Cameron novels. 

So here’s the deal: Detective Sergeant Frank Barca is a New Jersey cop with twenty years of experience in Homicide. At novel’s start he and his younger partner Crane are providing protection for a guy in the hospital who is about to turn evidence against the Roggeris, a mobbed-up family with tentacles all over Jersey. Then when Crane goes out for cigarettes and Barca’s alone with the guy, someone sneaks into the room and shoots Barca in the back of the head, then puts the rest of the gun’s bullets into the would-be witness. 

In material seemingly taken from a medical textbook (like Sanders, Lou Cameron wants us to know he’s done his research), we learn how the bullet did a ton of damage to Barca’s neurons but came to rest in his brain in such a way that he survived – and maintained all of his physical abilities. However, the bullet has also come to rest in such a way that to retrieve it via surgery could result in Barca’s death. This too is explained in copious detail, as Barca exposits back and forth with a neurosurgeon some months later, after coming out of therapy. 

Barca struggles with some memories, like when a pal from the Korean War calls him to wish him well, and Barca cannot remember the guy for anything. Barca’s bigger problem however is that it is only a matter of time until his brain rejects the bullet that is embedded in it. When this happens Barca’s mind will blank out, and meanwhile his body will go into convulsions and he will ultimately die. This too is covered in copious expository dialog. 

The premise is interesting: Barca gets the chance to solve his own murder, and he has to do it fast, before his brain explodes. Instead of Plot A, however, we get Plot B: Lt. Genero, reluctantly accepting Barca back on duty, puts Barca on another case, because it would look bad for the force if Barca started investigating his own shooting(!). Which Genero assures Barca the force is totally doing, it’s just a question of manpower and whatnot… 

So Barca gets the case he was working on before he was shot: looking into the hit-and-run death of a guy named Fantasia. It’s maddening in a way; the back cover and first pages set you up for one story, then Cameron pulls the narrative rug out from under you and soon Barca’s looking at the corpse of a dead young black girl who hooked for some boys who lived above Fantasia’s pharmacy, kids who were mostly into a dope and booze scene and not so much into heavy drugs. In other words, you get another story entirely than what was promised. 

Barca’s old partner, Crane, has moved on to a new gig after being promoted, but Barca will occasionally head over to his place to engage in dialog – because, gradually, it becomes clear that the Fantasia death might be connected with the Roggeris, ie the mobbed-up family that was going to be ratted on by the guy Barca and Crane was guarding the night Barca was shot in the head. 

It takes a long while for this to develop, though. For the first half of Barca we have a methodical procedural in which Barca interrogates a cast of characters who knew Fantasia; most memorable is Wrong Way Corrigan, an 18 year-old punk child of wealth who is known for crashing expensive cars. During this Baraca becomes acquainted with Beth Wilson, an (apparently) pretty blonde social worker who was helping the young black hooker who died of an OD. 

For a writer with a pulp background, Lou Cameron is curiously chaste. At least in the novels of his I’ve read. That he pulled off such prudery in the sleazy ‘70s is quite a feat. But there’s zero exploitation of the female characters and there is zero sex; Barca notices that Beth gradually begins to grow feelings for him, but when she asks him on a date late in the novel he turns her down – he doesn’t want her to start to like him and then have her feelings crushed when he suddenly dies. Personally I thought Barca was coming on as a little too self-important; just because a girl asks you out doesn’t mean she’s going to fall in love with you. 

We fare slightly better on the action front, but even here Cameron fails to deliver what he promises. Due to his condition Barca is not allowed to drive a police car, so he finds a workaround and starts driving a motorcycle. It’s a Honda, not a Harley, but Barca also starts wearing “leather togs” and packing two pistols, making the reader think of Chopper Cop, or better yet the bike-riding cop from The Blood Circus. 

But man; we only even know Barca looks like this because other characters mention it (again, the majority of the novel is relayed via dialog), and Cameron does precious little to deliver on his own pulpy conceit. I mean Barca drives the Honda around here and there; at no point does he turn into the leather-wearing, bike-roaring hellraising cop the veteran pulp reader might want. 

The novel’s sole “action scene” is over before we know it; following leads, Barca ends up at a garbage dumb outside of town, and none other than one of the Roggeris pull up. One of the guys with him’s a coked-up “junko,” and Barca shoots him with his Colt Cobra when the guy rushes him. But this scene too is played up more for the suspense angle, as Barca soon learns that there was more to this situation than he expected. 

But then overall Barca is more of a procedural than a thriller. Sometimes it’s unintentionally humorous, like the many and confusing tentacles that make up the Roggeri family. I mean there’s the one who was going to be turned against, the one who is a legitimate businessman, the one who became a priest. Then there’s the old crone who might be the most cruel mafioso of them all. And it’s all talking, talking, talking; even parts where Barca goes to talk to his old priest and they get into various theological debates. 

I mean a part of me can see Lou Cameron enthusing over all this, turning in a meaty and weighty “crime novel” that has more in common with John Gardner (the American, not the Brit) than Don Pendleton. But it comes off as so ponderous, especially given that so many scenes have no bearing on the outcome of the novel. The bantering between Barca and Lt. Genero also gets old after a while, and there are so many parts that are dumb – like Barca figures out another workaround, how to keep his gun even when he’s temporarily removed from the force, but when Genero tries to give Barca back his gun officially, Barca tells him to forget it! 

Probably the biggest issue with Barca is Barca himself. He’s nowhere as interesting as Cameron seems to think he is. There’s a lot of muddled stuff about his Italian upbringing, and how he could’ve been in the Mafia, but again it’s all just dialog with no payoff – like when Barca tries to ask that old priest of his about “omerta” and all this other stuff. None of it amounts to anyting other than making the book seem even longer. 

So, the reader can forget about the plot promised on the back cover of Barca. The concept of a tough-guy cop with a bullet in his brain going out for revenge on the mobsters who tried to kill him sounds like a great story, but it’s not the story we get in Barca. Instead, we get a tough-guy cop with a bullet in his brain who…investigates a hit-and-run death and talks to a bunch of people. Only gradually does he get around to solving who it was who almost killed him – and even this doesn’t have the emotional payoff the reader might want, Cameron going for more of a ‘70s-mandatory downbeat ending. (But an unsurprising one, as it should be obvious to even a disinterested reader who shot Barca.) 

I wasn’t very crazy about The Closing Circle, either, as it suffered from a lot of the same stuff. But that one was marginally better because the subplot about the killer at least kept things moving, and there was certainly more of a sleazy overlay – not via sex or anything, given Cameron’s prudishness, but in the wanton description of people shitting themselves when they’re strangled. To this day when I watch Dateline or whatever and it mentions a victim being strangled, I’m like, “Why aren’t you telling us they shat themselves?!” I mean, it’s the one thing I learned from The Closing Circle. 

Cameron wrote a few more of these “realistic cop novels in the vein of Lawrence Sanders” for Berkley; curiously, one of them is titled Tancredi, a name that appears in Barca. It’s not a cop or even a character in Barca, but a building where one of the Mafia capos operates out of, “The Sons of Tancredi.” There doesn’t seem to be any connection between these novels, so maybe Cameron just liked the name and decided to use it for his next book. But I’ll probably read that one next, and hope that it’s better than these first two.

The Closing Circle

The Closing Circle, by Lou Cameron

November, 1974  Berkley Medallion

Between 1974 and 1977 prolific author Lou Cameron published five paperback crime thrillers with Berkley. The cover art for most of the books had a somewhat-similar design to Berkley’s cover art for Lawrence Sanders’s The First Deadly Sin (which was even referenced on some of the covers of the Cameron books). These five novels weren’t part of a series, but they were all about cops. In addition to The Closing Circle, the others were Barca (1974), Tancredi (1975), Dekker (1976), and Code Seven (1977, but this one dispensed entirely with the cover design of the previous four books). Each of them were also fairly long, coming in around 250 pages. 

If The Closing Circle is any indication, Cameron’s goal for these books was realism, gritty cop-world realism that left no sleazy stone unturned. I’m not sure about the other books, but this one is not an action thriller by any means; it is a slow and methodical procedural, one that is livened up by Cameron’s focus on the lurid. He brings mid 1970s New York City to life in all its tawdry, grimy splendor, and he certainly captures the grizzled cops who patrol its streets. Our protagonist is Lt. William Garth, “a cold-eyed white man of about thirty-nine or forty,” per Kitty Hot Pants, a “high-yellow” black streetwalker who appears early in the book. “High-yellow” is a term I have only seen infrequently; I would imagine it is considered racist now, and assume it was a way that light-skinned black people were referred to at the time. I’m sure I’ll be headed back to sensitivity training for even wondering about this. 

But then, the racism is thick throughout The Closing Circle, courtesy the other cops on Garth’s force. This too is certainly a quest for realism on Cameron’s part; these are grizzled cops who don’t give a shit when they’re done for the day. One of them, a sergeant named Crosby who used to be Garth’s partner, bluntly states that he could care less about the latest serial killer when he clocks out for the day. Crosby also refers to a Hispanic colleague as “the Spic” and, when he sees Garth talking to Kitty Hot Pants and a new “colored” probationary patrolman named Till, Crosby asks Garth, “What’s with you and the spades today? Martin Luther King Day or what?” Crosby is not alone; there are racial slurs throughout the book. And for that matter, Garth himself is certain that the serial killer he’s hunting isn’t white, because the kills are happening in a white area that “resents” the encroaching black population – and the serial killer is moving around freely, meaning the white residents trust him. I found this very interesting from a historical perspective, given that we live in an era that has become so emasculated that, even when there’s an active black shooter afoot, his race is not mentioned. 

And speaking of lurid, move over William Crawford – we’ve found an author who seems even more obsessed with characters shitting themselves. Seriously, if there’s one thing I learned from The Closing Circle, it’s that you shit yourself when you’re strangled to death. Cameron reminds us of this many, many times. And he doesn’t just tell us. He has Garth and the other cops enthusing over the amount of shit at the crime scenes; “We really shit ourselves when we’re strangled!” Garth even exposits at one point. I mean we are told this again and again. Each and every single time the killer strangles a woman, we are informed she shits herself before dying. In the cases of the corpses the cops discover that are clean, we’re informed that the body must’ve been moved after death and then cleaned off – for, sure enough, the shit’s all over the place where the murder actually occurred. I mean William Crawford had an obsession with characters shitting themselves in his books, but Lou Cameron takes it to a whole different level. To an extent that I found myself questioning it…I mean honestly, let’s say you went to the john shortly before being strangled to death. Would you still shit yourself? These are the sort of questions I found myself wondering during the course of The Closing Circle. 

Adding to this lurid vibe is the killer himself. Now an issue with The Closing Circle is that it truly is methodical; Cameron really wants to show how an investigation is handled in the real world, with Garth and his fellows going over all leads, researching all clues, and putting forth theories. The only problem is, we readers know from the get-go who the killer is. Hell, the back cover tells us: it’s a “professional exterminator” named Kraag. And that’s in the literal sense; he’s not like a Syndicate contract killer but a guy in a uniform who goes around apartment buildings killing bugs and rodents. Cameron tries to get in Kraag’s mind, but he doesn’t come off as fucked-up enough for the crimes he commits. Basically, the sick bastard’s m.o. is that he strangles the old women in the apartments he handles, gives their corpses a bath, and proceeds to “bang them all three ways,” leaving their defiled corpses for the cops to find. And yet in the scenes from his perspective, Kraag isn’t nearly twisted enough…he just clearly hates women and thinks they’re more obedient when they’re dead. I mean sure, he’s twisted, but we aren’t talking like a wackjob personality-wise; he comes off more like a grumpy idiot, and we never even get a good idea of what led him to this particular serial-killer approach. 

Well anyway, it kind of ruins the suspense because we know what Kraag’s up to, but we’ll keep spending a lot of time with the clueless cops who try to put the puzzle pieces together. And unlike Crosby, our hero Lt. Garth is determined to find the killer, even working off duty. Kraag has already made a few kills when the novel starts, all of them the murders of old ladies in apartment houses around 72nd Street and nearby. The opening of the book is probably the highlight, as it comes off like a grungy ‘70s cop flick, with Garth bringing in veteran street hooker Kitty Hot Pants to ask if she’s seen any unusual dudes on her beat, given that she works the area in which the kills have occurred. We also get mentions of the “pussy patrol,” ie the NYPD vice squad. Again, a far cry from the domesticated demeanor of today’s police forces; The Closing Circle is populated by mostly-white detectives who sit around smoking and drinking all day and hurling racial slurs with aplomb. They also make poor choices throughout; Crosby in particular makes some dumb moves when Garth is temporarily removed from the case. 

Cameron was a veteran crime writer, and I suspect he enjoyed getting risque here. Even the dialog between Garth and the M.E. follows the overall lurid angle of the novel; there’s a part that goes on for pages where they discuss how guys “cream less” as they get older – the seminal fluids left at the crime scenes indicates that the perp is likely a middle aged man, and this gets Garth and the M.E. going on about the lessening of, uh, emissions as time goes by. There’s a lot of dialog in The Closing Circle, though, much of it recapping things we readers already know, but the majority of it retaining that same sleazy vibe. It seems clear that Cameron wanted to write a police procedural in the exploitative vibe of contemporary crime novels; perhaps Lawrence Sanders’s work itself was an inspiration, and not just a cover blurb. It goes without saying that Cameron didn’t reach the success levels of Sanders, as his sequence of Berkley crime novels seems to be forgotten today. 

The setup is that Kraag scopes out his victims when on exterminator calls, and then weeks or days later will go back to the building, get in the apartment on the claim that he’s here to finish the job…and then he’ll strangle the old woman from behind, wait until she shits herself, give her a bath, and then start raping her corpse. As mentioned Cameron tries to capture Kraag’s twisted mind, usually via crudity. Like for example when Kraag thinks what it would be like to rape a woman he’s planned as a future victim: “But she was so old her boobs would flop all over the place like empty sacks of shit.” The back cover hyperbole has it that Kraag himself will get caught up in an evil worse than even he is: this is in reference to Cynthia Dean, a “brassy blonde with a Miami tan. Cynthia Dean (and Cameron constantly refers to her by her full name) is the manager of the company that owns the apartment buildings that the killings have occurred in (the company also owns its own exterminator service). She’s the one who figures out one of her own men is behind the killings. However she has plans of her own, leading the narrative in an unexpected direction. 

At 255 pages, there’s a lot going on in The Closing Circle. Garth is not married, and Cameron tries to work in a romance subplot, but it too follows the same grim-eyed vibe as the novel itself. One of Garth’s top suspects is a 19 year-old kid named Randy who is mentally retarded and who was locked up for exposing himself to kids at a playground. Randy has a social worker named Sandy, a hotstuff babe Garth takes to, and they end up going on a few dates. The two like each other, even though Sandy is a social worker and she knows cops hate social workers – indeed, cops hate all “bleeding heart liberals.” Again, compare to today. I should mention here that, despite the ultra-lurid tone, there is no sex whatsoever in The Closing Circle. Spoiler alert, but Garth never scores with Sandy. And while I don’t consider rape scenes to be “sex scenes,” I should also note for the sake of thoroughness that all of Kraag’s assaults occur off-page. So this too is similar to William Crawford in that we can learn about all sorts of sordid stuff via the dialog, but when such material actually transpires the author quickly cuts to another scene. 

The focus on realism means that The Closing Circle also lacks much action. There’s a random part, midway through the novel, where Garth gets in a shootout. This part is very unexpected, as he happens to be on a date with Sandy…and sees a guy who is wanted in connection with a cop-killing. The guy fires at Garth, who takes him out in the firefight. All told, this sequence is over and done with in the span of a few sentences, and Cameron is not one to dwell on the violence of the shootout. Instead, the greater ramification is that Ballistics takes Garth’s gun and he’s put on temporary suspension while the “paperwork” is filled out – the cop-killer was from out of state, and thus there’s an extra layer of red tape Garth must overcome in order to get his gun back and be put back in charge of the serial killer case. So we can see here that Cameron’s goal is not a Dirty Harry type thriller but a realistic procedural; we’re even given occasional breakdowns of how the NYPD runs, with Cameron at one point baldly expositing through the narrative that the plainclothes detectives (aka “Clothes”) are the “true workhorses” of the entire force, even though they rarely get any recognition. 

Things really pick up when Kitty High Pants returns to the narrative…and ends up whoring out to none other than Kraag himself. This part isn’t much explained; we’ve been told through the endless theorizing-exposition bits that the killer (ie Kraag) is probably afraid of women (thus he always kills them before raping them), and likely wouldn’t rent a hooker. And yet Kraag does, and despite his racism there’s no mention made of how Kitty is black. Instead Kraag is excited that he can “bang her all three ways” for thirty bucks. But he does his usual thing (off-page), and given that Kitty was the favorite of a black underworld type, we soon have a Black Mafia contract out on the killer. This leads to fun stuff that seems to be from another novel, like when two black contract killers sit around in Manhattan on the lookout for Kraag and argue over how they can walk around in broad daylight with a shotgun. With the infamous “n-word” liberally employed by these colorfully-named underworld types as they bicker and banter (and try to kill each other), it gives the entire thing a sort of proto-Tarantino vibe…but probably was just another “inspiration” from Sanders, given how he too seemed to populate his book with a host of underworld characters. Again, I get the impression that these Cameron books were devised by Berkley itself, with the publisher probably trying to capitalize on the success of its Sanders paperbacks. 

Cameron’s other theme appears to be necrophilia. I mean necrophilia and shitting yourself are the two central ideas of The Closing Circle. Randy, the mentally-retarded kid Garth incorrectly assumes to be the serial killer, gets his own taste of necrophilia in a super weird scene where he accidentally kills a woman…and then starts exploring her body. This ultra-twisted sequence does lead to unexpected consequences in the finale, but again it’s another indication of Cameron seeming to enjoy the freedom crime writers had in the ‘70s. Oh and I forgot – even here in this sequence with Randy, the dead female also shits herself after being (unintentionally) strangled. I mean seriously! But as I was saying, this bit leads in an unexpected direction; Cameron, despite wanting to show thorough police work, also apparently wanted to demonstrate how thorough police work can lead to incorrect conclusions. An annoying thing about The Closing Circle is that its unsatisfying climax prefigures The Zodiac Killer, with fate and coincidence trumping police work. 

Sleazy mid-‘70s New York City is fairly well captured, though Cameron mostly sticks to the Upper West Side; Needle Park factors into the novel a lot. This so-called area, near 72nd and Broadway, was a favored spot for heroin users at the time, hence the name. There are also two separate scenes in a 42nd Street porn theater, but otherwise Cameron keeps the topical details few. In other words the city itself isn’t practically a character, like it is in Nelson De Mille’s Ryker and Keller cop novels. The ‘70s vibe is well captured, though, with the streetwalkers and pimps and whatnot, and also Johnny Carson gets mentioned a few times. I’ve always loved Carson and remember staying up late in middle school in the mid to late ‘80s to watch his show…I recall being super bummed when the school year would start and I wouldn’t be able to watch Carson anymore! Surely no kid today is staying up to watch the annoying dweeb who currently hosts the show. 

I think I have all of Cameron’s other crime novels for Berkley. They don’t all take place in New York, and it looks like some of them might be more action-focused than The Closing Circle, but that could just be the misleading back cover copy. Not that The Closing Circle is boring. For what it is, it’s very well done: a probing police procedural with a super sleazy overlay. But it certainly could’ve been tightened up. Garth is removed from the case for like 40 pages or so and we read as secondary characters try to make sense of the killings, and all this just seems to be a means to pad out the pages. But if you are into grimy ‘70s crime fiction like I am, I believe you’ll get a lot of enjoyment out of The Closing Circle.