Daren
This is a slender book, containing two stand alone novella, published in 1964.
The titular story The Flier rolls out the story of Cat Fallon, a rough pilot who flies a battered old Mustang, and by surprise inherits an airfield and all the commercial developments around it from an old army buddy he hasn't heard from for years - who died in an accident when he flew into a storm. Fallon has a feeling it wasn't an accident, and Tucker was wrapped up in something he had covered up pretty well.
This period, of course, was all about the communist risk and Cuba, being in he middle of the Cold War era and so the story wraps around that. In typical Spillane style there are two dames who feature heavily in the storyline, so there is plenty of sauciness and macho attitude on show.
This was an ok story with some plot turns obvious and some not so.
3 stars for this story.
The second The Seven Year Kill was not so good. This featured Phil Rocca, a newspaper reporter who had taken on the mob and been framed up, a young go getter who prosecuted the case to make DA and didn't look too hard. This was all a few years ago, and Rocca was quietly drinking himself to death, when a chance situation opened up an opportunity to get some revenge on the mobster who set him up, and everyone thought was dead.
In this novella Rocca plays a tough-guy, beating up on Mob heavies and taking plenty of hidings - it didn't work very well for me. Tough guy reporters? There were also some really obvious plot twists and the place the evidence has been hidden, which was the race sequence near the end of the story, was hidden in plain sight, pretty obvious to the reader, so was a bit of a flop.
There was still a Spillane damsel in distress, so that wasn't missing from the plot.
Probably one of the worst of Spillane's stories that I have read.
2 stars.
I almost always give Spillane books three stars, the second was definitely weak, but the first was ok.
This is a slender book, containing two stand alone novella, published in 1964.
The titular story The Flier rolls out the story of Cat Fallon, a rough pilot who flies a battered old Mustang, and by surprise inherits an airfield and all the commercial developments around it from an old army buddy he hasn't heard from for years - who died in an accident when he flew into a storm. Fallon has a feeling it wasn't an accident, and Tucker was wrapped up in something he had covered up pretty well.
This period, of course, was all about the communist risk and Cuba, being in he middle of the Cold War era and so the story wraps around that. In typical Spillane style there are two dames who feature heavily in the storyline, so there is plenty of sauciness and macho attitude on show.
This was an ok story with some plot turns obvious and some not so.
3 stars for this story.
The second The Seven Year Kill was not so good. This featured Phil Rocca, a newspaper reporter who had taken on the mob and been framed up, a young go getter who prosecuted the case to make DA and didn't look too hard. This was all a few years ago, and Rocca was quietly drinking himself to death, when a chance situation opened up an opportunity to get some revenge on the mobster who set him up, and everyone thought was dead.
In this novella Rocca plays a tough-guy, beating up on Mob heavies and taking plenty of hidings - it didn't work very well for me. Tough guy reporters? There were also some really obvious plot twists and the place the evidence has been hidden, which was the race sequence near the end of the story, was hidden in plain sight, pretty obvious to the reader, so was a bit of a flop.
There was still a Spillane damsel in distress, so that wasn't missing from the plot.
Probably one of the worst of Spillane's stories that I have read.
2 stars.
I almost always give Spillane books three stars, the second was definitely weak, but the first was ok.