Chadzilla ROARS!!!

.357 Vigilante #3: White Wash - by Ian Ludlow

Try as he might, Brett Macklin cannot escape his alter ego of Mr. Jury.  When a racist copycat killer begins using the Jury name, Macklin races against time to bring him to "justice."  Problem is, no one believes that there is another Mr. Jury.

The .357 Vigilante series concludes (due to the series publisher going bankrupt, not author disinterest) with what I think is the best book in the series.  For most of it's narrative White Wash is happy to be an unapologetically pulp adventure; filled with larger than life characters, villains so evil even the Devil wouldn't want them, and dashes of over-the-top action - at one point a guy gets decapitated by a helicopter's landing skid.

Lewis Purdue and Lee Goldberg, the writers behind the Ian Ludlow name, manage to keep a nice balance between gritty urban realism and over-the-top pulp luridness.  There is a bit too much 80's in some of the descriptions: one character is described as wearing a sweater draped over his shoulders, with its arms knitted in front, an 80's fashion staple, and the red jumpsuit with black make-up mask across the eyes ensemble the Mr. Jury clone wears seems more suitable for a Duran Duran video than waging stealth urban race warfare.  But it was 1985.

But that dated silliness only adds to the fun.  Something that was sorely lacking in the first two Vigilante books.  It was a real hoot to read about Macklin rebuilding his 1959 Cadillac, complete with bullet proof tires and glass, and machine guns mounted behind the front headlights.

I had so much fun reading White Wash that I'm saddened that the cliffhanger ending would never be resolved in the announced, but never to be, fourth novel in the series, Killstorm.

.357: Vigilante #2: Make Them Pay - by Ian Ludlow

Brett Macklin is back, albeit reluctantly.  At first.  It has been almost a year since "Mr. Jury" last stalked the mean streets of Los Angeles and Brett Macklin's hopes are that his violence loving alter-ego will become nothing more than an unpleasant memory.  But a recently released sack of scum named Wesley Saputo changes everything.  Saputo loves kids.  He also loves filming his kid loving and, with the financial aid of crime lord Crocker Orlock, Saputo has built a nice "little" kiddie porn business.  Errors made during an investigation have tied the LAPD's hands, forcing Los Angeles Mayor Jed Stocker to call upon the services of Mr. Jury himself, Brett Macklin.

Make Them Pay is a modest improvement over the first .357: Vigilante adventure.  College student turned pulp writer Lee Goldberg (writing as "Ian Ludlow," with the assist of Lewis Perdue) has a better grasp of both the story and characters this time around.  He also manages to avoid the silly sounding melodrama that made the first .357: Vigilante adventure read like something akin to a parody of the genre he was attempting to exploit.  He even works in some interesting, albeit somewhat ludicrous, plot developments that build the framework from which future .357: Vigilante adventures could hang.  (Unfortunately there was only one more, titled White Wash, before the publisher pulled the plug on the series.)  This makes .357: Vigilante #2 somewhat different from other Men's Adventure category novels, in that Goldberg/Perdue don't content themselves with simply rewriting the first book, replacing the dispatched villains with a different-but-similar cast of scum for Mr. Jury to wipe out.  The characters and the bizarro world they inhabit change and grow with each plot development/twist.

But what makes Make Them Pay only a modest improvement is its failure in the action department.  There really isn't a whole lot of it.  Macklin busts a shotgun wielding robber's head and, in a sequence so out of the blue I thought, for a paragraph or two, that is was only a dream, he blows away a trio of bank robbers, and that is about it until the inevitable showdown with Saputo, Orlock and their cronies at the story's end.  Even at a trim 150 pages (I polished this sucker off in less than a day) it feels light, too light, and, even worse, reluctant to embrace its bloodthirsty potential.  Death Wish 4: The Crackdown did it better, even though Make Them Pay did it first.

.357: Vigilante #1 - by Ian Ludlow

When the gang that brutally murdered his father is set free, Brett Macklin takes the law into his own hands.  Toting his father's .357 magnum into the urban jungle that is now Los Angeles, Macklin becomes the justice dispensing Mr. Jury: Terror to thugs, hero to citizens, and criminal to cops.  Although his personal desire for revenge is satiated rather quickly, "Mr. Jury" finds that his war against crime has only just begun.

Ian Ludlow's .357: Vigilante #1 is an amateurish, albeit modestly entertaining, relic of what appears to be an all but extinct sub-genre: the numbered category Men's Adventure novel.  (Men's Adventure novels now sport author branded franchise titles like Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell or Fire Ice: A Novel from the NUMA Files, instead of The Destroyer #111: Prophet Of Doom or Stony Man #61: Rogue State.)  While the book contains all the necessary elements of a Men's Adventure (a stalwart hero, a colorful supporting cast, and a slimy pool of scum villain that gets his deserved comeuppance personally delivered to him by said hero in a grand mano-a-mano finale) the final result feels just a tiny bit off.  At times .357: Vigilante #1 reads like a high school student's concept of what a hard boiled man of action story should sound like (not surprising, considering that author "Ian Ludlow" was actually a college student named Lee Goldberg) or an out and out parody of one.  For every taut action sequence, there is one that is clumsy to the point of being laughable.  The biggest offender for me was a love scene between Macklin and a helpful nurse named Cheshire.  I kept expecting her to purr, "Oh Brett, you have obviously had hundreds of girlfriends."  Macklin, although seeming to have no stated experience in handling firearms, is an expert shot and, despite leaving a trail of evidence that a blind man could follow, only receives a modest amount of attention from the bumbling detectives investigating the vigilante murders.  These boobs couldn't even catch a cold, much less a Paul Kersey wannabe.  To be fair, the novel does an adequate job explaining this incompetence, but, more often than not, it comes across as a first time novelist's attempt to get out of a plot hole, so that the illogical chain of events can somehow remain linked together.

Clumsy and uneven, .357: Vigilante #1 will be of interest only to fans of Lee Goldberg, or a numbered category Men's Adventure book completest.