Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2011 January 14 • Friday

The Johnny Staccato novel was from 1960. Frank G. Slaughter's Epidemic! came out in 1961.

Never mind about that plague stuff, you're thinking. Are there beatniks in it?

That same midnight, at the Blue Banjo (a cellar night club some fifteen blocks south of the hospital) another score was in the making. Its chief architect—the man on whom the amber-colored spotlights were now centered—was Brewster van Pelt, a poet of the new school, whose virile verses burned with so hot a flame that his devotees seldom noticed they made no sense whatever. Van Pelt was tall as a basketball forward, and scrawny as a whooping crane. But his tuft of red-brown beard was luxuriant and the eyes he fixed on his audience were twin thunderbolts.

Silence had fallen on the Blue Banjo, save for the throb of bongo drums in the background and the wail of a Chinese flute. It was played by the poet's legal wife, a hard-eyed girl dressed in an identical suit of rumpled corduroys.

This is always how beatniks are portrayed, isn't it? In the basement with bongos.

Epidemic! is a not very thrilling thriller. It's written well and moves along but there's very little suspense or excitement. The people in charge, from the mayor down to the doctors who respond to the plague, are such stalwart paragons of virtue and nobility that they might have embarassed Homer. They anticipate ever problem and are more than equal to it. Nothing goes wrong. They never have to scramble to find a solution to an unexpected development.

The plague comes by accident to New York City, on a ship that picked up some plague-infected rats. Communist subversives who control Puerto Rican street gangs find out what's happening, manipulate a sanitation strike and get the teenage gangs to attack power plants and perform other acts of sabotage.

Eventually Manhattan itself is quarantined with nobody allowed in or out.

Frank G. Slaughter certainly has the right name for a thriller-writer. His other books include Air Surgeon, Battle Surgeon, The Healer and Sword and Scalpel.