Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2025 March 05 • Wednesday

Quite a few books have been added to the Gutbrain library because of a positive review on the Paperback Warrior blog. (They have a podcast, too, but I find even the word "podcast" to be tedious. I did nonetheless listen to one episode, which means that in my life I have listened to two (2) podcasts.)

Last year they mentioned a short story they really liked, one of thirteen, apparently, featuring a freelance man-of-action named Johnny Hawk. They read the third story and loved it, so I decided to check out the first story, which appeared in the November 1968 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

Johnny Hawk is presumably no relation to the Native American New York police detective John Hawk played by Burt Reynolds in the TV series Hawk. (I watched the first episode on YouTube. It's got Gene Hackman in it!)

This first outing, "Dreamsville", takes place in drugged-out hippie-ville San Francisco, with Hawk entering this demimonde to locate a young woman whose parents want her back.

She's not a minor and she left home by choice soo it's not a job for the police and there's no legal basis for bringing her back. But Hawk isn't a cop or even a private detective. He's just someone who gets things done.

Author Edward Y. Breese seems to be feeling his way somewhat gingerly with his character's premiere adventure, establishing the basics: competent, experienced, tough, good-lucking, attractive to women, equally adept at sex and violence with no hesitation for either.

There's another underworld character who's also looking for the same missing woman and he knows Johnny Hawk by reputation and there's instant respect. So Hawk has got around. He lives in Florida and is all the way out here in northern California for a job, so it won't be surprising if people have heard of him wherever he goes.

The AHMM format pretty much demands that this be a very short story, so Breese gets q bunch of exposition out of the way up front, throws in some sex and violence, wraps up the expositional requirements in a second conversation and then briskly proceeds to sex and violence part two.

This is 1968 so while not extremely explicit, the sex and violence elements are fairly hardboiled and what actually happens to some of the characters is horrifying. It's not a feel-good story but rather a bleak and slightly sickening one.

Johnny Hawk wasn't especially impressive the first time out, but I have at least his first three stories here and am curious to see how they develop.