Keller #5: The Cannibal
Nelson DeMille
Manor, 1975
ISBN: 0-451-151122-4
Now I’ll straight up admit I’m a sucker for a nice turtleneck, sports coat and gun combo. It’s a real good look for a 70s action hero. It’s the exact outfit you want to be wearing while scouring the sewer for evildoers. Then you add the word “cannibal.” Forget about it. The 70s paperback world was pretty well rocked by Don Siegal’s Dirty Harry starring Clint Eastwood. Tough cops had alway been a genre stalwart but suddenly they could be, well, dirtier. They were meaner and shot more bad guys and mostly just acted like jerks to everyone and everything. The justice system in action, I guess. But it makes for some good slimy reading.
Nelson DeMille became a major best selling writer later, but at the time he toiled away in the low-end paperback houses like Manor books. He recently died with a vast back catalog of work to be pretty proud of, he was one of the better “big-time” writers, who was always entertaining even through the “bloat” of the modern bestseller. He was also a bit of a paperback-rascal, selling the same book to different publishers, the Keller novel The Night of the Phoenix to Manor and The Agent of Death to Leisure Books for their Ryker series, it worked because Ryker and Keller are essentially the SAME CHARACTER. How does that happen you ask? Well...
So, Keller and Ryker are the same characters, over two publishers, but sometimes they have continuity between them. Not confusing at all, eh? Also, DeMille wasn’t the only one to write them, but his name is on them. Not only that but in the 90s DeMille had them published by Pocket Books as “Jack Cannon” but he also put an asterisk at the end of the name and made sure everyone knew it was him. And yes he had both the Ryker books and Keller books reprinted then and he called them all Ryker books. Nelson, you sly dog. This is the fly-by-night attitude of 70s publishing in the lower rungs and it’s nice to see that DeMille was still doing it in the 90s.
All that being said, it doesn’t matter which name he’s going by Keller/Ryker is a grumpy New York cop with an itchy trigger finger and a super bad attitude. He’s actually just a total dick. The series on a whole has a fairly straight-action-cop vibe. It’s not an over-the-top-action with tons of explosions and supervillains like others in the Men’s Adventure genre. It makes sense for Keller to be a pretty low-key character. He’s still uber tough and also a racist and someone isn’t exactly a fan of civil rights. I can laugh at a character like this through a book like this because he’s almost a joke but I can see where people would be sensitive to it.
So, I just said that this was fairly realistic and I guess a cannibal that lurks in the sewer COULD happen, but I don’t think it’s highly likely. Keller is in Chinatown being a racist douche and investigating a series of disappearances. I’m not spoiling anything as the title of the book is The Cannibal. The titular Cannibal is Kondor, a Vietnam veteran who was basically forced into cannibalism in ‘Nam to survive in a utterly gruesome early scene. Once he’s back home in New York, he’s got the taste for it and can’t shake it. There’s some nicely gross descriptions of Kondor, uh, feeding. Keller can’t take that there’s a cannibal eating people. So, they clash.
This is far and away the best of the Keller/Ryker books I’ve read. It’s got a definite Italian giallo vibe with the police procedural structure tucked into an all out horror movie. There’s some genuinely creepy bits as Keller takes on Kondor, who does really feel like some sort of monster by the end of the narrative. It’s a sleazy book, nicely sleazy and if you have some love for 70s New York in the media the books totally capture that feel.
It’s easy to see why Nelson DeMille broke out of the paperback world and into the big-time best selling hardbacks. He’s an easy writer to read, everything moves along at a nice clip and he’ll give characters enough quirks or attitude to be memorable. I don’t really LIKE the Keller/Ryker character but I’ve read a few of them due to DeMille’s writing.
Roy Nugen is an award-winning writer, producer, property master, plus actor. He comes from a family of musicians, engineers, wildcatters, cops, lion tamers, and carpet salesmen. Evil Dead II changed his life and he once partied with Lloyd Kaufman.
He has written 15 short films including Bag Full of Trouble, Potboiler, Handle With Care, Death in Lavender, Hole in the Ground, and the feature film Arrive Alive, many of which have played across the country. He has been the property master on 17 short films and 2 feature films.
Roy is also a prolific book reviewer and collector of vintage pulp paperback books. You can read his reviews on his blog Bloody, Spicy Books and multiple magazines including Paperback Fanatic, Hot Lead and Sleazy Reader. He has also written afterwards for novels and for various websites. He lives in the only city that once arrested L. Ron Hubbard with his wife and cats.