Shoot It Again is a terrific thriller that follows a man's descent into drugs and murder.
Ed Lacy is one of the pseudonyms for Harlem writer Len Zinberg, a versatile novelist who was a popular paperback writer, publishing two or three well received books a year which veered into the literary arena. Lacy cut his teeth writing for The New Yorker, Esquire and Colliers alongside Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers, and didn't consider his work higher or lower than any other commercial novel from Faulkner, Spillane, or even Faith Baldwin. His 1940 novel Walk Hard, Talk Loud (about an African-American boxer) was also a hit play and film, and his 1958 Room To Swing (introducing the first African American private detective, Touie Moore) won him the Edgar Award for Best Novel.
Clayton Biner is an American artist relaxing in the Cote D'Azur with his Australian girlfriend. After a drunken night, he discovers the passport he holds is not his, some one has switched it. He tracks down the owner to find the man has been held captive, drugged and bled for his money. Clayton helps the police in his escape but they tell him to leave the country. Enter high class gallery owner and Clayton's art dealer who asks him a one time favour: carry a package back to New York when he goes for a $50,000 fee - a glass cat figurine filled with pure heroin. He agrees, but before the parcel is handed to the receiver, there is a bloody shoot out leaving Clayton holding the pound of heroin with no idea what to do with it. He hits up his ex-wife for pocket money, and seeks various people he figures were involved in the smuggling, or, could help him sell the junk. The trail of those involved all turn up dead.
The first part in France was witty with almost comical action, the smuggling to America a little darker - especially when the plan goes south - but the last third quickly turns sordid when he meets Lucille - a junkie whore he thinks can connect him with a dealer big enough to buy the lot. On the run in cheap lodgings, having become her pimp and a cold-blooded murderer, they flee a dragnet as both the police and the drug bosses close in like an inevitable noose. Told in flashback, bookended with brutal scenes of bloody death, you know from the first page no one is getting out alive.
This was everything I hoped it would be, including finding an author I will now seek out. Well written and lurid, Lacy takes Clayton on a ride into darkness - from his carefree days in France as an untalented artist, to a man stripped of everything.
For me, he is a writer to watch out for.
This was originally titled The Sex Castle, and although the lurid titles made him "grit his teeth, too", novels such as The Woman Aroused, Sin In Their Blood, and Strip For Violence were often well written and well plotted, the titles and covers not doing the books justice, as is the case here.
1963 / Paperback / 160 pages
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