Man Eater

Dick Jones, F.S. Publishing / Gay Way, c. 1968-1970

Jackson “Jake” Gold, the first-person narrator of Dick Jones’ warped serial-killer thriller Man Eater, works for the United Nations Crime Control Commission, a covert, international, multi-jurisdictional agency like Mission: Impossible’s IMF — except that it really exists, though it went through a series of name changes before settling on UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in 1992.

In any event, Vietnam-veteran Jake dodged a bullet of the war-crimes variety because the UNCCC was recruiting gay agents so aggressively that his military training trumped warning signs that Jake’s experiences in uniform — notably the bloody death of his lover Dave — have left him on shaky psychological ground. Setting Jake on the trail of a bestial serial murderer dubbed “The Man Eater" — he’s fatally castrating gay men with a set of razor-sharp metal teeth — may not be the soundest idea. Incidentally, the teeth of Man Eater’s “mad oralist,” as Jake thinks of his quarry, predate those of both Francis Dolarhyde in Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon (1981) and the iconic James Bond movie villain Jaws, of 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me. (His counterpart in Fleming's 1962 novel, to which the movie bears little resemblance, doesn’t have shark-like mouth knives but just “front teeth... cheaply capped with steel.”)

Even in a genre lousy with haunted protagonists, Jake Gold's self-loathing is epic. He regrets stepping over the landmine that killed Dave. He regrets going through a “super-faggot” phase of believing that since great men like Alexander and Socrates were gay, greatness and gayness were inherently intertwined. He regrets never having tried to locate Dave’s troubled younger brother for fear seeing Dave’s face in his; regrets invariably leading with the wrong head and comes to regret putting almost everyone whose path he crosses on death's radar. Oh, and he regrets having a really bad three-way with a couple of Germans into some freaky role play, one that ended with an epic morning-after walk of shame. But Jake has never hated himself for being gay and has never violated the moral principle that your right to explore the outer limits of sexual experience stops at the other guy's right to demur.

On one level Jake is a genre stereotype, a variation on tough, relentless and deeply damaged noir protagonists who, knowing the world is fundamentally cruel, unfair and tough on the weak, the incautious and the just plain unlucky, try to right what wrongs they can and live with the fact life isn’t fair. But while traditional noir thrillers often included gay characters — some overt, some coded — they were generally the bad guys, fey gunsels and effete aesthetes: Witness novels/movies like The Maltese Falcon (Peter Lorre’s effeminate Joel Cairo), Little Caesar (small-time crook Joe, who leaves the rackets to become a nightclub hoofer) and Laura, which, title notwithstanding, is dominated by queen-bitch Waldo Lydecker. Setting Jake loose to track the bestial serial killer using razor-sharp, surgical-steel teeth to gnaw a bloody swath through Europe's velvet underground does nothing good for Jake's state of mind.

Author Dick Jones imbues Jake with James Bond’s casual randiness but offsets it with the subtext that Jake’s bed-hopping is a quest for self-annihilation wrapped in convoluted introspection. Jake’s running internal monologue touches on everything from survivor’s guilt to observations about sexual activities for which he doesn’t generally care; they include S&M, voyeurism, orgies, sex with women, sex with hustlers and role-play … in all of which he nonetheless participates. Jake’s voracious and flexible appetites are neither inhibited by his scruples nor, at least to his way of thinking, incompatible with his aching need to love and be loved in return. He loves sex, but regards it as "just one aspect of being human," not a competitive sport. "If I got laid half as much as the characters in some novels I've read, I'd be long dead of friction burns," Jake sneers after sampling a much-lauded book; "[s]ome day … there will be some books that treat being gay as just one aspect of being human rather than a sexual road race." Still, en route to Man Eater's mind-bending climax Jake gets laid like a carpet by a gallery of smutty stereotypes, including a strutting matador; a brace of kinky aristocrats; a Nazi-fetishist duo; a studly movie star and a pair of dewy twin hustlers so sweetly accommodating and impressively acrobatic that their charms are undiminished by the accompanying price tag. Ever the pragmatist, Jake reasons that paying for any old roll in the hay shows "a lack of style," but buying a world-class fantasy come to life is just common sense.

Unfortunately, Jake's enlightened ethical outlook and self-acceptance in the face of entrenched societal bigotry are at odds with the demands of his job. He eventually decides that to flush out the killer he must transform himself into bait — “an ultra-homophile,” a flamboyant target like the victims. To get into the role, says Jake, “I had picked up three pairs of skin-tight, bell-bottom jeans…. Without underwear they made me look like the biggest whore in Europe…. I found some lace shirts that were almost pornographic in the way they fit, and I'd picked up some chemical tanning liquid and a bottle of hair dye at the pharmacy.... Two hours later I was looking into the face of Miss Mary SuperThing, glowing light in the sky of homosexual liberation.” That his calculated lectures in clubs and bars about the righteousness of being a cartoonish super queer attract an audience of young gay men just trying to figure out their own places in the world becomes one more thing on Jake’s overburdened conscience.

Dick Jones writes with more panache than buyers of adults-only pulps had any reason to expect. He has a way with sex-as-a-weapon imagery, from switchblades to billy clubs to Krupp cannons (describing the scene at a Berlin orgy, of course), and can write a hell of a dream sequence. He puts Jake through the wringer of a fever dream whose psychosexual luridness begins with the funeral of a man-sized penis and concludes with a swarm of cannibal vaginas, complete with fangs and clitoral tongues, gathering beneath an endless blood-red sky. And Jones can be darkly funny, as in a snippy little dig at his own publisher, Gay Way, slipped into Jake's contemptuous assessment of the notion that the "gay way" is competitive promiscuity and can-you-top-this contortions.

Man Eater’s attention to detail is vivid, from Jones’ use of contemporaneous military slang and shout-outs to real restaurant, clubs and museums, including Madrid's venerable restaurant Botin (founded in 1725 and still in operation), the Whiskey Jazz nightclub and the Prado, where Jake spends an afternoon wallowing in the obliterating darkness of Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son." There's also the unsettling vividness with which the novel depicts Jake's struggle to function under high-pressure/low-control conditions while in the grip of post-traumatic stress disorder, which still lacked its own name when Man Eater was written (WWI-era terms like "combat fatigue" and "shell shock" were still in common use until the 1980s) and its subtle evocation of Jake's matter-­of-fact alienation from his own flesh, which always seems to be doing things of its own volition while he watches with detached curiosity.

That Jake never realizes the connection between a bit of easily overlooked back-story and the case that tears his mind apart is a disquieting denial of genre expectations — most adult-book novelists didn’t expect their readers to pay close attention to the details, but Jones pulls all the threads together in a shattering way. The killer's baroquely yet sadly credible motive is firmly rooted in the consequences attempting to proscribe or distort individual sexuality to further larger political or social agendas, and Jake is self-aware enough to know that there is no one right way to be gay. Jake is his own man, a man who doesn't care for water sports or role play or "fake females" (what would an elderly Jake make of a world in which TV viewers of all orientations tune in to RuPaul's Drag Race?), but whose opinions stop at his own bedroom door. "I don't mind how a person gets his thrills," he opines is his distinctive, faintly pedantic manner, "but there are things to which I'd rather not be a party."

And Jones' 11th-hour bitchslap to thriller conventions is the throwaway revelation on Man Eater's penultimate page, one that yanks the rug out from under the novel's apparently tidy conclusion. Bravo, Dick Jones.

Note: The date-range I ascribe to the novel is approximate because there’s no copyright notice. But I remember the late 1960s and early 1970s, and everything about Man Eater situates it on that cusp of eras.