KELLER: THE CANNIBAL

I think I’ve written about this book before on one of my other blogs, but it’s worth a re-visit.

Nelson DeMille is a name that’s fairly well known in literary circles, but – as “they” say – he hadda start somewhere. Here’s where he developed his writing chops – at a cheap, sleazy publishing house like Manor Books.

DeMille wrote at least two series books for Manor back in the 70’s; the KELLER books and another cop series, RYKER. Books in the RYKER series sometimes alternated between DeMille and someone (or several folks) named “Edson T. Hamill”.

The books are pretty interchangeable owing in some part to the fact that both Keller and Ryker had the same first name and had the same type of marital/family history. Apparently all lead detectives in these books were named “Joe” and had bad attitudes, foul mouths, were WAY lacking in police courtesy, homophobic, and likely to engage at any moment in beating statements out of their witnesses. You can guess that these AREN’T your CAR 54, WHERE ARE YOU type of police officers.

Ok, so Joe Keller is a NY cop with an attitude problem; we’ve established that. Mr. Charming here gets thrown into a case in which a former soldier, Albert Kondor, survives the war by hiding out and resorting to cannibalism to survive.

The problem is, Albert likes human delicacies a little TOO much and when he makes his way to New York after the war, he maintains his dietary standards. He prefers Asian “meat” and so when folks start disappearing from Oriental communities, you know that it’s Al doing his own form of Chinese Take-out. Unfortunately, three days later he’s hungry again.

The plot of THE CANNIBAL isn’t complicated at all but then these are Manor Books we’re talking about here and they were not particularly known for classy literature. Their rival publishing house, Leisure Books, were neck and neck with Manor in the sleaze factor sweepstakes. In fact, Leisure was the home of the RYKER books.

I do think that Manor missed the boat here on a good cover blurb for this book. Perhaps they could have used these:

“Is It Soup Yet?”
“It Was Still Better Than ‘White Castle’.”
“Pardon Me, Do You Have Any ‘Grey Poupon’?”

But since I’m not in the publishing biz, what the hell do I know about it?

Joe Kenney, a new friend of mine, advises that this particular book goes for high dollar amounts at online auction sites. Me, I paid 65 cents (approx half off the cover price) for mine many moons ago at a used book emporium.

Good luck finding your own copy - that is if you have the appetite for it.