by Jack Tunney
I then delivered the coup de grâce, a right cross thrown with every last volt of energy within me. As the punch connected, I had one split second to realize my right wrist was as solid as it had ever been – no pain, no hesitation – my punch was again the giant killer it had always been.
Trask fell backward, his eyes rolling up in his head, and I realized too late what was going to happen.
I grabbed desperately for Trask, but as I grasped for him, he slipped away from me timbering into the roiling foam of water and snakes surrounded the plateau.
He was silent in his fall, and I watched in horror as his body was overcome and consumed by the hellish wriggling masses awaiting for him. The black lengths of cottonmouths seemed to rush from around the island to the point where Trask was thrashing, each desperate to sink their fangs and draw the evil from it.
I became aware again of Charlotte Adrieux’s wailing and then a literal clap of thunder as she slapped her hands together over her head. In the sudden silence, the roiling of the snakes ceased and the waters were still.
In the flickering light of the torches, the body of Lucas Trask – bloated and lifeless – floated slowly facedown away from the island, carried by invisible currents until it was hidden in the sawgrass.
I felt myself drooping, but Tombstone was suddenly beside me. His strong arms help keep me on my feet.
“Archie Moore better look out for your right,” he said.
EPILOGUE
The Army? You called out the Army!” Chief Parker didn’t know whether to foam at the mouth in fury or laugh out loud.
“Seemed like the best option at the time, sir,” Tombstone said, straightfaced.
“And you, Flynn ... You thought getting yourself sent to prison was a good idea?”
“You said to show ‘em how we do it here, sir,” I said. Throwing Parker’s words back at him were a calculated risk.
We were in the Chief’s office the day after arriving back in Los Angeles – by train this time. I ran the brim of my Fedora back and forth in my hands.
“And is that how we do things here?” Parker asked, his voice dangerously low.
“We do whatever it takes to get the job done, sir.” I said, just as quietly.
Parker looked at me then cut his eyes to Tombstone. “How did you handle this Banister character?”
“We didn’t trust him from the start. With the help of the Adrieux clan, I disappeared after the fixed fight when Flynn supposedly killed the undercover cop, Danny Romani.”
“Why?” Parker asked.
Tombstone shrugged. “Survival instinct. While Flynn was around, I was safe. But with him incarcerated, I was just another expendable black man.”
Parker nodded. “But there’s more to the story ...”
Tombstone shrugged. “The whole situation smacked of bad ju-ju. When Flynn was set to be transferred to the Sauvage, I had a quiet talk with Banister to find out exactly what was going on.”
“A quiet talk?”
“Yes. Just Banister and myself. I picked him up at his house. Took him out through a back window while his wife and a guest were sitting down to dinner. Took him out into the swamp and introduced him to a little voodoo of my own. It was surprisingly easy to get him to spill his guts once I provided a way for him to save face.”
“And he is still running the anti-corruption unit in New Orleans?”
“Taking all the credit for himself. According to the New Orleans’ papers, it was Banister’s idea to call in the Army, his idea to take down the corrupt Lucas Trask and shut down the penitentiary.”
Chief Parker shook his head. “Politicians,” he said with disgust, as if he wasn’t one of the breed himself. “And the other prisoners?”
I answered. “The Army rounded them up. They weeded out the ones who actually needed to be transferred to other incarceration facilities – let the local jurisdictions deal with the ones there because Trask wanted them there.”
Parker grunted. “So, all of this is actually down to Mickey Cohen wanting to get revenge?”
“Seems to be, sir.” I said.
Parker leveled his eyes to take in both Tombstone and myself. “Then no more running off on holiday jaunts. Mickey Cohen is a cancer in this city and I want him cut out. Don’t let me down.”
We took our leave of the inner sanctum. In the anteroom, Peggy Parsons, the chief’s secretary, held out a note to me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“The chief had me making some calls while you were gone. He wants to rub salt into the figurative wounds Mickey Cohen suffered when you knocked Solomon Kane out of the fight game. The championship shot that was supposed to go to Kane has to go to someone ...”
I looked at the name and telephone number on the paper Peggy had handed me. I held it up for Tombstone to see. His smile spread all the way across his face.
“Archie Moore’s manager and his number,” Tombstone said.
Peggy smiled too. “The chief seems to think there will be no trouble setting up the fight card.”
I rotated my strong right wrist. I felt inside me for the heat still behind the spot where Charlotte Adrieux’s fingertip had cut me.
I was Patrick Felony Flynn, the giant killer, and I was getting my championship shot ...
END
CONTINUE READING FOR
FIGHT CARD EXTRAS
INCLUDING A PREVIEW OF
PATRICK ‘FELONY’ FLYNN’S
FIRST ADVENTURE,
FIGHT CARD: FELONY FISTS
FIGHT FICTION: A HISTORY
Paul Bishop
Cultural influences, tough
economic times, and the hope
and appeal offered by fight fiction ...
The fight fiction genre has become an integral part of our cultural history – especially when economic times have been as tough as the character’s in a fight fiction tale.
Even before the explosion of fight fiction stories in the pulps of the ‘30s and ‘40s, Jack London was penning fight stories for the masses, such as his classics A Piece of Steak and The Abysmal Brute, among others. Feeding the need of the everyman to rise above his daily struggle for survival through vicarious fight entertainment, London’s fight tales were devoured.
London learned to box by sparring with his friend Jim Whitaker, and his love of the sport never waned. Wherever his wanderings took him, London always had a pair of boxing gloves, always ready to mix it up with any challenger. Most often, however, London’s regular sparring partner was his wife, Charmian Kittredge, with whom he routinely sparred.
Even on the Snark, travelling to the Solomons Islands, or on the Tymeric from Sydney, Australia, to Ecuador, or the Dirgo from Baltimore to Seattle in 1912, Jack and Charmain would put on their bathing suits and square off for an hour of sparring before throwing buckets of salt water on one another. Because he couldn’t strike back against Charmain as he would against another man, London developed an almost impenetrable defense, making him more than a challenge for any man he toed the line against.
London hated bullfighting and hunting, considering them without any sporting interest. However, the specific mano-a-mano science of boxing fascinated him. He always tried to attend professional fights as a reporter in order to secure a ringside seat.
In 1905, he wrote one of his most highly regarded fight stories, The Game, which was serialized in Metropolitan Magazine. The story caused a clamor when critics claimed a fighter could not be killed by hitting his head on the canvas. London’s reply was a claim to have seen it happen in the West Oakland Athletic Club.
Eventually, lightweight champion of the world, Jimmy Britt, settled things in the San Francisco Examiner when he was quoted as saying, “With ... nothing more to guarantee me that he knows The Game than his description of his fictional prize-fight, I would, if he were part of our world, propose or accept him as referee of my impending battle with Nelson."
During the height of the pulp era on the ‘30s and ‘40s, Robert E. Howard was
another writer who banged out fight stories while also engaging in the pugilistic arts. Even though as a child he was bookish and intellectual, in his teen years he took up bodybuilding before eventually entering the ring as an amateur boxer.
Best known as the creator of Conan The Barbarian, Solomon Kane, and other sword and sorcery characters, Howard had a lifelong interest in boxing, attending fights and avidly following the careers of his favorite fighters. He also claimed to considered his fictional fight tales – especially The Iron Man, and the adventures of Sailor Steve Costigan, the lovable, hard-fisted, and innocent semipro pugilist who regularly squared-off against dastardly villains in exotic ports of call – as among the best of his works.
Howard’s boxing tales and hundreds of other two-fisted stories flourished in the fight pulps such as Fight Stories Magazine and Knockout Magazine, helping a generation of readers to fight through the Great Depression and the tough years to follow.
During the ‘50s, the printed tales of fight fiction gave way to a wider appreciation of live bouts. Television brought those fights into American living rooms for all to see. However, as the public became jaded by the scandal of fight fixing and the real life encroachment of organized crime into the fight game, a new realism in fight fiction wrapped its hands with tape and pulled on battered leather gloves illegally loaded with lead.
Published in 1958, The Professional written by W. C. Heinz cast a harsh reflection of the seedy circus-like atmosphere of boxing with its assorted hangers-on, crooked promoters, and jaded journalists. With his lean sentences, rough-and-ready dialogue, dry wit, and you-are-there style, Heinz brilliantly used the cynical eyes of fictional sports writer Frank Hughes to recount the trials of middleweight Eddie Brown and his crusty trainer, Doc Carroll, as Brown prepares for a championship fight.
Heinz’ novel is still as revered today as it was when Hemingway – himself an amateur pugilist and teller of fight stories such as Fifty Grand and A Matter of Colour – declared it “the only good novel about a fighter I've read and an excellent novel in its own right."
Like the fight fiction novels to be published in the ‘40s and 50’s. movies of those eras also reflected the public’s growing disenchantment with boxing in the ‘50s. Humphrey Bogart’s last screen appearance in 1956’s The Harder They Fall – based on Budd Schulberg’s 1947 novel – dramatizes a thinly disguised account of the real life boxing scandal involving champion Primo Carnera. Bogart's character, Eddie Willis, was based on the career of boxing writer and event promoter Harold Conrad. The book and film pulled no punches, showing brutal and brutish fight scenes coupled with the cynical and humiliating treatment of fighters by those surrounding them – which further reflected the middle class workers’ own feelings of punitive treatment by upper management.
Finally, in 1969, the noir edge of fight stories was capped with the publication of Fat City. Written by Leonard Gardner, Fat City, set in the small-time boxing circuit of Stockton, California in the late ‘50s, became an acclaimed film from director John Houston in 1972. As in The Professional and The Harder They Fall, the message of Fat City was a harsh metaphor for the impossibility of a public striving to get ahead while surrounded by forces determined to derail you at every turn.
As the ‘70s progressed, the public became primed for a change in their fight fiction. Unlike with prior generations, this change in popular entertainment would not be tied to the socio-economic factors of the day. Instead, a blurring of the lines of fact and fiction – especially in the world of boxing – was occurring, reflecting the hyper embellishments of celebrity being inflicted upon larger popular culture as a whole.
In boxing, the anger, power, and sheer showmanship of Muhammad Ali – the man who would become boxing’s greatest ambassador – had revitalized the public’s fervor for ring action. Ali’s larger than life love-me-or-hate-me-I’m still-The-Greatest personality overshadowed the ever darkening machinations of the trademark spiky-haired head and grasping fingers of promoter Don King.
In 1971, Joe Frazier fought Ali in a bout hyped as The Fight of the Century. Frazier prevailed over Ali, who was returning to boxing after being suspended for over three years for his refusal to obey the draft. The defeat sent Ali on a quest, fighting contender after pretender to the heavyweight throne in an attempt to obtain another title shot.
The Rumble in the Jungle in 1974, pitted then world Heavyweight champion George Foreman against former world champion and challenger Muhammad Ali. This fight, coupled a year later (1975) with the climax of the bitter rivalry between Ali and Frazier – dubbed The Thrilla in Manila – returned boxing to the world stage like nothing that had gone before.
Norman Mailer's bestselling non-fiction work, The Fight, documented the greatest fight of the greatest life with all the power of a great fictional narrative, ushering in a culmination of self-involved journalism. All of which laid the ground work in preparing the public for the little film that could go the distance ... Rocky.
Rocky not only detailed the winning underdog story of a fighter who only wanted to go the distance – an achievable, if difficult, goal believed in and desired by the everyman of the day in his everyday mundane life – but was, in the actual inception and creation of the film itself, an underdog story to rival its fight fiction plot. Sylvester Stallone was inseparable from his onscreen persona as he fought for his screenplay and starring role against all studio odds – and then went the distance as Rocky would go on to win three Oscars ©, including Best Picture.
Rocky and its (eventually) five sequels were hits and misses with the critics, but not with the public. The average Joe began to see the hype of the real world fights and fictional movie fireworks as almost one and the same.
Fight stories were back in the public eye in a big way.
In 2000, fight fiction morphed yet again with the publication of the pseudonymous F.X. Toole’s, Rope Burns: Stories From The Corner. Each story in the collection was a gem. But unlike the tales populating the fight pulps of old, the stories in Rope Burns gave a whole new human face to the world of boxing, a deeper meaning – all leading to the brilliant Best Picture Oscar © winning film Million Dollar Baby, based on several stories from the collection.
The stories in Rope Burns proved to the wider public, yet again, what fans of fight fiction have always known – the world of the sweet science, at its best, has always been a reflection of what it means to be human, what it means to struggle, what it means to be hit in the face with the daily and millennial challenge of survival as individuals, as families, and finally as a race.
In the new millennium, the economy is struggling again. Today, the ever exploding popularity of mixed martial arts tournaments (MMA) has again brought the fighting arts back to the forefront of the public consciousness. In MMA, the everyman sees in the caged octagon a release of his or her own frustrations at the state of the world – the stark struggle to survive in a time and place where the rules have change, where the action is faster, more brutal, and yet possessed of a choreographed beauty.
Simultaneously, the thirst for fight stories has also increased, as shown by the popularity and critical acclaim for such MMA-themed novels as Suckerpunch by Jeremy Brown, The O’Quinn Fights by Robert Evans, The Longshot by Katie Kitamura, Choke Hold by Christa Faust, and many more.
Traditional boxing novels are also flourishing. Every Time I Talk To Liston and Las Vegas Soul by Brian DeVido; Pound For Pound, F. X. Toole’s posthumously finished novel; Waiting for Carver Boyd by Thomas Hauser; and more, continue to tell the tale of the tape and the story of the squared circle.
By the end of 2013, the Fight Card series (along with spin-off brands Fight Card MMA and Fight Card Romance) will have published twenty-seven plotted tales of fistic mayhem from some of the best New Pulp authors working today, each sporting a stunning cover created by artists Keith Birdsong and David Foster.
2014 will also offer a full slate of monthly Fight Card titles, including more tales from the Fight Card MMA and Fight Ca
rd Romance imprints along with more of the traditional Fight Card tales set in the noir-filled streets of the earlier decades.
Retro or modern, Fight Card novels will continue to provide inspiring, entertaining stories of tough guys caught in tough spots with nothing but their fists, wits, and fighting nature to battle against the odds. The Fight Card novels are about characters and their individual journeys and how they can inspire our character and our journeys.
As Fight Card readers you can become part of the Fight Card team by writing reviews on Amazon with your honest opinions of the tales you’ve read, giving us shout-outs on your blogs, and visiting the Fight Card website at:
www.fightcardbooks,com
FIGHT FICTION AND THE
FIGHT CARD SERIES
Paul Bishop
An old genre made brand new again ...
What exactly is fight fiction? I’m glad you asked ... in 2011, when fellow writer Mel Odom and I designed the format for the Fight Card series, we knew several things immediately: The books would be 25,000 - 30,000 word novelettes, designed to be read in one or two sessions, and draw their inspiration from the fight pulps of the '30s and '40s – such as Fight Stories Magazine, Knockout Magazine, and Robert E. Howard’s two-fisted boxing tales featuring Sailor Steve Costigan – and they would be written under the unifying pseudonym of Jack Tunney (combining the names of our favorite fighters, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney).
Furthermore, we knew the Fight Card tales would be set in the1950s (although this later changed to include many different time periods), with a locations all over the world. We knew we wanted the prose to be hard-hitting, but still fall within a PG-13 range for language and violence. We also decided the different main characters in each tale would have a connection to St. Vincent's Asylum For Boys in Chicago (an orphanage) where Father Tim Brophy, The Fighting Priest, taught the sweet science as a way to become a man.
