Burns Bannion #9: “Kill Me In Roppongi” by Earl Norman
(Norman Thompson). In this final novel of the “Kill Me In …” series, Hedges
sends ex-Stars & Stripes newspaperman, Addis Racquets to him for help.
Racquets now runs his own small paper, and has received a death threat along
with an ad. He hires Bannion to answer the ad, and find out what’s going on.
Although Inspector Izawa and Hedges are mentioned, they have no active part in
this story. It involves the IOON (International Order of Nationalists) Nazi
organization. They are running an illegal abortion scheme in Japan, bringing
women from all over the world that need an abortion, then blackmailing them to
work as their sex spies. Unfortunately, this was the final Burns Bannion novel.
Not a great series, but definitely a fun one with sex and karate as the main
theme. The series was published by Berkley in the U.S., but distribution in the
Far East must have been poor, so Norman Thompson, who had contacts with the
military and Stars & Stripes, had the series printed by a Japanese
publisher under his ERLE BOOKS Logo. This enabled him to get his books on the
racks in the PX system of military bases, where millions of G.I.s became
familiar with them. I don’t know if Berkley was aware of this double-dealing or
not. Sadly, the ERLE Editions seem to have been printed without editing or
proofing, so there are many typos in them. If readers have a choice, buy the
American editions published by Berkley instead.
