FOR TRADE
Kill Me In Roppongi & Kill Me In Atami
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. Actually, I’m not sure if
Berkley even published the last two stories or not. This one is only 49k, kind of short for a
paperback. I have a pdf of this one for trade.
Burns Bannion #6: “Kill Me In Atami” by Earl Norman (Norman
Thompson). This one could have been a Bud & Lou comedy film. Bannion is
hired by a wealthy widow, Mrs. Hikonami. She wants a renter removed from her
estate. Legal action would take years, but she wants Bannion to see that he
leaves early, even if it means a karate chop to back of the neck. But there’s
more to the case, as he soon finds out. The widow’s husband was murdered by a
karate blow to the back of the head, forcing the head into a sharp instrument,
but everybody says it was a suicide. En route to the estate, Bannion picks up a
‘wooley booger’ girl (read the book to find out) who loves sex, but someone
hangs him and pins a suicide note on his chest. Arriving at the mansion, he
finds the widow’s sister, Fujiwara, and Mrs. Hikonami’s daughter, Asako.
The three women are exact images of each other. Over the next three nights, the
power goes off, and one of them enters his room to seduce him, but he never
knows which one. Except that it isn’t the 300-pound maid, who also knows
karate. There are hidden passages behind a bookcase, tunnels beneath the
mansion, and monsters lurking about the tunnels and an abandoned sanitarium
nearby. More supposed suicides happen, men hanging in the tunnel, and Bannion’s
wooley booger girl inside the sanitarium. This is one of my favorites in the
series. Thought Hedges is mentioned, he isn’t in this story. Inspector Ezawa
introduces Bannion to Mrs. Hikonami, and then we don’t see him any more. Oddly,
this is the only Burns Bannion novel not reprinted in the ERLE Edition in
Japan. It’s only available in the American Berkley 1962 printing. I might add
at this point that the Berkley editions were well edited, while the Japanese
ERLE editions were not. This Berkley edition paperback is for trade.
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