I was rummaging through the cardboard boxes at a library book sale one weekend when I came across this title. Black letters on a bright orange background, no cover art:

"Murray was a big city cop, and he got everything... the women... the booze... the graft. NIGHT STICK." The authors name was given as D. Royal.

The back cover contained another brief description:

"He was the best cop in the city; he followed the rules, he tried to understand the other guy. Then one day, something happened. Find out why in NIGHT STICK."

Below that, two very brief blurbs:

"Brutal...raw...open." - Jack Clive, The News

and,

"The best story about a cop I've ever read." - H. Elliott, Police Gazette.

I check the publication date - 1970 - and assume that what I've stumbled upon is cheap pulp crime novel about a corrupt cop, maybe a little Bad Lieutenant action going on with this Murray guy. So I throw it on the pile and forget about it until a year later, when a grab it for some light reading material on a flight to Georgia.

I crack Night Stick open while people are still boarding, and by the time we've reached altitude I'm already past the first couple of chapters; the book starts with Murray at a hippie peace march where a glimpse of a flower power girls breasts triggers a brief 'Nam flashback, and then we're off into an origin story. The writing isn't bad, and story is progressing through Murray's childhood into his teenage and adult years and military service in Vietnam, which not surprisingly contain some romantic interests and sexual escapades, but by the fifth chapter I begin to notice that every single chapter includes at least one sex scene.

The truth beginning to dawn on me, I skipped to the back of the book where older paperbacks listed other books for sale and start skimming the titles offered by the same publisher...

The Man Who Gathered Cherries
How They Do It In China
The Nurse Came Naked
Hoagie McAllister's Topless Airlines
The Fire Island Dirty Dozen Minus 2
Seed

Yep. I'm not reading a crime novel on the Atlanta flight. I'm reading some classic seventies paperback smut. Perhaps two out of the three names listed on the cover not including first names should have tipped me off. At this point, a lesser person would have tossed the novel in disgust. I'm a trooper, however, and once I start a book, I finish it. I just wonder if anybody on the flight noticed from the cover what I didn't at the book sale.

To the credit of D. Royal - which I am assuming is not the author's real name - the reason I even made it that far without realizing what I was getting myself into is that the writing in this thinly disguised stroke book is actually pretty good. The story follows "Murray the Pig" as his idealism is first instilled in him and then corrupted, and through a series of events that include a lot of sex, he eventually discovers the falsehoods behind his earlier convictions, comes to terms with his past, and finds himself in a muddy Woodstock acid-fueled hippie orgy.

The sex scenes sprinkled throughout the book (no doubt by publisher guidelines) range from plot relevant to blatantly gratuitous. Most of what goes on as Murray works undercover for military police in Vietnam to uncover a soldier-run prostitution ring - where more than half of the book takes place - makes sense to include and paints a vivid portrait of the war-fueled sex trade. Things get a bit absurd when Murray is forced to fight off the sexual advances of a rape victim's mother he walks home the same night, and later when he and some fellow cops working a war protest are kidnapped by some Weathermen members, one of whom insists on performing fellatio on the captive police officers.

It was a weird trip reading erotica from a time when smut had to masquerade as legitimate fiction on the paperback racks, and I count myself lucky that I was tricked into reading one entry from those more innocent days of pornography that seems to have been written by an author capable of much more. Remove maybe half of the sex scenes, and Night Stick would read as a straight men's adventure crime drama. I certainly hope D. Royal has other work out there under his own name... and with a few less sexual rendezvous. ( )