Customer Reviews

.357: Vigilante #1

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For those who don't know, Ian Ludlow is an early pen name of Lee Goldberg, author of My Gun Has Bullets and Beyond the Beyond, and writer/producer of many TV shows, including Diagnosis Murder and Martial Law. He wrote the .357 Vigilante series when he was a UCLA student, and chose the pseudonym "Ludlow" so he'd be right next to "Ludlum" on bookstore shelves.

Even as a teenager, Lee's biting humor and his talent for writing visually came through in this series. The stories clearly grin at TV and movies, where heroes shake off bullet wounds and broken bones and carry on to bring the evil ones to justice, showing up for the closing credits with a band-aid over one eye and a slight limp. Brett Macklin, aka Mr. Jury, aka the .357 Vigilante, is all that and a quart of Rocky Road! He was just an ordinary guy who liked to restore classic Cadillacs until his father, the loveable neighborhood cop, was torched by some street punks. When the justice system allows the punks to escape punishment, Brett takes his dad's old .357 magnum and becomes Mr. Jury. He hunts down all of the gang, finding most of them in the process of committing new nefarious acts, which of course further justifies his blowing them away.

In the second book, "Make Them Pay", Brett is recruited by the LAPD to use his Mr. Jury tactics to stop a child pornographer who murders his young models after the shoot is over. In the third book, "White Wash," a rabid pack of white supremacists have unleashed a racist killer on LA who is calling himself Mr. Jury as he commits a series of hate-murders against the black populace. Brett's best friend, a black LAPD detective, becomes a target of the group, also.

I have to wonder if the series ended with book three because there were no crimes left to write about that were heinous enough to allow Macklin to continue his career as good-guy-hero who also happens to be a serial killer. I also have to wonder why this series was never picked up by the movies. It has all the action and gore a guy could ask for!

This is a lost classic...a gritty, darkly funny, hardboiled tale of vengeance and justice in Los Angeles. To be honest, I bought the book for its cover, thinking it would be cheesy fun, and wasn't expecting it to be so good. The two that follow aren't quite as hardboiled, veering into a giddy kind of over-the-top action you don't often find in airport paperbacks. I wish Ian Ludlow would write more books!