Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

I had a thoroughly non-exotic upbringing, in a small town in southern New Jersey, across the Delaware River from and a little north of Philadelphia. A drowning occurred every year or two, either in the river or in the Rancocas Creek which runs along the other side of the town. But there was seldom any violence. The only guns I ever saw growing up were the (probably dusty) ones worn by the town police force, and a "liberated" German rifle which my Dad had mounted on a little pedestal, stock-end down, and turned into a floor lamp.

Maybe it was because of the everyday quiet of life there, but for some reason I harbored a number of adolescent fantasies, brought to me through the media of books and television -- fantasies of mystery, of combat, and of visceral thrills.

On TV, the great dramatic fantasy passions of my adolescence were "Combat!" and "I Spy." Dad almost never talked about World War II, in which he'd served in Europe, so my head was filled with images of him appearing on "Combat!" as a bit player in the background. Of course I had no real idea what it meant to shoot someone, to be shot, or simply to aim at someone (let alone to be aimed at). But the very idea of shooting, in whichever direction, seemed the pinnacle of manhood.

As for "I Spy," maybe there's a kid somewhere who never dreamed of having a secret identity -- but if so, I never met him or her. What a wonderful life it seemed it would be, to play tennis professionally but actually be an undercover agent...

In books around this time, I was reading my first genre fiction. This included horror, and whole gobs of science fiction. Not novels so much, but short-story anthologies. And my favorite SF short-story author was A.E. van Vogt.

[Disclaimer: van Vogt was personally not someone I'd have liked, I think. For one thing, he was an early adherent of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, i.e. Scientology-to-be. But the 12- to 16-year-old version of me loved his fiction.]

Van Vogt wrote many stories besides my favorites. But the only ones which still stand out in my mind, decades later, are the stories and novellas revolving around the "weapons shops of Isher."

Here's van Vogt himself, taken from a 1980 interview, a quote which pretty much describes the series in a nutshell:

In the Weapon Shop series I assumed that man's basic nature was unchangeable. So I devised a permanent party in power: the imperial house of Isher, and a permanent opposition: the weapon makers. From an indestructible weapon shop an aggrieved citizen could buy a defensive weapon, whereby he could defend himself from an attack.

Note the slight departure here from stereotypically gun-driven pulp fiction: The weapons shops didn't supply weapons like latter-day pawnshops, gun shows, and the like -- that is, for citizens to shoot (defensively or otherwise) other citizens. The weapons shops were designed expressly to enable citizens to defend themselves against the government...

This isn't a post about the guilty pleasures of adolescence, though, but one about the guilty pleasures of the present. "Combat!," "I Spy," and the weapons shops of Isher -- they all feed into this Friday's guilty pleasure: Repairman Jack.

Jack is the protagonist of a series of novels (none with the words "Repairman" or "Jack" in their titles) by F. Paul Wilson. (Wilson is a New Jersey resident, and evidently proud of it; I like that about him, but that's not why I read his books.) Here's a description of him, from his official Web site:

Jack is a denizen of Manhattan who dwells in the interstices of modern society. He has no official identity, no social security number, pays no taxes. When you lose faith in the system, or the system lets you down, you go to a guy who's outside the system. That's Repairman Jack.

But he's no Equalizer, no knight in shining armor. Jack is strictly fee for service, and he may be a few bricks shy of a full load himself, but at least he's under control... most of the time.

The name: Abe [Grossman -- more about whom, in a moment] dubbed him Repairman Jack during the start-up years of Jack's fix-it business. Jack used it awhile as a sort of gag, but it stuck. Now, like it or not, he's known as Repairman Jack.

Throw in that Jack is a regular user of handguns, and -- so it would seem -- what you've got here is pretty standard hardboiled pulp fare. Not so. Consider:

• For years, Jack has had an ongoing deep relationship with a woman named Gia, a talented artist who really, really wishes Jack would hang up his spurs. Gia has a daughter named Vicky, in elementary school, about whom Jack is also crazy. Gia and Vicky sometimes provide Jack's motivation for dealing with the "bad guys," who sometimes learn of Gia and Vicky's importance to Jack and try to use it against him.
• One of Jack's best friends is the Abe Grossman mentioned above. Abe is elderly, balding, fat (but constantly led astray from healthy eating by Jack, who shows up bearing Entenmann's products and other delights). Abe is also the proprietor of the Isher Sports Shop (aha!), which sells the usual fare (tennis gear, basketballs, and so on) but almost never gets any business. As you go down the stairs at the back of the shop, though, you get a sense of Abe's real business. First, there's a sign on the wall: "The right to buy weapons is the right to be free" (which is also, curiously enough, the words appearing on signs in van Vogt's weapons shops). And second, the basement itself is taken up with Abe's real stock in trade: weapons, mostly guns, of every description.
• As the capsule description above implied, Jack does not "exist" in any way traceable. He has no Social Security number; he doesn't advertise his services, relying instead on word of mouth to bring him new business; he has no real office; he's adroit at managing phone numbers -- both regular and cellular -- to make him peculiarly invisible.
  
• Finally, Jack's opponents in each book are not, well, fully (or at all) human.
  

It's this last point which makes the Repairman Jack books unlike other thrillers. They're a weird but also weirdly successful blend of horror, SF, hard-boiled New York PI, and espionage fiction.

(When I told one of my sisters about the Repairman Jack series, she recommended Laurel Hamilton's "Anita Blake, vampire hunter" series, which you might prefer if the whole hard-boiled-guy fiction of Repairman Jack doesn't at all appeal to you. I've read the first one of those, Burnt Offerings, but am still trying to decide if I want to pursue others. The one I read was generally creepy but for some reason not -- for me -- rewardingly so.)

Now, when I say that Jack's nemeses aren't human, I don't mean they're animals, or extraterrestrials, or loyalists of the Bush misAdministration. They're, uh... creatures. "Demons"? Maybe something like demons, yeah. However the hell you want to classify them, they are pure evil. Taken as a whole, these are tools of something called "the Adversary" -- something like the forces of darkness, or Chaos perhaps. In a way, to call them evil is to misrepresent them; what they loathe, and work against at every opportunity, isn't good but order. In the process, of course, they end up accomplishing quite a bit of evil after all.

Jack's role in this was rather accidental. Even Wilson was surprised. Originally the Repairman Jack novels and his other books were developing along separate tracks; it was only later that he realized they were two interconnected paths.

Much to his discomfort, Jack has been "selected" for reasons he doesn't understand as a tool of the forces of order. This by no means makes him more than human. He has no superpowers. His bones break. He bleeds, sometimes profusely. And when he's treated for his injuries, he takes time to heal. And no one is more surprised than he is that he's still alive at all. Despite his best efforts to take on clients who present simple problems for his solution, somehow they always lead him into death-confronting situations.

I don't want to spoil your own introduction to the series. But note, per the helpful guide on the Repairman Jack Web site, that the chronology of the narratives collectively called "The Adversary Cycle" (some of which don't include Jack at all) does not match up with the order of writing or publication. If you want, you can read them in the order of the events portrayed. This will give you the advantage of getting the end-to-end saga, starting at least as early as 1941. (The Jack books take place roughly in the present day.) Or you can read them in the order in which they were published -- and thereby take advantage of Wilson's growing confidence, both with the Repairman Jack storyline and with his own writing. For what it's worth, I had no idea when I picked up my first Repairman Jack book -- The Haunted Air -- that it was even part of a series, much less what its place in that series might be.

Bottom line: If you've got a taste for action stories, are willing to suspend disbelief enough to read horror/SF tales, and are not put off by the violence of a protagonist for whom violence is sometimes the only way out of a desperate corner -- if all this is true of you, make a point of picking up at least one Repairman Jack book. Great beach reading. Fast reads all. And a highly addictive guilty pleasure.