Shaft Among the Jews by Ernest Tidyman.
Published by The Dial Press 1972

So let’s get this out of the way: This book is not horrible. There will be times in this review I will mock it, to be sure. I will call it out for all sorts of things and poke fun at it, but I have to be honest about it, as well. In the end, Shaft Among the Jews is a perfectly fine example of second-generation American thriller/noir.

And just to define my own genre label there, because lord knows if it makes enough sense outside of my head, second-generation just means it ain’t Spillane, it ain’t Chandler. This is the 70s and people were doing pulps in the same but different way. It’s a change that you know when you read it, frankly, and it isn’t dependant on time always. Still, in the 70s there were a lot of books like this, and they aren’t eye-bleedingly bad at all. They’re full of action and adventure mixed with sex and raw violence.

Now what makes this so special is that it wanted to one-up the competition so badly that Shaft is built to be sexier, grimier, grittier and harder. He’s from the street, you know, and that makes him a hard motherfucker. But really, in regards to this book – what the fuck?

First of all in the 70s, the mighty 70s the lion might have slept that night, but the homophobia didn’t. Shaft certainly wanted to one up things there. A lot, and I mean a lot, of the thriller/crime books made fun of gay men then. They were a safe target. But Shaft, remember, needed to take things further.

On page 2, Shaft is bitching about his office. It seems he is sleeping with some rich woman and he let her redecorate his office in a “modern style” which Shaft finds revolting. He curses himself for letting her hire a decorator and ruining his office. Let’s turn to the video tape:

Why, John Shaft wondered, had he let her talk him into this?

“Listen,” he could have said,” I’ll fuck the faggot and you redecorate the office. You know, have the wall painted or the floors swept or something. …Maybe you could get the cheap bastard who owns the building to clean out the crapper down the hall. I’d rather piss in a Tennessee gas station than go in there. …”

He hadn’t. Instead, he had made the mistake of accepting her pretensions. It was the price of pussy. And now he was paying it in an atmosphere that jangled the nerves he was supposed to have assuaged with three weeks of stringing them out on the sands of Jamaica.

See, because he’s Shaft he can call a decorator we never hear about a faggot and utter nonsense. Because what? He’d fuck the faggot and she could redecorate? But didn’t she redecorate? And who is this mythical faggot that he would fuck? Did she fuck someone in order to get his office redone? But she’s rich so there is no indication that is what happened. What the holy hell is Shaft talking about? No one knows. So long as it sounds street, for some definition of the word I can not quite nail down, it passes muster.

Which is to say nothing of the “price of pussy” referred to. Because once again we’re always told how sexy Shaft is. How no one can refuse him because, you idiots, he’s Shaft. So why does he have to put up with this crazy woman who wants to redecorate his office just to get laid?

Obviously we need to find out about this magical woman and her Pussy of Redecoration +5 so we go to the end of page 2 where we see some woman talk to him at a bar. She flirts shamelessly with him, but she has a great ass. By page 3 she is suggesting they leave for somewhere else. Which means her home. They get there and she pretty much instantly starts to strip. This starts a horribly written sex scene that goes to page 12. Let’s grab some excerpts:

“Help me with the damned thing,” she said.

Man, what the hell am I into? he wondered. Only briefly. The catch on the zipper really was stuck, and his fingers felt as big as bananas as he pulled and twisted at it for two minutes. Nothing.

“Force it. Tear it apart.”

“I’ll ruin the…”

“Rip the goddamned thing open,” she said.

———————————–

“I want every detail of this with you, John–and I want you to have it, too, to savor it, drink deeply of it.” Oh Jesus, yes, he needed a drink. Of it, of anything.

———————————–

“Mr. Shaft, did anyone ever tell you you are built like a brick shithouse?”

———————————–

“Don’t fondle me, darling. I don’t need it. I’ve been wet for you since I looked at you at the party. And thought of you inside me.”

He would go insane. His eyes would pop and his brain would explode.

———————————–

“You have a beautiful penis,” she said. Cold, clinical, educated word. It was his cock, his jalop, his meat, his licorice stick, it was 735 dirty words of humping, fucking, balling, making it. But it might never again be anything but this that she had called. and now touched. And now guided.

“Slowly, John,” she said in caution to the first fire of the open flesh. “And look at us. Look at your strength entering me, penetrating. Is it sweet? Is it warm? Is it beautiful to behold?”

Does she not sound like the worst lay in history? I think Shaft fucked a Terminator sent back in time to prevent John Conner from ever reading this book. Or something. Fuck, I don’t know. I just hope I never, ever, have such oddly joyless sex.

Then the book starts a plot. Some guy in Israel has perfected a way to make fake diamonds that are 100% improvable as fakes. He does this using lasers. It was the 70s. Anyway, he comes to America and wants to give them away to the world. For free. And hopes it won’t crash the diamond market but make things better.

What? This old man, he is nuts. It’s like reading Bush’s economic plans. First we’ll devalue everything. Then we’ll pretend that that is helpful and makes things more precious, because anyone can have as much as they want. And for free. And then Step 3 – Anti-Profit!

Whatever, old man. You don’t matter to the plot as much as you might think.

Meanwhile someone is having other diamond merchants killed. For reasons that never end up making sense except that it gets Shaft hired by some Jews. And you were all waiting for that moment, right? Here it is:

“Hello?”

Cowboys and Indians. The disembodied head that peered around the door from the third floor hallway was wearing a heavy black beard and a big black sombrero. Well, there were funnier looking things swimming around the waters of Times Square, No reason he should be surprised that one of them came into his old building.

“Yeah?”

The cowboy’s response was just to look around the office slowly, then back to Shaft.

“I know how you feel,” Shaft said, pushing down the envelopes in his pockets, beginning to button the coat.

“Shaft?”

“Just like on the door.”

“We would like a few words with you.”

We?

“You want to talk in here or out in the hallway?”

The cowboy came into the office then.

“Excuse me,” he said, turning to look back over his shoulder with a nod of approval.

There were seven of them, But they were something. In assorted shapes, sized, and ages, the seven men who filed into his office were identical in dress–each one wearing a wide-brimmed black hat, long and dark outer coat, dark suits with vests, white shirts, and black, old-fashioned-looking shoes. They all had beards and curls hanging down around, in front of, or over their ears.

Shaft remembered meeting a writer in the No Name Bar across the street from his apartment house one night and the guy’s telling him his next book would be Great Jewish Gunfighters of the Old West, beginning with Coward Cohen in Cimarron and ending, in a puff of gun smoke, with Rapid Rabinowitz in Dodge city. the memory made him smile. Nobody smiled back. The men crowding into the office, standing closely together like visitors to an alien, unsafe land, continued to inspect him and his surroundings. He became aware, of course, that they were not cowboys, that he had seen the darkly suited and heavily hatted men and their beards crossing his path briskly, brusquely, always quite vigorously, on a number of occasions.

He had assumed they were Jewish simply because they appeared to be Jewish, assumed without really thinking it out that their more formal attire signified some special position or purpose.

Anyway! Seven Jews walk into John Shaft’s office. If that ain’t the set-up for a joke… but this is no joke, my friend! They want him to find out who is killing these other jewel merchants. Of course they have to discuss it which leads to the seven of them holding a conference in Hebrew in Shaft’s apartment at great length, which Shaft gets bored during. Really it reminds me of an Entmoot.

Which makes John Shaft into Frodo. Well, Merry or Pip, I guess, really. Black Hobbit: The Revenge! I can just see it now. Wait, let’s get back to the book. So yeah the hire him.

The guy who is having people killed, of course, is also the guy who is planning to kill the guy with the Really Bad Diamond Idea above. The old guy’s daughter comes to NY looking for him, as well, so you know she ends up fucking Shaft.

And Shaft himself is basically useless. He goes after this guy, not sure if he is really the one having people killed, and a bunch of Mossad agents (called Israeli CIA here) are after him, or the guy, it isn’t clear and things get shot up and Shaft has no idea what is going on, pretty much ever. He finds out things by luck and stumbles into the right place while talking about how good he is and so on. And then the book ends.

Yeah. Really.

But before it ends. You also need to know that the bad guy has an assistant who is gay. Who traps the bad guy, because the bad guy has a small mental breakdown, and uses him to get what he wants. What does this assistant want? For that we go back to the video tape:

“Help me,” Blackburn whispered.

“Of course I’ll help you, I don’t care if you lied to me, Morris … I really don’t. I don’t mind at all–now. I know you love me. You do love me, don’t you Morris?”

“Like a son,” he said hoarsely.

Alexander smiled wistfully. “I don’t want you to love me like a son, Morris. I want you to love me life a wife.”

Morris Blackburn stifled a groan, then bent his exquisitely elegant head and vomited between his feet.

Every gay man in the book, and there are a fair amount, are bad guys, evil wicked men who want to ruin everything for everyone. I don’t know what the obsession is, but after a while you start to wonder, don’t you? Anyway, the assistant ends up dead, so fuck him.

Oh, and after dominating the first bit of the book that woman with Willy Wonka’s Magical Vagina Ride and Fresh Fruit Emporium vanishes except to call and berate Shaft for not being around. Oh and once she forces him to have sex instead of doing his job for a bit. And then she calls more and annoys him . And then Shaft hangs up on her and, I guess, breaks up with her. I don’t know that she ever gets a name, even. She’s just Magi-Pussy the Ever-fucking.

And really that’s all there is to say about Shaft. Everyone dies except characters who can be used in the rest of the series: John’s friends and cops, and the nice Jewish girl goes back to Israel even though Shaft might love her.

And Shaft ends up making like half a million bucks on the case and walks away rich.

The end.