The Million-Dollar Bloodhunt by Joe Millard (1973)

If Pachuco's so squat, why does he look like Arturo de Cordova here?

A bounty hunter, a sassy acrobat, a Lee van Cleef aeronaut and an alcoholic dwarf all meet in a desert. Adventures and shenanigans ensue.

Manco is chasing after the two-bit outlaw Froggy Benson when he's basically run over by a hydrogen balloon and Benson makes off with his horse and gun.
The accident was caused by Professor Samson Garff, an aeoronaut and Lee Van Cleef lookalike, with Saginaw Kirp's "tawny, leonine eyes", who is Manco's only hope of recovering his possessions.
Among Garff's crew are Sally Simmons, the acrobat, and the dwarf Jigger. This circus troupe is different to the one in A Coffin Full of Dollars. A bit smaller and more ragtag. The blurb paints them as double-dealers and "treacherous" but they seem like okay people.

Froggy Benson, described as being "like one of nature's bad jokes", had worked under the bandit chief Pachuco, and had earned a large price on his head. He's the subject of a prophecy envisioned by an old Apache medicine man, Buffalo Going Away, and gets a shirt from him which they all believe to be magical but of course ultimately it's just a dud. And it doesn't help that Buffalo Going Away repeatedly overestimates Benson's power. When we see Benson kill someone, it is a literal misfire.

Meanwhile Pachuco is in prison waiting to be hanged, but escapes from the vast prison in a vividly written, death-defying stunt. Garff's balloon knocks him off the outer wall into the prison courtyard, but ends up on the right side of the wall when he clings to the grapnel rope. So Pachuco escapes not only with strength, but with luck, too.
To paraphrase Manco, Pachuco "is only half as smart as he thinks, but twice as smart as he talks and acts". His bloody murder of his cellmate shows him to be as vicious as El Indio from a Few Dollars More, but he's more comically impetuous.

Now free from prison, the outlaw makes his way to the hidden gold stash only he knows about.

Like Apachito and Bandera, Pachuco is described as "squat", "swarthy", "pudgy", "fat", etc, and little else. Neither he nor his other counterparts are given important facial details. Are their foreheads prominent or not? What are the shapes of their noses, or their lips? Pachuco's only other physical distinction is that he's shirtless for most of the story (which begs the question as to how he could have hidden a makeshift knife in his sleeve if he doesn't wear a shirt). Even though his name potentially means "flashily dressed".

Pachuco appears to be very little in the story, but he is the best written between himself, Apachito and Bandera, even though ultimately the three are virtually indistinguishable and interchangeable. The three are all classic bandidos out of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Nevertheless, Pachuco has the potential to be among the revisionist character types of the mid-Sixties onwards.

I've learned from this book that Manco can speak perfect Apache. That would have solved a problem or two in A Dollar to Die For (which was by a different author, but still.)

Speaking of Manco, he has the same problems as before. He talks too much and even raises his voice a couple of times. Talking that much had gotten him into trouble in A Coffin Full of Dollars and he would have known that.
I heard that when he got the script for A Fistful of Dollars, Clint Eastwood crossed out most of his lines and told Leone that it was a better idea if he communicated through his expressions rather than through dialogue, and it worked.

Manco's constant yapping reminds me less of Clint Eastwood, and more of John Wayne. It's not his voice I want to be hearing when I'm reading these, it's Eastwood's.
True, Eastwood is just as dogmatic and self-righteous these days but that's beside the point.

Manco not only raises his voice this time around, he yells. That's something I can't imagine. His outburst is written as such "MY GUN AND MY HORSE!"

Professor Garff, like Pachuco, is virtually indistinguishable from his counterparts. He has a very similar personality, too: gruff, tough and intelligent. Like Shadrach, he is a bounty hunter, and like Kirp, he has had a past with the respective bandido of the novel; While Kirp knew Bandera from the Civil War, Garff made a deal to break Pachuco out of prison so he could fly over and get the gold from the bandit's hideaway. But the twist is, Garff wants the bounty on Pachuco as well as the gold because he feels like he needs to be rewarded by the Mexican government.

So, since they're both after the same thing, Manco and Garff are forced to work together, inevitably.

Sally Simmons is a pretty cool character. She's like all the Deever women in A Coffin Full of Dollars  put together. Sure, she makes food and coffee for the men and sort of needs to be saved by Garff and Manco at one point, she does dare to shove Pachuco off his horse with her strong gymnast's arms (that's what I meant by "sort of") and escape from the outlaws, as well as save herself from Pachuco when he tries to abduct her a second time. She is not a groundbreaking character by today's standards but she is a very capable woman for the time the book was written.
She also has quite a standard love-hate relationship with Garff, who found her when she was homeless and hungry, and in the end decides to marry him. Manco secretly disapproves and decides she deserves someone better (not him, either, although his manners have been better around women ever since he put on that poncho.)

Until recently I thought that in the entire Dollars franchise, including novels, the only bandido whose life Manco/ Joe/ Blondie spared was Tuco Ramirez in both The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  and A Dollar to Die For. There was another- Pachuco, whom the bounty hunter wanted to keep alive so he could lead him to his hidden gold stash. However, the situation is complicated when Apaches come after the outlaws, and the posse hunting Pachuco arrives, too. In the end, Manco could not protect Pachuco, who was killed by a stray bullet as he gunned down Froggy Benson.

So in the end the whole journey was pretty much pointless, just like both endings of The Good, the Bad, the Weird . In the International ending, Tae-goo is in the Pachuco role, but in the Korean ending, he's in the Manco role, and it wouldn't be the last time; In GBW 's Korean ending, Tae-goo pulled the same trick that Joe did in A Fistful of Dollars, and like Manco in this book who doesn't get the gold but collects the bounties on Pachuco and his lieutentant Much-Belly, though he never got the treasure, Tae-goo was able to escape with the diamonds that Chang-yi With him.

The novel goes along quickly, despite the padding of banter between Garff and Manco, and has some pretty good action scenes in it.

The story is basically just men's adventure, but it's fun.

Blood for a Dirty Dollar by Joe Millard (1973)

Blood for a Dirty Dollar is probably the strangest of Joe Millard's spinoff novels so far. And that's saying something. The last one had a circus. This one has a Medieval castle with knights in suits of armour.

Some time after the Civil War, some English jackass named Lord Veldon gets the insane idea of moving an entire English castle, stone by stone, to the American desert, where it was rebuilt near the Broken Hills, known to be a den of thieves, gets a bunch of guards to dress like Medieval knights but with long-range guns and refuses to deposit whatever treasure he's got in the bank. A couple of scientists go to investigate the castle and mysteriously disappear, and a "brown butterball" with a $20,000 bounty on his head named Bandera has something to do with it.

The Man with No Name- Manco, Joe, Blondie, whatever you may call him, goes in to investigate, too, and while at the tavern closest to Veldon Castle he runs into one Saginaw Kirp, life insurance agent and another Lee Van Cleef lookalike. Kirp is not the peaceful life insurance agent he makes himself out to be. He's described exactly the same as Shadrach except without the scar. They have a distinctive "wedge shaped" face and everything. They even both wear frock coats!
However, unlike in A Coffin Full of Dollars, Millard doesn't make any clever remark about the fact that Lee Van Cleef has turned up in two of Sergio Leone's movies in different roles.

Joe and Kirp get a lead on Bandera when they meet a cagey reporter who claimed to have interviewed him. They go and check out the bandit chief's hideout and what follows is a loose retread of Joe/Manco and Shadrach's discovery of Apachito's hideout in A Coffin Full of Dollars, only with scientists in captivity, and Bandera's men making copies of the armor (but bulletproof, unlike the armor at Veldon Castle) and a greasewood powered wagon to storm Veldon Castle with.

Meanwhile a petty thief named Jingles goes west to sneak into Veldon Castle. I enjoyed his subplot. He was a fun little rascal, even though he did distract from the story a bit.

This one has the same problem as in the last one I read: The Man with No Name talks too much. Was it so hard just to write his inner monologue, just as thoughts? Also, he rarely loses his temper and when it does it comes out in a terrifying slow burn. He never raises his voice. Millard should have made note of that. Either that or he was really good at pushing Joe past his limit.

Bandera, real name Juliano Bandera Mescato, is described in the exact vague manner as his counterpart Apachito: squat, swarthy and with a "guttural" voice. Any other details he would have cared to share? Apachito in A Coffin Full of Dollars is said to have the "unmistakable stamp of Indian blood on his features". Bandera's face is only "broad". "Broad" is still no help.
We do get to know more about Bandera than we do about Apachito, including how he found his hiding place, and a little bit of his backstory.
He's not as entertaining as Apachito, but he livens up the story, even though he's a one-note villain in the vein of Gold Hat from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Sometimes Millard writes his accent phonetically, but most of the time he forgets to.
By the way, I like how his middle name means "flag". Very lofty.

And as it turned out, Kirp, who is a former Confederate officer, knew "Bandy" from the Civil War days. What are the odds?

The book jumps back and forth in time quite a bit which got me a little confused at times.

Everyone squawls a lot. There is an awful lot of squawling.

There's a really liberal use of the word "cute" as an insult. (Mind you, the word "liberal" is an insult in itself, too, so I've heard)

And a crazy final battle in the courtyard of Veldon Castle.

This, like the other licensed "Dollars Trilogy" fanfictions, was rushed out to cash in on the movies and therefore doesn't feel like a story that the Man with No Name belongs in.
Still, this is one wild story. It's kind of fantastical. If you're into that sort of thing.

Cowboys and knights. I never thought of those two elements going together.

A Coffin Full of Dollars by Joe Millard (1971)

And we're back!

I don't know why Manco looks so young. He's got to be about sixty-something in this story.

This is the second Man with No Name spinoff novel/licensed fanfiction I ever read. Since it presumably takes place about 20 years after For a Few Dollars More, the Man with No Name is Manco at this point.
I have to say, I enjoyed this one more than A Dollar to Die For. I found it as an eBook on Scribd and read it from beginning to end on my phone.

While going about his bounty hunter business and turning in the corpse of "No Nose" Megley, the circus comes to town.

Yes, you heard that right. Well, it's not terribly out of place in a Western story. This circus is led by Dandy Deever, gambler, con man and family man whose wife and children, as well as a trumpeter who might be black but I'm not sure, are travelling by with their animals, including a very true-to-nature old lion.

So Manco gets his ticket to the circus, and Dandy confides in him that he's actually a pickpocket. I really like Dandy, actually. He's one of the most entertaining characters in the novel.

Standing in the crowd, a distance away from Manco is... dun dun dun... Lee van Cleef! Or one of many Lee van Cleefs that we see in this series of novels, anyway. This one is his rival, Shadrach, who is faster to gun down the bounties and collect them than Manco could ever hope to be.
I kind of like it that as superhuman as Manco's skills are, as flawlessly as he can shoot a rope from at least fifty feet away, he still has a rival, someone to bring him down from his lofty status as the best gunman in the world. Then again, he must be in about his sixties by now, and his body might be giving up on him, who knows? He is played in the movies by a fantastic stuntman.

I say all this because the story seems to take place in the 1890s, and when Manco comes across the trumpeter, he mentions to him that what he's playing is something they call "jazz", which didn't start until at least 1895. I'm just nitpicking here.

While the show starts, the show is interrupted by a couple of wasted thugs whom Manco has time and space to pick off after they start making advances towards Dandy's wife and daughter. These thugs belonged to the mestizo bandit chief Apachito ("half-Apache, half-Comanchero and all poison mean)".  Apachito himself is the other most entertaining character in the novella. Burly, cocky and sadistic, and very credibly dangerous. He's a man with attitude and I loved every moment of it. I also found it funny how easily he was scared off by that moth-eaten old lion.

However, his physical description leaves something to be desired. He's described as "squat" and "thick-bodied", but Millard goes into little to no detail about his facial features. Why is he described in such a vague manner compared to Shadrach?

So anyway, after Manco saves Dandy's family, he agrees to go on tour with them and do a shooting act.

I can't believe I just said that.

Isn't that a waste of bullets? He needs those for his work. Or some way to make money.

I'm having a lot of trouble imagining Manco on stage right now.

The circus troupe passes through the rough and tough town of Hangville, a haven for criminals and such. Apachito shows up for the first time, and Shadrach also turns up, forcing him and Manco into an alliance. They evacuate money from the bank before Apachito and his gang can get their hands on it. And it appears that Dandy has hidden the dollars in the trick coffin, hence the title.

The novella has mostly original characters in it so Millard doesn't raise too many eyebrows of devoted fans.

The one thing that's really out of character is that Manco talks too much. As a rule he only says what really needs to be said and takes a secret delight in being smarter than everyone else.

Also, there's a scene where he dreams about his own past, way back even before he was Blondie (or Whitey, as Millard once called him for some reason). That bothers me because it ruins the mystery of who he is, what he is or where he came from. We don't know that he was ever a ranch hand.

There is another scene that wasn't needed, where Manco gets into trouble with the people of Hangville, almost gets arrested, escapes, kills an outlaw and then he and Shadrach continue their journey like nothing happened. That scene went nowhere.

The supporting characters are a lot of fun, though. Shadrach, Dandy and Apachito are all a delight to read about. The action sequences, while a bit silly, are also very creative.

It also seems that Manco and Shadrach have a nice little bromance going on. Maybe it's just me but they are a little too open about each other's personal habits.

A Coffin Full of Dollars at best is just an entertaining adventure story, if you can get past the fact that it was hurriedly written to make money off of a popular trilogy. I think it has a lot to offer.

A Dollar to Die For by Brian Fox (1967)

Those two on either side of Blondie are definitely not in the review.

As you know, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is my all time favourite movie. It's a beautifully crafted masterpiece, and the main character, the lovable thief and outlaw Tuco Ramirez, is very close to my heart and has inspired me immensely in my artwork and self expression. What's more, Eli Wallach is, to say the least, a triumph in the role. So when I learned that there were spinoff novels and he was in one of them, I was nervous, excited, anxious and finally bought my copy, and first read it in October 2015.

The Dollars Trilogy movies were always going to be a hard act to follow, especially when the novels were written in a short amount of time to capitalize on the movies' success. They were basically licensed fanfiction.

This book isn't the worst thing I've read as far as Western pulp novels go, but it does have a lot of problems.

First of all, the book is not as humorous as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It's very dramatic and violent, with a lot of double crossing from different directions and a very strange Apache torture device.
Second, Blondie and Tuco have very few scenes together, for those that miss the violent bromance that they shared in the film.

The story introduces us first to the Man with No Name, bringing in an outlaw for the money and then freeing him, as he did with Tuco. I guess the scam just keeps being a good idea for him. He's out to capture a presumably "half-Apache" criminal named Pinky Roebuck, who has the distinction of being a charismatic Albino.
The MacGuffin of the story is the gold that the Count de Cabronet failed to send puppet Emperor Maximilian to save his life. I like the presentation of authority brutality in the story. There's a short scene where the greedy and corrupt governor kills the guard who had slipped Maximilian the note telling him he would be saved while torturing him for information. It's a nice demonstration how in such a huge political crisis, no side is innocent.

On that note, despite supporting a capitalist dictatorship, the Count de Cabronet is far too benevolent to be considered a threat. De Cabronet reminds me of the Baxters from 'A Fistful of Dollars'. Apart from attempting to free the pawn of a tyrant, who is portrayed in a sympathetic light here, he doesn't really do anything all that bad towards the other couple of guys. In fact, greed and dodgy political views aside, he's about Blondie's moral level. No wonder the bounty hunter trusts him.
The Mexican Army is out to recover the money, and Sgt. Tuco Ramirez is among them. That part surprised me. Those who have seen him in GBU will know that Tuco is not a political man, and finds war and rebellion just an obstacle in the way of money. He wouldn't sign up as a soldier, at least not enlisting using his real name ("One name is as good as another. Not wise to use your own name.") . He's too two-faced for that and he knows it. He knows better than to risk being caught and executed for treason. One of his charges did list him as "misrespresenting a Mexican general", but it's likely that he made that up to raise the bounty when he and Blondie were doing their scam together. And I doubt he would commit the same crime twice, or not twice in the same place.

I preferred Tuco when he was just a tinhorn bandit. He was the constant victim of pratfalls and outright horrible luck. He constantly got tied up, nearly hanged and then left behind in the desert only to start mouthing off like he had suffered a breakup. And his obsessive determined revenge against Blondie, like that of a rejected lover, was a distinguishing and relatable feature, and so petty it was hilarious.  The fact that he's so down and out was a constant source of humor, and I think that if Brian Fox had taken a different creative direction he'd have made the book as funny as the movie that inspired it.
Reading this, I feel like he's changed so much that I barely recognize him anymore.
He's still energetic and very entertaining to read about, but I think he could have suffered a little more consistently. We could have laughed at him a bit more. His humour is what makes him one of the greatest movie characters of all time.
Also, Fox is mean to him. He calls him ugly constantly. I know that's his designation, but the point is he's ugly on the inside. And Eli Wallach was one handsome fellow, up until the age of about 60.

After killing De Cabronet's men, Sgt. Ramirez and his fellow bandits murder members of their own company, and Tuco promotes himself to General. As highly as he thinks of himself, he wouldn't go shouting that out in a forest. He'd know that he'd get caught and somebody would be listening. Even joining the army in the first place is out of character for him, or at least lasting in the army without getting fired for speaking out of turn or something.
Another thing, he keeps calling himself Tuco the Terrible. Yeah, that caught on really well.
While that went on, Blondie captures Pinky Roebuck, who is a fairly interesting character, if not merely delightfully evil. He's like this charismatic Giuliano Gemma type, only, you know, a terrifying albino. They find De Cabronet with his throat cut, but alive, so Blondie saves his life and the Count informs them about the gold that Tuco and his buddies made off with.
Meanwhile "General Tuco", having hidden De Cabronet's gold in various places and replaced the money in his men's bags with rocks, is out partying, and passes out by the well. This little gaffe that the bandit makes is one of a few moments where Fox actually does get the character down.
Apaches attack the town, kill Tuco's men and take him hostage, mistaking him for someone more important than he really is.
Pinky arrives, interrogates him, and despite the fact that Tuco is frightened out of his wits, we are aware Fox has abstained from him most of his own humanity. However find out that Roebuck's going to double-cross Blondie as well to get the gold for himself.

And here's where it gets weird. The book has this bit where Apaches would stake their prisoner on an anthill and have ants eat them alive. I don't know if that's a real Apache form of torture or not. It sounds really made up. Maybe Fox was racist against Native Americans, I dunno. It seemed really pointless for the Count de Cabronet to arrive with his sword (which Tuco conveniently left behind trying to fend off Apaches), and kill a bunch of guys who explicitly aren't interested in gold.
I think at this point I'd have instead had Blondie and Tuco, tied together against a tree, attempt to get out, instead of having Apaches slash their shoulders with spears as they remained trussed up there. That would have been true to the spirit of their relationship. Then they'd have had a chance to turn on Pinky together. That I'd have liked to see.
But no, instead Blondie had to have that ant thing happen to him, almost, so that this Cabronet he trusts can save him.

Meanwhile Pinky is leading the captive Tuco through the desert and the poor bandit is starved half to death. That big beautiful body of his (which Fox doesn't speak of so favourably) has pretty much shrunk as he bravely refuses to tell Pinky where he hid the money. He's depressed and drained of energy, and at this point, we really feel bad for him.
It's sort of the same thing that Tuco himself had put Blondie through in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, only the physical effects on him are described to be much worse. 
It also recalls the horrible beating that he took in the Union camp on orders from Angel Eyes, and yet again here he gets his revenge.
We start to root for him as he turns the tables on the albino Apache, tying him to a tree and making off with the gold. If I were Tuco, I'd have killed Roebuck for what he did to me.

What I like about the book is that there's moments of peace. There's moments where our bandido can just kick back and relax and once more, you feel it with him. You feel his health returning and you can't help but smile with him.
Yes, I'm in love with him, can't you tell?

There are few funny moments in the novel, but one is where he's dreaming that a beautiful woman is touching his shoulder when really it's Captain Alvarez. You can just picture his expression, a goofy, sleepy smile morphing into a mask of dread.

The last act of the book was rather weak.
Tuco is found by Captain Alvarez and promoted to Lieutenant, then found by Blondie. The book mentions Pablo in passing, although not by name, as "one of [Tuco's] brothers". I know I sound like a purist for the movie but it worked better when Pablo was his only brother. It makes them feel closer somehow.

Blondie and Tuco kill the Mexican soldiers to get to the gold and it's all a confusing mess. De Cabronet joins the fight, but his leg gets wounded, and Pinky and Tuco get turned in for their crimes against humanity. I don't understand why Pinky had to survive, other than the fact that Blondie is all too generous. We know the guy is worse than the Apaches, and yet the Apaches die for their trouble.
Good news is, Blondie yanks open the jail cell window because he feels that "a world without Tuco would be far less interesting." I knew it! He does feel something for him!

This book was just okay. Not good, not bad. But it has serious problems with characterisation, the most glaring example being Tuco. Fox gets a fair grasp of his personality but chooses to portray him as more of a stereotypical bandido than the complex, morally ambiguous figure he is. Also, he doesn't call Blondie "Blondie". I wonder why Fox made that choice.

Speaking of Blondie, Fox makes better sense of his personality, but there is one issue. Why does he accept that spiked drink from the Count de Cabronet? He would be streetwise enough not to do a thing like that.

The plotting doesn't go as all over the place as something like Flaming Irons. It does have something close to a beginning, a middle and an end.

Like I've said, although it's licensed,  it's nothing more than just glorified fanfiction.

Not as good as it could have been, but if you're really curious, maybe check it out.

Also, it inspired an animation from me! A short, pencil one, anyway. This one's called Tuco in Tyopa, and it depicts the scene where he's collapsed by the well in a deep, drunken slumber, and wakes up to find the town being sacked by Apaches!

Here's the Vimeo link in case it doesn't play very well.

https://vimeo.com/167015752