BARON ORGAZ by Frank Lauria (Bantam 1974)

"Baron Orgaz" sounds ridiculously camp, like "Flesh Gordon" or something, and it doesn't help that the cover sports a naked woman with a skull in front of her and a Nazi swastika behind her. Oddly, Lauria plays the name . . . well, I wouldn't say "straight," but definitely serious. It's never played for yucks, that's for sure. If anything, this is the grimmest, most downbeat entry in the series thus far.

A friend of a friend disappears. Orient reluctantly lets himself get talked into looking into the matter. Then the boy turns up dead, bearing brand- and whip-marks from an apparent S/M scenario gone wrong. Lauria then takes Orient deep into New York gay subculture. This one really is all about the gay. It's not my place to say how accurately he presents it, but my impression is that he at least tries to treat the subject with some seriousness and care. Ultimately, though, this is a more-or-less sleazy horror paperback, so Lauria gives Orient's search the air of tour through the Inferno, and paints the walls of certain scenes thick with coats of noir-ish grime. Then, there's no getting around the fact that the bad guys are gay Nazis. I guess what I'm saying is, he really tries to walk a tightrope between earnestness and exploitation. To my mind, he pulls it off well, but your mileage may vary.

As for what makes this a particularly dark entry in the series, Orient comes into it with a number of relationships still unstable from the previous novel, Lady Sativa. Those relationships never do stabilize, and in fact distract him with a lot of emotional turmoil while he's trying to face down his most dangerous enemy yet.

The Nazis here are truly chilling. They aren't the jackbooted men's-adventure cartoons associated here at Groovy Age with rape gorillas and whatnot, but ruthless, icy killers with frightful black magic at their disposal. Lauria does tread onto dubious territory when one character "reveals" that the Holocaust was not an ethnic cleansing, but a mass ritual of human sacrifice toward some occult end. As with the treatment of gay characters and homosexuality, given the kind of book Lauria is writing here, milking the Nazis for their exploitative potential is part of the job he's set for himself, but he seems concerned to do it as seriously, even tastefully as possible--with inevitably mixed results.

There are a number of twists, but one in particular that really left my jaw hanging open--it just wasn't even something I entertained as a possibility.

International politics/events become a much bigger factor here than in any prior entry, as Orient finds his movement into and within Egypt severely constrained by the Yom Kippur War with Israel.

Bottom line--this series continues to impress! I'm inclined to recommend it more highly with each installment I read. Here's looking forward to the next!