Showing posts with label Award Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Award Books. Show all posts

Monday, December 11, 2023

Assault #1: The Raid On Reichswald Fortress


Assault #1: The Raid On Reichswald Fortress, by J.M. Flynn
No month stated, 1974  Award Books

A short-lived attempt at a Dirty Dozen-styled action series, Assault only ran three volumes, and might have caused some reader confusion because it was credited to two different authors. Veteran writer J.M. Flynn handled this first volume, and the other two were credited to C.J. Floyd. I’m assuming then that Award Books didn’t consider this series along the lines of Nick Carter: Killmaster, as only one volume was published a year and the series was not credited to a house name. Speaking of which, Flynn gets some imprint in-jokery in, with the mention late in the novel of a character reading “a dog-eared French translation of a Nick Carter book,” though given that this novel occurs in the early 1940s, it must be one of those early 20th century Detective Nick Carter pulps. 

Whatever the story behind the series’ origin, Assault #1 proudly boasts its “in the tradition of” heritage, namechecking both The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare on the back cover. At only 172 pages, The Raid On Reichswald Fortress is a fraction of the length of E.M. Nathanson’s The Dirty Dozen, but like Nathanson, J.M. Flynn spends a goodly portion of the narrative focused on training, with the climactic “raid” almost an afterthought. Hey, it just occurred to me: E.M Nathanson, J.M. Flynn, C.J. Floyd…gee, do you think Award was trying to establish a trend? “Don’t just rip off the plot – rip off the author’s name, too!” 

J.M. Flynn was quite prolific, but in all the years of the blog I’ve so far only read and reviewed his Joe Rigg books, which were published by Leisure after this Award series and were credited to “Jay Flynn.” It’s been so long since I read the Rigg books that I can’t tell how Flynn’s narrative style here in the first Assault compares. He does have a gift for memorable opening lines, and tries to bring realism into his tale. He doesn’t deliver much on the action front, but he does cater to the genre demand for sex, with hero Sgt. Brendan Deasy Jackorowsky (aka “Mister Jack”) scoring with two ladies in the short course of the novel. However, given that Award was a slightly more upscale imprint than Leisure, there’s none of the “I want you in my ass!” raunch of the Joe Rigg books. The sex scenes here are more along what one might find in the Nick Carter: Killmaster books, if only a little more explicit. 

Flynn does bring a little more evocative scene setting to the opening than the typical men’s adventure novel, opening the tale with a young Mister Jack (I refuse to type out his long last name!) as a young man just out of the States, starting his life as a mercenary in the Spanish Civil War. From there he goes to a tenure as the overseer at a plantation in South America, then finally into a six-year hitch in the Marines to avoid prison time. We’re told in almost off-hand fashion of the “dirty tricks” Mister Jack pulls on the Germans as the action starts up on the European front, but again he rubs officials the wrong way and is sent back Stateside, where he becomes a drill sergeant – which is where he picks up the “Mister Jack” title. 

Luckily Flynn doesn’t spend the entire novel on this origin material. We get to the meat of the plot pretty quickly. It’s before the Normady invasion and Mister Jack is called in by an Army general to head up a special project that was dreamed up by the “Psych Warfare Department.” These guys claim that “suicide squads” are all the rage, and that condemned men might fight better and harder than normal soldiers. Given his past, with dirty tricks on the Nazis and his general run-ins with authority, Mister Jack is picked as the man to helm this project, even though he’s a Marine and it’s officially an Army deal, one that’s being run by the OSS. 

All this seems rather heavy-handed so far as setup goes, made even more strange given that Flynn makes a big deal out of the “instant hate” Mister Jack has for his commanding officer, portly old deskbound General Mose Barnum, who misses the days back in the Great War when he ran his own dirty tricks on the Germans. But here’s the thing – despite what Flynn tells us, Barnum and Mister Jack get along pretty much without any trouble. In fact, General Barnum even sneaks his way into the climactic raid, proving his own despite being over the hill. What I mean to say is, it seems Flynn was given this inordinate setup – have a Marine head up an Army job with a commanding officer he hates – but he only sort of catered to it. I mean General Barnum spends the first part of the narrative huffing and puffing at Mister Jack’s various “derelictions,” but then just looks the other way. There’s no tension or confrontation or anything. 

Anyway, as for the project Mister Jack will head up – of course, it’s the Dirty Dozen deal. Flynn’s given various dossiers of imprisoned soldiers and puts together a group of thirty who will ultimately become his “Assault Team.” Flynn only focuses on a few of them – the ones, of course, who will be chosen for this novel’s assignment. There’s Truman Belcher, a black guy who speaks perfect French. And Calvin Justice, a “non-gay” drag queen who was thrown in the brig and has been “raped more times” than he can count by his fellow soldiers because he looks so much like a woman when he’s in drag (a drag queen soldier – how prescient! In today’s Army he’d make general!). There are also a pair of “forage masters” from the South named Eastwood and Dixon who “forage” by stealing things. 

Flynn rather clumsily wields together two subplots: while first coming onto the job Mister Jack goes into the city one night and picks up a hotstuff brunette named Elaine. She claims to be engaged to a soldier who is overseas, but she hasn’t heard from in a while. Mister Jack rather easily breaks down her “I’m engaged” defenses and…she gives him a bj, folks, one of the stranger “first date sex scenes” I’ve yet read, particularly given that Flynn doesn’t go for full-bore sleaze in the details and leaves much to the reader’s fevered imagination. Humorously, Elaine will be there to fulfill the narrative’s need for random sex, as Mister Jack will occasionally head off-base to get some nookie, also successfully breaking down Elaine’s “I’m engaged so I’ll just give you a b.j.” defenses so that they engage in full hardcore shenanigans. As mentioned though the sexual material in the novel isn’t too raunchy, along the lines of “She made love fiercely” and the like. Hey, wasn’t that the title of a Monkees song?

Anyway, here’s the messy subplot-tying: one day Mister Jack is receiving a new batch of GI prisoners from overseas, guys who have ran afoul of the brass while stationed in Europe, and wouldn’t you know it but one of them’s Elaine’s fiance!! Indeed, he’s been arrested for murder. But man, Flynn does zilch with this setup…no spoilers intended, but Elaine’s fiance is out of the novel posthaste and Elaine never even finds out about any of it. In fact, Elaine herself is soon gone from the narrative, but (again apologies for the spoilers) she shows up at the end without much fanfare. The entire “fiance” subplot has no bearing on the plot, and to tell the truth it offended me on a personal level. 

Once his thirty men are chosen, Mister Jack and his second in command Charlie Bates head out to a base in the Nevada desert for even more training! This entails the forage masters rustling up game to eat, others on the team working on the buildings they’ll live in, and in general more training for their eventual dirty tricks missions on the damn Nazis. Finally the job comes up – did you guess it was going to be a raid on someplace called Reichswald Fortress? Some British OSS guys give Mister Jack the mission: it’s in the South of France, and the job entails springing a double agent named Annabelle who has gone missing and likely is being held in the fortress. Mister Jack and a select few of his team are to go in there and rescue her – or kill her if they can’t. They show Mister Jack her file photo and he sees that she is “all woman, with out-thrust breasts.” Ah, the days when you didn’t need to be a biologist to know what a woman is! Simpler times. 

Even here we are denied much action. The team heads over to London – where, coincidence be damned, Mister Jack bumps into Elaine again, for a little more hanky-panky – and then they move to France, where they split off in various undercover roles. The feeling is more of a caper as the crew, even old General Barnum, pose as locals and try to get the scoop on the fortress. The heavy lifting is done, unexpectedly, by the transvestite, as Calvin Justice poses as a local floozie and gets cozy with a Nazi official who is stationed in the fortress – including such memorable stuff as Justice getting the guy too drunk before he can successfully feel up Justice and realize “she” is really a he. 

More heavy lifting is done by Belcher, who poses as “a pimp from Marseilles” and gets intel on Reichswald thanks to the hookers he assembles for his stable. We get our first action scene when Eastwood and Dixon take on a German squad; this happens fairly late in the novel, which should give you an idea of how “action packed” The Raid On Reichswald Fortress is. In fact, the titular raid is over and done with in a page or two, Mister Jack and team wearing hoods with googles and “spraying” Nazis with submachine guns as they swoop in and rescue Annabelle. Of course, she will turn out to be Mister Jack’s second conquest, Flynn so casually dropping the sex scene into the narrative that you suspect he’s meeting an editorial quota. Even more humorous is that we have another vague-ish sex scene immediately thereafter, once Mister Jack has returned to the US and reconnected with Elaine. 

This was it for Flynn’s involvement with Assault, but by novel’s end we learn that Mister Jack’s team is now a “unified assault team” and is ready to go on missions across Europe at the behest of the OSS. We’ll see if C.J. Floyd retains the same setup and uses the same characters for the team members, or if he introduces new ones for each new assignment. I’ll also be curious to see if Elaine is established as Mister Jack’s main squeeze, which definitely is implied at the finale of The Raid On Reichswald Fortress.

Thursday, October 26, 2023

The Terrible Ones (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #13)


The Terrible Ones, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1966  Award Books

I hereby take back my sexist comment that female authors can’t write men’s adventure novels – or at least I’ll amend it to that some female authors can write men’s adventure novels, and Valerie Moolman proves that she is one of those very few with this installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster. Which is ironic, because Moolman is the Killmaster author who inspired my sexist comment in the first place. 

But man, Moolman really delivers this time, with plentiful (and at times quite violent) action scenes and even a sex scene that goes on for pages in fairly explicit fashion. And sure, Nick Carter friggin’ falls in love this time around, but we’ll pass that off as maybe Valerie Moolman having her tongue in cheek, because I think practically anyone who has read a men’s adventure novel can figure out what happens to the girl Nick falls in love with. Otherwise The Terrible Ones indicates that Moolman, who wrote the initial volumes of the series, might have around this time become acquainted with the work of series newcomer Manning Lee Stokes, who delivered a much more brutal version of Nick “Killmaster” Carter than the one depicted in the first volume

What I mean to say is, the “Nick” (as he’s referred to in these early volumes) seen here is not much at all like the Nick in the other Moolman installments I’ve written, and seems more like a prefigure of the arrogant, sexually-baiting Nick of the later Jon Messmann installments. The latter comes to play with his acidic banter with a female guerrilla he hooks up with during the book; their venomous spatting, with Nick heavily laying on the sexual innuendo, reminded me a lot of the stuff in the almighty Sea Trap (still one of my all-time favorite men’s adventure novels ever). And Nick is more quick to fight and kill this time around…though, now that I think of it, Moolman’s Nick was always fairly brutal, like when he “jokingly” gassed to death legions of men in Hanoi

Well anyway, we get into it pretty quick, with Nick when we meet him scaling a cliff on a dark night in Haiti, and he’s just gotten here on a new mission with very vague explanation from boss Hawk, the briefing only shown in flashback. The more important thing here is that Nick’s scaling the cliff with “metal claws” on his hands and feet, and turns into a proto-Wolverine when he gets up top and is discovered by a Cuban. Here’s where I realized this wasn’t the typical Valerie Moolman installment, as Nick hacks the dude up good and proper (“The fellow’s guts were dribbling out”), not to mention a guard dog he later encounters. In fact these metal claws are so focused on in the book that the copywriters at Award even noted them in the first-page preview, “the man with the claws.” 

There’s a definite fun factor throughout as Nick is chagrined to learn that his local contact isn’t “Paolo;” due to a communications snafu it’s actually Paula, a hotblooded (and, naturally, hotstuff) blonde who takes an immediate dislike to Nick. This is where the acidic banter comes into play, as the two constantly try to one-up each other in the putdown stakes, or match their fighting skills. Paula is a member of the titular “Terrible Ones;” the title has you expecting some legion of cruel Chicom sadists (ie the mandatory villains in the eary Killmaster years), but in reality the name is more of an intentionally misleading one, as the Terrible Ones are all…beautiful young women from the Dominican Republic. Or, rather, beautiful young widows, their husbands having been executed for plotting against former Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo. The novel is very much of its time here, as Trujillo is constantly mentioned with no explanation or setup; his name likely resonated much better with readers in 1966 than it does in 2023. 

To clarify, the Chicoms do factor into this one, too; a subplot concerns Dr. Tsing-fu Shu, here in Haiti for something called “Operation Blast,” and also leading a secret operation to find a cache of $100 million in gold that Trujillo supposedly hid here in Haiti – the same thing the Terrible Ones have come to Haiti to find. Indeed, the plot is rather busy, and given that Nick is thrown into it with little preparation or setup, discovering things as he goes along, one can almost figure this is a sign of Valerie Moolman herself winging her way through the plot. I have to admit, though, that the sections with Dr. Shu and his minion Tom Kee were a bit trying, mostly because they took away from the Nick-Paula sequences. 

And these, as mentioned, are pretty great. Moolman does a great job developing the relationship; it is clear as day to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the series that Nick will have sex with Paula. I mean given that we are informed how pretty and busty she is in her intro, it’s really only a matter of when the Killmaster will have her. The fun of it is how it develops. As mentioned there are a lot of fireworks between the two, and Moolman delivers some humorous banter. But when Paula sees the Killmaster in action, her feelings start to change – indeed, to the point of “love!” Yes, folks, the blonde beauty (she explains why she’s blonde even though she’s from the DR, by the way) tells Nick she loves him when she gives herself to him…and, crazily enough, Nick starts to feel the same way about her during the several-page boink that ensues! 

Like I said, you don’t need a master’s degree in men’s adventure to see where all this is going. The important note here is that Moolman ignores the series requirement that Nick enjoy the company of three different women per volume; Paula is his only conquest in the book, but boy does Moolman make it count. It does go on and on, and as mentioned it’s fairly explicit. Nothing to the outrageous levels as seen on later Lyle Kenyon Engel productions like The Baroness, but still more risque than any of the sex scenes I’ve yet read in a contemporary Killmaster

Nick, by the way, loves Paula because she is so much like himself – a resourceful, hardy individual who is caring for others but who can kill when necessary. Moolman does strive to make Paula Nick’s soul mate, but the veteran series reader can’t help but remember Julie Baron, a recurring character in the earliest volumes who was also put across as Nick’s equal, soul mate, star-crossed lover, or what have you. Given that she’s only just been introduced with this volume, and Julie (sometimes “Julia”) Baron had already been in a few volumes at this point – and would be in several more – Paula doesn’t really match up. But man, Nick even talks about being with her “after” the mission and whatnot…it’s like the dude is basically declaring her death sentence. 

Yet at the same time, it’s absolutely without sentiment. This book is such a harbinger of a lost time that Paula is multiple times referred to as a “bitch,” ie “This bitch of a girl,” and at the end of the book (after they’ve declared their love for one another, btw), when Paula taunts Nick that he’ll have to take her and the other Terrible Ones along with him on his climactic assault, we’re informed, “The bitch was smiling at him.” It’s humorous that a female author is able to dole out such misogyny, so again I can only congratulate Ms. Moolman – I was thoroughly impressed. Stuff like this is almost like a slap to the face in our thoroughly domesticated and emasculated era of “strong empowered women” who must never, ever, but ever be questioned or criticized.  Not to mention once-masculine heroes who have been neutered by the adherents of a runaway ideology. 

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention something interesting. The cover art for The Terrible Ones was later recycled for The Black Death, a Manning Lee Stokes installment that also took place in Haiti…and included a part where Nick pretended to be a zombie so as to scare some superstitious native soldiers. Early in The Terrible Ones Nick, still with those claws, pretends to be some sort of mountain demon or something, lurking in the shadows and emitting all these unearthly howls and growls to the increasing dismay of the native soldiers who are hunting for him. It’s all pretty goofy but at the same time another harbinger of an early time, as Nick hacks to friggin’ pieces the guard dog the soldiers send into the cave after him. So we have here a “hero” who calls his “one true love” a “bitch” and kills dogs…this is clearly not a hero who would much resonate in 2023, but as mentioned I loved it just because it was so different. 

Action wise the novel’s good but it operates on more of a suspense and tension tip. There’s a great part where Nick and Paula are captured by a trio of Cuban soldiers and Nick undergoes the torture that was mandatory in the earliest volumes; this part sees yet another memorable appearance of Pierre, the tiny gas bomb Nick keeps hidden by his balls. The finale is also pretty cool, with Nick and some of the Terrible Ones congregating on “the temple of the blacks,” which is an old monastery populated by monks in face-covering black cowls. Again Moolman here delivers a bit more violence than in the previous installments of hers I’ve read – and also she attempts (and mostly succeeds) in giving the end of the book much more of an emotional impact than the series norm. 

Overall I really enjoyed The Terrible Ones, and I was happy to be reminded that a series ghostwriter can throw a curveball and turn in something not at all like what you expected.

Monday, September 11, 2023

Hawkshaw


Hawkshaw, by Ron Goulart
No month stated, 1974  Award Books
(Original hardcover edition 1972)

Around twenty years ago I picked up a handful of Ron Goulart sci-fi paperbacks from the ‘60s and ‘70s and eagerly looked forward to reading them, given that they seemed to be along the lines of the funky freaky post-psychedelic sci-fi I have always loved. Then I tried reading one! I think it was Gadget Man. And I realized that Goulart’s schtick is more of sci-fi satire comedy, and that just wasn’t what I was after at the time. 

Flash forward twenty years and I figured I’d give it another go. Hawkshaw was one of the paperbacks I got back then (of course I kept them all, even though I had no plans to read them!), so for no particular reason it became the one I’d try to read. And it seems to be along the same lines as Gadget Man, perhaps even set in the same world – a dissolved United States of (what was then) the near future. In this case it’s 1997, but it’s essentially the 1970s taken to absurd proportions…sort of what Lawrence Sanders did in The Tomorrow File, but much more “comedic” in nature. 

At 156 pages of big print, Hawkshaw is essentially a fast-moving spoof that doesn’t have the time for any elaborate world building. It’s mostly formatted like a mystery, with cipher-like hero Noah Kraft, a reporter, venturing to the “colony” of Connecticut to investigate some supposed werewolf sightings. The werewolf stuff turns out to just be a distraction, as ultimately the plot revolves around Noah chasing a Maguffin: a document with the locations of concentration camps a right-wing group called The Robin Hood Foundation is supposedly running on the east coast. 

If I’m not mistaken this “Fragmented America” was the setting for several Ron Goulart novels; in fact I think most of the ones I have are set in this world. He doesn’t much explore the setting here in Hawkshaw, it must be said – the novel is basically a fast-moving slice of pulp with a definite comedy vibe. And spoiler alert, but there’s hardly anything in the way of sex or violence. All such risque material occurs entirely off-page, and for that matter Goulart isn’t much for the exploitation of the female characters: Noah hooks up with a sort-of agent named Donna, and about the most we get is that she’s “slim” and “pretty.” 

But for that matter, Noah Kraft is himself a cipher. He’s a reporter of the old school, looking to track leads and get the scoop. There isn’t much in the way of technology in his line of work, other than a “pix phone” he uses to call his boss. I also loved the tidbit that he sits on an “air-cushioned seat” while talking on the pix phone with his boss; very 1960s Haus-Rucker Co. space age. Otherwise Ron Goulart is not one for word-painting, and the reader must do some heavy lifting throughout, because Goulart doesn’t much describe anything. He doesn’t even really provide much backdrop for this fractured America, other than errant notes like the fact that the country split up in 1989. 

Instead, Hawkshaw essentially exists so Goulart can lampoon the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. This extends to even underground comix, with the appearance of Bud Tubb, a heavyset “comix” artist known for drawing risque material. I got the impression he was inspired by Vaughn Bode. Upon arrival in Westport to look into the supposed werewolf, Noah soon meets Bud Tubb, who tells Noah of both the mysterious Hawkshaw, leader of the liberal movement, and also the equally-mysterious Robin Hood Foundation, which is based here in Westport and is right-wing in its composition. It’s also led by a colorfully-named mystery man: George Washington II. 

The werewolf is just window dressing, and is quickly found and explained: some guy who was the victim of some Robin Hood Foundation chemicals. More time is spent on oddball shit like a practicing group of cannibals who capture Noah and Donna while they are out driving around. Goulart tries to get a lot of comedy mileage out of this group who come off ultra polite but proud of their newfound taste for human flesh, courtesy a popular TV show: “I might not have turned to cannibalism if the United States had held together,” explains one of them. 

There’s also weird nonsense like Uncle Kidnapper, a guy who employs clowns and works as a contractor for the government; his speciality is saving kidnapped people for a fee. Then there’s the part where Noah goes to New Jersey, which is entirely run by the mob, with more “funny” stuff like the border patrol guards – Mafia wiseguys – handing out “The Mafia does not exist” pamphlets to tourists entering the former state. My favorite of all the random crap though is the actor who goes around in a one-man show as Norman Mailer, reading from Mailer’s work and getting in fistfights with a planted audience member he’s paid to call him a “liberal son of a bitch.” 

All the comedy of course takes away from any tension or suspense; there are a few times where Noah’s in danger, or Donna has been adbucted, but none of it has any bite. Nor does the revelation of who Hawkshaw is; indeed, more time is spent figuring out who the mysterious George Washington II is. At no point does Noah Kraft fight or shoot anyone or do any other sort of action-hero stuff. In fact, the fate of a somewhat important character is left unexplained by novel’s end, which sees Noah returning back to his home base for another story. I’m too lazy to see if this character appeared in any other Goulart novels. 

Well, as mentioned it’s taken me a long time to get around to Ron Goulart. In fact, I’ve put off reading William Shatner’s Tekwar series precisely due to the reason that it was ghostwritten by Ron Goulart, even down to the “funny androids” Goulart was known to populate his own novels with. And I have to say, now that I’ve finally read one of Ron Goulart’s novels, it will likely be quite some time until I read another.

Monday, June 26, 2023

The Liquidator #3: The Cocaine Connection


The Liquidator #3: The Cocaine Connection, by R.L. Brent
No month stated, 1974  Award Books

The third volume of The Liquidator dispenses with the continuity that linked the first two volumes and comes off more like a standalone piece, the mysterious “R.L. Brent” (supposedly Larry Powell) dropping a lot of the earlier subplots and focusing solely on hero Jake “The Liquidator” Brand’s attempt to bust a Syndicate drug pipeline in Florida. That said, the book still retains the “hardboiled ‘70s” vibe of the previous books. 

Brent pulls a trick from the template of contemporary men’s adventure magazine yarns: The Cocaine Connection opens toward the end of the story, with an unarmed and injured Brand being chased through darkened woods by rifle-toting goons. We are quickly told that Brand’s cover has been blown, they’re onto him, and if they catch him he’s dead. Then they catch him, and the story flashes back about a week. It won’t be until page 160 that we get back to this opening incident, but the main effect is that we know from the start that Brand’s cover is going to be blown, which makes pretty much the entirety of the ensuing narrative moot! 

But as usual R.L. Brent is too gifted a writer to make it all seem like a waste of time. The taut, effective prose of the earlier books is still present, as is the tough vibe. I just had a problem with the overall story of this one. So as we know, Jake Brand was once a top cop and was put in prison on fake charges, all of which was recounted in the first volume. Brand’s out now and has been exacting vengeance on the Syndicate bastards who put the frame on him, but the mastermind of the plot, Crosetti, has thus far escaped Brand. 

Rather than follow through on this revenge angle, R.L. Brent instead gussies up the plot with Brant venturing down to Florida to impersonate a Syndicate rep in the hopes of undoing a cocaine line that’s been put together, supposedly, by Crosetti. The reasoning here is that Brand’s trying to find Crosetti, so I guess he figures that if he busts up his coke ring the man himself will show up. Or something. As stated, The Cocaine Connection is mostly a standalone, and could just as easily be an installment of Narc, with Brand almost acting as an undercover Federal agent. Indeed, people even believe he is an undercover Fedearl agent in this one. 

You know, back in the first volume I speculated that this was a sort-of “near future” series, in that the events of the first volume seemed to take place in 1973, and in that same book Brand was sent to prison for five years. Meaning, it was 1978 when he got out, a few years after the publication date. But in The Cocaine Connection we’re informed a rich guy is driving a 1974 model car, with the implication that it’s brand new, so maybe Brent just dropped the idea, or maybe even more preposterously I was just wrong. Otherwise this volume does refer back to the first volume quite often, mostly because Brand ventures to Miami in this one for the first time since he was a cop. 

There’s still a bit of a Parker vibe with Brand using his underworld connections to find Crosetti. It’s in this way that Brand learns of the cocaine pipeline; long story short, a remote island off Florida called Reese’s Bluff seems to be the location where a Syndicate courier makes the payoff for the cocaine, the importation of which is handled by a non-Syndicate organization. In order to finally get Crosetti, Brand decides to go down there and bust up the pipeline. He manages to find the guy who handles the payoff, getting in a long car chase with him in the process. 

From there it’s into the “undercover agent” scenario…but again, we know from page one that Brand’s cover is fated to be blown. Reese’s Bluff is essentially a small town blocked off from the rest of society, and Brand is immediately treated with suspicion when he shows up there – posing as “Luther Martin,” new Syndicate money man. Like a regular Mack Bolan, Jake Brand is such a natural at pretending to be a mobster that he manages to fool the people he hands the coke payoff money to. It doesn’t hurt matters that the wife of the head honcho happens to be a busty redhead in her 30s who immediately has an eye for Brand – and eagerly thinks about getting him into bed. 

This leads to one of the more humorous lines I’ve recently read; the horny redhead is named Liz and Brand is certain she was doing the previous Syndicate money man. So Brand starts pushing her buttons and, when she shows him to a spare room he can sleep in that night, he basically invites her to slide into bed with him for some sex that night, capping it off with the unforgettable line: “I like to be awakened by a pair of naked tits in my back.” Well who doesn’t?? Of course this only serves to make Liz even more horny and she does this very thing to awaken Brand shortly thereafter, leading to a somewhat explicit conjugation between the two. 

Another memorable bit follows, when Brand’s jumped by a trio of goons who work for the lady’s wife. This is a brutal sequence of hand-to-hand combat that could almost come out of Gannon, only without the spiked knuckles ripping out eyeballs or anything. Otherwise Brent again displays his ability to write “realistic” crime pulp with a woozy, hurt Brand managing to defend himself against three opponents – and get the upper hand, thanks to a tire iron that he puts to violent work. A super cool sequence that is probably one of the more tense action scenes I’ve read in a while. 

But regardless I feel the plot of The Cocaine Connection just doesn’t make much sense. For reasons I couldn’t understand, Brand stays in Reese’s Bluff and, uh, “bluffs” his way into the upper echelons of the non-Syndicate coke ring. Why? He tells them he’s an upwardly-mobile goon who wants a bigger piece of the pie, or whatever, but what makes no sense is that it is of course all bullshit and one phone call could undo Brand’s entire disguise. It gets even goofier when he meets the brains of the non-Syndicate cocaine ring, Hamilton Reese, Brand doesn’t just kill him – even though he knows he should – and just continues with his charade. 

Meanwhile, he gets laid again: this courtesy Hamilton Reese’s “small breasted” hotstuff daughter, Valerie, who like Liz immediately lets Brand know of her interests. He must certainly be virile, given that per the plot he’s been banged out of shape and has various stitches on him, thanks to the aforementioned fight with the three thugs. But Valerie still lets her interests clearly be known. The payoff of this subplot will upset the sensitive readers of today: when Valerie catches Brand snooping around the house that night, he pushes her into her room and forces himself on her. But given that she’s just as much a nympho as Liz, she’s all for it, even if it’s “the next thing to rape,” leading to another somewhat-explicit sex scene. 

It's to Brent’s credit that the lead-up to Brand’s cover being blown is filled with tension, even though we already know it’s bound to happen. He’s guilty of a little revisionism, though; I got a chuckle out of how, in the opening pages, Brent states several times that Brand is unarmed…then, later in the book, we’re told that Brand straps a sharp letter opener to his calf, hidden under his pants. When he finally uses it, once the narrative picks up from those opening pages, we’re informed “he almost forgot about” the knife that he’d hidden on himself! The cynic in me could almost think that R.L. Brent was just coming up with all this on the fly. 

The finale is pretty cool. After being “the hunted,” Brand decides to “go hunting” and tracks down the coke pipeline runners one by one. Memorable stuff follows, like one guy impaling himself on the spike that’s used for copy sheets in a printing office. But it’s a little rushed at times, with some of Brand’s vengeance-sating not being exploited to the full extent. Brent does wrap up one of the major revenge angles of the series, but by novel’s end The Liquidator is prepared to keep on liquidating; and we get a hint that he might finally start hunting down that lookalike who framed him the first volume. 

Overall The Cocaine Connection was another fun entry in The Liquidator, with the same tough, terse vibe as the previous two books. It just felt a bit disconnected, given the entire “undercover” angle of the plot. Otherwise I’d certainly agree with no less than King Features and their cover blurb – and I’m starting to suspect that The Liquidator was one of the very few (only?) men’s adventure series that got any industry cred because publisher Award-Universal was probably affiliated with King Features, but who knows. I’m sure a simple Google search would explain it all, but I’m quite lazy.

Monday, June 6, 2022

The Cobra Kill (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #47)


The Cobra Kill, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1969

Within a few pages of this installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster, written by series veteran Manning Lee Stokes, I realized that it was actually sort of a sequel to an earlier Stokes yarn, possibly The Red Guard (1967). I am assuming that earlier volume, which I haven’t yet read, features Nick (as he was referred to in these earlier volumes) in Hong Kong, up against the Red Chinese and some Chinese tongs. The Cobra Kill opens with Nick once again in Hong Kong, this time on vacation, but his cover’s been blown and he’s on the run from various Tongs and Commies who are out to get him – as revenge for the incidents in that previous volume.  Or maybe it was another Stokes volume...maybe even one I’ve read but have forgotten! 

After this establishing setup, though, The Cobra Kill becomes its own novel, with no further references to the events of The Red Guard. In fact the reader doesn’t even need to have read the earlier book; it’s not like the plot of this one hinges on anything that happened in it. Nick will be out of Hong Kong and on into Indonesia and Malaysia for the majority of the novel. But actually it’s not even “Nick” this time…sadly, friends, we’ve now moved into the first-person years of Nick Carter: Killmaster, which would last until the mid 1980s. Nick Carter himself tells us the story, and thankfully he doesn’t prove to be as much of a bore as he was in the other first-person Killmaster novels I’ve read by Manning Lee Stokes, The Red Rays and The Black Death. The action pretty much keeps moving, with Nick not slowing down the proceedings with his incessant asides like he did in those other two books. But then we do get a fair bit of jungle travelogue in the novel, which gives The Cobra Kill more the vibe of something like Joaquin Hawks

Before I get into it though I wanted to note some things I’ve belatedly noticed about Stokes’s take on Nick. For one, Stokes doesn’t refer to Nick’s customary trio of weapons by their goofy nicknames: Wilhelmina the Luger is just “the Luger,” Hugo the stiletto is just “the stiletto,” and Pierre the gas bomb…actually the gas bomb isn’t even mentioned in The Cobra Kill. I can’t recall if Stokes used the weapons nicknames in the third-person Killmaster novels he wrote. Another thing is that Stokes’s take on Nick is that he’s purely an assassin; Stokes takes the “Killmaster” title literally, in that Nick Carter is only ever sent out on assignments that require someone to be killed. So this is sort of like the 007 setup of James Bond, but whereas “007” just means Bond has the approval to kill, Nick Carter is straight-up an assassin…something Manning Lee Stokes makes quite clear in The Cobra Kill

In fact Nick is certain that the fact he’s a professional assassin scares a particular AXE contact this time out. As mentioned though when we meet Nick he’s on vacation in Hong Kong, but it’s as if we’ve missed another story entirely, as we’re informed that within the past few hours Nick has run afoul of Tongs, Commies, and the cops, and he’s hiding in a US embassy…just as a call comes in from his boss David Hawk. Nick is to leave Hong Kong and proceed to Indonesia, where he’ll eventually go to Malaysia; the Malaysian government has worked out a secret deal with AXE for Nick, top AXE Killmaster, to kill commie rabble-rouser Lim Yang, aka The Red Cobra. This Mao-type leader has put together a guerrilla army of red insurgents in the Malaysian government, and since the government has never acknowledged him, they want him quietly killed by an outside party. It’s a bit of a belabored setup, but it’s Nick’s job, so he’s on the case – again, he is a professional assassin, and his job isn’t saving the world, it’s killing a communist leader. (I wonder if Nick has a celll phone number where I can reach him?) 

Seriously though, the anti-communist invective is strong throughout The Cobra Kill; Nick even notes in reluctant admiration how the Red Cobra has gone after college kids in Malaysia, knowing they’d be susceptible to his message, given how they’d want to go against their parents. But Nick, AXE, the Malaysian government, and practically everyone else realizes that communism is a bad idea, so there are no niceties in play; the job calls for the Red Cobra’s death, which would kill off the movement. Nick pays an expat – a former newsman who killed his wife and moved to Hong Kong, we’re informed randomly enough – to safely get out of Hong Kong. Once Nick’s in Indonesia the plot kicks in…the major portion of The Cobra Kill is Nick trying to find the Red Cobra, and most of it takes place in the jungles of Malaysia. The short sequence in Indonesia is pretty much the only part of the novel where Nick’s in civizliation. 

Nick, posing as a boisterous vacationer in a plush hotel, gets a gander at his AXE contact…who of course is a hotstuff babe. Indeed, a sultry “Malay-Chinese” who really turns on the Killmaster. Nick delivers a paean to this girl’s legs that I just had to share: 


The quota for Nick Carter: Killmaster was that Nick would bang at least three broads per book. Stokes as we know would often veer from templates – per Will Murray in his 1982 article on Killmaster, Stokes often went off-course from the setups series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel provided. But of course this leggy Malay-Chinese contact, whose name turns out to be Mora, will be our narrator’s first conquest in The Cobra Kill. Stokes isn’t very explicit this time; again, Stokes’s first-person installments are altogether more tame than his third-person ones, both in the sex and the violence departments. While there isn’t much sleaze, we do learn after the fact that Mora is sort of a nympho…I mean, not a full one, at least per Nick’s post-boink assessment, given that Mora can at least achieve orgasm. She’s just cock crazy is all…not that Nick uses those exact words, being a gentleman and all. Humorously enough, Nick offers to set Mora up with “Doc Saxe, the AXE headshrinker!” 

Nick heads to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Stokes clearly did his research on the flora and fauna of the country – and he wants you to know it. Have I mentioned before that my wife is from Malaysia? I thought about showing her The Cobra Kill to have her vet the details, but then figured the hell with it. One thing I noticed though was that Stokes seems to imply that everyone in Malaysia is Muslim, and this certainly is not true. But then again it could just be the characters Nick encounters. Otherwise Stokes really brings to life the humid green hell of the country, particularly when Nick gets into the jungle with its chittering monkeys, crops of durian, and random cloudbursts. Stokes really did his research on durian, a local fruit which, per Nick, “smells like a sewer” but tastes like heaven. I’d never even heard of durian until I met my wife – she and her family went on about how it was notorious for its bad smell but good taste, but honestly I didn’t think it smelled that bad. 

Actually, Stokes makes one goof: he has Nick flying into Kuala Lumpur Airport. I learned from my own research years ago, during a project I was working on, that there was no major airport in Kuala Lumpur (or “KL,” as the locals call it) until the 1990s – until then all flights went to an airport in Subang, a nearby city. So Stokes, despite his voluminous research, must’ve just winged it (lame pun not intended) when it came to the aiport. But then his intent is to get Nick into the jungle asap. The stuff in KL is over quickly; Nick finds that a colleague has been murdered, and the Killmaster makes his own first kill on page 61 when he bashes the assassin’s head in with the butt of his Luger. This leads to a brutal fight with another assassin, in which Nick “blinds” the guy by jabbing his fingers into the guy’s eyes – though Stokes apparently forgets this incidental detail, as when Nick takes the unconscious assassin off to be interrogated, the guy wakes up and starts “look[ing] around.” 

From here The Cobra Kill gets into the jungle, and will stay there for the duration. Stokes really excels at capturing the vibe of the locale, and as usual he serves up very evocative sequences – like when Nick comes across an abandoned village during a sudden squall, and soon discovers that he’s not alone. But Manning Lee Stokes as ever understands exactly what we expect from the genre: the mysterious figure darting around the ghostly village is a hotstuff native jungle girl named Siti who will serve as Nick’s partner for the remainder of the tale. And of course also per the template, they’ll ultimately get down to some jungle love – with jungle girl Siti (who refers to herself in third-person) insisting that Nick take her from the rear for their first boink: “This way, my way, Siti is comfortable and have all of you, Tuan. All!” 

A curious thing about Stokes’s first-person Killmaster novels is that Nick Carter comes off as a bit obsessive in them. Obsessive about some very unsettling things. In The Red Rays, for example, narrator Nick was obsessed with the fact that, early in the novel, he’d had sex with a triple agent who had been condemned to death; that Nick had, essentially, “screwed a corpse.” This led to periodic asides in the text where Nick ruminated over his bout of necrophilia…even wondering at times if the poor girl was dead yet. Indeed Nick came off as quite the creep in that one. So screwing corpses was his obsession in The Red Rays; in The Cobra Kill his obsession is latrines, and shit. Literal shit. “I went into the latrine and looked at the turds” is an actual line from the book, and in fact I was going to start off the review with that quote but thought it might be a little too off-putting for the more sensitive readers of the blog. 

And why is Nick so obsessed with shit this time? Because he’s tracking the Red Cobra’s guerrilla army through the dense jungles of Malaysia, and by “checking the latrines” of the recently-vacated campsites Nick can get a gauge of how recently the Red Cobra’s army has been in the area. At one point he even goes into a latrine to poke “the feces” with a stick to judge the freshness! He’s also quite interested in how the Red Cobra puts lime on his latrines to cut down the stench. It gets to be a bit much, and honestly made me miss the days when Nick would obsess over screwing a corpse. But this sort of thing makes up a large portion of The Cobra Kill; I mean it’s a lot of jungle travelogue, but Stokes capably captures the setting and brings it to life. Anyway this “latrine checking” is how Nick gradually closes in on the Red Cobra, who despite his colorful name is actually a bland character, an older Malay Chinese with a professorial air. 

But even though he looks harmless, the Red Cobra is truly sadistic, known for wiping out entire villages. Another hallmark of Stokes’s Nick Carter is that he’s a professional, a calm and cool killer, but this time he is driven to hate his target, and for the first time (so Nick tells us), he can’t wait to carry out his assassination. Another hallmark of Stokes’s Killmaster novels is that he’ll take Nick through the wringer, and he certainly does here. Given that the Red Cobra is Chinese, he’s “naturally devious,” and isn’t content to just shoot Nick in the head. Instead, Nick is outfitted with a scuba tank that only has an hour of air in it, and is sent down to a sunken “Jap” sub from WWII (“Jap” is used repeatedly throughout the novel); if Nick can find his way out of the sub, he can live. But of course all avenues of escape from the sub are closed off due to the wreckage, and the Red Cobra has scuba-suited men patrolling the water with spearguns. This is one of the most tense climaxes Stokes has ever delivered for the series, to the extent that the reader himself feels as if he’s running out of air. 

Other than this thrilling climax, there’s nothing really noteworthy about The Cobra Kill, and it almost appears that Stokes pushed himself through the writing by doing a lot of research on Malaysia and jungle survival. Again per Will Murray, it’s quite clear that Stokes was burned out with the series at this point. Whether or not this is true, The Cobra Kill turned out to be Manning Lee Stokes’s penultimate volume of Killmaster. The following year he turned in the aforementioned The Black Death, and that was it for him on the series. It’s easy to see why, as at this point he was also writing Richard Blade and The Aquanauts for Lyle Kenyon Engel. And one can see the kernels of both series in The Cobra Kill: simple jungle sexpot Siti could be any number of the simple barbarian sexpots in Dimension X, and the tense climax with the sunken sub and the empty scuba tank could’ve just as easily featured Tiger Shark as Nick Carter.

Monday, February 14, 2022

The Liquidator #2: Contract For A Killing


The Liquidator #2: Contract For A Killing, by R.L. Brent
No month stated, 1974  Award Books

So with this second volume of The Liquidator I’m prepared to claim that this series is the Parker of the ‘70s. I know, the Parker series itself was being published in the ‘70s, but you know what I mean. Maybe we could say it’s the men’s adventure equivalent of Parker: more action-driven, with more sex and violence, but retaining that tough, crime-pulp vibe, with quality writing and a host of memorable one-off characters. I’m sorry I let these books sit around so long and didn’t start reading the series sooner. 

I still question the authorship: I mean Larry Powell, supposedly “R.L. Brent,” is also supposedly the guy who wrote Donovans Devils, and the first volume of that series was so boring I still haven’t moved on to the second one. The Liquidator comes from an entirely different universe; it’s certainly one of the better-written men’s adventure series of the day, but not in a “literary” sense a la Jon Messmann or Marc Olden. Whereas those authors could get a litle too bogged down in interior dialog or philosophical musings, “Brent” keeps things moving with a lean and mean prose style that still manages to convey depth of characterization. The series really has the vibe of a ‘70s action film, one of those gritty urban action deals that would’ve had a wah-wah guitar and Afro-Cuban percussion-heavy score by Lalo Schifrin. 

These series books were pretty much under the radar, not getting the industry coverage of hardcovers or even standalone paperback originals. But reviewers of the day noticed that The Liquidator was better than the standard offering; just like the first volume, this time we are presented with a few industry reviews touting the book. Indeed, no less than Publisher’s Weekly praised The Liquidator, according to the blurb on the first page: “It’s refreshing to find a hero as interested in sex as bloodletting.” Now there’s a reviewer after my own heart! And that’s certainly true in Contract For A Killing; hero Jake Brand is no prude and, like too many of his “business first” men’s adventure brethren, doesn’t turn down the willing women who come his way. 

Speaking of which, this volume opens with Jake (as the author refers to him) indulging in some of those perks, courtesy Gwen, the babe he picked up at the end of the first volume. They’re in Virginia, laying low, and Jake’s recuperating from his wounds – while also engaging Gwen in some good lovin.’ Jake’s vengeance on the mob still hasn’t been sated, and also there’s still the dangling subplot about the guy who framed him and got him sent to prison for five years. This guy, a professional assassin who goes by many names, looks enough like Jake that he was able to get Jake framed for some murders Jake himself didn’t commit. One of the names the assassin goes by is Richard Stuart, which is the name Brent uses for him in the first half of Contract For A Killing

Brent actually has a lot of subplots in play, and unlike a lot of series it doesn’t come off like page-filling even when we cut over to one-off characters. The series has also clearly been written as a series, if you catch my drift, and not just a bunch of standalones. There are still dangling subplots even at the end of this volume, which leads me to conclude that reading the entirety of The Liquidator could be an enjoyable experience. I certainly enjoyed this volume. The author definitely has his pulp skills intact, for as expected Jake is uncovered, leading to a nice chase sequence. Once he’s sent Gwen off to safety, our hero gets back on the path to revenge, armed only with a .45 and a .38. Unlike other mob-busters of the ‘70s, Jake doesn’t tote around an arsenal, or at least he doesn’t in these earliest books. But this does not detract from the action; the author does a great job of juggling plot development with frequent action sequences. 

Another cool gimmick of the series is that Jake Brand doesn’t have access to limitless funds, like Mack Bolan or Philip Magellan do. He has to stretch his few remaining dollars, and isn’t above snatching up a hundred dollar bill someone insultingly drops in front of him. This gives these novels a bit more of a realistic vibe. Nothing too realistic, but still…it’s not like Bolan, who will routinely loot the Mafia of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to the point that he can just give the “blood money” away. Jake’s mind is often on his wallet and how little money he has to fund his vengeance quest. This lack of funds also has unintentional consequences, in that it puts the mob on his tail. One interesting development in this regard is that Jake hawks the sportscar Gwen lifted at the end of the first volume, buying a less-obvious car, and of course the shady car dealer has mob ties and starts to suspect who Jake might be. 

The Parker vibe for me comes with how Jake works his way through the underworld in search of his prey, meeting a host of oddball characters. First is a guy named Grail, who acts as the agent for Richard Stuart. Grail’s a muscle-bound man of wealth who lives in opulence; blind, he relies on a hotstuff Chinese babe named Anita as his assistant…and bodyguard. This Jake learns the hard way when he tries to lean too strongly on Grail: “The lady knew Kung-Fu, and she knew it very well.” This is a tense scene that takes place in the pitch-dark room, Jake constantly scrabbling around for his dropped gun while the lady and Grail take turns kicking his ass. Another cool thing about The Liquidator is that Jake Brand, despite being all kinds of tough, is not a superhuman a la Mack Bolan. He often makes mistakes, like his penchant for barging into places with little in the way of an exit strategy. 

There’s also a good deal of ‘70s-mandatory lurid stuff; in some sequences dealing with Richard Stuart, the professional assassin, we learn he’s a sadist who enjoys beating around hookers before screwing them. (“It was like raping a woman who had finally given in.”) There’s also a part where another female character is tortured and raped (mostly off-page) for info by a group of Mafia thugs. What’s curious is that another minor character – an independent contractor who tries to cash in on the bounty on Jake Brand’s head – comes acrosss this woman after her torture-rape and offers to help her, but nothing more is mentioned of it this volume. Given that our author has a knack for continuity, I’m wondering if this female character will return in a later volume. 

But the naughty stuff isn’t all grimy; as stated Jake Brand gets his share of tail. This is demonstrated by another memorable one-off character: The Countess, a “full-breasted, narrow-waisted, and long legged” platinum blonde beauty Jake encounters soon after arriving in New Orleans. Jake’s come here due to a lead from Grail; Richard Stuart, per Grail, has been contracted to murder an up-and-coming singer named Angela who lives in New Orleans. This subplot ultimately detracts from Jake’s own story of revenge; Brent clearly is trying to develop an ongoing series here, and apparently doesn’t feel he can do so by focusing solely on Jake’s quest. So to compensate he turns Jake into the traditional role of hero, and thus he serves in this capacity to Angela, a woman he doesn’t even know – trying to find her, trying to protect her from being killed by Stuart. While this does make Jake seem more heroic, it also takes away from his own story. But then his goal, as Brent often reminds us, is to kill two birds with one stone: keep an innocent woman from being killed, and catch the man who plans to kill her – the same man who jacked-up Jake’s own life. 

Well anyway, the Countess is a former madam (despite only being in her early 30s) who now lives in a mini-fortress, a pair of muscle-bound black men serving as her henchmen. Jake’s gotten word that Angela, who has gone to ground, might once have been one of the Countess’s girls. Per men’s adventure tradition, not only does he get the required info from the beautiful lady, but he also gets laid. Another fairly explicit scene unfolds; nothing too risque, but at least it doesn’t fade to black. We do learn that even an experienced former madam can be impressed by our hero. Through the Countess Jake learns that Angela is shacked up with a wealthy oil man named Lassiter, and in fact is hiding out on Lassiter’s yacht. A recurring mystery though is why anyone wants her dead; Angela once sang at a nightclub run by the mob, and was given her start by a mobster, but the Mafia is more interested in getting her back because she brought in customers. 

Angela, who turns out to be a stacked brunette beauty, has her share of secrets, and also she doesn’t seem very willing to accept Jake’s assistance. But his word is soon proven accurate when Richard Stuart makes his move to take Angela’s life. This is another cool scene in which Jake and the assassin initially pass by one another on a dock, Jake belatedly realizing that he just walked by the man he’s been hunting. Jake is hurt in the ensuing scene, but he recuperates thanks to some more good lovin,’ this courtesy his third “conquest” in the novel: Elena, the hot daughter of Martinez, a Cuban expat who moved to New Orleans after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. This conjugation, per Elena, was “inevitable” from the moment they met, and next thing you know Jake’s “[sliding] into the pulsing warmth between her thighs.” The Liquidator, baby! 

The finale has Jake taking on the local mob forces of Don Valante and also figuring out who was really behind the hit on Angela. He gets a boost in the armament department thanks to Martinez, who like any anti-Castroist living in the US has a full stock of weapons at his disposal. One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that, while Contract For A Killing is certainly violent, Brent doesn’t dwell on the gore. Again, the book is very much in line with the era’s mainstream crime fiction, only with a bit more of a pulp bent. And as mentioned there are sufficient plot threads dangling at novel’s end, with Jake’s vengeance still unsated, so I certainly look forward to reading the next volume.

Monday, January 10, 2022

The Adjusters #5: The Temple At Ilumquh


The Adjusters #5: The Temple At Ilumquh, by Jack Laflin
No month stated, 1970  Award Books

Someone at Award Books must’ve decided The Adjusters still had legs, as three years after the previous volume was published the series returned. Several changes are evident, though: for one, a real author is credited, whereas the previous four were credited to series protagonist Peter Winston himself, a la Award’s far more successful Nick Carter: Killmaster series. Also, the cover design has been changed. Most importantly, though, the entire premise has been changed, with The Temple At Ilumquh having almost nothing in common with the previous four volumes, other than Peter Winston himself. 

Jack Laflin is also new to the series, but in the mid-‘60s he wrote the five-volume Geoffrey Hiller spy series for Belmont. I have every volume but still haven’t read any of them yet. Overall his writing is good if a little too fussy. He’s one of those authors who likes his long sentences, which to me doesn’t much suit the genre, making what should be a tense sequence instead come off like a long list of “this happened and then this happened, and furthermore this also happened.” Also he changes the setup in a major way; The Temple At Iluquh has more in common with the Joaquin Hawks series than with The Adjusters, as in this one Peter Winston spends the entire novel in disguise as “Yusuf from Alexandria.” 

Laflin starts the novel in the middle of the action, with Winston already on the job in Yemen and several of his contacts murdered; there’s mention of a professional assassin named Hamid and a “joy girl” named T’Shura, but no setup on who any of them are. This cold opening only served to make me confused, particularly given how different everything was to what came before – I mean, Winston’s always been more of a James Bond type, going around the globe in a secret agent capacity. He’s never been embedded in a foreign country and trying to pass himself off as a local. Then we have the necessary flashback and learn that Winston was elected for an “experimental unit” at White and Whittle (the firm that employs Winston as “A-2”), one in which he’d receive heavy training in Arabic life, language, and religions, with the goal that he and fellow Adjusters could ultimately be dropped into the Middle East and pose as natives on a moment’s notice. 

So the Peter Winston we knew from previous books is gone; part of his training entailed letting his beard grow, and he spends the entire novel in robes and such. However he still carries his not-very-secret-agent .357 Magnum, which he uses in the occasional action scene…but Laflin’s over-fussy style tends to rob these scenes of much impact. We know Winston’s training lasted some months, and he was put back into normal duty before the call came in and he was shipped off to Yemen. The entire setup is ridiculous and has nothing in common with the previous books. It’s more of a desert yarn with Winston, posing as Yusuf throughout, meeting a ton of natives, adopting their various customs, and trying to figure out what nefarious Red China activity is going on here. 

The novel is prescient in how Laflin predicts the radical movements that would overtake the Middle East in the ‘70s. Winston’s been sent here due to word of a new jihad that’s about to be started, one that would shake up the pro-West mindset of the current leaders. Laflin doesn’t miss the opportunity to tell us a lot about local customs and Moslem beliefs, either. Winston gets in periodic gunfights and chases, as a lot of his contacts turn up dead and he tracks down the killers. We have here another sad indication of how much more vile our modern world is; the radical Moslems, despite hating the West and wanting to start a jihad and such, still aren’t suicidal nutjobs who are willing to strap bombs onto themselves (or their children); they’re more of a crafty and cunning lot, concerned about saving their own skins. 

Laflin adds a lot more sex to the series than previous volumes, and all of it’s courtesy T’Shura, the 18 or 19 year-old dancing girl who acts as another of Winston’s local contacts. It’s not super explicit, but Laflin does use words like “orgasm,” which is pretty unusual for the era – the sequences in these mainstream paperbacks would usually be a bit less blunt at the time. And boy do Winston and T’Shura go at it a whole bunch. She’s a “part-time joy girl” who has had a ton of men in her time, but relates to Winston that he’s the first to ever truly satisfy her. Of course he is! This means that she’s constantly wanting to hump him, but Laflin leaves most of it off-page after the initial act. In fact the novel even ends with T’Shura struggling to unzip Winston’s pants; she’s clumsy with zippers, given that all her previous clients wore robes and such. And also this is the only time in the novel that Winston’s in Western garb. 

Winston is initially sent to Yemen because two local contacts have been killed, and ultimately this leads to the uncovering of the Red China plot. It takes a while to get to this, though, and a lot of the first half of The Temple At Ilumquh concerns Winston ingratiating himself into the Yemen community as “Yusuf” and trying to find out who has murdered his colleagues. Laflin has done his research on the land and the customs and he wants you to know it. He treats Islam with a fair bit of respect, other than Winston’s grumbling over the “stupid custom” of not drinking alcohol. But man it’s like we’re suddenly reading an entirely new series, and one wonders why Award even published this as an Adjusters yarn. It could’ve just as easily been a standalone, or even the start of a completely different series. 

What makes it worse is that the cover promises an almost sci-fi sort of plot (“half-men, half-machines”). This however only refers to the radical Muslims Winston eventually encounters, who as mentioned are a lot less radical and violent than the ones of our modern era. They congregate around the titular Temple of Ilumquh, deep in the desert, which is a sort of headquarters for assassins. Ilumquh, we’re informed, was an ancient goddess. Chief among the assassins is Hamid, and Winston has a few run-ins with this guy, before finding out that his fellow Americans are somehow involved. Winston shadows a State rep and Hamid out into the desert, and this is how he finds out that the Chinese archeologists here, ostensibly for a dig, are really enemy soldiers and spies. 

The finale is a big action sequence, bigger than in any previous Adjusters yarn, and features Winston blasting away with his .357, a machine gun, and some grenades. He even gets in a few protracted kung-fu fights; Laflin explains that this is a form of “Chinese in-fighting.” Humorously, Winston gets the better of his martial opponents by resorting to old-fashioned “pugilism,” bashing away with his fists. He makes several kills, but it isn’t violent in the least, at least in that there’s no gore or anything. Winston also proves himself to be a bit of a subpar secret agent by getting captured twice here in the final quarter. But by novel’s end he’s having one last roll in the hay with T’Shura, who previous to this has begged Winston to take her with him back to America. However by novel’s end she seems to accept that she’ll never see Winston again. 

As it turns out, it didn’t matter, as Peter Winston never returned, and this was truly it for The Adjusters. Ultimately I found this series a bit too generic, despite the cool setup. Only the first volume, clearly by Paul Eiden, really kept me entertained throughout. The next three, which I’m assuming were all written by someone named Jim Bowser (Eiden’s hand is only evident in the first volume, at least), were more along the lines of tepid mystery novels, and I found them boring. But this fifth and final volume was by far my least favorite of the series, and I’m hoping it’s not an indication of what Laflin’s Geoffrey Hiller novels are like.

Thursday, December 23, 2021

The Chinese Paymaster (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #18)


The Chinese Paymaster, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1967  Award Books

The mysterious Nicholas Browne, who per Will Murray in his 1982 article for The Armchair Detective was a merchant seaman, turns in what has to be the most slow-moving installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster I’ve yet read. I mean this one’s sluggish, folks, and gives Amsterdam a run for its money as the most boring volume of the series. This is strange, as the other two Browne novels I’ve read (he only wrote four of them), Operation Starvation and The Bright Blue Death, were pretty good, and featured such far-out stuff as unfrozen viking warriors(!). 

There’s no far-out stuff in The Chinese Paymaster, that’s for sure. And also this one wins the award for “most deceptively slim paperback” ever – this book’s a mere 157 pages, but boy does it have some seriously small, dense print. The thrill-lacking plot doesn’t help much with the forward momentum, either. Personally I’m surprised a merchant seaman had the time to turn out such a long book. Maybe he wrote it while bored at sea, who knows. Looking at my review for The Bright Blue Death, I see that I mentioned that book somewhat had the “realistic” vibe of later Killmaster novels, like Blood Red. Well The Chinese Paymaster is very much in that same realm, very similar to the sub-Robert Ludlum novels Jack Canon would write in the final years of the series…only with even less sex and violence. 

I kind of suspected something was up with The Chinese Paymaster when I noticed that the back cover copy didn’t give a firm understanding of what the plot was even about. We’re told about three separate incidents across the globe (a doctor being killed in China, a Green Beret squad being wiped out in Laos, and a dignitary dropping dead in a New York restaurant) and that Nick “Killmaster” Carter will be put on the case. My assumption is the poor editor at Award couldn’t figure out how to make Browne’s sluggish book sound exciting. Actually what the plot turns out to be about is Nick flies around the world as part of a charter flight, trying to figure out which of his fellow travelers is the titular “chinese paymaster.” 

Oh and misleading title alert – the paymaster isn’t even Chinese. All Hawk, Nick’s boss at AXE, is sure of is that the paymaster is getting around the world and illicitly spreading money to fund Red Chinese nefariousness. In that 1982 article Will Murray mentioned how the earliest Killmasters featured Red China in a villanous capacity, something that was gradually filtered out of the series due to the thawing of relations. Well, things have come full circle, haven’t they! Anyway we open with a long chapter in which we see those back-cover incidents play out, and then Nick’s called into Hawk’s office and apprised of the situation. Per Hawk, “The Chicom paymaster is a greater threat to Western Society than The Beatles.” But he has nothing real for Nick to go on, other than that the Chicoms have come up with the idea of shuttling their paymaster around on a charter flight…and AXE believes they’ve figured out which charter. Now it’s up to Nick to figure out who among the passengers – or crew – is his target. 

We’re in for the long haul as Nick settles into the plane – which is total ‘60s with a cocktail lounge and all the other stuff that’s been removed so they can pack in more passengers like sardines – and begins his flight around the world. We do get the pretense of action early on, as when boarding the plane at Kennedy Nick is accosted by an attacker. Nick chases him, Luger drawn, but the guy ends up getting chopped to pieces by the propellers of a plane that’s about to take off. Nick gets on board, takes his seat by an old blowhard named Pecos, and it’s off to London. Pecos blathers away – as he will for the majority of the novel, Browne almost desperately padding out the pages – and Nick fumes that his cover has already been blown. Per tradition, two of the passengers are hotstuff women, and Nick wonders if either of them could be his target: first there’s blonde bombshell Tracy Vanderlake, a jet-setting heiress, and also there’s Li Valery, a Eurasian model. 

The veteran reader of the series will immediately know that Nick will ultimately have his way with both women, and of course the veteran reader will be proven correct. But whereas Operation Starvation and The Bright Blue Death had at least some hanky-panky in them, the sexual material in The Chinese Paymaster all occurs off-page. Seriously, this is the men’s adventure novel Agatha Christie never wrote; it’s a cozy mystery in which Nick acts more like a detective, trying to figure out who among his fellow passengers is guilty. It has nothing in common with most other volumes in the series, and likely was only published because Award was determined to get several volumes out per year. It really has more in common with a mystery novel, one featuring a plane filled with red herrings. 

Our first stop is London, where Nick follows Tracy to a jam-packed club where a mod band plays. Here too Nick is shot at by an unseen assailant, and this leads to a long sequence in which he’s chased by some “teddy boys” along the docks. Tracy is abducted, but the charter flight continues on(!?), next stop Paris. Here we have another red herring bit where Nick deduces that Eurasian beauty Li is the paymaster, and indeed she is smuggling money for some commies. However as it turns out it’s against her will, and has nothing to do with the plot Nick’s trying to stop. But boy does Browne fill up a lot of pages about it. Unfortunately he doesn’t have nearly as much to say about the inevitable Nick-Li sex scene, which while inexplicit would still upset sensitive readers of today, given that Li’s one of those girls who can’t make up her mind. “Nick took her triumphantly” should tell you all you need to know about who comes out on, er, top of this particular struggle. 

We’re on page 70 and this is Nick’s first “conquest.” His first real action scene follows immediately after, as another would-be assassin slips into the room and tries to kill him. Killmaster of course turns the tables, leading to another curiously overpadded sequence where Nick sneaks the body away, dragging it along the streets as if it were a drunk friend he was helping home. Oh and have I mentioned that blonde beauty Tracy is back at this point, delivering a hard-to-buy story about slipping away from her captors, whom she assumes were just people out to ransom her for her family’s money? She is yet another red herring in a book filled with them. She becomes the sort-of female lead after this, the expected shenanigans between her and Nick also kept off-page, but she does take part in some of the action scenes. 

The flight moves on to Rome, where we have another action sequence as more would-be killers come after Nick, and then on into North Africa. Here follows a safari, in which a character is suprisingly killed off, followed by a random bit where Nick is captured by Arabs in the desert…and then is randomly saved by his plane pal Pecos…who randomly carries the shrunken head of his dead friend in his luggage(!?). With all the globetrotting in The Chinese Paymaster it occurred to me that maybe Browne did write it at sea; maybe these are all his ports of call during a particularly long voyage. We also even learn of off-page visits to Greece, and later on we’re told of another off-page visit to Japan. The narrative picks back up on the return flight to New York, where Browne clumsily stages the climactic action scene in which the paymaster is finally uncovered – an action scene where Nick doesn’t come off very well, having to go borrow a fellow passenger’s gun because he gave his up! 

But Browne’s not even done spinning his wheels; we have a second climax in which Nick deduces that someone else was really the paymaster, the brains behind it all, and this leads to a confrontation on the aiport tarmac which comes off like a retread of the earlier scene where Nick chased his would-be killer directly into the spinning blades of an airplane. About the only clever thing here is that Nick decides on a staycation at novel’s end; not that Browne uses that term, but still Nick and Li decide that it would be more enjoyable to spend a few days in Nick’s penthouse after their nigh-endless trip around the world. 

With that The Chinese Paymaster mercifully comes to a close. I had to force myself to keep reading this one. I know this is the second negative review I’ve posted this week, and I apologize for that. I mean I wanted it to be all sweetness and light on this week before Christmas, but the book was a chore to read. And pulp fiction should never be a chore to read. There’s only one Browne Killmaster left for me to read, Seven Against Greece, so here’s hoping it’s more like his other two and less like The Chinese Paymaster.

Monday, December 6, 2021

The Weapon Of Night (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #19)


The Weapon Of Night, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1967  Award Books

The final Nick Carter: Killmaster by Valerie Moolman, The Weapon Of Night taps into the Northeast blackout of November 1965, with UFOs and LSD also somehow figuring into the plot. Sounds like a bonkers installment, but Moolman doesn’t really exploit any of this stuff, and for the most part the novel features Nick Carter running around various nuclear plants. Even the novel’s villain, the series regular Mr. Judas, is given short-shrift, and comes off as pretty boring. This I’ve found is typical of Moolman’s work on the series in general, and given that she was the sole writer of Nick Carter: Killmaster for its first few years, I’m surprised the series lasted long enough for other ghostwriters to come aboard. Maybe readers were just desperate for any spy fiction at the time. 

I suspect Moolman knew this would be her final venture, as she brings back characters from her previous installments; we’re even informed which volumes they appeared in on the first-page preview. She also does something unique in that the novel opens with Nick finishing up an assignment in progress; chasing an old Nazi across the rooftop of a Chicago skyscraper. A blackout occurs during the melee and the Nazi plummets to his death. Nick hops aboard a plane and heads back to his New York penthouse, figuring that he’s wrapped up the case…not realizing of course that the blackout presages a case he’ll be working on posthaste. 

We have a lot of sequences with one-off characters experiencing weird stuff across the US: UFO sightings, blood-red water coming out of faucets, “grubby” atmospheres, and another blackout – this one hitting the airport as Nick’s plane comes in to land. There’s this strange, almost casual vibe to Moolman’s Killmaster books; Nick finds a letter waiting in his mailbox from Hakim Sadek, a “cross-eyed criminologist” in Cairo Nick worked with in Safari For Spies. Something about a plot Hakim has uncovered, in which people are having their faces changed and somesuch. Shortly thereafter another previous Moolman character returns: Nick’s boss Hawk tells Nick that his next assignment is to escort a Russian VIP on a tour of a US nuclear plant, and that Russian VIP is Valentina Sichikova, who appeared in The 13th Spy

“Now there is one dame I really love!” Nick says when informed that Valentina will be his guest. But as it turns out, she is “one of Russia’s biggest women,” and is morbidly obese and whatnot. Ostensibly here to tour a plant for vague reasons, Valentina’s real purpose is to discuss the blackouts that are also occuring in Russia; she tells Nick and Hawk that the USSR suspects some Chinese are behind the plot. Ultimately this will tie in with the letter Hakim sent. Valentina, Nick, and Hawk sit around in AXE HQ in DC and talk – there’s a lot of talking in the The Weapon Of Night – and it all has more the vibe of a mystery than an action novel. Once again Moolman gives the impression that AXE is a massive organization like U.N.C.L.E., with tons of employees going around, each of them with different numbers and security clearances. 

Another character returns: Julia Baron (sometimes referred to as “Julie,” though Moolman doesn’t here), hotstuff AXE agent with “slightly slanting, catlike eyes” and black hair. She appeared in the first volume (as did Mr. Judas) and then in several others, before being removed from the series in Time Clock Of Death. In each instance she was presented as the perfect match for Nick Carter, the love of his life and whatnot. But here the two have more of a contentious relationship, with Julia snipping at Nick and constantly questioning him. This was annoying and brought to mind the vibe of modern thrillers, in which the heroic male characters are constantly mocked and second-guessed by the lead female characters. Ironically this doesn’t prevent Nick and Julia from getting in bed – she’s his only conquest in the novel – for some vaguely-described shenanigans (ie “She accepted him again and he plunged into warmth and softness.”). 

But the problem is, Moolman clearly likes these characters she’s created, and spends too much time with them instead of on action or suspense. In particular she spends way too much narrative on Valentina and her earthy proclamations and sentiments, and Hakim too gets too much print. What makes this an issue is that it’s all written in this highfalutin style, ie “American officialdom gave [Hakim] a pain in the traditional place.” Lame stuff, and very similar to the lifeless style “Bill Rohde” brought to Nick Carter: Killmaster in his (their?) installments, a la The Judas Spy and Amsterdam. In fact, I wonder if the Rohde style was influenced by Moolman; in Rohde too AXE is a vast organization akin to U.N.C.L.E., with an army of technicians and planners and etc, and an overall “safe” approach to the proceedings where hardly anyone ever gets hurt, let alone killed. In this regard the volumes of Manning Lee Stokes, when he came onto the scene with The Eyes Of The Tiger, must’ve been like a bucket of cold water to those who had grown familiar with the vibe of the preceding Moolman novels. 

Even the action scenes are lifeless, not to mention bloodless. And Nick doesn’t come off nearly as badass as he would in later books, particularly the ones by Stokes. I mean Nick is knocked out three times by page 114. He also uses more gadgets than in the Stokes novels (just as he does in the Rohde books – another similarity), including a “pocket-sized laser gun” which he uses at one point to get himself and Julia out of danger. A curious thing is that there’s no tension in Moolman’s action scenes; there’s such a safe, casual air that you know even the supporting characters will be safe. There’s a part, for example, where Valentina is abducted, and never once is her fate in doubt. Instead, more entertainment comes from the strange bitterness between Julia and Nick in these action scenes; Julia second-guesses and mocks Nick at every turn, a la “Why aren’t you out there doing something?” It’s strange and makes me wonder if Moolman had built up this resentment in her earlier volumes. 

But as mentioned the bickering nature doesn’t prevent the bedroom action, and the novel’s climax features Nick and Julia…watching TV. I mean nothing says “action novel” like your hero sacked out in front of the television in the final pages. Judas you see has orchestrated various blackouts, but AXE – using various high-tech tracking methods – has been unable to locate him. The blackouts have gotten worse, to the point that the President addresses the nation on television, and Nick and Julia watch this from their hotel room. The President’s name is never given, but he’s clearly LBJ (not to be confused with FJB). A blackout occurs at that moment, knocking out the TV screen, and Nick deduces where Judas is. This leads to a climax where he faces off against Judas overtop Niagra falls, trying to cut the supervillain’s line so he will plummet to his doom – a nice callback to the plummeting Nazi of the beginning. 

The novel mercifully ends here, but there was a pseudo-sequel many years later: Vatican Vendetta. The climactic events of The Weapon Of Night are referred to throughout that later installment, which also happened to be the last one “produced” by Lyle Kenyon Engel. And per my review, it’s my assumption that Vatican Vendetta was written shortly after The Weapon Of Night and just went unpublished for a few years. Overall I didn’t much enjoy The Weapon Of Night, and I haven’t really enjoyed Moolman’s work on the series. Not that she’s a bad author, I just feel that she doesn’t bring much bite to her novels, which come off more like cozy mysteries.