Showing posts with label Chet Cunningham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chet Cunningham. Show all posts

Thursday, February 16, 2023

The Penetrator #42: Inca Gold Hijack

 
The Penetrator #42: Inca Gold Hijack, by Lionel Derrick
June, 1981  Pinnacle Books

Chet Cunningham changes up The Penetrator with a series that might cause repercussions in future volumes, but probably won’t. I mean I’m sure series co-writer Mark Roberts won’t bother playing out on any of the developments. But long story short, Inca Gold Hijack features Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin suffering his greatest loss yet in the series – his greatest loss since his girlfriend’s murder, which happened before the first volume even took place. 

After so many, many lackluster volumes, Cunningham slightly gets back to the lurid vibe of the earliest volumes; this “Mark” (as both authors refer to their hero) is still not the same unhinged lunatic who would torture and kill hapless thugs in the earliest (and best!) volumes of the series, but at least he does blow a few bad guys away this time instead of just knocking them out and handcuffing them. (But then, he does that here, too.) Otherwise Inca Gold Hijack, with its trucking plotline, recalls a previous Cunningham joint, #20: The Radiation Hit (and goofily enough Mark uses this very name, “The Radiation Hit,” when recalling the events). 

The novel opens with what seems to be the promise of earlier, more action-focused installments: Mark is already on the job, hovering in a helicopter near Chicago and waging an assault on some trucking hijackers. Mark kills a few, even blowing one of them up with a grenade; Cunningham notes the “gore” in the cabin, which is probably the most violent instance in this series in I don’t know how long. But after that Inca Gold Hijack settles down into the PG vibe of the past twenty or thirty volumes, with Mark Hardin acting more like a TV protagonist of the day, chasing leads and going out of his way not to kill anyone unless absolutely necessary. 

The nice cover is a bit misleading; while there is an attractive “dusky-skinned” brunette in the novel, she and Mark never actually meet face to face. (Or, uh, face to cheek, as per the cover.) Instead, it is Joanna Tabler, that platinum blonde dish of a Federal agent who has appeared in several previous installments (the majority of them Cunningham’s) who factors into the novel’s steamy situations. And yes, Cunningham does finally sleaze things up just a little; when Mark and Joanna rendevous in Chicago, Joanna being in the city on assignment and calling up Mark’s Stronghold HQ just in case Mark too happens to be in Chicago(!?), things get a bit saucy as Cunningham doles out sleaze unseen since those earliest volumes: “Mark kissed her marvelous mounds,” and the like. Of course, when the actual tomfoolery begins, Cunningham cuts the scene. 

Mark and Joanna have not seen each other in “sixteen months;” this phrase is used so often when Joanna first appears that it gets to be humorous. This would be a reference to the previous Cunningam yarn #34: Death Ray Terror, which is also called by that name by the characters themselves. But whereas the two had a casual affair in those earlier volumes, spending vacation together and whatnot, this time Cunningham lays it on thick. Or, rather, Joanna does; within moments of their first boink Joanna’s getting misty-eyed and talking about her “silly, womanish, 1940s dream” of marrying Mark, living in some cottage somewhere, and raising a bunch of kids. Through the rest of the novel Joanna will stay safely in a hotel room, waiting for Mark to come home that night, so they can hit the sack again and she can start crying with worry over him and dreaming the impossible dream of them being together happily ever after, etc, etc. 

Folks, you don’t need a master’s degree in men’s adventure to guess that something might happen to Joanna Tabler in this installment. 

This “Joanna” subplot turns out to be the most memorable thing about Inca Gold Hijack. The main plot itself is threadbare; some Incan gold, you might guess from the title, has been hijacked…by truckers! So Mark Hardin follows leads and suspects that a trucker by the name of Big Red, who runs his own operation, was probably behind the heist, working with the Mafia. It’s very heavy on the early ‘80s redneck tip with Mark going undercover and getting a job as a trucker in Big Red’s operation and hanging around the pool hall and stuff. Meanwhile Joanna, also undercover, gets a job on the clerical staff. 

Action is sporadic and bloodless. There’s some fun stuff which, again, recalls the unbridled fun of the earliest volumes. Like when Mark gets a lead on someone who was involved with the heist, and it turns out to be a gay guy who was blackmailed into it – thanks to “homosexual intercourse pictures” (as Mark refers to them) which were secretly taken of the guy in action and used as leverage to get him in on the heist. An interesting note here is that Mark shows absolutely no judgment of the guy being gay, which must have seemed been pretty novel in 1981. That said, Mark does push the poor guy’s face into a puddle of his own vomit, but that’s just to put some fear into him so he’ll talk, not because he’s gay or anything. 

Cunningham also ties in to some earlier novels and subplots. A few past capers – ones with Joanna – are mentioned, and also there’s a goofy part where Yolanda, the dusky-skinned babe who is in charge of the Incan gold, requests The Penetrator’s help in the paper, at the behest of reporters. When Mark responds to the note in the newspaper, he has to pass a “screening” test from a long-time “Penetrator fan” who asks Mark all kinds of questions that only the real Penetrator would know. That said, the stuff with Yolanda is really just framework to set the action in motion; I just remembered that she does indeed meet Mark, soon after this, but it’s only to talk – and besides soon leads into an action scene. But after that Yolanda slips out of the narrative. 

There’s also the recurring Cunningham penchant for a torture death-trap; midway through Mark is caught in the bad guys’s headquarters and finds himself in a special room from which there’s no escape, where the place literally turns into an oven. Mark uses C4, handily hidden on his ankle, to bust his way out, rendering himself deaf for twenty-four hours(!?) in the process. This is another recurring Penetrator schtick, with Mark getting badly injured. And guess who nurses him to health (while crying) before heading off to her undercover job at Big Red’s outfit “just one last time?” And who of friggin’ course is captured in the process? 

Cunningham again gets lurid with all this; poor Joanna is raped (off-page) by Big Red and four of his men, and then the real torture begins (off-page as well). But the finale is slow-going and it seems evident Cunningham was spinning his wheels (lame trucker-plot pun alert). First Mark captures Big Red, then the two drive around with Big Red running his mouth, taking Mark to different places where he says he’s stashed Joanna, then finally they get to the real place where Joanna is hidden…and only then does Big Red try to run away so he and Mark can get in an extended chase and fight scene. It’s all muddled and lame, but the impact of what happens to Joanna isn’t lessened – the only thing that does lessen it is the likelihood that it will never be mentioned again, except perhaps in passing. And only in a Chet Cunningham installment. 

The justice dealt to Big Red is also suitable and again a reminder of the hard-hearted Penetrator of the earliest volumes…except that this time he keeps reminding himself to shut out his thoughts while Big Red screams for it all to stop. Last we see Mark Hardin, he’s bereft and just wanting to take a cab ride to nowhere, as “nothing will ever be the same” for him now. But then, in eleven volumes Mark himself will be in for the big finale.

Monday, December 13, 2021

The Penetrator #40: Assassination Factor


The Penetrator #40: Assassination Factor, by Lionel Derrick
January, 1981  Pinnacle Books

Well folks this volume of The Penetrator is something else entirely…this is, I’m fairly sure, the only volume of the series yet in which hero Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin doesn’t get in a single fight. And he doesn’t even get laid! Poor Chet Cunningham must’ve been supremely weary of writing the series at this point; I mean, even his previous half-assed contributions, like #30: Computer Kill or #36: Deadly Silence, actually featured a little action, not to mention the death of the main villains…even if the villains did Mark the favor of killing themselves. Not so here; for once again Assassination Factor comes off like the novelization of a bland TV movie. 

In fact, Cunningham is so bored that he spends most of the novel writing about other characters. As far as I’m concerned, with these series novels the series protagonist should always be the primary character. But Cunningham here spends much more time with one-off characters, in particular a professional assassin named Butler (not to be confused with the other Butler) who is killing off famous people who use their platform to speak ill of the United States. (Boy would this guy have his work cut out for him today!) We see him in action at novel’s start, taking out by methodical (not to mention pages-consuming) means a variety of targets. He’s pretty diverse in that he hits anyone who bad-mouths the US, whether they be Liberal, Conservative, or even Independent, as demonstrated in his first kill, which really threw me for a loop. Check this out and see if a certain phrase jumps out at you:


“Make America Great Again” was a slogan originally used by Reagan in his 1980 campaign for president; Trump bought the rights to it in 2016 and obviously branded it more than Reagan ever did. But at the time Assassination Factor was published, this phrase would’ve resonated as Reagan’s, and initially I thought Cunningham was “taking the piss” (as the British say) out of series co-writer Mark Roberts, who as we all know was a pretty conservative guy. But as it turns out, Butler kills liberals as well as conservatives; as the novel progresses we see him take out a civil rights activist (where Cunningham doles out the dreaded n-word), a wealthy Iranian, and finally a Jane Fonda analogue, who presumably is the busty babe on George Bush’s cover…and yes, the “No nukes” stuff works into the plot. Anyone who denounces America on a public stage becomes Butler’s target. 

But as mentioned Cunningham is bored with it all. For example, Mark Hardin is fishing when we meet him, and then he hears about this assassination early in the book. He heads back to the Stronghold and, playing a hunch, starts making a list of all the recent deaths of notables, and gradually comes to the conclusion that it’s the work of a hitman who is making the kills seem like freak accidents or whatever. And folks, Mark spends the first 76 pages investigating at the Stronghold! Literally sitting at a desk and looking at computer printouts and making lists! It all gave me bad flashbacks to when the similarly-“badass” hero spent nearly the entire novel pecking away at a computer keyboard in Stand Your Ground

On the plus side, this is by far the most the Stronghold has ever featured in a Penetrator novel. While it isn’t much brought to life, it was interesting to see Mark Hardin there so long, as generally we get but a page or two at his “home base” before he heads off on his latest mission. Curiously though the Stronghold is explained to us again, how it’s built on an old Borax mine and how the Professor built it and all this other setup stuff that you think wouldn’t be necessary in the 40th volume of the series. But again, poor Chet Cunningham is bored with The Penetrator and he’s doing his damndest to fill up the pages and meet his word count. He’s even got Mark calling up various contacts – including even Dan Griggs, the Justice Dept dude who is supposed to be finding and arresting the Penetrator – to ask if they have any info on these mysterious murders. 

Cunningham only proceeds to pile lameness on top of lameness. Intermittently in Assassination Factor we will encounter one Marshall Songer, a guy in his early 20s in Los Angeles who likes to go around…pretending to be the Penetrator. He’s got plastic blue arrowheads, a .45 he managed to acquire, and he blusters his way into shopping areas and whatnot to give people lessons on the danger of crime and etc. The cops nearly bust him at times and Marshall always gets away – there’s also a weird gimmick that he does magic tricks on the side – and Mark eventually finds out about it. We already know there are “Penetrator fan clubs” out there, and while Mark is okay with those, he’s concerned this imposter Penetrator, whoever he is, will get killed by the real Penetrator’s many enemies. 

Of course as it plays out, Mark eventually heads to LA, finally leaving the Stronghold (on page 76!) to scope out an Iranian whom he thinks will be the assassin’s next target. Mark will be proven correct, though he’s unable to catch or prevent the killer. Instead, more focus is placed on Mark coming across Marshall Songer during one of his “Penetrator” routines, and then tracking him back to his home and doing like a “scared straight” sort of thing, where he convinces the punk that he is in over his head. This sequence ends with Songer pretty certain that his mysterious visitor, who claims to be a reporter, is likely the real Penetrator. But luckily that’s all there is to this particular time-waster of a subplot. 

But man, that’s what The Penetrator has been reduced to by this 40th volume of the series: a guy who sits around and “investigates,” occasionally giving pep talks to wayward youth. And believe it or not, after meeting Songer he goes back to the Stronghold to investigate some more! Finally he figures that famous movie star-slash political activist Jane Marvel will likely be the assassin’s next target. Clearly a spoof of Jane Fonda, Marvel is a hotstuff brunette with “full breasts” (“thirty-nine inches,” we are specifically informed) who, when not making films, is known to get involved in the latest activist stuff. Currently she’s been denouncing various nuclear plants and silos, and folks you better believe that Cunningham wastes pages and pages on Jane protesting at not one but two events, her activist husband Larry Tollison (ie Tom Hayden) in tow. Her third husband, we’re informed, Cunningham slyly setting it up so we won’t be too shocked when Jane makes her inevitable pass at Mark. 

Curiously, Jane Fonda herself was mentioned in a previous Cunningham volume: #28: The Skyhigh Betrayers. This means that there is both a real Jane Fonda and a fake Jane Fonda in the world of The Penetrator. Jane Marvel, we’re informed, even watches movies on “the China Syndrome,” an unsubtle reference from Cunningham to Fonda’s real-life film of the same name. Furthering the similarities, Jane Marvel even went to ‘Nam during the war to protest, which ran her afoul of the servicemen there; later in the book, when Mark and Jane meet, the actress asks Mark why he’s trying to help her, given that he served in ‘Nam and thus should hate her guts as a traitor. Mark’s response is that, while he doesn’t agree with most of what Jane preaches, for this one instance they are aligned. Plus he’s a big fan of her movies! Even if she’s “an all-around extremist,” so far as Mark is concerned.

Mark gets into her confidence via goofy means. He scopes out Jane’s mansion, up in the richer area of Beverly Hills, and slips past her elaborate security system. There he rings the house phone and speaks to Jane on it, informing her that he’s waiting for her in the den! Mark manages to convince Jane and her husband that he’s certain an assassin is coming for her, and that he’s here to help. Soon enough he’s shadowing Jane on the studio lot, and prevents her “accidentally” being crushed by a sandbag that falls from the rafters or somesuch. But it’s clear at this point that there will be no action finale for Assassination Factor. Instead, the only time Mark fires his gun in the entire novel is while guarding Jane’s home that night, shooting at Butler’s shadow out in the woods. We get a retread of the very same thing the following night, but this time Mark manages to lure Butler into a trap and knocks him out, ties him up…and then tells Jane to call the cops! 

I mean he doesn’t kill the bastard or anything! Nor do we have a big confrontation between Mark and Butler…for that matter, Butler himself at this point is lost in the narrative, just a mysterious figure Mark’s trying to stop. You might imagine him as this buzzcutted humorless super-patriot, but Cunningham does absolutely nothing to bring him to life, nor to let us know what makes him tick. No, Mark just knocks him out, ties him up, and takes off – another assingment complete. And as mentioned he doesn’t even have the expected sleazy shenanigans with busty Jane Marvel; she plants a big kiss on him twice in the book, and at one point bluntly propositions him, but Mark Hardin can’t be bothered with such things. I mean, the lady’s married! The Penetrator has morals, folks! 

It’s all just so lame and stupid…you almost wonder if you’re reading a TJ Hooker novelization. Actually that’s an insult to TJ Hooker, plus I don’t think the show was even on the air yet. But you get my drift. Overall this one was very lame, as bad as Cunningham’s previous “worst installment ever,” #22: High Disaster.

Thursday, December 17, 2020

The Penetrator #38: Hawaiian Trackdown


The Penetrator #38: Hawaiian Trackdown, by Lionel Derrick
October, 1980  Pinnacle Books

I love the cover of this installment of The Penetrator – take that, “Adult Books!” And humorously enough there is a sequence where Mark “Penetrator” Hardin assaults a series of adult bookstores; he doesn’t do it with a shotgun, but instead goes into them and rips up all the pedo magazines. For that’s what Mark is up against this time: I was hoping for a sleazy installment of the series, with Mark wading into the murky waters of porn flicks and whatnot, but instead the focus is on child exploitation. Fortunately Chet Cunningham isn’t nearly as exploitative of this topic as the somewhat-similar Ninja Master #7 is. 

We meet Mark as he’s pacing around the Stronghold, wondering what to do next. He gets wind of some recent pedo-ring busts in California, violent ones in which people involved with it have been murdered or found dead. In fact we see a few one-off charcters meet their grisly ends on account of their involvement with it, in particular one young guy who fell into it thanks to a honey trap who took him to an orgy which “introduced” a few kids into the mix, with the guy – drunk and high – being photographed as he was encouraged to engage with the kids! For this he’s being blackmailed, but at any rate his head is blown off like a few pages after he’s introduced, so really it’s just Cunningham filling pages instead of introducing a character that will have ramifications on the plot. 

Mark has to look up “pedophilia” in the dictionary – a sad reminder of when stuff like this wasn’t common knowledge. He is sickened by the very thought and decides to bust some heads. He flies to Sacramento – luckily there’s no “amateur aviation” stuff as there would be in a Mark Roberts installment – and hooks up with old pal Captain Kelly Patterson, last seen in #26: Mexican Brown, but I believe first introduced in #2: Blood On The Strip (which happened to be Cunningham’s first novel in the series). Here Mark muses that he first met Kelly “more years ago” than he’d like to think of, yet Mark is still presented as being the same age he was back in the first volume! Otherwise there’s no big character development here, and Patterson could’ve been any other one-off character; he has no reall scenes with Mark other than to trade a little info and to then show up and arrest the people Mark has tracked down – Patterson being one of the few people who know that Mark Hardin is the Penetrator. (This list seems to be growing!) 

Mark won’t be in California long; he first visits a few adult bookstores, where he’s sickened by a kiddie-focused magazine titled Life Child. He tries to find where it’s published, but there’s no info. Eventually he meets up with a producer in Hollywood, Mark posing as a “member of the league” who is into pedo stuff. The guy, who is involved with pedo movies and magazines, throws a party, where Mark runs into hotstuff babe Drisana, aka Drisa, who comes on strong to him. She turns out to have “acted” in some adult films on the side, though she claims to have nothing to do with the pedo stuff. Mark ends up torching the studio and tying up the producer – not to beat a dead horse, but let’s recall that Mark Hardin is curiously wimpy these days, the series having more of the vibe of Magnum P.I. than the ultra-violent early installments. In fact Mark doesn’t kill anyone until page 161 – which makes it all the more grating how he’s constantly threatening people throughout. There’s even a part where he tells some guy, “I should cut off your balls and laugh while you bleed to death,” and of course it’s just bluster…but in reality you could see the Mark Hardin of an earlier Cunningham novel, say #12: Bloody Boston, actually doing such a thing. 

Drisa will turn out to be the main female character of the novel, and she’s a typical Cunningham creation: hot-to-trot but with the emotional content of a child. She’s the closest we get to what I wanted this novel to be – a hotstuff pornstar who becomes Mark’s willing accomplice. But Cunningham is just as determined to neuter the sex as he is the violence – the expected boink occurs off-page, Mark scoring with Drisa in the back of the Brown Beast (that sounds wrong on so many levels, so I should clarify that “The Brown Beast” is Mark’s nickname for his truck and trailer combo). As if to jab the knife in further, Cunningham has Drisa merely talking about the sordid activities, next day, which is how we even learn anything happened between them. As Mark Twain once said, “Don’t just tell me the hero banged a pornstar, show me!” 

But as mentioned Drisa is woefully unexploited; Mark learns from her that all the “pedo stuff” comes from Hawaii, so off he goes to track down the source of Life Child. Drisa manages to tag along because she claims to have overheard the name of the guy behind the magazine and other pedo ventures; she just can’t remember the name, and swears to Mark she’ll be able to if she can come along with him and stay in the hotel, etc. Cunningham must’ve recently visited Hawaii, as we get a lot of topical detail when the two arrive at the airport, Drisa going on in total childlike detail about every thing they see as they drive to the hotel. Mark for his part is humorously blasé, as he’s “visited Hawaii several times.” I imagine this must’ve been back in his ‘Nam days, as I don’t recall him visiting Hawaii at any point during the series. Also the fiftieth state is here transformed into a murky den of iniquity, in which pedo rings secretly operate out of every other business and all one has to do is bypass “the usual tourist spots” to find hardcore smut, particularly of a child-exploitative bent. 

The Magnum P.I. vibe is very apparent, what with the Hawaii setting (not to mention Mark’s moustache on the cover)…and the fact that all Mark does is drive around and question people. At this point he’s essentially a private eye himself. For the most part a large portion of the novel is Mark looking around for wherever the pedo magazines are published from. Along the way he spots a trio of young black men, and wonders if they’re members of a rock band(!?), given that he believes black people aren’t commonly seen in Hawaii. This turns out to be the clunky introduction of the main villain of the novel, “the amazingly evil black man” Mark tangled with back in #24: Cryogenic Nightmare: Preacher Mann. For this is the name Drisa finally remembers…folks, her part in the book is literally reduced to sitting around in the hotel room and scribbling names in a notebook until she remembers the name of the mystery figure behind the pedo ring. 

But at least Cunningham makes it interesting: After Mark realizes Preacher Mann is indeed the same guy he fought before, Drisa whips out a gun and says “they” told her it could only be the Penetrator if he knew the name Preacher Mann. So she’s been a plant all along, which of course calls into question the part where she stood by as Mark torched an entire warehouse of porn flicks and magazines. Anyway she shoots at Mark and takes off, and this is the last we’ll see of her until the very end. Mark picks up another helper, though: Uchi Takayama, a buddy of his from ‘Nam who lives in Hawaii and has fallen on hard times. Uchi becomes yet another person who learns that Mark is really the Penetrator, and helps him out as Mark continues his seemingly-endless search for where Life Child is published out of. Along the way they get in a few fights and shootouts, but still Mark doesn’t kill anyone. He threatens people a whole bunch, though, and even throws in some unexpected racial slurs when he gets hold of that black trio he spotted earlier in the book. They of course turn out to be thugs employed by Preacher Mann. 

And just as with Kelly Patterson, there’s no reason why this particular character has been brought back; Cunningham does nothing to bring him to life and it could’ve just been any other random villain for the Penetrator. Preacher Mann only appears a handful of times, where we learn he now has a burnin’ yearnin’ to wipe out the Penetrator, given that he destroyed his whole “let’s freeze hookers and send them to clients” plot. It’s assumed he now heads up this “International League” of pedophiles, blackmailing people and whatnot, but ultimately we’ll learn – via lazy exposition – that Preacher Mann isn’t even the leader of the group. All of which to say Cunningham does little to exploit the fact that this is one of the few (if only) times we’ve had a recurring villain. 

As if to further distance ourselves from early volumes, in which Mark Hardin would go around with enough weapons to take on a small army, we have a protracted sequence here where he tries to buy some guns. This takes us to the climax, such as it is, where he and Uchi assault Preacher Mann’s hidden headquarters. Cunningham has a fondness for pulp-style death traps Mark gets caught in, and he delivers two of them here in the final pages. The second one is the most tedious, with Mark trapped in a bathhouse while little darts are fired at him. When Preacher Man arrogantly comes in to look at Mark’s corpse, he finds that the Penetrator was able to protect himself with nothing more than a few bath towels(!!). This leads to a big reveal where Mark learns who the real villain was – culminating in one of the few instances in which our hero blows away a female character. Actually now that I think of it, that is something we haven’t seen since the earliest volumes, though here it’s made very clear that Mark only pulls the trigger after he’s been fired at. 

Overall Hawaiian Trackdown is an altogether stilted, slow-going affair, with little in the way of the sadistic action of earlier installments. Probably the highlight is Mark’s rampage through several adult bookstores in Hawaii, where he grabs up every issue of Life Child and tears them up, telling the owners if they don’t like it they can call the cops! Otherwise it’s more of the same…just a slow-going and generic entry in what was once a very entertaining (and brutal!) series.

Monday, January 6, 2020

The Penetrator #36: Deadly Silence


The Penetrator #36: Deadly Silence, by Lionel Derrick
June, 1980  Pinnacle Books

At this point my reviews of The Penetrator could basically be on autopilot: the rot has set in, each volume is a bland repeat of the one that came before, and the brutal vibe of the earliest volumes has been replaced by a generic tone more akin to a TV show of the day. Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin is a pale reflection of what he was, and goes out of his way not to kill anyone.

And once again the villain sucks; Chet Cunningham in particular has been delivering loser antagonists for his past several installments, like the sad sack computer programmer in #30: Computer Kill. In Deadly Silence he gives us two loser villains: one a guy who runs a “communications union” monopoly and another an old general who is being forced into retirement. The folks at Pinnacle only got the memo on the first villain because he’s the only one mentioned on the back cover. Indeed it seems Cunningham himself decided to change course midway through and to present a bigger villian for Mark to face, but sadly the communications union guy is the more memorable of the two, despite being fat and having long blond hair – hardly the villain one expects from this genre.

Cunningham takes his time getting into this one; we open with a sequence of various people in the communications industry running afoul of a shady operation calling itself the National Communications Council of America. One guy blows up some phone lines in New York at NCC’s behest, then another is killed by goons in California for refusing to comply with an FCC request. Gradually we learn that the NCC is run by Victor Jerele, the aforementioned loser villain, who runs the outfit from a palatial estate, his usually-nude mistress Mello Tone by his side. Humorously, Mello completely disappears from the text – as I say, Cunningham seemed to write this one in a hurry, changing his mind wily-nilly as he pounded out his first (and final) draft – despite initially being presented as a main character, Mello is anticlimactically dropped from the text. 

Meanwhile Mark himself is just sort of lazing around the Stronghold…we meet him as he’s going on his daily jog and checking out the “Situation Board” to see what trouble spots have arisen around the country. Humorously, one of the situations Mark has been monitoring is the seeming monopoly of the communications unions…I mean you can see already the series is in trouble at this point. Surely there’s a terrorist to kill somewhere? Instead Mark poses as a cop on the handy police teletype he has in the Stronghold, querying on the FCC – he’s noted this name in two of the stories concerning suspicions communications-world deaths in the US. One of the responses Mark receives is from Goodman, the FBI agent who has been hunting the Penetrator “for over five years” and who has no idea of course he has just sent information to the very man he is hunting. Also I think Cunningham’s math is a bit off here as the series has been running for seven years now, not five.

Mark’s biggest lead comes from a cop in Phoenix, Arizona, pertaining to how one Victor Jerele of FCC briefly ran afoul of the authorities at one point. Posing as a reporter for the National Enquirer(!), Mark snoops around the FCC HQ, even gaining a brief phone interview with Jerele. The first whiff of action finally arrives in a brief “soft probe” Mark carries out on the HQ, using some of the knock-out darts in his Ava pistol to take down a pair of guards, one of them being a dog. But while leaving the site Mark picks up a tail, one of Jerele’s goons on a motorcylce. Here again we get a reminder that this is not the same Mark Hardin of the earliest installments – and surely not the brutal sadist who starred in Cunningham’s early installments. For Mark merely doses the guy with sodium pentathol, grills him for info, and then makes sure he’s nice and comfy until the effects of the drug wear off, after which the guy’s free to go!

The novel’s highlight occurs when Mark infiltrates Jerele’s estate, this time posing as a mad scientist…a ruse that Cunningham could’ve better exploited. Instead Mark whips out his .45 and gets in a shootout with Jerele’s thugs, but it all turns out to be a setup as Jerele knew Mark would show up eventually. Mark falls for it, returning gunfire and running for a door that suddenly opens in front of him. It turns out to be a cell of sorts, straight out of an old pulp; Mark is trapped and assailed by blinding lights and loud noise, and the walls are slowly closing in. Mark here comes off like a proto-MacGuyver, using various tools hidden in his belt and pockets to free himself, most notably a small strip of C-4 which he uses to blow off the door of the cell.

This leads to another memorable bit, where Mark is temporarily deafened. A recurring series schtick is that Mark gets hurt on the job, and Cunningham does a good job of capturing Mark’s plight as he escapes Jerele’s estate, unable to hear a thing but convincing himself it’s only temporary. Of course he’s ultimately proven correct, Mark’s hearing slowly coming back as he sits in his rental car, but still I wouldn’t advise setting off any C-4 charges just a few inches away from yourself. Mark’s hurt again at novel’s end, knocked unconscious and given a “minor concussion,” so Cunningham really delivers on the “Mark get hurts” template this time, though this latter part seems to exist mostly so Mark can hook up with a hot nurse at the conclusion of the novel.

Jerele seems to be the novel’s main villain, but Cunningham proves otherwise halfway through the novel. Mark’s learned that Jerele plans something big on this coming Sunday, and gradually determines that Jerele is going to black out the entire country’s communications network – but he’s being paid to do this. Mark learns the final details during a desert meeting with Jerele and a few thugs, a meeting that of course turns into a firefight. This section comes off like survivalist fiction, as all the cars are destroyed and Mark and Jerele, the only two survivors, are trapped in the desert. Again Mark Hardin shows himself to be a different guy from the early volumes; he gets the info from Jerele, tells him he’ll never survive in the desert, and hands him a .45 to take care of himself…which Jerele promptly does as Mark walks away.

Once again Mark is near death, stumbling through the desert. Cunningham page-fills – uh, I mean character-builds – with a random flashback to Mark’s ‘Nam days, one of the few times we’ve gotten to read about Mark’s time in the war. This is all due to a hallucination Mark endures due to heat stroke and thirst. He makes it through the desert but collapses, only to be saved by a truck driver – opportunity for Cunningham to dole out some CB and ham radio stuff he didn’t get to use back in #20: The Radiation Hit. After this Mark flies to California and drives to nearby Air Force base Edwards, having learned that a General Hemphill is the guy who paid off Jerele to black out the country on this coming Sunday.

But man it blows. Mark poses as a Justice Department officer and snoops around the base; we meet General Hemphill, that depraved bastard, while he’s playing bingo. While he’s playing bingo!! I mean good grief folks, it’s like when they’d make R-rated movies into TV shows back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, replacing all the “adult” stuff with middle-of-the-road banality. Anyway Hemphill is over the hill and being forced into retirement, so his foolproof plan is to cause a blackout and then, thanks to a lackey aboard Air Force One, redirect the President’s plane so that it has to land at Edwards. This accomplished, the President is directed to a “special area” the base has for VIPs…an area which is in fact built over an old prison. Thus the President has become Hemphill’s unwitting prisoner. And per the cover art by George Bush (not Dubya!!??) we can go ahead and assume the President is Johnny Carson.

The General is pulling a fast one on his base, thus there are no major fireworks of Mark taking on a battalion of rogue soldiers or somesuch. Instead, it all plays out on the maddening tepid vibe the series has now appropriated…Hemphill assumes that Mark is the rep sent from Washington, and proudly shows off his captured President. Mark uses the “wind walker” technique to slip past security and talk to the Prez, explaining the situation, which leads to a Mission: Impossible scenario in which the President poses as a patient on a gurney and duped base paramedics escort him and Mark off the base. After this Mark goes back to the base to boast to Hemphill that he’s freed the President! And here we have another villain doing Mark the favor of offing himself, Hemphill blowing himself up with his own explosions. Lame, folks. Lame!!

As mentioned Mark ends the novel recuperating in the hospital, where he manages to pick up a hot blonde nurse. He also speaks to the President over the phone, however an editing snafu prevents us from knowing what Mark says in response the President’s offer to increase Mark’s Justice Dept pay – the President being under the impression that Mark’s a Justice contractor. No matter. Deadly Silence is just another middling effort in the Penetrator, a sad reminder of how something once so unpredictable and fun has become so tepid and bland.

Monday, July 22, 2019

Moscow At High Noon Is The Target (Hot Line #3)


Moscow At High Noon Is The Target, by Paul Richards
No month stated, 1973  Award Books

Curiously the final volume of Hot Line isn’t copyright Lyle Kenyon Engel, like the first two were, which makes me suspect this short-lived series suffered the same fate as the Engel-produced Nick Carter: Killmaster: total control eventually went over to Award Books. But anyway Hot Line never really got off the ground, only managing three volumes.

Thanks to Spy Guys And Gals we know this one was a collaboration between Chet Cunningham and Dan Streib. Streib co-wrote the previous volume, and his stamp is frequently evident here, particularly when protagonist Grant Fowler whines about how tough his life is and desperately wishes to quit and get married. Streib’s action protagonists usually lack any balls, as most notably demonstrated in the Engel-produced Chopper Cop series. Like “tough cop” Terry Bunker, Streib’s Grant Fowler is a worry wart who is determined to quit the spy game asap and find some woman to marry. This is a far cry from the grizzled asshole who starred in the first volume.

There’s no pickup from either earlier volume, though we are informed Fowler has only been the President’s man for a few “months.” Fowler when we meet him is in Copenhagen, still successfully perpetrating his wealthy gadabout cover. Now he’s hawking a new business venture called Antique Aircraft Inc, which specializes in rebuilding exact replicas of WWI airplanes and staging mock aerial combat around the globe. There’s a lot of flying material in this one, about as much as you’d encounter in the average William Crawford novel, and it gets to be boring after a while.

This is too bad because the opening of the novel’s pretty cool, promising more thrills than what is ultimately delivered: a group of commandos, possibly American, stage daring, bloody heists behind the Iron Curtain. They’ll hit armored trucks, banks, whatever, taking out guards and innocent bystanders with subguns and explosives. The commie powers at be are convinced America is behind these attacks, and tensions have escalated to the point of WWIII. The President of course decides to call in his sole Hot Line man, Grant Fowler.

It seems to me that Cunningham handled the brunt of the writing duties; the book reads very similarly to his work. But it might be Streib who writes the occasional cutovers to the President and his secretary, who deal with their own somewhat-boring subplots in DC while Fowler handles the action overseas. I say this because these scenes are page-fillers with fretting, worried protagonists wondering what might happen next; there’s a lot of stalling and repetition. Personally I think some of the opening heists could’ve been more fleshed out.

More info on the heisters would’ve been wise, too; as it is, we only get to read about “The Commander,” who leads these American servicemen turned criminals. They operate out of Berlin and use surplus military gear in their raids. It’s dangled as a mystery who the Commander is, but gradually the puzzle pieces together until we realize it’s one of two characters, both of whom happen to work with Fowler on the assignment. This group calls itself The Brigadiers, and their next heist will be particularly audacious: the theft of Lenin’s embalmed corpse, on display in Moscow.

Fowler only knows that something’s going to be stolen in Moscow, so must get over there without blowing his cover. Luckily Antique Aircraft is scheduled to take part in a mock WWI battle in that very commie city, so Fowler’s able to get himself in the show due to the fact that he’s a pilot and he’s the owner of the company. He heads over to Frankfort, Germany (and yes, it’s spelled “Frankfort” throughout) to take over the preparation for the mock combat, and finds time for some shenanigans with Elaine Katz, the hot brunette pilot who runs the European branch of Antique Aircraft – and I can’t believe I forgot to mention that Fowler’s already had some off-page shenanigans with a blonde babe in Copenhagen.

Here in “Frankfort” Fowler meets two men who will add the mystery to the narrative, as one of them is the Commander of the Brigadiers: first there’s Okie Bob Arnold, a CIA man with “mod clothing” and a flashy moustache who has been sent to help Fowler on his assignment, and next there’s General Sloane, an older retired military man who is flying one of the planes in the mock combat. Cunningham kills the mystery posthaste, as one of these men makes a phone call and next chapter Fowler finds out Elaine’s been killed in an airport “accident,” chopped up by prop blades. Cunningham tells us which of the two men made the call, totally blowing any chance at mystery. I couldn’t believe he was so brazen about it. Particularly given that the rest of the narrative tries to play the reader along over which of the two men is really Fowler’s enemy.

Fowler’s bummed over Elaine’s death – which occurs like an hour after they sleep together – but soon enough he’s checking out bikini-clad Maria at the General’s place. She’s been sent along from Moscow as a sort of state rep to ensure everything goes well. There’s also some flatfooted suspense about whether Fowler can trust her or not, and honestly all this stuff comes off like the work of Streib, with a suddenly-wimpy Fowler moaning how hard it is for him to open his heart to a woman, due to how she could be an enemy just waiting to stab his back.

There isn’t much action. In Moscow Fowler and Okie Bob go to a bar frequented by circus freaks, a surreal setting that’s handled in Cunningham’s trademark meat and potatoes narrative style. Fowler’s deduced that the Brigadiers are using an old tunnel beneath the bar to sneak in and out of Moscow, paying the midget bar owner a fee for the benefit. Fowler slaps around the midget and then goes down the tunnel, promptly getting in a shootout with some unseen Brigadiers. He kills one with his .357.

He’s also found the time to get busy with Maria, and again I have to point the finger at Streib because here Fowler becomes a lovey-dovey sap. This is going to be his last job, no matter what, he’s done with the spy game and all the death and all that, and what’s more he’s going to bring Maria back to America and marry her and start a family. The authors basically telegraph what’s going to happen to Maria and don’t even try to be subtle about it. But then this was the last volume of the series, so hell, they could’ve just had the two go off for a happily ever after.

The Lenin corpse heist isn’t even the climax of the novel; the title comes into play because it’s learned that the Brigadiers will steal the body at noon, and Fowler manages to get in the viewing line at the right moment. He causes a scene and Moscow police intervene, stopping the ambush that would’ve caught them unawares had it not been for Fowler. After this we have the belabored mock aerial combat, with planes again factoring into the actual finale: Fowler versus the Commander, who plans to steal the Russian royal jewels or somesuch and fly away with them. His true identity is officially revealed in the final pages.

Overall Moscow At High Noon Is The Target was pretty lackluster. Grant Fowler never did manage to make himself memorable to the reader, with even his occasional gadgets coming off as lame, like the “deadline clock” wristwatch he wears which ticks away a time set by the President. I was more interested to find out if Engel just dumped the series on Award, disinterested in Hot Line himself. Readers certainly weren’t interested, and this was it for the series.

Thursday, March 7, 2019

The Penetrator #34: Death Ray Terror


The Penetrator #34: Death Ray Terror, by Lionel Derrick
December, 1979  Pinnacle Books

The Penetrator says goodbye to the ‘70s in yet another phoned-in installment courtesy Chet Cunningham. George Wilson’s cover again focuses on the few action scenes (though the bikini-clad babe only shows up on the last page), whereas the novel itself is mostly a slow-going affair of padded scenes and page-filling expository dialog. All of which to say Death Ray Terror is just business as usual for The Penetrator, further proving that the series should’ve been ended years before – or that a new “Lionel Derrick” should’ve been hired.

Wilson’s cover also doesn’t lie – that blond guy in the glasses wielding a carbine with an almost psychotically bland look on his face is indeed none other than Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin. He’s decided to bleach his hair blond and shave off his moustache in one of his arbitrary attempts at masking his identity. The real reason for this is that Cunningham finally brings FBI agent Howard Goodman back into the series – Goodman being the agent with a personal grudge against the elusive Penetrator. I can’t remember the last time we saw him, but here he has many conversations with Mark, of course not realizing that this blond-haired “Justice Department agent” is the person he’s been chasing.

Cunningham also brings back Justice agent Joanna Tabler, last seen in #24: Cryogenic Nightmare. She sends Mark a letter at the Stronghold letting him know she’s in New Mexico working on a case involving eco-radicals. We readers already see the situation in an opening segment that features a mentally-retarded guy who has been hypnotized into a suicide attack on the research labs in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the top-secret Operation Long Reach project is being worked on. The hypnotizer is a guy named Harry Ackors, a ten-year resident in good standing of Los Alamos, a business owner and member of various boards, but in secret a KGB operative.

Curiously, Cunningham seems at great pains to bring sleaze back to the series, but mostly via outrageous dialog. Like in the opening sections in Los Alamos, in which we see Ackors’s main weapon – a busty blonde named Dawny – at work. She’s been through two of the top lab scientists, one of whom was killed in a car wreck she arranged and another who gave up the project in shame when his affair with her was discovered. Now she’s at work on number three, who goes on about various parts of her anatomy in dialog we’ve never before encountered in the series. No funny business, though. No, Dawna blows the dude’s brains out instead of screwing him, given that he finally cottoned to the fact that this girl was asking too many questions.

What’s funny is that Ackors tells Dawna she needs to scram, but she’s still in town when Mark Hardin shows up…and no one but him seems to think it’s screwy that the same woman was involved with three dead (or departed) scientists at the lab. It takes a while for her to return to the narrative, though. Instead Cunningham page-fills with Mark scoping out the town, watching a demonstration of the Star Wars-esque laser defense being built in the labs, and also sitting through a long speech on the economy of Los Alamos. Fun stuff is only sporadic, mostly through the limited conversations Mark has with Goodman, aka the Penetrator’s number-one enemy. Goodman resents being taken off the Penetrator case for this Long Reach business and spends his time going through his thick files on his quarry, all while Mark is standing in front of him.

As for the action, it’s very sporadic. Cunningham has shown less and less interest in action as the series has progressed, and this time he keeps Mark out of anything serious until nearly a hundred pages in, when he guns down one of the eco-terrorists. Oh, these characters take up their own goodly portion of the narrative; led by HR Rivers, a young lady with very small boobs (that’s how you know she’s evil – Men’s Adventure 101, folks), the greenpeace freaks seem to have stepped out of the previous decade, spouting “power to the people” babble that seems pretty dated given the ’79 publication date. Cunningham randomly includes a former professional basketball player named Clutch in their ranks.

Actually Clutch’s appearance leads to some of that “unacceptable in today’s world” stuff; Joanna Tabler has her own pages-filling subplot in which she goes undercover as a new member of the eco-terrorists, trying to gain the trust of Rivers. Clutch hits on her relentlessly, and Joanna lies to him that she’s gay so he’ll back off. But meanwhile Rivers is gay for real, and she calls Joanna to her room that very night. Here Joanna admits she fibbed to Clutch because “He’s so big and looked mean and he’s black.” This part also features some of that random raunch Cunningham has suddenly decided to add to the series; Clutch refers to Joanna, apropos of nothing, as a “honkey tight-twat.” Almost sounds like a country music dance craze – “Folks, it’s Merle Skrugg and his Pickin’ Grinners with their number-one hit, ‘Honkey Tight-Twat,’ tonight at the Opry!”

Speaking of random, later on we learn one of the lab techs is a guy named Dan Streib, but nothing much comes of it – he doesn’t even have any dialog. Anyway it all just sort of grinds along; Rivers’s terrorists attack the labs a few times, and only Mark can convince the heads to call in military support. It’s just sort of goofy and juvenile…the eco-terrorists hit the lab, then scramble back to their headquarters and sit around. And meanwhile Mark suspects someone’s behind them, using them as a diversion. He does at least take a few of them out, in another of their attacks on the labs, but Cunningham is very conservative with the violence this time.

And he’s conservative with the sex, too, despite the occasional dirty talking; for example, Mark and Joanna’s expected coupling occurs off-page at the very end of the novel. Mark doesn’t even have an encounter with sexy Dawna, who returns to the novel long enough to try to take out a few more lab scientists (one of them being the Streib character) all while still avoiding police suspicion. However Dawna does engage Mark in the longest and most entertaining action scene in the book; early on she makes a failed attempt on his life, and at the end of the book Mark finally goes back to her house for some payback. They engage in an almost Police Squad!-esque firefight, shooting at each other from behind furniture in her living room, mere feet apart. This fight involves hands, feet, and knives, but as usual with the genre Dawna meets her maker via her own accidental hand, tugging on a grenade handle a little too hard.

Actually the whole book is sort of cartoonish, or at least juvenile. Particularly given that Mark, toward the end, figures out that popular Los Alamos citizen Harry Ackors is really a Russian spy. But instead of driving over to Ackors’s place and blowing his brains out, Mark sits around and waits for the opportunity to arrest him. It’s all just so ridiculous; this was a series in which the protagonist used to kill even the most minor of villains with a sadistic glee. Now he seems to think of himself as an officer of the law, and apparently takes his fake Justice Dept creds as genuine.

The finale is also juvenile and lame – Ackors fakes everyone out with another suicide attack using yet another piece of cannon fodder, and when the place is again defenseless, only Mark is there to stave off Ackors’s grenade attack via helicopter. In the finale Mark himself suffers first-degree burns and must spend a few weeks off…of course on the beach with Joanna so they can have some of that hot off-page lovin’.

Humorously, Death Ray Terror ends with a survey, in which readers are asked how many books they read a month, what Pinnacle titles they like, etc. Hopefully Pinnacle got some feedback telling them that The Penetrator had gone to shit and needed work asap. Because it’s kind of surprising the series lasted almost another 20 volumes.

Thursday, May 3, 2018

The Penetrator #32: Showbiz Wipeout


The Penetrator #32: Showbiz Wipeout, by Lionel Derrick
July, 1979  Pinnacle Books

After a couple misfires The Penetrator sort of gets back on track, though make no mistake this is a greatly watered-down take on the character, particularly when compared to the merciless incarnation of the earliest volumes. It was Chet Cunningham who gave us that merciless Penetrator (wow that just sounds terrible, doesn’t it), which makes it all the more humorous that in this one Cunningham has Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin practically walking on eggshells to only kill those who truly deserve it.

But at least this one rises a bit out of the torpor which seems to have settled over the series. That being said, Showbiz Wipeout is more akin to a private eye yarn, as Mark suddenly becomes all fired up about a potential creative agency monopoly in Hollywood – clearly the authors used this series to write about whatever their current fancy happened to be. Why this would be of any concern to the Penetrator is something the reader is encouraged not to think about. Even more goofily, Mark is appraised of the situation via the “bulletin board” in his Stronghold, ie the converted mine which serves as Penetrator HQ.

What really has Mark interested is all the random deaths and injuries going on in Hollywood; the book opens on an extended sequence of various notables either being killed, beaten, or swindled by thugs who work for Global Talent Agency. The goal of course is all the Hollywood bigshots under one roof, and the mysterious head of GTA will stop at nothing to achieve his goal. Humorously the LAPD doesn’t even appear to exist, and these murders – including even a staged car crash, as depicted on the cover – are carried out with little concern about running afoul of the law. 

Cunningham fully commits himself to his own goofiness; not only is the Penetrator suddenly interested in this Hollywood nonsense, but he also just happens to have an old college buddy who now runs a talent agency! This is Joey Larson, Mark’s old frat buddy. Mark calls him up, drives over to Los Angeles, and discovers that Joey is stressed out because he too is being hassled by GTA. They want ownership of Joey’s one star client, who just happens to have been the victim of the car crash mentioned above. GTA is also threatening Joey’s life, so Mark puts him up in a motel and insists that he hide there.

Mark poses as “Lance Lansing,” up and coming actor with regional theater exeperience, his headshot and resume prepared by Professor Haskins back at the Stronghold. He gets an interview at GTA, coming off like an ass to the head agent there, a nebbish chump with a “honkey afro.” Mark sneers at the lowball offer he’s given, puts down the agent, and then beats the shit out of the two thugs the agent calls in. Mark also ingratiates himself into the orbit of Lorna Luna, a onetime box-office draw but now “old” at 45. She takes a shine to hunky “Lance” at the party she holds in her mansion, though Cunningham doesn’t have Mark exploit it – and also we get a few random mentions that Mark is only 27 or so, which doesn’t seem right to me. The series has appeared to occur in a sort of real time, ie the first volume was in ’73, seven years before this one, and periodically we’re reminded of the passage of time in various installments…so are we to believe Mark Hardin was only 20 years old in that first one?

Anyway, while Mark passes on Lorna Luna, he does become involved with plucky private eye Angelina Perez, aka “Angie,” a hotstuff Latina who carries a piece in her purse and who was herself hired to look into GTA. Mark becomes so smitten with Angie, in fact, that he occasionally wonders if he should let her know he’s the Penetrator and make her his partner! The veteran Penetrator reader can’t help but wonder why Mark never felt this way about his casual girlfriend, Joana Tabler, who is basically the same as Angie, she too being a gun-toting agent of sorts. Now that I think of it, Joana hasn’t been seen much in recent installments, so maybe Cunningham is paving the way for a new casual girlfriend for our hero. Hell, Mark even ends up not having sex with her, so as not to ruin any potential for an actual romance in the future or something.

Action is infrequent, again keeping with the pseudo private eye vibe of the novel; Mark’s kills are only few, and his first victim is the GTA thug who murdered the girl in the car wreck at the start of the book. Otherwise Mark mostly makes use of dart gun Ava, which per the norm these days is only loaded with knockout doses. The first big action scene comes at an intended trap; the mysterious leader of GTA has figured out that the Penetrator is on the scene, thanks to those handy blue flint arrowheads he always leaves behind, and sets up a “jiggle girl” event which is really just a ruse to lure out the Penetrator. A “jiggle girl” is a new busty actress the studios show off for reporters; the event, which Mark himself realizes is a trap, takes place on the Universal Studios lot and features actors dressed up like Keystone Cops (as shown on the cover – again, the cover is faithful to actual events in the novel).

Again Mark mostly does his fighting with Ava or a .45 automatic. The Keystone Cops turn out to be more GTA thugs, and one of them almost gets the better of the Penetrator, pinning him down during a long chase through some empty studio lots. Here Angie comes to the rescue, blasting away with that gun in her purse, and again there is the blatant disregard for reality as one would normally expect in a Chet Cunningham novel. After the firefight, our heroes basically just drive off and grab a bite to eat. Angie has been digging around off-page, trying to determine the paper trail that will lead to who ultimately owns GTA: we readers learn it is a producer named Jeffrey Scott Duncan who was blacklisted years before, and now aims to get the ultimate revenge on Hollywood by taking control of all the major stars.

The climax takes place at a costume ball in an old villa that’s recently been used for a horror film. Duncan has rigged the place with various booby traps, again expecting the Penetrator will show. He does, dressed as Zorro; Angie goes as a “harem girl.” But by this point Duncan doesn’t have any goons left, so rather than the typical action denoument, we instead have this “tense” bit that goes on and on where Duncan, suddenly acting crazy, reveals that he has a bomb on the premises and intends to blow everyone up as his final act of revenge. Or something. Actually the part with the bomb reveal is kind of funny in a dumb way because Duncan straight-up tells everyone it’s a bomb and they’re going to die, but everyone thinks it’s part of an elaborate act, given that the entire grounds is done up with robotic actors and taped recordings of arguments, sex scenes, and other gimmicks.

The Penetrator again fails to actually kill anyone; Duncan’s fate is so ridiculous I had to read it twice to ensure I hadn’t missed something. (Spoiler alert – the dude’s eaten off-page by a tiger!!) Cunningham winds up the tale with Mark again puzzling over his growing feelings for Angie, wondering if he’ll ever give up the Penetrating life some day and get hitched – or maybe even bring on a partner. But he tells Angie so long and heads off for his next mission, which hopefully will be a bit more fun than this one. I mean, Showbiz Wipeout isn’t terrible – it’s probably the best we can expect from the series at this point – but it replaces the gory violence of the early volumes with a sort of goofy surrealism. Personally I miss the gory violence.

Thursday, June 8, 2017

The Penetrator #30: Computer Kill


The Penetrator #30: Computer Kill, by Lionel Derrick
March, 1979  Pinnacle Books

Chet Cunningham turned in this 30th installment of The Penetrator; Cunningham recently passed away, and I don’t want to speak ill of the dead…but this book sucked!! I mean, it was one of the worst “men’s adventure” novels I’ve ever read…down there with Cunningham’s earlier #22: High Disaster. Seriously, I know it had to be a bitch to keep turning in these manuscripts year in and year out, but still…like I wrote in an earlier Penetrator review, someone at Pinnacle shoulda said to themselves, “You know, maybe we need a new Lionel Derrick.”

Just as in High Disaster, Cunningham turns in a volume that has precious little in common with those that came before it…Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin is retconned into a computer-savvy security expert…the villain is a lame-handed electronics engineer….and there’s practically zero action in the entire book, other than one hilariously-arbitrary fight. Indeed, the majority of Computer Kill is made up of ALL CAPS COMPUTER FONT as “main villain” Hector Lassiter, the aforementioned electronics engineer, hacks into the virtual coffers of the Bainbridge Corporation.

In many ways Computer Kill is prescient in how it is focused on cyber theft, security, hacking, and identity theft. Cunningham had clearly researched this nascent field – these were the days when a good PC system could take up a whole room – and was aware of the dangers it presented. He was right on the money with all the nefarious things a good computer hacker could do. But as Zwolf so accurately and succinctly said: “You want to know a secret? Technology isn’t very interesting. In fact, it makes things boring.”

And if nothing else, Computer Kill sure is boring. When we meet him, Mark Hardin’s already in Chicago, checking out this latest threat which has captured his interest – the dwindling profits of a large corporation called Bainbridge. Yep, folks, “The Penetrator” has suddenly become interested in financial matters. He poses throughout the book as an IRS security specialist, and I kid you not, there are endless sequences where he goes through pages and pages of financial data with Barbara Simpson, the hotstuff computer director babe who is running Bainbridge in all but name, given that Jethro Bainbridge, ancient founder of the company, hasn’t been seen in years.

But really Mark is a supporting character in his own book. The real star is Hector Lassiter, a nutjob computer whiz who was fired from Bainbridge a few years ago after a hand-crippling accident he suffered on the job. Now he’s sworn revenge, which he’ll reap via extortion. At egregious page-length we will read as Hector gets the various codes for various Bainbridge accounts, hacks into the system (all of it tediously described via ALL CAPS computer commands) and makes off with increasing amounts of money. Then he’ll call Barbara Simpson with threats for more money, or else, and this executive-level babe will break down in tears, begging “IRS security expert” Mark Hardin for help.

It wouldn’t be a Cunningham book if there wasn’t any weird and arbitrary shit in it. For one, Hector seduces a fugly Bainbridge computer worker to get access codes from her, and when she discovers the truth, he stabs her to death….and then decides to make her murder look like a “random” Satanic massacre! Slashing up her corpse and scrawling “Pentagrams and other symbols” on the walls, he hopes he’ll throw off the cops (he doesn’t). And speaking of arbitrary, Computer Kill has Cunningham indulging in his own “arbitrary action scene,” along the lines of the “random bank robbery” series co-writer Mark Roberts gave us in #27: The Animal Game.

While walking around Chicago, Mark is attacked by some random dude who just happens to spot Mark and realizes he’s the very man who killed his brother years ago. Turns out this guy was brothers with one of those corrupt Seattle cops in Cunningham’s #8: Northwest Contract, and, spotting Mark on the streets, rushes to get the revenge he’s wanted for so long. It goes without saying that he fails, and indeed Mark barely breaks a sweat as he takes the guy out, “knife expert” and all.

And really that’s it so far as action goes in Computer Kill, which makes the now-customary “Penetrator’s Combat Catalog” at the back of the book especially ridiculous. Mark doesn’t use any of his weapons; even the finale, which sees him rushing to capture Hector before he can blow up the Bainbridge corporate skyscraper, doesn’t have any action. I mean, at least the similarly-pathetic “main villain” in High Disaster had a few thugs Mark could blow away. Hector Lassiter doesn’t even have that – the one dude he does get to work for him, Hector himself blows away, so as to cover his tracks.

To make matters worse, Mark doesn’t even kill off the increasingly-annoying Hector; the finale sees Hector’s plans to blow up the building with hydrogen fail, but he and Mark inhale copious amounts of the noxious vapors. (Mark later walks it off, given his fine-tuned Indian superpowers or whatnot.) While a brain-fogged Penetrator escapes in an elevator, Hector blows himself up by firing at some compressed hydrogen – and dies off-page! In fact it’s some random character who even informs us that Hector is dead!

And what makes for the final pages of Computer Kill? Mark sitting in Barbara Simpson’s office and helping her recoup, via computer, all the money Hector stole from the company! I wish I was making this up, but I’m not – that’s the climax of the novel, as if we readers were super-concerned that Bainbridge was still out a couple million bucks. I mean throughout the book you keep wondering to yourself, “Why does the Penetrator even give a shit about any of this??”

Thirty volumes in, and this series is in pretty big trouble – ironic, then, that around this time Pinnacle was trying to drum up business with a free pamphlet they were giving out at bookstores around the country (boy I wish I still had mine!). It contained writeups about the various Pinnacle action series: The Executioner, Death Merchant, The Penetrator, Richard Blade, The Destroyer, and Edge (The Butcher was on hiatus at this point). Some of these writeups showed up in the Pinnacle paperbacks of the day; the Death Merchant writeup by Joseph Rosenberger appears in Computer Kill.

And speaking of which, Allan at the Sharp Pencil blog recently sent me the Death Merchant writeup as a Word document, with the intent that I put it up here on the blog – and I’m going to get around to it posthaste.

Monday, January 9, 2017

The Avenger #4: Manhattan Massacre


The Avenger #4: Manhattan Massacre, by Chet Cunningham
October, 1988  Warner Books

The fourth and final volume of The Avenger finds unhinged hero Matt Hawkee slightly less unhinged as he ventures to Los Angeles to wipe out “a new Oriental syndicate.” The “all druggers must die” vitriol of the previous volume is a bit whittled down this time, Chet Cunningham for the most part leaving the sadism to the villains. This is the New Connection, a conglomerated triad which takes heroin-hooked whores off the street, gussies them up, and has them play Russian roulette in front of a betting audience!

Some unspecified time after volume 3, Hawke is in Los Angeles, looking into the recent rash of hookers who have committed “suicide.” All of them were teenaged runaways, heroin addicts despite their youth, and Hawke’s drugger senses are alerted. There’s no attempt at making Hawke an empathetic character this time; he baldly exposists his sad-story background to one dude early in the book, and then on page 114 we get an arbitrary flashback. But otherwise he’s just your typical men’s adventure protagonist, out to use his endless arsenal against the drug-dealers in a variety of firefights.

As mentioned we get a good glimpse of how evil Hawke’s latest target is. In a long opening sequence, we meet a 15 year-old street hooker/heroin addict from Chinatown who is taken into an opulent “palace” in Chinatown and pampered. She is to be the latest roulette victim, offered a hundred thousand dollars for the bet – if she survives, the money is hers. Cunningham makes us feel for the poor girl as she is taken into the betting room on a grand throne, dressed up to the nines by a staff of makeup and wardrobe artists. The sequence ends as expected, with the girl blowing her brains out.

Hawke tracks down David Wong, older brother of the dead girl; a successful businessman in Chinatown, Wong tried to keep his sister from taking to the streets but failed. He becomes Hawke’s first accomplice in the novel, eager to get vengeance on whoever was behind the girl’s death; he too disbelieves the newspaper stories that these have all been unconnected suicides. However he is very fearful of the New Connection. He also has another sister, this one a hottie named Jasmine who dances for a living and who surprisingly does not become one of Hawke’s conquests.

Hawke also reconnects with an old ‘Nam pal while in LA. This is Buzz Yuan, former ‘Nam chopper pilot, current Wall Street type. An interesting note throughout Manhattan Massacre is that Vietnam is given a lot more focus. Whereas most men’s adventure heroes in the ‘70s were also ‘Nam vets, very seldom did we actually read anything about the war – the focus instead was on their current, lone wolf activities of the characters. But in the ‘80s the memories of Vietnam were brought to the fore – no doubt catering to the rash of action flicks which featured Vietnam vets – so we have many arbitrary reminsices from Hawke or Buzz about “that time in Huey” or whatnot.

Together these two get in a bunch of firefights throughout the novel, traveling around the New York area and taking out various New Connection operations. Buzz gradually drops his businessman makeover and becomes more at home in the chaotic bloodshed he once experienced daily in the bush; it’s all entertaining but increasingly unbelievable, like when Buzz even rents out a chopper so he can more completely recreate his ‘Nam days, above the streets of Manhattan.

Cunningham gets a little pulpy with New Connection’s leader, the mysterious Mr. Chu of Hong Kong who uses three gorgeous, miniskirted Chinese ladies as his personal bodyguard. However Cunningham doesn’t exploit this; the bodyguard gals are hardly featured, and arbitrarily sent to take out Hawke at one point, who almost perfunctorily wastes them without the proper exploitation factor the scene requires. But Hawke does score with another gorgeous Chinese lady: Lin Liu, herself a former heroin addict who was roped into the Russian roulette scheme and actually survived. Now she’s a high-ranking New Connection member, but, as Hawke discovers, she’s eager to leave.

Posing as a heroin dealer himself, Hawke does business with Lin Liu, who for no reason at all abruptly tells Hawke she can tell there’s something different about him; she blabs her entire lifestory to this veritable stranger, desperate that he might help her escape Mr. Chu and his people. Cunningham leaves the sex scene off-page, but afterwards Hawke has feelings for the girl – and posthaste she’s abruptly removed from the narrative, captured by a suspicious Mr. Chu. She’s basically in the book long enough to exposit to Hawke about the syndicate, have sex with him, and then get caught!

Most of Manhattan Massacre is comrpised of Hawke and Buzz raiding various places and killing all the druggers within. Cunnigham doesn’t get too crazy with the violence. He also adds arbitrary stuff like the sudden presence of a DEA agent whose partner – a Chinese guy – turns out to be a traitor. Meanwhile Buzz is the one who falls in love with Broadway dancer Jasmine Wong, thus it’s Buzz we’re to empathize with when Jasmine is also caught by Mr. Chu in the climax – Lin Liu has been gone so long we’ve already forgotten about her. However Cunningham brings her back just long enough to gut us with her sad fate.

The finale sees Hawke and Buzz raiding the opulent palace in which the Russian roulette takes place – humorously, Hawke arrives just seconds after the latest victim inadvertently blows her own brains out – and while by this point the constant action scenes have lost a bit of their novelty value, or at least their excitement, Mr. Chu is delivered a very Hollywood-esque sendoff: Hawke jams a primed grenade in his mouth.

Speaking of Hollywood, Hawke announces his intention to head there and root out the rampant drug-dealing at the end of the book, thus the unpublished fifth volume likely occurred there. I think I read somewhere – was it Brad Mengel who wrote about it? – that this fifth volume was eventually epublished, but I’ve never bothered looking it up. At any rate, here ended the Avenger series, at least so far as the paperback run went.

Monday, August 15, 2016

The Penetrator #28: The Skyhigh Betrayers


The Penetrator #28: The Skyhigh Betrayers, by Lionel Derrick
November, 1978  Pinnacle Books

Chet Cunningham brings the sleaze factor back to The Penetrator; in his latest mission, which sees him venturing around San Francisco, Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin finds the time to visit a few strip clubs and cathouses – all in the line of duty, of course. And while our hero himself doesn’t get lucky (the sex scenes were whittled out of this series long ago), he does become friendly with a platinum blonde who strangely enough is almost identical to another Cunnigham creation, Joanne Tabler, the federal agent who has sporadically appeared since the earliest volumes.

This volume also sees the continued softening of Mark’s formerly-rough edges. Multiple times in The Skyhigh Betrayers he has the chance to kill someone, but goes out of his way not to – despite the fact that these people later come back to cause him more problems. This Mark Hardin sure as hell isn’t the same guy we were presented with back in #4: Hijacking Manhattan. The softening has been going on for quite a while now, and I wonder if it was because Cunningham himself had become less bloodthirsty or if Pinnacle requested that the protagonist of the series be less sadistic. While this does make Mark Hardin seem more like a normal hero, it also does make him appear rather stupid – how else to explain a part where he fights a bunch of Cuban agents out to kill him and goes out of his way to just knock each of them out?

The Skyhigh Betrayers is a bit busy in the opening with laying groundwork. Long story short, the lead scientist on some atomic energy research project has killed himself – or was he murdered? And the number one guy on the project, Dr. Brunt Maxwell, has gone missing. Apparently the project had something to do with a shielding for atomic warheads which would cut down radioactive fallout or somesuch. Anyway Mark Hardin gets wind of all this and figures something rotten is up, so he heads on over to San Francisco to find out what’s up.

As usual posing as a federal agent, Mark is able to bullshit his way into various agencies and high-security areas. When visiting the research center, he meets a gorgeous blonde-haired babe named Juliet Marshall, a woman apparently so pretty that Mark will basically pine over her throughout the novel. As mentioned there’s no sex for poor Mark this time out, but he’s really crazy about Juliet; indeed he considers her the most gorgeous woman he’s ever seen. She’s new on the project and now is mostly taking care of Mrs. Brunt Maxwell, who has no idea what happened to her husband or even whether he’s alive or not.

There’s a lot of goofy “comedy” stuff in The Skyhigh Betrayers, sort of like the hijinks you’d see in late ‘70s action movies, usually ones of a redneck bent. For example an early scene has Mark’s rental car being arbitrarily inspected by a random cop, and Cunningham ruins the tension by having Mark sneak over and disengage the parking brake on the cop’s patrol car. The cop goes running off after it and a chuckling Mark drives away. But even goofier is Mark’s sudden resolve not to hurt anyone this time around. This mostly presents itself via the appearance of Juanita, a sexy Cuban secret agent who keeps running into Mark and threatening him, with Mark laughing it off.

Juanita initially goes after Mark in a different way – when he confronts her in her hotel room, having figured out she isn’t just an innocent employee after all but really a Cuban agent – she doffs her top and offers herself to him. Instead “The Penetrator” laughs this off as well and takes his leave. Later in the book Juanita will come after him again and again, even sending some thugs after him.  The real villain of the piece is an East German agent named Thomas Ashford who is also hunting down Dr. Maxwell. Ashford is one of the most brutal villains in the series yet; his intro in the book has him torturing a Mexican dayworker in a sequence that will have the reader squirming. This opening in fact was so lurid that it had me expecting the series was about to return to its grimy roots, but it appears that Cunningham saves the sadism for the villains, these days.

The Skyhigh Betrayers is almost like a private eye yarn in that the majority of it is comprised of Mark going around the seedier areas of the city and hunting leads. Midway through he discovers that Brunt Maxwell had a penchant for nudie clubs, and Mark finds himself at a strange dive where you can buy a camera in the foyer and go in and photograph naked women. For extra cash you can feel one of them up or more in a private room. You guessed it, Mark finds Brunt’s favorite gal and gets a private room with her, and she too pretty much offers herself to Mark – not that he takes her up on it.

There’s sporadic action throughout, with Mark mostly armed with a .45 throughout, though he does finally break out Ava, his dart gun, again. By the way, starting last volume we’ve gotten “The Penetrator’s Combat Catalog” at the end of each book, with drawings and ballistics of some of Mark’s weapons, similar to the material that would appear in the final pages of early volumes of Gold Eagle’s Executioner line. This time we get to see Ava, and talk about lame – it looks exactly like a Luger! All along I’ve pictured it as some sort of sci-fi raygun-looking thing. But the bit with Ava is another indication of Mark’s softening; Cunningham introduces the dart gun again, reminding us of its lethal payload…and then Mark just carries around a .45, usually butting people in the head with it.

But Mark’s biggest and most inexplicable goof this time is his early failure in the killing of Ashford. The two first meet when Mark’s walking around a local fishing site, asking random people for Brunt, a well-known sports fisherman. This sequence, quite padded and dull, caps off with Ashford, who himself is posing as one of the fishermen, pulling his gun on Mark. Ashford gets away this time, and later – after taking out some of Ashford’s thugs – Mark heads for the dude’s house to kill him. Instead he throws a grenade at Ashford and the East German agent runs for safety; the explosion burns down the house. Mark walks off, just assuming (wrongly) that he’s killed the man! 

Cunningham was also fond of putting topical interests in his installments, as best displayed in #20: The Radiation Hit, with its trucking focus. This time it’s skydiving, which in fact leads to the (meaningless) title of the book; from the strip club babe Mark learns that Brunt Maxwell has a secret love of hang gliding, and Mark eventually goes out looking for him. This entails lots of skydiving stuff shoehorned into the book; Mark you won’t be surprised is suddenly revealed to be an expert hang glider, telling some young dude whose gear he borrows that he’s logged several hours of flight time. In reality we learn that Mark only has a passing familiarity with it, though you gotta wonder how a guy whose been on various vengeance quests for the past, what, six years would have time to do much else.

Mark finally tracks down Brunt here in the sky, and succeeds in talking him down; there follows an arbitrary bit where some random guy pulls a gun on Brunt, demanding that he race him. But the dude’s strung out on goofballs or something (don’t worry, Mark doesn’t kill this guy, either, even though the dude tries to kill Mark!!)…  Cunningham as ever has a thing for ending each chapter on a cliffhanger, no matter how lame or contrived. Pretty Juliet Marshall is also here; turns out she too is an agent hunting down Brunt, though it’s never outright stated to which agency she belongs. As for Brunt Maxwell himself, he’s super annoying; shy as a rabbit and always trying to run away.

“There’s been enough killing,” Mark consoles poor lil’ Brunt, promising that he’ll keep the scientist safe from danger. It doesn’t work out that way, though, as within minutes after Mark has located the rogue scientist, none other than Juanita shows up, toting a gun and abducting the man from right under Mark’s nose! Even here Mark refuses to kill the annoying enemy spy, instead causing her to suffer a horrendous car crash (which she apparently survives unscathed), and then planting a submachine gun in her wrecked car…for which, we later learn, she’s hauled off to jail.

Meanwhile a still-alive Ashford has done some abducting of his own – he’s kidnapped Mrs. Maxwell. Here Cunningham realizes he’s in the homestretch and starts writing Brunt as a completely different character, full of resolve and quick-thinking; Cunningham brushes off the copout by having Brunt claim that he often experiences occurences of schizophrenia or something, and when confronted by lots of stress he will temporarily take on a new personality. Whatever! At least the book caps off with a shotgun-toting Mark heading for an abandoned amusement park, where Ashford waits with a bound Mrs. Maxwell, surrounded by various traps.

Even in the finale Mark fails to kill the main villain – that honor goes to Mrs. Maxwell – but he does make off with the gal, Cunningham informing us that Mark and Juliet are headed off for vacation together. She still doesn’t know Mark is the infamous Penetrator and Mark still doesn’t know who she works for – Juliet jokes that she’s “one of the Jane Fonda Commandos” who “go where any women’s libber needs help” – but Mark figures she’s part of some NASA security force. At any rate it’s left up in the air if Juliet will return someday.

Wrapping up, The Skyhigh Betrayers was kind of middling, a bit too padded at times, with a curiously-restrained Mark Hardin acting more like the hero of a late ‘70s TV show than the bloodthirsty revenger of previous books. But it wasn’t the worst Cunningham book I’ve read by a long shot.

Oh, and that image on the cover of the dude in the scuba suit wrestling a dolphin? It’s not in the book. Neither are there any atomic lab-protesting hippies or any opium-smoking Chinese dudes. Bummer!