Showing posts with label Irving A. Greenfield. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irving A. Greenfield. Show all posts

Thursday, August 26, 2021

The Pleasure Hunters


The Pleasure Hunters, by Irving A. Greenfield
July, 1973  Dell Books

Proving once again that there’s no sleaze like ‘70s sleaze, The Pleasure Hunters is a super-hardcore romp set in Mexico courtesy Irving A. Greenfield, who wrote sleaze novels in the ‘60s and must’ve gotten a chuckle out of writing sleaze for a major imprint in the ‘70s. But while The Pleasure Hunters brands itself as being in the tradition of Acapulco, it really has more in common with the “risque comedy” PBOs Dell was publishing at the time, like Black Magic and Greenfield's own Making U-Hoo, with the caveat that this one’s a lot more hardcore. 

Those books, while promising salacious reads, often turned out to be tiresome, unfunny “comedies” with smutty undertones, and hardly ever were as sleazy as the covers implied. The tone was usually farcical, with goofy characters encountering goofy situations. The same holds true for The Pleasure Hunters, which is a bummer, because I was hoping it would be a slightly more sleazy take on the typical Burt Hirschfeld novel. But then, Greenfield I think was incapable of writing a potboiler like Hirschfeld; Greenfield’s books are usually fast-moving yarns with paper-thin characters and not much in the way of the introspection you’d get in Hirschfeld. What I am trying to say is that Greenfield was a lesser writer, but then he made up for it with much more explicit adult shenanigans than you’d find in Hirschfeld…or really most mainstream authors of the day, save for perhaps Harold Robbins, who usually went to even more extremes than the “in the tradition of”-type authors. 

The Pleasure Hunters actually starts off like a regular steamy ‘70s type of novel, though. We meet young Sergio Martinez, a hunk bellboy in Oaxaca, Mexico, as he goes to an attractive guest’s cottage to “fix her window.” But after some banter it’s clear the young lady, an American tourist, has called Sergio over for something else. The bellboy is quite familiar with such requests and goes about pushing the initially-reluctant young woman into an explicity-detailed sexual escapade. In fact Sergio is so used to such matters that he also expects payment in return for his Latin lovin,’ and is angered when this latest lay doesn’t take the hint that he wants money. So he basically tells her “no more for you” and leaves! This opening gives a good indication of the novel we’re about to read – it’s incredibly raunchy in the exploitation department, and Greenfield pulls no punches. To the extent that I refrrained from excerpting anything for fear of offending any of you! 

But shortly after this a new shipment of tourists arrives at the hotel, and slowly The Pleasure Hunters will transform into one of those “risque comedies” like the other paperbacks mentioned above. One of the guests is a sleazy salesman type named Harry Harris, who has come here as the leader of the group and is a loudmothed type, but he has ulterior motives: a friend who stayed at the hotel months before claims that the bellboy named Sergio has an in-line to an incredibly valuable mural that’s hidden somewhere in Oaxaca. So, per this vague backstory, Harry thinks he can finally strike it rich by taking Sergio into his confidence and finding out where the mural is. Only as it develops Sergio not only doesn’t remember Harry’s friend, but also has no idea of what “mural” Harry is referring to. Comedy, uh, ensues. 

Greenfield at least knows to throw us a bone with frequent explicit shenanigans. He proves this posthaste with a random sex scene between Harry and the beautiful, black-haired Elli, a topless dancer with “voluptuous breasts” that Harry’s brought along. Greenfield tries to establish a former affair between these two, but it broke off due to Harry’s business sleaziness or something, but now against her better instincts Elli’s come along on this latest caper, or some such crap. The point of it all is that they get right down to the sleaze posthaste, a scene featuring Elli’s memorable line: “Just stop talking and put it inside of me!” 

But this rampant sleaze is soon clouded over by those farcical tones that sunk all those other Dell paperbacks, like when Harry insists that Sergio take a busful of guests on a tour of Oaxaca, and it descends into a goofy sequence in which Sergio and a hotel colleague he’s brought along try to b.s. their way through it for the behest of the gringos. Speaking of which there’s also a lot of stuff from Sergio and the other Mexican employees’ points of view, and Greenfield makes them all seem rather dumb but still cagey in their street smarts of how to get more money out of the gullible gringos. Eventually the crux of the plot revolves around Harry trying to convince Sergio that Sergio knows where this mysterious mural is, and, uh, comedy ensues. 

I really don’t feel like writing more about the book because it sucked. So what the hell, I’ll go ahead and randomly excerpt some filth after all. Read at your own discretion! 
 



Monday, September 14, 2020

Julius Caesar Is Alive And Well


Julius Caesar Is Alive And Well, by Irving A. Greenfield
No month stated, 1977  Manor Books

This obscure Irving Greenfield paperback turns out to be the sequel to another obscure Irving Greenfield paperback: Making U-Hoo, which was published four years earlier by Dell. I had no idea of this when going into Julius Caesar Is Alive And Well, thus it turned out to be a pleasant surprise – as well as a relief, as “the U-Hoo Conspiracy” is constantly referenced in the narrative, with absolutely no background on it. One wonders if the few people who bought this Manor publication even realized it was the sequel to a book that had been published by another imprint a few years before.

My guess is that by the time Greenfield turned in his manuscript, Dell had moved away from the “sleaze paperbacks with photo covers” they’d been doing in the early to mid-‘70s; there were a ton of books in this unofficial line, in addition to Making U-HooSexual Strike Force, Michelle, My Belle, etc. Another possibility is that Dell just rejected Greenfield’s manuscript, which truth be told is pretty bad. I mean no joke, this is a lousy book. There are few things worse than an unfunny comedy, and unfortunately that’s exactly what Julius Caesar Is Alive And Well is. Whereas Making U-Hoo at least made the pretense toward being fairly “straight,” this one’s more of a madcap yarn in the vein of Ron Goulart, only spiced up with frequent hardcore sex sequences. This is another similarity to the previous book, and another indication that Greenfield likely wrote it thinking Dell would publish it.

At any rate we are introduced to returning hero Bart Sherriff (misspelled “Bat Sherriff” on the very first line of the book, reminding us from the get-go that this is Manor and not Dell) while he’s enthusiastically – and explicitly – banging his assistant, a redheaded beauty named Pam. Bart we’ll recall is a “trouble shooter for the big ad agencies on Madison Avenue” and charges thousands of dollars for his freelance advertiser services. He lives in a swank suite high atop Manhattan, often entertaining eager young women on his round bed with musical accompaniment courtesy an 8-track tape system; no mention is made, this time, of the lights that accompany the music. Last time Bart got involved with a conspiracy that had him rubbing shoulders with government agents and foreign spies, and the same holds true here, but this time Greenfield doesn’t even bother with the “freelance advertiser” setup.

Bart and Pam are interrupted mid-boink by a call on Bart’s “red line,” which is what the emergency calls from panicked clients comes in on. Pam doesn’t want him to answer, but Bart argues that his professional pride demands he do. Greenfield indulges in these sub-Len Levinson dialog exchanges throughout, with Bart engaging in pseudo-“deep” conversations with characters, but whereas such material is humorous in Len’s work, here it comes off more like teeth-pulling. Bart answers the phone to find it’s Fred Warren on the other line, president of North American Labrotories. Bart met him the other week at a party in Manhattan, where a drunk Bart was asked who was the greatest writer in history was and responded, to the amazement of all, “Julius Caesar.”

Choppering Bart out to the corp HQ, Warren explains that this is the very reason they want to hire Bart. You see, and brace yourself in for the stupidity, the lab once employed a man named Dr. Douglas who also said that Julius Caesar was the greatest writer in history! This, these “scientists” believe, is too much of a coincidence. A confused and progressively annoyed Bart claims that a “hobo” told him the Julius Caesar thing fifteen years before, and for no reason at all Bart repeated it at the party. By showing him some photos, Warren and his executive board prove that the hobo Bart met years ago might have been Dr. Douglas – Bart barely remembers what the hobo looked like, but he admits he remembers him as looking somewhat similar to the photos of Dr. Douglas.

It gets goofier: Dr. Douglas turns out to be dead, and the man who was working here at the lab was an imposter. One who stole some secret involving genetic engineering. Since Bart made this harmless statement about Julius Caesar being the greatest writer at the party, Fred Warren has decided to hire him to track down the missing man who was posing as Dr. Douglas and find out what happened to the secrets he stole. It’s all so incredibly preposterous, especially given that it has nothing to do with advertising, which is Bart’s forte. However, he’s somewhat famous now due to the “U-Hoo Conspiracy” (which is mentioned so many times I pity the poor readers who had no idea there was a previous book in this “series”), so Warren figures Bart will have no problem turning into a temporary gumshoe.

On this shaky ground the novel stands. The jumbled plot is however just an excuse to whisk Bart around the country so he can boff a series of hot, willing women. First among them is Dr. Paula Kay, who was friendly with “Dr. Douglas.” She claims there was something unusual about the man, particularly how he’d speak of historical events in almost casual terms. After this it’s down to the business of screwing, with Paula feigning drunkeness so Bart can escort her back up to her hotel room. As ever Greenfield spares no detail in his sex material, with the usual focus on oral activities, particularly Bart’s going down on the various women. This is a recurring theme in Greenfield’s work, by the way; there’s always more focus on the protagonist licking out the women, as well as “diddling her bunghole” in addition to dining at the Y.

But man, the book still sucks even if words like “bunghole” appear in it. And there’s so much padding. Like an entire chapter given over to Bart razzing his hot and built secretary, Wendy, that God just called him on the phone. This is in regards to a mysterious, deep voice on the other line that instructs Bart to “forget about Dr. Douglas.” The chapter ends with Bart making a lame joke to Wendy that he just spoke to God, and preposterously enough the entire next chapter is given over to Wendy asking if this is true – including “shocking” stuff like Wendy arguing that “when God comes” and Bart interrupting her and saying he’d never talk about God “coming,” when of course all Wendy meant was “coming” in the sense of appearing, a la like a burning bush and the like. Just low-brow bullshit like this that even a glue-sniffing punk in detention would think was immature, and it goes on for pages.

Warren sends Bart to Kentucky, where he’s to research the company the real Dr. Douglas worked in – where he was working when he was killed in a car wreck two years ago. But on the way Bart’s drugged by the hot stewardess, coming to in a hotel room and disovering the “stew” is really a Russian spy named Natasha, here with a couple male Russian spies. They’re all still simmering over the U-Hoo thing, and are also ticked off because they too were duped by a deep, mysterious voice on the phone – one that warned them that Dr. Douglas would be flying to Kentucky under the name “Bart Sherriff.” Realizing they’ve been duped and that Bart doesn’t know anything, they drug him and leave him in the hotel room, to be found by the local cops, who eventually let Bart go.

Here Bart learns that someone named Sanders stole Dr. Douglas’s identity, and after trading some dialog with a memorable cab driver – another similiarity to Len Levinson’s work – Bart catches a flight to New Orleans, where he talks some more with Jo Ann, hot-to-trot widow of Sanders. Surprisingly this does not lead to a sex scene. Instead, Greenfield’s moved more into a Keystone Cops sort of thing, with Bart constantly bumping into the Feds. Admitedly this does lead to a somewhat funny part where Bart, in a cheap wig and disguise, finds himself sitting across from the Fed he just lost, and the two men pretend to be underwear salesmen. As I recall, this “fooling around with idiotic government agents” seemed to have taken precedence in Making U-Hoo as well, which does lend the novel a ‘70s vibe.

Another thing I recall from that earlier novel is that the swinging ‘70s sex gradually faded away, in place of the “mystery” subplot. Same holds true here, with Bart’s hardcore moment with Dr. Paula halfway through the novel being the last such moment – though he also apparently has sex with stewardess Natasha on the plane, but the scene is played more for (unfunny) comedy, so it’s not explicit at all. Indeed, it’s so non-explicit that I didn’t even realize they’d had sex until the end of the novel, where the act is mentioned. But anyway Bart’s soon ducking and dodging various Feds, even using a buddy of his, a famous mystery writer, to get him out of a scrape late in the book. There’s no real action, though, and no violence at all – again, it’s all just a broad comedy centered around a lame mystery. But my friends believe it or not, the title of the friggin’ novel blows the entire mystery!

The last quarter has Bart in London, where Sanders was recently seen – and to again prove how stupid the novel is, Bart’s author buddy, Reese, just happens to have run into some dude at the airport, a dude who was on his way to London and who said in passing that Julius Caesar was the greatest ever writer. So Bart gives chase, but instead of getting to this mysterious figure, Greenfield instead pads the pages with Bart running around London with an overly-British private investigator. And then, on the final few pages, Sanders is revealed – and folks, spoiler alert, but who the hell cares, right? Because I really don’t think any of you will ever want to read the book. But get this – Sanders, aka Dr. Douglas, is in fact…Julius Caesar himself, who is alive and well!

There’s absolutely no explanation of this, no piecing together of the lame puzzle Greenfield has developed throughout the dumb-assed narrative. I mean really, Julius Caesar appears on like the last four pages of the book, and it’s all dialog. We get some shit about him being into genetic work and cloning, and he apparently stole the material Dr. Douglas was working on to prevent mankind from attaining the secret of cloning. Oh, and Dr. Paula and Natasha and Fred Warren were all part of the plot – Bart was hired, due to his activities in the U-Hoo Conspiracy, so as to make an easy target for the various Feds and Commie agents (of whom Natasha is a “friendly member,” JC reveals, in another go-nowhere moment casually relayed in the last pages). The goal was for Bart to distract the various spies so that JC could slip out of the country undetected.

And on this lame note, the entire group drinking a toast and Bart feeling confused, the stupid novel comes to a close. Having endured the 234 pages of banality, I can only suspect that some intelligent editor at Dell Books did indeed reject Greenfield’s manuscript, and Greenfield later managed to sell it to Manor. This is one of those books were I wonder what the author’s goal was. I mean, Julius Caesar Is Alive And Well isn’t funny, so it’s a failure as a comedy. And the “mystery” is treated so ridiculously (intentionally so) that it can’t be viewed as a suspense novel. The sleaze is rampant, initially at least, but soon disappears. So what are we left with? Probing character portraits? Soul-plumbing narrative and introspection? There’s none of that, either. In fact it seems as if the entire book serves as a payoff of the title itself, but unfortunately Greenfield does little to even bring to life – let alone exploit – his vaguely sci-fi concept.

Greenfield was very prolific, so they can’t all be winners. Admittedly though, I’m still waiting to read a Greenfield winner, but I’m sure there’s one out there. Finally, a sad note on Greenfield: I just learned, here, that he passed away on April 1st of this year, at the age of 91. According to this lengthy piece, he turned to producing independent plays, including one that was based on his experiences writing Depth Force.

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Depth Force #8: Suicide Run


Depth Force #8: Suicide Run, by Irving Greenfield
March, 1987  Zebra Books

I’m missing the seventh volume of Depth Force, but for once we get a little bit of backstory in this eighth volume; Irving Greenfield usually doesn’t tell us much about what came before, but at least this time we find out it’s “several months” after #6: Sea Of Flames and there have been a few soap-operatic changes to the characters and story. For one, hero Admiral Jack Boxer apparently suffered some sort of breakdown in the previous volume, but he’s doing fine now and he’s about to marry some lady named Francine, who made her first appearance last time. 

Boxer’s also now in charge of a sub called the Barracuda, so presumably the Shark was destroyed by the nutjob who hijacked it toward the end of the sixth volume. Boxer’s also got new commanders: Tysin, his direct commander (inexplicably referred to by the nickname “Chi-Chi”), and Mason, the new director of the Navy. Humorously, not only do these guys hate Boxer but they’re actively plotting his death!! Apparently Boxer embarrassed the US last time by insisting that a bravery award be given to best bud-archenemy Borodine, the other series protagonist – and Borodine has his own continuing “As The Periscope Turns” subplot, with a new wife and his own skirmishes with commanding officers. I usually skim his parts because they bore me.

Actually the whole series is pretty boring. A weird thing about Greenfield’s style is that he always foregoes any opportunity for excitement; seriously, main characters will be killed off and it’s relayed so casually, in a humdrum narrative style, that you have to go back and re-read the section to be sure you understand what’s happened. It’s almost as if the series were catered to invalids, or people with nervous conditions – “I want a yarn about submarine commanders in some near-future Cold War setting, but for god’s sake no action or suspense – my heart couldn’t take it!”

Per series template, we meet Boxer just as he’s wrapping up the events of the previous volume; as mentioned before, every volume of Depth Force follows the same path. We’ll have the first quarter-plus devoted to wrapping up the previous book, then we’ll have the meat of the tale, which is comprised of plotting and counterplotting and other soap opera stuff, and then we’ll get to the “main” plot (ie the plot described on the back cover)…and this “main plot” will only take up about twenty pages of the book. Indeed, the back covers of Depth Force usually are more accurate at describing the next volume. So then Suicide Run (the title a perfect summation of how the reader feels when undertaking one of these books) doesn’t get to this promised plot – the Russkies attacking a section of Alaska – until page 200, and the book only runs 220+ pages.

As usual we meet Boxer while he’s dealing with Borodine and other Russian forces, fighting them and then coming to their aid, or vice versa. So this time Boxer’s just prevented the Russians from assaulting Yemen or somesuch, and he’s making off in his sub with the actual raiding party, looking to reunite them with their countrymen. Of course, his commanding officers demand that he bring them all back to the US as prisoners of war, but Boxer refuses and shuts off communication. He runs right into a trap, as Borodine’s sub has been positioned as bait by the Russians – Boxer’s objective is to drop the men off with Borodine and then head home. He manages to evade the trap and drop off the men, but unexpectedly encounters a more devastating attack in the waters outside Virginia, where the Barracuda is hit by some mysterious object. Here Boxer’s first mate, Cowley, is killed in the action…but again the reader has to go back and make sure this is what’s happened, as it isn’t much elaborated upon.

At this point the plot settles into the usual soap opera dynamic; Boxer reports to Tysin and Mason, who immediately begin plotting his death – in particular, Tysin plans to use Sanchez, Boxer’s former best buddy, to kill him. Sanchez appeared in the earlier volumes and had a falling out with Boxer, presumably in the previous volume. However this won’t pan out until the very end of the novel, when Tysin meets with Sanchez, asks if he’d be interested, and Sanchez says he won’t kill Boxer but he will abduct Boxer’s fiance Francine and hand her over to his “friends in Arabia,” who I guess must run a sex-slave ring.

Now I know what you’re thinking – it might be boring and all, but at least we can expect some random explicit sex in Depth Force right? Well friends brace yourself for this one: there’s no sex in Suicide Run! I mean the one thing that at least keeps you turning the pages, in the hopes you’ll come across some Harold Robbins-esque filth, and it’s not even there! Francine serves more in the capacity of Boxer’s confidant, more so than any previous female character, there for a shoulder to lean on and to come to his aid in unexpected moments – there’s another vague subplot about Boxer trying to get custody of some kid (I presume his son, last mentioned a few volumes ago), and the lawyer’s trying to pull a fast one on Boxer, until Francine reveals she’s got info about the lawyer’s gay frolics, which will make for a sensational news story.

It just goes on and on, with only occasional action. Boxer scuba dives with another shipmate where Barracuda was mysteriously attacked; he comes to the conclusion it was a missile, and we readers already know Tysin was behind it. Boxer gets in a skirmish with some enemy frogmen, sent here by Tysin to plant evidence so it looks like Barracuda hit a motorboat. Boxer uses an “underwater rifle” and takes them both out, but of course his friend is killed. This leads to another action scene as Boxer, a local cop, and Stark (Boxer’s former commanding officer, now retired and living with Boxer and Francine) get in a brief firefight with some men – a sequence that could’ve been much more exploited.

The “main plot” as mentioned comes up very late in the book, and has to do with the Russians closing in on some “newly-discovered oil fields” in Alaska. Boxer is put in charge of a new sub, Tiny Tim, and heads off with another assault team he’s supposed to drop off. And once again all the action happens off-page while Boxer stands in the control room, watching monitors. This time a nuke is even set off, with the last image of Suicide Run being particularly apocalyptic; a mushroom cloud in the distance, the entire assault team and Russian invading force wiped out, and, once again, Borodine and Boxer trapped in quickly-failing submarines, about to go to one another’s rescue. I’ve got the next one, at least, so will see how some of these plot threads play out.

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Depth Force #6: Sea Of Flames


Depth Force #6: Sea Of Flames, by Irving Greenfield
June, 1986  Zebra Books

The Periscope Turns as Irving Greenfield delivers another soapy installment of Depth Force, per series template picking up immediately after the previous volume. And as ever you’re just S.O.L. if you haven’t read that one, because Greenfield throws the reader right in with little backstory or setup. But also per series template this part is quickly wrapped up, with the majority of Sea Of Flames more so about the melodramatic lives of its many characters…before the plot promised on the back cover kicks in for the final quarter.

But having read that previous volume I was at least prepared for this cold open – Captain Jack Boxer had commanded an experimental sea/land vessel called the Turtle into Libya, where he was to drop an assault party which was expected to endure mass casualties in a pitched battle against Muslim extremists. The novel ended with Boxer learning pretty much everyone was dead but Boxer’s pal Vargas, the CIA spook, and Boxer decided to send the Turtle in to save him. Thus Sea Of Flames opens with an action scene – a quite boring action scene, mostly relayed, again per series template, via dialog, as Boxer shouts out orders on the Turtle’s bridge and info is relayed back to him. This series certainly lacks the typical immediacy of the genre.

Boxer manages to extract Vargas and another of the landing party, a fellow spook named Morell who turns out to be the bastard who set up the landing party. Later we’ll be given vague reasons for this sellout by chief spook Kincade, Boxer’s archenemy and boss – not to mention grandfather of Boxer’s latest bedmate Trish, who made her debut in #4: Battle Stations. The Morell subplot seems to promise things (none of which pan out in this installment, naturally), with him trading intel on how the Turtle can avoid hidden mines in exchange for safe passage off the ship. Last we see of him he jumps off a boat on the way to Sicily, evading Boxer’s orders for his death; Kincade later claims that Morell was following orders, or something, and also that he has Mob connections, so Boxer better watch out if he ever tracks him down to mete out revenge.

The Turtle gets destroyed anyway; this after Boxer has sent it back into the depths and has been busy dealing with Captain Bush, the psychopath who went nuts on the bridge and tried to rape Cynthia Downs, another of Boxer’s many previous conquests. Bush pleads to be returned to command and Boxer grapples with whether he should be kept locked up or not(?!). The Turtle is attacked or something – I kind of lost the thread at this point – and Boxer has to abandon ship. He’s the last off, along with an injured Vargas, and the CIA agent dies on the way to the surface. Boxer mourns him for a couple pages – so distraught in fact that he turns down an offer for sex from Vargas’s sister, after the funeral in New York!

Boxer actually turns down a bit of sex in this one; on the flight from Italy to New York, he finds himself sitting beside a hot redhead lawyer, Francine, who apparently debuted in the previous volume…as we’ll recall, in one of the arbitrary subplots Depth Force is known for, Boxer was contacted to handle the estate of a dead pal, in particular ensuring that the dead pal’s son got this and that. Well, Francine was the lawyer working the estate, I guess – I have to admit I’ve forgotten – and the two chat away on the flight, with it all clearly leading to another of Greenfield’s sex scenes. But Boxer, despite his interest in the lady, never goes through with it, even when later in the novel he enjoys a homecooked meal at Francine’s place. This is mostly because Boxer has fallen in love with Trish and plans to ask her to marry him.

But before all that – As The Periscope Turns! Folks I kid you not, the captain comes on the plane’s PA and announces that he’s just been informed there’s a bomb onboard(!). And mind you this is a commercial flight, Boxer and his remaining crew getting a ride on it for hazy reasons. We’re vaguely informed that the Libyans Boxer was fighting at the start of the book planted the bomb in revenge, somehow knowing Boxer et al were onboard…whatever. It gets super-goofy as Boxer goes into the cockpit and helps out, but meanwhile a Libyan fighter plane is dogging them and ends up shooting the plane out of the sky. This entire sequence is written in the lifeless prose of the series: “The plane crashed down into the water and quickly began to settle.” That’s how the plane crash is written, folks – no immediacy, no impact.

Boxer also turns down the promise of sex courtesy his ex-wife, Gwen, a soap opera star (how telling, given the bent of this series). Did any of you know that Boxer has a prepubescent son? I sure as hell didn’t, but maybe we were informed back in the first volume, which I don’t have – and as we know, you only get one chance with Irving Greenfield. The dude isn’t one for reminding his readers of anything from previous books. Well anyway this arbitrary plot is almost hilarious in how half-assed it is; Boxer in that plane crash realized he hadn’t seen his son in two years(!) and vowed to visit him. The boy, John, is “seven or eight,” per Boxer, who truly doesn’t remember. All this is relayed to “Chuck,” this rebel-type young man Boxer abruptly meets up with in Staten Island…no setup or anything, naturally, but apparently this guy was the son of “Rugger,” one of Boxer’s many dead friends. Perhaps it’s the same kid who came into that inheritance brokered by Francine in the previous book. Folks I really don’t the hell know at this point.

Well anyway, all this stuff with Chuck is just goofy as can be; Boxer runs afoul of the rough types in the neighborhood, and to prove he’s a big man in the Navy he radios in a “Code Ten.” This brings in a squad of marines who close down the street, with helicopters flying around. Seeing he’s proved his point to the dumbass locals, Boxer tells the marines “all clear,” and they leave. They just leave! And later Boxer chuckles about the situation with his commander! But anyway by the time we finally get to John, aka Boxer’s “seven or eight” year-old son, Greenfield has become bored with the whole thing and gives the kid like two lines (“Daddy! I missed you!”), and ends the scene – apparently Boxer’s plan is to have Chuck hang out with John; Boxer himself clearly has no plans to. And yet the next day as he’s flying home to DC, looking forward to screwing Trish silly, Boxer “feels good about himself.”

Boxer’s devotion to Trish is ironic given that she’s in the midst of a hot and heavy affair with Borodine, aka Boxer’s Russian archenemy/best friend. Trish doesn’t come off particularly well this time, wantonly screwing Borodine (for once, mostly off-page) and openly lying to Boxer, sometimes savoring to herself the fact that she’s just had sex with two dudes within hours of each other. While she keeps the affair secret from Boxer, Borodine is aware of it. I mentioned back in my review of the third volume that, when I discovered a few volumes of Depth Force on the shelf of a used bookstore some years ago, I opened one of them up right on a random hardcore sex scene, as arbitrary as could be. Well, this book was the one – Trish graphically fondling herself as she imagines being double-teamed by Boxer and Borodine and screaming as she climaxes, “They’ll never do it! They’ll never fuck me together!” We also get a few XXX bits with Boxer and Trish, but none of it’s as explict as prevoius volumes – at least, the word “bung hole” doesn’t appear this time around.

But while the series is soapy, one must never forget how cruelly its characters are treated, in particular the female characters. While we know from the scenes in her perspective that Trish has guessed Boxer is going to propose to her – but plans to tell him no – it’s still a bit of a shock when, during dinner with Boxer and Borodine (Trish again relishing that she’s sitting down with both her conquests, and also relishing Boxer’s ignorance of this fact), Trish’s ex-husband walks in and shoots Trish in the head! We’re soon informed she’ll “never wake up,” in other words she’s now a vegetable. But by novel’s end Greenfield has decided to hell with this and has Kincade radioing Boxer (in the middle of a battle!) and informing him that Trish has died(!). Meanwhile Boxer’s already decided to move on…it’s really humorous in a way, friends. Occasoinally he’ll think about her, but within pages he’s like, “I’ll be okay.”

Trish’s ex-husband by the way is our segue into the plot promised on the back cover; his name is William McEllroy (he also first appeared in the fourth volume) and he’s a “former congressman” who now leads a sort of hard-right army dedicated to starting war with Russia (still communist in Greenfield’s fictional 1997). This group, which brings to mind the rebel government in Greenfield’s earlier Waters Of Death, plans to take over the world in the wake of a nuclear holocaust. They’re a pretty resourceful bunch, managing to free psychopath Captain Bush from the funny farm (where Bush kills a couple people “accidentally”) so that he can captain the Shark, ie the top secret nuclear sub normally commanded by Boxer. They even manage to steal the Shark, leading us into the “tense” climax.

Almost immediately after Trish’s assault – McEllroy humorously escaping without much fuss – Boxer is informed the Shark has been stolen. He’s put in charge of another vessel, the Neptune, and gives chase before the Shark can launch nukes on Moscow, thus ushering in WWIII. Russia is alerted, and none other than Borodine commands his own nuclear sub as both countries join to find and stop the Shark. Once again it’s all relayed via dialog; there are more scenes of Boxer and his chief mate Cowly “sipping coffee” on the bridge than the sort of bloody violence you’d expect from a book labelled as “men’s adventure” on its spine.

As expected, Captain Bush goes nuts, killing off everyone but McEllroy, then taking off to incredible depths and changing route, his plan to nuke Paris and other European countries instead of Russia. The two men get in a fight and McEllroy knocks out Bush, but he can’t pilot the Shark and they’re further beneath the sea than any other vessel can go, so McEllroy is kind of screwed. At any rate this is where Sea Of Flames ends, but we can predict how the next one will go down: quick wrapup of this plot in the opening pages, followed by some long-simmer soap.

Monday, April 23, 2018

Waters Of Death


Waters Of Death, by Irving A. Greenfield
No month stated, 1967  Lancer Books

It appears that Irving A. Greenfield started off as a sleaze writer, one of the many authors serving as Vin Fields, before branching out into sci-fi under his own name, then moving into trash fiction in the ‘70s, and finally writing the many-volumed Depth Force series in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Greenfield’s writing though appears to remain consistent no matter the genre or year – slightly melodramatic, at least when concerning the torrid love lives of his characters, yet curiously threadbare in the description and plot departments, with major events (and the deaths of major characters) occurring off-page.

While Waters Of Death suffers from these same things – and more – it did well enough with the sci-fi readers of the day to warrant a few printings. The year is 2167, and Greenfield only gives us the trimmings of this hellish future society; basically, the Earth is overpopulated and undernourished, and all food is harvested from the sea. Society has broken down into rigid, progressivised hierarchies very much along the lines of that seen in the vastly superior After The Good War. But it’s sort of the same thing – there’s a single global government (the horror, the horror), independent thought is prevented at all costs, and any infraction against the government is dealt with quickly and mercilessly.

This is something our hero of sorts discovered two years ago: Dr. Robert Wilde, 35, of the Institute of Oceanography and Marine Biology. We get some vagueries about “independent research” he conducted a few years ago on underwater harvests or something; when the ruling party discovered this, Wilde was drummed out and cast in a loserville sort of purgatory. But in this hellish future society, being a government outcast is akin to being a social leper; Wilde was not only ridiculed, but his wife turned on him and began openly sleeping around. Wilde only stays with her so as to be with his son, because apparently – Greenfield doesn’t elaborate – children are only raised by married parents. Otherwise they are sent to government foster homes to be raised in a hive mentality setting. 

Not that Wilde, as he’s presented to us in the novel itself, appears to give two shits about his son. Greenfield’s characters are as a norm incredibly self-involved; I think my own son, who is only 14 months old now, is more aware of the feelings of others. Rather, Greenfield sort of goes through the motions that Wilde wants to see his son, yadda yadda, but the kid’s in like three pages of the book and, humorously enough, rarely even referred to again. There isn’t even any regret on Wilde’s part when his wife announces she’s to become a government whore of sorts at the local “sex center” – another vaguery of Greenfield’s, that there are veritable temple prostitutes in this future society – and thus the kid will have to go to a foster center, after all. Oh, and Wilde’s wife is pregnant with another man’s child!

But Wilde’s thoughts are more on the new job he’s been tasked with, one that might bring him back into the prominence he once enjoyed. His old boss at the Marine Institute has called him in and offered Wilde the opportunity to redeem himself; the sea farmers in the Caribbean are apparently revolting, as crops are dying and being destroyed by mysterious means. Leading the revolutionaries is Jessup Coombs, Wilde’s old friend; we’re briefly informed that, fifteen years ago, Wilde spent a tenure with these very same sea farmers. After a big blowout with wife Marion (“If you were a real man you’d hit me”) and son John (who screams “I hate you!” when he catches Wilde finally taking Marion up on her offer of hitting her), Wilde says to hell with it and heads off for the Caribbean.

First though he bangs the secretary of his old Institute boss – there’s a lot of secretary banging in Waters Of Death, in fact. As with most sci-fi, this novel is more about the era in which it was written, thus this 2167 is run by straight white males who drink and smoke and keep leggy secretaries in their office, mostly for sexual services. But curiously Greenfield keeps the sex off-page, and even the expected exploitation of the female characters is kept to a minimum; at least, it’s nowhere as explicit as the material he wrote in Depth Force, or another books of his I have from 1973 titled The Pleasure Hunters, which is filled with graphic screwing.

As mentioned, Wilde and Jessup were friends back in the day, but anyone expecting some “how’ve you been, you old so and so?” camaraderie between the two has never read an Irving Greenfield novel. Indeed, Jessup barely even remembers Wilde, and the fact that Wilde once worked beside these sea farmers is a simple plot contrivance that is never expanded upon. Jessup himself fades into insignificance; he’s built up as a revolutionary firebrand, but instead he’s more interested in picking up the wallflower secretary of the local government official. Yes, here’s another secretary prime for the exploiting, though Greenfield builds up a growing love between the two…then doesn’t do much of anything with it.

In fact Wilde’s time with the sea farmers itself is glossed over. What exactly he’s doing here isn’t much detailed, nor is the daily life and tools of the sea farmers. We do learn they are at the lowest strata of society, with precious few rights, something adding to their growing hostility. Jessup claims the farmers are not destroying the crops, and we readers know he speaks the truth, as we’ve seen the perpetrators: a shadowy cabal of government officials who have banded together in the hopes of starving the populace, killing off a large portion of it, and then swooping in to take control of the entire world. They are led by Zahn, global government Security Chief; one of the plotters is named Ahura Mazda, and whether it’s the ancient Zoroastrian god come to life Greenfield doesn’t say. I liked to pretend it was.

So much stuff is unexplored. Before leaving for the Caribbean, Wilde is given this proto-cyberpunk data dump into his brain, the government not only feeding him sea farming data but also secretly implanting pro-government propaganda. This doesn’t go much anyplace. Instead, we have yet another spawning romantic subplot, as Greenfield realizes that Loraine, the young brunette daughter of a sea farmer widow, is a mega babe, with “full breasts” and everything, though again Greenfield curiously leaves the sleazy a-doings off-page.

Action scenes are as outline-esque as those in Depth Force; a bunch of “renegade sharks” attack the crops late in the novel, and Jessup rounds up some sea farmers to hop in their underwater vessels to go fight them, armed with “high-intensity sonic beams.” Here Greenfield proves the sloppy execution he’s sometimes known for, as Jessup is killed – just like that, folks. He goes down to save a comrade, radios to the others that he can’t make it out, and that’s it. I kept expecting him to show up again, sharkbitten but alive, or for Wilde to go to his rescue, but it doesn’t happen. He’s dead, Jim, and that’s that. For that matter, Wilde thereafter leaves the sea farmer community, and we aren’t even properly informed of the fact until he’s already back at the Institute, doing studies on his findings underwater (whatever the hell they were).

The climax is particularly rushed. The shadowy cabal gets their hooks on the new leader of the sea farmers, spurring him to start a revolution, and soon scads of people are dying off-page. In fact, this new leader himself is perfuntorily killed off-page, us readers only informed of the event in passing. This after we’ve gotten a few scenes from his viewpoint which imply he’s going to be a major character. Jessup’s secretary girlfriend is never mentioned again, and we learn, again in passing yet mercilessly so, that Loraine too has been killed (and probably even raped) in the rioting.

Not that Wilde bats so much as an eye. Instead he takes his “findings” to his old Institute boss; he’s learned that man himself is causing the destruction of the sea harvests, due to chemicals being put in the ocean and scaring the aquatic life or somesuch. But he’s again branded a rebel and this time he’s thrown in a government prison. Soon he learns of the rioting going on around the world. And only here, like over a hundred pages later, does Wilde even bother to think of his son again, wondering what happened to him. Dad of the year, folks!

Greenfield goes for one of those downbeat endings that would be all the rage in the ‘70s; the rioters, now that the sea crops have all been destroyed, have turned to cannibalism, and Wilde, thinking he’s being freed from prison by a group of rioters, discovers instead that they’ve come here to eat him. And here Greenfield ends the tale, Wilde getting his “throat ripped open” by the very same government secretary he was having an affair with, early in the novel.

This one was lifeless, folks, and I wouldn’t recommend it. Greenfield was capable of better and one sees why he eventually moved out of the sci-fi field. But you’ve gotta love the cover art on this second edition: “Waters Of Death – starring Drew Carey!!”

Monday, July 11, 2016

Depth Force #5: Torpedo Tomb


Depth Force #5: Torpedo Tomb, by Irving A. Greenfield
February, 1986  Zebra Books

The Depth Force series continues to come off like a soap opera in novel form; this series could’ve just as easily been titled “As The Periscope Turns.” For once again “action” is for the most part nonexistant and author Irving Greenfield is more focused on detailing the potboiler lives of his main characters. I mentioned in my review of the previous volume that I didn’t have this instalment, but the men’s adventure gods intervened and I recently came across a copy for a pittance.

However, as I’ve found with the other installments I’ve read, I could’ve indeed skipped Torpedo Tomb without missing anything pertinent. Per the usual template this one picks up from the previous volume’s cliffhanger finale, without a shred of background detail to catch up readers new to the series. Hero Captain Jack Boxer and his crew of the Shark are introduced en media res, and lord help you if you don’t know who any of them are or don’t know what happened in the previous book; Greenfield certainly doesn’t remind you. Having read that previous installment I knew that it ended with the Russian sub squad of Captain Igor Borodine, briefly housed on the Shark after their own sub’s destruction, attempting to take over the Shark – while two more Russian subs were attacking it. 

Greenfield brushes off the mutinying Russians subplot, with the riot already quelled when Torpedo Tomb opens. Rather, it’s all about the attacking Russian subs, which fire “killer darts” that almost destroy the Shark. Apparently these are like heat-seeker torpedos or something. Again the “action” is for the most part relegated to dialog as Boxer stands on the bridge and shouts orders to his crew. This time the only two Shark characters who rise out of the anonymous backdrop are Vargas, aka “The Spic,” who leads the ground assault forces, and Cowly, Boxer’s EXO who outs himself as gay in the first half of the book. Otherwise they’re all nonentities save for Boxer himself.

Borodine is also onboard; the Depth Force series is built around the dynamic between Boxer and Borodine, with the rival sub commanders respecting each other despite the Cold War (which still rages in this fictional 1997). Greenfield doesn’t spend as much time with the Russians this volume, with the sexy female Russian scientist who propositioned Boxer in the last pages of Battle Stations given short narrative shrift and Borodine himself relegated to mourning – in the usual heartless vibe of this series, he finds out via a radio dispatch from his comrades that the woman he was going to marry – plus her unborn child – has been been killed in a car wreck! By novel’s end Borodine has been promoted to Rear Admiral and is sent to D.C. on some sort of ambassadorial mission, which will certainly guarantee more soap operatic stuff in future books.

When the Shark returns to port Boxer takes care of priorities – having sex with his girlfriend Trish in one of Greenfield’s patented explicit sequences. Sadly though, Torpedo Tomb features less dirty stuff than previous books. However Trish delivers one of the greatest lines of all time, cozying up with Boxer in his quarters on the Shark for some illicit shenanigans: “Finger me, my darling.” But after the whopping mutual climaxes Boxer and Trish realize they have an audience – a shocked Cowly watching from the door. Trish freaks out, questioning Cowly’s manhood in dialog that’s hilariously un-PC in today’s world, but meanwhile Cowly does later admit to Boxer that he, Cowly, is gay, and was in fact enjoying the view while he watched ol’ Boxer hump away!!

Methinks the Boxer-Trish romance will gradually go the way of all the other Boxer romances so far; the dude’s had like four girlfriends in the three books I’ve read. But Trish is getting increasingly pissed with how Boxer is so devoted to his work and how he keeps leaving her, etc. And as for that soapy Borodine angle mentioned above; Torpedo Tomb ends with Borodine and Trish on a date in DC, kissing, announcing they want to have sex with each other(!?), and then sort of wondering what to do. At any rate Trish is Boxer’s sole bedmate this volume, with another explicit featuring the two later in the book – which is it so far as the hardcore stuff goes, this time.

Instead, Greenfield spends more time on dialog, much of it either banal or just regurgitation of stuff we’ve already read about. The novel runs to the usual exorbitant Zebra length, but it’s got big print and lots of white space; I feel bad for Greenfield, because it’s clear he was handed an unwieldy word count for this series. So as ever he takes the plot in all sorts of directions. Once he’s back in his home (and Greenfield by the way rarely if ever describes any of the surroundings – or characters, for that matter), Boxer is contacted by Sanchez, shadowy CIA dude who has offered to find the muggers who inadvertently killed Boxer’s mother in the previous volume. Here follows an arbitrary bit where Boxer heads to New York and, armed with “a .357 with silencer,” he blows the kneecaps off the three men who beat his mother into a fatal coma.

Gradually the main plot bears its head. Responding to a distress call from a monster sub called the Tecumseh, Boxer is unable to find the ship and eventually deduces that someone has hijacked the ship itself. When the corpses of the Tecumseh’s crew begin to wash up on New Jersey’s shores, Boxer’s hunch is proven correct – and here follows another very arbitrary bit where Boxer finds out he’s been willed two million or so bucks by the dead Tecumseh captain(!?), and Boxer goes into the slums of the Bronx to find the guy’s bastard son and tells him that, if he can get his shit together, the kid stands to become a millionaire when he’s 18. Again, it’s all like something off Days Of Our Lives.

It gets even more soapy when Boxer and a few of the Shark crew are placed on the experimental vehicle The Sea Turtle, which is a submarine/tank combo; it can go beneath the water, then sprout tank treads and travel overland. But also placed onboard the Turtle in an overseer capacity is none other than sexy Cynthia, Boxer’s on-again, off-again girlfriend from previous books – again, we aren’t reminded of specifics, and Cynthia’s just introduced as if we remember her as well as Boxer does. At any rate this causes a bit of friction on the bridge, with Boxer struggling to deal with the woman after their hot n’ heavy romance of yore.

And if that wasn’t soapy enough for you, the Turtle soon responds to a crashed airplane in the Atlantic, which went down in a thunderstorm. Boxer has the survivors pulled out of the stormy sea and put onboard the Turtle, and it develops that one of the passengers is eight months pregnant and has just went into labor from shock. Coincidence be damned, it turns out to be Louise, Boxer’s black girlfriend who was forced (by Boxer’s CIA boss Kincade) to break up with Boxer in the previous book (because she was black!). After delivering the baby Louise has a heart-to-heart with Boxer where she reveals that the “Dear John” letter she wrote him wasn’t her idea, and anyway she’s happy now, married to a doctor who treats her well, and etc. As The Periscope Turns!

More soapy stuff ensues with the fractional presence of Captain Bush, who apparently appeared in volumes 1 or 2, neither of which I have. Per Kincade, Bush is put in co-command of the Sea Turtle, and whereas before he was apparently “tight,” now he’s acting “loose.” In particular, Cynthia claims that he’s been sexually harrassing her. This leads to a short but bizarro section where Bush goes nuts, takes over the Turtle’s bridge and announces himself on the PA as “Captain Bligh,” and orders Cynthia onto the bridge so all the men can gang-bang her! After sending Cynthia to the bridge(?!?), Boxer gases the room and puts Bush in custody.

In the final quarter the plot promised on the back cover takes place. Again proving how small this soap opera world is, the Turtle is to pick up none other than Sanchez, ie the dude from the New York section, who will be leading Vargas and an Agency assault team on a strike upon a prison camp in Libya in which some Americans are held. Boxer is informed that the place is run by the Shushas, “an extremist Arab group” that is 500-man strong. The expected casualty rate for Sanchez’s assault force is seventy-five percent! Boxer drops ‘em off and Greenfield proves again that Depth Force is not an action series by any means; rather than read about the assault on the prison camp, we instead sit around with Boxer and crew on the Turtle bridge while they listen to radio updates and sip coffee! 

Things quickly and anticlimactically escalate to yet another cliffhanger ending, something for which this series is also known. Sanchez and his force is almost wiped out to a man and Boxer realizes the whole mission was a set-up, as the Shushas knew they were coming. When he discovers that Boxer is still alive, Boxer orders the Turtle to the attack, but meanwhile it’s been caught by an underwater steel net or something, and more forces are coming to attack them.

And that’s it – no resolution, no climax. As ever, the tale just sort of rolls along, and the next volume will pick up from this very moment with nary a word of background material. Luckily I’ve got that one, so I won’t be completely lost when I start reading it.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Depth Force #4: Battle Stations


Depth Force #4: Battle Stations, by Irving A. Greenfield
July, 1985  Zebra Books

Once again coming off like the men’s adventure equivalent of a soap opera, the Depth Force series continues with this fourth novel that picks up immediately after the events of the previous volume, with not one word of helpful background material to catch up the reader.

Battle Stations follows the same template as that third volume; the first quarter wraps up events that began in the final quarter of the previous volume, and then the narrative moves on to documenting the harried, soap opera-like life of hero Jack Boxer, captain of the experimental nuclear sub The Shark. And like that previous installment, the “main plot” of Battle Stations doesn’t even get started until the final quarter of this volume, with events once again unresolved, so that the fifth volume will pick up the thread and continue the cycle…

As we’ll recall, Boxer was in Russian waters in the Arctic when last we met him, having exfiltrated a group of spies while at the same time kidnapping a bunch of KGB agents, including the head of that agency. When Battle Stations opens Boxer is still in the midst of this life-or-death battle. Only through the deus ex machina crash of a US plane in the ocean is the Shark able to evade the radar of the Sea Savage, the Russian equivalent of the Shark which is captained by Borodine, a noble sort of dude who harbors much respect for Boxer, and vice versa. However they both understand that they will kill one another in open combat if the opportunity arises.

Once the Sea Savage leaves the area, Borodine mistakenly believing he’s destroyed the Shark, Boxer must navigate his ship through the hostile ice-fields of the Arctic ocean. This sequence goes on forever. As with the previous volume, “action” is mostly relayed via dialog, and boring “naval” dialog at that, with Boxer shouting orders to his sailors. Meanwhile, back in the US, Admiral Stark (Boxer’s friend and mentor) bickers with Kinkade (wily CIA chief who hates Boxer). The latter is more so concerned about the KGB abductees, and rails on and on about how Boxer refuses orders (the Shark is owned by the CIA, by the way).

When the Shark finally gets back to friendly waters, Boxer returns to DC and is reuninted with Stark. Here the soap opera vibe resumes; last volume, Boxer hooked up with a pretty nurse named Louise Collins. Kinkade we learned didn’t like this relationship – because Louise was black, and a radical black, at that. So, behind the scenes, he’s paid her lots of money to leave Boxer a “dear John” letter and hit the road. She’s done just that, and now Boxer reels at his loss, not knowing that Kinkade was behind it all. He was “in love” with Louise and etc, blah blah blah…not that this matters, as once again Boxer scores with many women in explicit detail.

In the brief action denoument of Bloody Seas, a Shark sailor named Redfern was killed (Greenfield by the way is notorious for not reminding or even informing readers who the characters are, nor what they do on the ship). Apparently Boxer was close to this dude, and thus goes to a dinner party held in the home of his father-in-law, Senator Sam Ross; also there is Sue-Ann, Redfern’s attractive widow. After getting in a fight with a McCarthy-esque senator named McElroy, Boxer repairs to his guest room…and what reader will be surprised when Sue-Ann shows up by his bed that night?

“I want to be fucked,” announces the recently-widowed woman, and after like a second of deliberation Boxer grants her wish. One of Greenfield’s typically-graphic sex scenes ensues, complete with thorough description of oral venturings and deep plungings. Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy for writing stuff like this – this genre should be filled with filth. But this is just a one-time fling, announces Sue-Ann, and besides she just wishes the Russians would give back Redfern’s body, as it’s still back there on Russian soil. Boxer determines to use his “friendship” with Borodine to get the body back.

There’s no action, no thrills -- Battle Stations is really more along the lines of the trashy novels Greenfield penned in the ‘70s, with a bit of a “political suspense” overlay. This is mostly through Kinkade, who schemes against Boxer throughout, as well as Senator McHugh, who makes it his career to “destroy” Boxer publically. In this McHugh and Kinkade become allies. But the novel is mostly relegated to scenes of Boxer driving around DC and talking to various people about thing he’s done and things he plans to do. Seriously, most of the dialog throughout the novel is of an incendental nature. (Ie, “Where would you like to go for dinner tonight?” and the like.)

Plot developments from the previous book are lost – for example, General Yeotev, the KGB leader who was shot in the knees before his capture, is only given passing mention. Instead we get bizarre, out-of-nowhere stuff like Boxer’s mother dying after her home’s broken into and she’s beaten by thugs(!?). As I said, it’s all very much like a soap opera, mostly because the series seems to be more about Captain Jack Boxer’s love life. This is evidenced with the appearance of Lt. Cynthia Lowe, Admiral Stark’s secretary, and apparently a character who either last appeared in volume 1 or 2; as usual, Greenfield does nothing to fill us in.

But at any rate Cynthia and Boxer were once an item, and somehow, prior to Bloody Seas, they broke off, and on bad circumstances at that. Boxer sees that she’s back on duty when he visits Stark (why exactly she was off duty is also unexplained), and after initial hostilities on Cynthia’s part Boxer is able to get her out on a date – and, of course, back in the sack. Cue more graphic sex as they exuberantly fuck, making up for lost time. But before that can happen, Boxer is cockblocked…shot by a cop!!

Bloody Seas featured a goofy bit where Boxer got in a bar fight with some thugs who were against the fact that his date for the evening, Louise Collins, was black. Battle Stations features an early moment where Boxer blithely tells the bartender at this same bar that he’d fight those assholes again. Well, it soon happens – but after Boxer’s beaten them, pulling a gun to defend himself, some cops come in and shoot him by accident. Or something like that. While Boxer recovers, Cynthia warms up to him.

More soap opera stuff – Boxer and Cynthia go on a yacht cruise, which Sue-Ann also attends. She gets drunk and starts screaming at Boxer in front of everyone about being a horrible leader, how he got her husband killed, and also how he was so quick to jump in the bed of his husband’s widow! Seriously it’s all like Days of Our Lives or something. Then Sue-Ann’s on her knees apologizing, and then Boxer and Cynthia are back in his stateroom, once again exuberantly fucking…

Now Boxer’s in Paris, where the Russians have said they’ll hand over Redfern’s body. Meanwhile Borodine has been cornered by the KGB to set up his “friend” Boxer for death. Boxer meets Borodine’s ex-wife, Maria Dodin (aka Glena) here, where she works for the US – a completely superfluous scene, though Greenfield fools us by describing how “impossibly beautiful” Maria is; normally this would be instant grounds for another sex scene. Instead Boxer gets his booty from the most unexpected source – Trish, the gorgeous young wife of Senator McHugh, aka the dude who is trying to destroy Boxer. Oh, and Trish also happens to be the granddaughter of Kinkade!

Any nitwit would suspect something, especially after the blowup Boxer had with the McHughs early in the novel, yet when Boxer receives an invite to dinner with the McHughs while in Paris, he ends up going – only to find a sexily-dressed Trish waiting there for him alone. When Greenfield mentioned her incredible cleavage, I immediately knew where it was going. One thing he did surprise me on was that Trish McHugh actually ends up falling in love with Boxer; in other words, the backstabbing playout I suspected doesn’t happen. She is here on her own free will, not sent here by McHugh to “distract” Boxer.

Trish ends up being the most frequent bedmate of Boxer this volume, and the one who receives the most explicit scenes; like the last book, Greenfield once again graces us with a sex scene that features the word “bung hole.” We also get Trish’s memorable declaration: “I’m going to come quickly.” But hey, remember how the KGB was going to kill Boxer here in Paris? This is where that goofy “Boxer’s mom gets killed by burglars” subplot arises, and our hero is called away suddenly to attend her funeral, thus unwittingly dodging his planned assassination – and the entire “Redfern’s body being returned” element is hastily dropped.

Now the plot’s all about McHugh’s attack on Boxer, and it’s dumb because the dude is aware that his wife is screwing Boxer, but doesn’t care. However he almost succeeds in destroying Boxer anyway, only saved when someone (perhaps someone sent by Admiral Stark) shows up with photos of Boxer and Trish together in bed. McHugh drops his case in shame, less the photos be revealed, and ends up divorcing Trish, who happily announces she wants to be with Boxer. Oh and meanwhile Cynthia is long out of the picture, having gotten into another spat with Boxer, who had only been considering her for an “easy fuck,” with no intention of a relationship.

Only in the final pages does the plot announced on the back cover come into play. Basically, the crew of a Russian sub mutinies, and the Sea Savage is sent off to destroy the sub before it can reach western waters. The Shark hurries to get there first, only to find the Sea Savage nearly destroyed after a confrontation with its sister ship. Now Borodine and crew are trapped on the bottom of the ocean, their oxygen running out. Boxer ignores orders from Kinkade and vows to save them. By the way, Kincade’s had a heart attack, after a confrontation with Boxer over his granddaughter…strangely, Kincade wants Boxer to marry the girl, despite how much he hates the man.

The Shark manages to save the crew of the Sea Savage, and the Russians plan to overtake the ship, a fine way to show their gratitude. Meanwhile Boxer’s about to get laid by his fourth woman in the book, hot KGB agent Dr. Suslov, who comically enough first offers herself to Borodine while the Sea Savage is stuck on the ocean floor (they are however unable to do the deed, thanks to the Shark’s timely arrival), and then later that same day waltzes into Boxer’s stateroom and informs him that she wants some good lovin,’ pronto.

But then the klaxons go off, and Boxer sends a still-unsated Suslov back to her quarters, with orders to shoot on sight if she attempts to flee. Now Boxer must contend with Borodine and his crew, who have taken over part of the Shark. And here, the action finally growing heated in the final few pages, Battle Stations comes to an inconclusive end – to be continued next time.

Unfortunately volume 5 is one I don’t have, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

And a curious final note – whereas the previous volume was stated as taking place in the “future” year of 1997, this one is stated as taking place in 1995! In fact it’s expressly stated that the last portion of the novel occurs in October of 1995 – yet this book clearly takes place after the previous volume. Maybe the Shark is the USS Eldridge of its day, unstuck in time due to some Philadelphia Experiment…?

Not that Boxer would notice…he’d be too busy exuberantly fucking.

Monday, November 11, 2013

Making U-Hoo


Making U-Hoo, by Irving A. Greenfield
November, 1973  Dell Books

Another of those early ‘70s sex novels Dell Books specialized in, Making U-Hoo is courtesy Irving A. Greenfield, who again delivers a fast-moving narrative that, while not being especially memorable in the plot department, definitely delivers some memorable sex scenes. In the ‘60s Greenfield served as “Vin Fields” for porn imprint Midwood, so he certainly had the experience under his belt (so to speak) to capitalize on the sex novel boom of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s.

The playful title is apt – the characters in this novel “make yoo-hoo” in both the literal and the figurative sense. Sales for a previously-low tier soft drink called U-Hoo (a citrus-lime soda clearly modelled on Sprite) have gone through the roof, basically destroying the profits of larger soft drink manufacturer SDA (read: Coca-Cola). Protagonist and sometimes narrator Bart Sherriff, a consulting ad whiz, is called in by SDA to find out what’s going on.

I say “sometimes” a narrator because most of Making U-Hoo is in third-person, but Greenfield will arbitrarily jump into Bart’s perspective for several first-person sequences. Sometimes it’s when he’s meeting with clients, other times when he’s just walking around (strangely though, none of the actual sex scenes are written in first-person), so there seems to be little rhyme or reason to the perspective changes.

Bart Sherriff is a totally ‘70s protagonist; he’s in his 30s and lives in a swinging bachelor pad in Manhattan complete with a round bed and a stereophonic system that’s hooked into a fancy lighting system, so that various colors will flicker in accordance with the mood of the music. He’s such a successful advertising man that he rents out his services, charging high dollars for his consultations. Just as importantly, so far as the narrative goes, he’s also a big success with the ladies, able to score with ease.

We see Bart handling a few accounts before he’s called in by SDA president Knowles to handle the U-Hoo situation. Knowles states that the problem threatens the national economy, and it’s so bad that people are bootlegging U-Hoo, buying it off shelves and reselling it at a massive upcharge. After accepting the job Bart realizes he’s being followed, and soon discovers that the Feds are on the case, shadowing his every move.

Not that this prevents him from sleeping with the first of three conquests in the novel, this being a gorgeous blonde SDA secretary named Sandy, who just started working at SDA, is happy to go home with Bart, and is obviously an FBI agent (though it takes Bart a while to realize this). In the ensuing sex scene Greenfield takes us completely into the shagadelic ‘70s, with the couple engaging in explicitly-rendered sex on Bart’s round bed while stroboscopic lights flash around them.

Greenfield lazily works up a mystery here, but the novel is moreso in the light humor vein, with no violence or deaths or anything of that nature. In fact when Bart is confronted by a pair of FBI goons he’s easily able to fool them into thinking he himself is a G-Man, and then gets the guys drunk and sends them on their way. This after the trio have watched a televised speech from the President (clearly Nixon, though he isn’t named – and there’s a fair amount of President-bashing throughout the novel, again firmly rooting it in its era), in which the President informs the country of the “soda conspiracy” and requests that everyone buy a can of pop the next day.

It’s his ruse to further throw off the Feds that leads Bart to his next conquest, a brunette model named Lois. The focus of the most sex scenes in the novel, I guess Lois is the closest we get to a female protagonist. Bart calls in a crazy friend to throw a costume party in Bart’s apartment, so Bart can take off in the fray and leave the Feds to wonder what happened to him. He tells his crazy friend to bring along anyone he knows; one of these people happens to be Lois, who offers her place to Bart as a safe place to stay, and thus moments after meeting each other they rush back to her place to screw. Ah, the ‘70s.

Greenfield serves up another pages-long sex scene here, miles beyond the metaphor and analogy-ridden purple prose you’d encounter in say the Baroness series, with graphic depictions baldly rendered…though not with the outrageous aspects of Harold Robbins or the boring, repetitive, and mechanical sex descriptions you’d find in a vintage sleaze novel like Flowers And Flesh. One thing I’ve noticed though about Greenfield is his tendency to always mention what his female characters taste like, if you catch my drift.

Making U-Hoo runs at 251 pages of fairly big print, and I figured most of those pages would be given over to sex scenes, but that’s really not the case. In fact Greenfield seems determined to deliver an actual story, one that’s couched in goofy humor and the occasional sex scene. Most of the novel is focused on Bart’s inner monologues and his thoughts and feelings on various things as he traipses around ‘70s New York City tracking down clues. However the U-Hoo “conspiracy” stuff is not given enough weight or focus to classify the novel as a thriller or anything of the sort. Again, it’s more of a comedy.

In fact the whole mystery angle is rendered moot in the reveal, when Bart meets Flosie, a black masseuse. While giving Bart a handjob she casually informs him that she’s behind the “conspiracy,” having spread the word that the black community should “get whitey” by buying up one brand of soda and then gouging the market with inflated resale prices. Bart thanks her by paying to have sex with her, having already broken off his days-long relationship with Lois. In fact the women just abruptly drop out of the narrative once Bart’s done with them, and Greenfield intentionally or not builds ill will against his protagonist, as it’s clear that these women develop feelings for Bart, particularly Lois, but he could care less.

I’m sort of on the fence with Making U-Hoo; I enjoy Greenfield’s writing and the dialog he gives his characters, but the plot is middling and forgettable. However the book works as a nice capsule of early ‘70s New York and the fashions of its hipper denizens, which always results in high marks from me. I guess I’d end by saying you should maybe check it out if you come across it for cheap, but it’s not worth going to great lengths to hunt it down.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Depth Force #3: Bloody Seas


Depth Force #3: Bloody Seas, by Irving A. Greenfield
April, 1985  Zebra Books

Irving Greenfield started publishing novels in the 1960s; it appears he came closest to fame in the ‘70s, with a slew of trash fiction novels that featured some pretty hot and heavy sex scenes – I have two of them, 1972’s The Sexplorer and 1973’s The Pleasure Hunters, and cursory glances through them would indicate they’re pretty damn explicit and sleazy.

But in the ‘80s through the early ‘90s Greenfield apparently spent most of his time on the longrunning but now forgotten Depth Force series, which debuted in 1984 and ran for a staggering 16 volumes, plus one Super Depth Force. The series is about a top-secret, CIA-operated submarine (the Shark) as it battles against the Soviets, and seems to be influenced by Tom Clancy, only with more of a pulp fiction bent. But since naval fiction has never been my thing, I never looked into the series.

Then one day I came across a handful of Depth Force novels at a used bookstore, and cursory glances through them indicated that they were pretty damn explicit and sleazy! The books seemed to alternate between naval jargon and super-graphic sex scenes – some of them quite arbitrary, which is just how I like them. Needless to say, I bought them all. This third volume is the earliest one I have, which is unfortunate, because it would appear that the Depth Force series is a lot like Doomsday Warrior – if you’ve missed the previous volume, you’re shit out of luck.

Bloody Seas opens immediately after the events of the second volume (apparently the Shark engaged a Russian vessel during an underwater storm for a large cache of gold). Greenfield throws us right in, never once telling us who these characters or or what they’re doing. For that matter, it isn’t until page 215 that we learn that this series takes place in the “future” year of 1997! But at any rate our hero is Captain Jack Boxer, a bearded, 35 year-old ladies man who is devoted to his ship and men, and who is propositioned by practically every woman he meets. Seriously, there are moments in the novel where a woman he’s just met will bluntly inform Boxer that she intends to have sex with him.

There are a lot of sailors on the Shark, and Greenfield introduces the majority of them into the text, but for the most part doesn’t remind us who they are or what they do. I guess this would make for a great, seamless read if you caught the previous two volumes, but for a first-timer like myself it was a little overwhelming. But here’s the thing – Greenfield has such a steady command of narrative that you keep on reading. You can tell the guy had many novels under his belt by the time he got to Bloody Seas, as Greenfield keeps the action moving with lots of dialog and soap opera-type plot developments. In fact, of all the men’s adventure novels I’ve yet read, this one comes the closest to being the literary equivalent of a soap opera – no doubt due to Greenfield’s earlier days as a trash fiction author.

The book opens immediately after the events of the previous volume; the Shark leaves the scene of battle only to engage immediately in another, as a few Russian subs come after it. I found this action sequence boring as it’s just an endless sequence of Boxer relaying orders on the Shark’s bridge, his subordinates repeating his orders, and then reporting back on the ensuing damage done to the other ships. But then, that’s naval military fiction, I guess. But I miss the more personal nature of the average men’s adventure novel action sequence. Greenfield does provide a more traditional action moment, though, when Boxer, on some yacht or something (again a pickup from the previous installment with absolutely no setup material to let us know who these people on the yacht are), is attacked by pirates who are coming after the gold he got in the previous book.

Once the Shark has returned to the US, Greenfield continues with the soap opera feel; there is no more action until the very final pages of the book. Instead the focus is upon Boxer’s harried personal life; he has a casual sex thing going with Tracy, a nymphomaniacal reporter who apparently hooked up with Boxer in the previous book and is doing a feature on the Shark, despite its top secret status. Greenfield also hops over to Russia to detail the similarly soap opera-esque life of Borodin, Boxer’s Russian counterpart. The two men are not only identical but also respect one another, and Greenfield hammers it home how alike they are to the point where it’s as if we are reading the same storyline for both men.

But suddenly it’s “months later” and Boxer, removed from command of the Shark while his superiors research the gold-recovery fiasco of the previous volume, has fallen in love with Kathy Tyson, whom he plans to marry! Then Tracy returns to the fray, informing Boxer that she’s discovered Kathy is really a CIA agent, sent here by Kincade (commander of the CIA and Boxer’s boss) to monitor Boxer. Cue even more soap opera stuff as Boxer throws a tantrum and kicks Kathy out, followed by more tantrum-throwing as Boxer confronts Kincade. Greenfield even works in an arbitrary sequence in which Boxer’s father is dying – and to continue with the soap opera feel, as his father’s dying Boxer meets a sexy black nurse (Louise) whom he starts up a fling with.

The sex scenes, as mentioned, are pretty explicit, though to be sure Greenfield doesn’t go into as much detail in this volume as he does in some of the others I’ve perused. There seems to be a determined focus on oral sex, and this is also the first novel I’ve read that contains the word “bunghole” in a sex scene. Meanwhile Boxer falls in love with Louise, despite the racial insensitivy of his fellow Navy men…again, the whole book is basically just a melodrama, frameworked around a bit of naval warfare stuff. There’s even a scene where Boxer beats up some drunk in a bar who assumes that Louise is a hooker.

What little “action” that occurs during this stretch is mostly handled off-camera. Greenfield not only shows an ease with offing major characters but he also does so quite sadistically – for example Tracy, the reporter who does the story on the Shark. After finding out that Tracy informed Boxer that Kathy was a spy, Kincade, clearly a mean son of a bitch, orders that Tracy be taken care of – and we learn, some pages later, that she’s been raped and murdered! Boxer handles the news pretty much emotionlessly, and Greenfield really digs in the knife with all these characters coming out of the woodwork and informing Boxer that Tracy loved him and even said he was the best she ever had(!), etc.

The back cover has it that the plot of Bloody Seas is about the Shark venturing into Russian waters to exfiltrate a group of spies. This plot actually doesn’t show up until the final pages of the book, as Boxer is called back onto command status and takes over the Shark. During the rescue of the spies Borodin again appears, commanding the Russian version of the Shark (named the Sea Savage), and we have another mostly-boring naval battle between the two. There’s a bit of gunplay stuff though as Redfern, apparently the commander of the ground troop squad of the Shark, disembarks the sub and takes on some Russian commandos, but for the most part Greenfield glides through the action scenes with little violence or gore.

True to form, the novel ends with this climatic action scene, leaving the implication clear that the next volume will pick up immediately afterward. Luckily, the fourth volume is one of the handful I have, so I’ll be able to at least get a grasp of the continuity-heavy basis of the Depth Force series. While I can’t say Bloody Seas was great, it did flow very well, mostly due to Greenfield’s assured command of the craft…not to mention the goofy, Harold Robbins-esque sex scenes.