Showing posts with label Smuggler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Smuggler. Show all posts

Thursday, August 16, 2018

The Smuggler #7: Welcome To Oblivion


The Smuggler #7: Welcome To Oblivion, by Paul Petersen
June, 1975  Pocket Books

Grab your hankies, everyone – The Smuggler comes to an end with this volume. Seriously though, it’s another tedious trawl of a read, 200+ pages of characters sitting around and talking – and usually the sole topic of their conversation is hero Eric “The Smuggler” Saveman, that perfect paragon of human perfection who is perfect in every way.

It’s four months after the previous volume, the date given as May, 1972. Eric is on trial, indicted by none other than the Supreme Court for his “treasonous” actions in the climax of the last book. As we’ll recall, Eric expressly went against the President’s orders so as to stave off a war with China or something, and now his ass is in trouble. It appears that Petersen set his series in the recent past (the first volume was set in 1969) because he wanted to bash Nixon a little more – this volume brings up a subplot that the government is corrupt and at novel’s end Eric wonders who he is even working for. 

The end result is that the Supreme Court puts Eric on suspension – for at least 4 and a half years, or until the ’76 election. Now we delve into the tedious, ultra slow-moving section of the book where Eric says goodbye to all his friends, like blue-eyed black guy Joshua Kane and his wife Belinda, and Eric’s dad, and all these other characters, because Eric is no longer a ZED agent and can’t associate with any of them because they are top-secret people living top-secret lives. Even Eric’s home in Connecticut, the pretentiously-named paradise that is Cascade, is ransacked by ZED staffers; the bastards even take his guns, though Eric still has a couple of his own. Not that he uses any of them. 

Indeed, action is pretty damn sparse in Welcome To Oblivion. And the title, by the way, is couresy an offhand comment Eric makes when he’s canned; “Welcome to oblivion,” he mutters to himself, in what will prove to be an incredibly lame bit of foreshadowing. Because this installment’s villain turns out to be named “Dr. Oblivion,” folks! But anyway Eric goes around saying so long to everyone, then decides to head out of town…and on the way he does what any other recently-fired secret agent would do. He sees a softball game in progress as he’s driving along the road and he decides to join in(!).

On this incredibly hamfisted “plot development” the entire novel hinges; Eric ends up with a hot tomboy on one of the teams. Her name is “Alysson O.” and she talks Eric into heading to Manhattan with her in her mobile home(!). While Eric’s driving she goes in the back to change and comes out with long blonde hair and a skintight dress that shows off her “full breasts.” She relates that her dad wanted a boy and raised her to act like one or whatever, so she indulges in the occasional baseball game and shit like that. It’s all just so ridiculous as to be awe-inspiring; Eric was just fired by the Supreme Court a day or two ago.

As if that weren’t enough, Alysson reveals that she’s a fan of Eric’s – she even has, believe it or not, scrapbooks devoted to his quarterback days at Stanford years ago. And that’s scrapbooks friends, ie in the plural! Man, The Smuggler is just an ego-trip of the highest order…as we’ll recall, Eric Saveman is a demigod among mortals, better looking, better muscled, better skilled than anyone, and smarter to boot. And when he’s not on the page, the other characters sit around and talk about him. Or think about him. Eric Saveman is the sole human being of any importance in the world of The Smuggler, with entire government conspiracies centered around him and a master criminal who has even devoted six years of planning to draft him.

And look at that…judging from the cover, Eric Saveman sort of looks a little like…why, he looks a lot like Paul Petersen! Wait a minute, it is Paul Petersen!

Petersen attempts to be going for more of an ensemble piece this time, with other ZED entities, in particular Joshua and Belinda, getting their own subplots…and yet all they do is talk about Eric! Or think about him! The fact that Alysson O. actually kept several scrapbooks devoted to Eric Saveman’s glory years as a friggin’ college quarterback is actually just one example of many such Eric-worshipping moments throughout the book. But at the very least Alysson turns out to be a great ultra-‘70s sort of babe, right up there with the New Age occult babe of  volume #3.

For one, her Manhattan pad is an ultramod dream – it’s got “platforms” that are like rooms on elevators, and with the push of a button you can bring different “rooms” down to you. This is explained at length – of course, Eric actually knows the guy who designed the place, ‘cause Eric Saveman knows everyone and everything – but I did dig the “music room,” which is stuffed with LPs. It’s suddenly an analog geek’s delight as Petersen starts namedropping vintage stereo gear – Alysson has MacIntosh equipment, a Garrard turntable, and a Shure cartridge. Eric’s such a superman he even fixes the “contact strips” of the faulty Shure in a matter of seconds so the music can blast.

And what music do they play? Welcome To Oblivion features a lot of period details, which is cool if you’re into stuff like that, as I am, so we get various mentions of rock or jazz groups of the day; Eric himself plays some Hubert Laws before leaving Cascade, and here at Allyson’s he tells her he “doesn’t understand” Miles Davis or John Coltrane, so Alysson decides on some more soothing jazz as the two of them get down to the dirty business of finally screwing – but Petersen, for once, cuts away from the shenanigans! Yet more evidence that the depraved, graphic second volume was courtesy another author…though maybe that one, which as I recall was written in a more rough-hewn style, was the work of Petersen, and all the other volumes, which are a bit more polished but not nearly as depraved, are courtesy the mysterious co-writer David Oliphant, who is only credited in small print on the copyright page. 

Not that Petersen (or Oliphant) doesn’t give us a little sleaze here and there. We come back to the Eric-Alysson thing mid-boink, as if the author(s) realized we needed a little something to keep us from falling totally into a stupor. I mean The Smuggler isn’t as boring as Dakota, but it’s definitely up there (or down there, I guess), and it doesn’t help that this final volume is mostly made up of talking, talking, talking. And usually all the talk’s about the same topic – you guessed it, Eric Saveman. But there are more topical ‘70s flourishes about, like when some of Alysson’s jet-setter friends come over (one of the lovelies, wouldn’t you believe it, immediately hits on Eric!!) for a bona fide cocaine party, and Eric after a little deliberation partakes in the coke bowl as it’s passed around. This makes Eric the second of two men’s adventure protagonists I know of who snorts cocaine, the other being Johnny Rock in Len Levinson’s The Sharpshooter #7.

Things finally pick up when Eric meets Alysson’s dad, Dr. Oblivion. He’s a spare guy with a bald head and a nondescript demeanor and no one seems too taken aback that his name’s friggin’ Dr. Oblivion. They’re jumped by some thugs outside a Manhattan restaurant and Eric of course makes short work of them, this being the second action scene in the book, about a hundred pages in. But it’s all a ruse, the thugs secretly in the employ of Oblivion, and the good doctor drugs Eric’s drink and the Smuggler’s out for the account. Doctor and daughter casually discuss everyone’s favorite topic right over his unconscious form – Dr. Oblivion has planned this for six years at least, and his goal is to turn Eric.

And yes, Eric met Alysson because he decided join a softball game on the spur of the moment…well, this is vaguely and quickly explained away as like Providence or something, at least on Alysson and the Doctor’s part. Eric comes to in Montana, in the doctor’s lair, where he’s to be brought into the man’s employ…to do something. At this point Petersen seems to be writing a James Bond script in the manner of the Roger Moore years; Dr. Oblivion has this high-tech SCUDA thing, self-contained underwater drilling apparatus, which he plans to cause some global havoc with. Oh, and he’s got a forest of coca plants, ie millions of dollars of cocaine, so Eric knows the dude’s loaded, yet he’s sure someone else is footing the bill. Eventually Eric will learn that Dr. O even bought out a portion of the US government to frame Eric, and also many of them are conspiring with him in his SCUDA plot. 

The finale sees Eric almost too quickly escaping, and calling in some of the students from the nearby Deep Security School, where Eric himself was a student in the second volume. At one point they get caught on SCUDA, where Alysson joins the cause – mostly because her dad decides to make her a casualty of war, to die from lack of air in the sealed-off, inescapable SCUDA! “Perhaps if you’d been a son,” he regretfully tells her over the ship loudspeaker. That’s cold, man! And while the other characters are freaking out because there’s no way to escape the SCUDA, guess who keeps a level head and comes up with a way to get out??

From here we have an almost off-hand climax in Venezuela, to which Dr. Oblivion has absconded. Whereas the previous volumes at least had some semblance of climactic fireworks, this one continues on the blasé vibe, with Eric and team surprising Dr. O and Eric handing the doctor a pistol to finish himself off. As mentioned the novel ends with Eric back at ZED, but wondering if it’s all worth it – the novel (and series) ends on a Watergate joke, which would imply that the “something treasonous is going on” subplot that runs throughout is intended as a reference to the soon-to-happen (in 1972, that is) Watergate fiasco.

I wonder if Petersen and Oliphant had this ending in mind all along. We know from publicity reports that Petersen got a contract to write eight books in the series – my hunch is still that the unpublished eighth volume was actually something between volumes two and three, as discussed in my review of the third volume. In other words I don’t think the eighth volume was one written after Welcome To Oblivion, as the series definitely seems to conclude here, and gives some indication at least why Petersen set the series in the recent past – perhaps he was leading up to Eric getting caught up in the corruption of the Nixon administration?

Who knows. The important thing is it’s all finally over.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

The Smuggler #6: Death Benefit


The Smuggler #6: Death Benefit, by Paul Petersen
May, 1975  Pocket Books

The Smuggler returns to the “serious spy drama” angle of the fourth volume; the fantastical elements of other volumes, in particular the third, are long gone, leaving us with a tepid, slow-boil affair in which ultra superheroic protagonist Eric Saveman discovers treachery within the ranks of his top-secret ZED organization.

Saveman’s the worst part about this series, mostly due to his demigod status. If you thought The Baroness was idealized, then wait till you get a load of Eric Saveman, a dude so uber-perfect that he not only knows everything but everyone, and everyone is in awe of him; seriously, there are parts of this book where minor characters (themselves bad-ass spies, mind you), will stand around and say stuff like, “Wait till Eric goes after him,” or whatnot. It’s almost laughable, particularly when you factor in that author Paul Petersen apparently hoped for a TV series based on The Smuggler with himself in the starring role.

This one is as patience-testing as the others in the series (save that is for the wild and wooly second volume, and the broad-ranging third volume), with lots of dialog and scene-setting and little in the way of action (of either variety). Anyway it’s two months after the previous volume and Saveman is once again on vacation when we meet him, which seems to be a series staple. He’s still living with the lookalike sisters he encountered last time around, who have no idea what Saveman does for a living. Also hanging with Saveman here in St. Croix is Joshua Kane, black ZED agent who first appeared in the ultra-lurid second volume and who is mixing sun and sex with yet another ZED agent, Belinda, the black beauty who spent the majority of the fourth volume having sex as part of her undercover assignment.

One thing Petersen (and co-writer David Oliphant) does here is invest The Smuggler with a lot of continuity; someone who enjoys this series more than I do would get a thrill out of meeting up with all of these characters again and again. But what grates me is that Saveman’s world is a little too small. Everyone he meets he either knows or has heard of him, to the point that it’s unintentionally humorous. For example, the novel opens with Saveman and Kane all-too-casually dispensing of some M-16-wielding terrorists who show up on the golf course; later they learn that a black radical is behind them – and it’s a dude Saveman once played college football with!!

Turns out there’s yet another former Saveman pal behind it all – Marc Wrestle, another ZED agent, one who is currently on a mission in Laos which has him smuggling guns as part of a sting operation or something. But Wrestle stumbles across a stash of Red China-created germ warfare in an undercover lab in the jungle and escapes, realizing he’s been contaminated…running for his life and thinking to himself that Saveman will take care of everything(!).

Honestly folks, Saveman might as well have a big red “S” on his shirt, the way the other characters hold him in such awe. The funniest damn thing is, the dude wouldn’t even be in the top ten of most bad-assed men’s adventure protagonists. Probably not even in the top twenty. At least those lookalike sisters have enough of him; they tell Saveman they’re hitting the road when they all return to Saveman’s swank mansion outside New York, because they can’t handle the sudden violence of his life.

From here we settle in for the long haul as Saveman argues with crusty old General Velasco, scarred boss of ZED; Saveman is certain Marc was onto something big, but his death has been covered up to make it look like he was a turncoat or somesuch. Saveman, who we’ll recall (and if we forget we’re reminded again and again) is a much-vaunted Free Agent (meaning he can do basically whatever he wants), insists that he go to Paris for Marc’s funeral (Marc’s dad being an ambassador stationed there).

In France Saveman hooks up with ultra-sexy “Eurasian” Dominique Charbonet, yet another ZED agent who, believe it or not, doesn’t have immediate sex with Saveman. The only sex we get in the first half is courtesy Joshua Kane and Belinda; the two are in love, and Kane is given a desk assignment which will see him posing as a wealthy entreprenneur with Belinda posing as his wife – the author(s) now intending to write the couple out of the series, apparently. 

It’s all a bunch of wheel-spinning and dialog, with the occasional “shaggy ‘70s” flourish I so enjoy about these vintage paperbacks. Like the part where Dominique slinks into Saveman’s posh hotel room and breaks out a case of marijuana sprinkled with “Nepalese hash,” not to mention some high-grade coke, along with her own coke spoon. Saveman, that drug-smuggling demigod, once again doesn’t partake in drugs himself, but gives Dominque (and the interested reader) some handy tips on how to break up cocaine so the particles don’t screw up your nasal membranes. And here Saveman even turns down an offer for sex from Dominique, despite which we’ve been reminded constantly how sexy Saveman finds her; his excuse is he needs to keep his wits about him, or some nonsense.

Of course the long-awaited sex scene duly arrives, on a private flight to Thailand of all places, and while the authors get explicit it’s nothing as raunchy as in the second or even third volumes. As I’ve mentioned in reviews for other volumes, The Smuggler has gotten tamer with each installment. In fact Dominique is Saveman’s only conquest this time around, and he spends more time fretting over the complex mystery behind Marc Wrestle’s death and that stash of germ warfare. We also get periodic over-detail about the implants in the brains of all ZED agents, which allows them to be tracked around the globe and even snuffed out if it’s determined they’ve gone rogue; of course, Saveman’s has been deactivated.

Petersen goes to great lengths to capture a spy-fy vibe, particularly when it comes to the high-tech ZED HQ, with lots of scene-setting of walls sliding open to reveal wallscreen monitors and the like. He also again goes to great pains to show he’s done his research, with lots of detail on germ warfare; another unintentionally humorous moment, with Saveman even able to spit out obscure information about this subject, like he’s one of those omniscient characters on CSI. The dude’s so perfect you want to step into the book and knock the smug look off his moustached face. Hey – “smug – smuggler;” I didn’t do that on purpose!

Gradually Saveman figures out that one of the ZED elite is behind the plot, working with a Chinese Minister who hopes to use the newly-created germ warfare in an attack on Peking, to wipe out the Western-friendly regime and start a war. But Saveman learns via the research of his father (who is himself nearly perfect) that the germs will actually cause the death of a large portion of the Chinese population.

So Saveman, who has been ordered off the assignment by no less an authority than the President (who says basically “let ‘em die” when he finds out the plot will backfire and kill millions of Chinese people), hijacks a jet plane, flies it back into China, crashes it, turns off the power of the base that creates the germs(!!)…and wakes up in a hospital a few days later, where he’s thanked for saving so many Chinese. Oh, and he’s meanwhile taken out the ZED turncoat in one of the most anticlimactic shootouts you’ll ever read.

There’s a goofy finale in which Saveman and Velasco have a face-to-face with the President, and Saveman basically tells the President to go to hell and how he’ll never be able to order Saveman around again. Also here Petersen seems to state that the novel has taken place in 1972, which I found odd – were these books really written so long before publication? And also it would mean that Saveman’s bitching at Nixon, which would explain his hostility…I mean who could’ve gotten so angry at Gerald Ford??

Luckily the next volume was the last one.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

The Smuggler #5: The Crystal Fortress


The Smuggler #5: The Crystal Fortress, by Paul Petersen
January, 1975  Pocket Books

Perhaps proving out my theory that the Smuggler series actually had two authors, with Paul Petersen and David Oliphant trading installments, this fifth volume sort of returns to the sleazy feel of the second and third volumes, whereas the first and fourth volumes were anemic in that regard. But it’s nothing to get excited about, as this series is still pretty lackluster – about the best thing is the cover artwork, which by the way continues on the back for each volume, so you really get two covers per volume.

One thing that remains true is that each volume has an unsteady opening. First we’re watching as Dr. Rudolph Balencroft oversees the launch of a new orbiting satellite that’s like a precursor to Star Wars technology (the Reagan kind, not the movie), chucking evilly to himself that the government who forced him to do these jobs will soon pay. Then we’re on an old steamship named Le Havre that’s been turned into a pleasure cruiser, where Eric “Smuggler” Saveman is enjoying vacation.

Saveman, that ultra-perfect bastion of maleness, quickly disposes of his latest conquest, some bimbo he found in second class, and returns to appreciating himself in the mirror of his first class suite. But then he’s really pissed to receive a coded message from his boss, General Velasco, requesting that Savemen spy on a KGB operative named Tyziac who also happens to be on the ship(??); instead, Saveman hooks up with a pair of hot sisters, Lori and Lyla Claiborne, super-rich scions of an engineering dynasty, headed by their grandfather, Wiley, who also happens to be on the ship.

The sleaze returns, but it’s not as page-consuming as it was back in Fools Of The Trade; when Saveman has the expected sex scene with the sisters (who inform him that they grew fond of having sex with each other back in boarding school), it’s pretty explicit, but it only lasts a few paragraphs. Then Saveman discovers the murdered corpse of Tyziac, which leads to an action scene in which Saveman receives help from a fellow agent, one who is posing as a shiphand. This boring action scene has the unique outcome that Saveman almost gets killed.

The Smugger series has never been shy about info-dumping – these authors clearly want to make their novels appear “realistic” – and we get lots of detail when, two weeks later, Saveman recovers enough to go to ZED headquarters in Connecticut and get briefed by his boss, General Victor Velasco. Long story short, Dr. Balencroft has absconded with the secret code that will activate six nuclear-armed satellites. However, that French dude, DeFleur, is also hunting him down, or something.

More interesting are the topical ‘70s touches. Saveman now lives in this sprawling bachelor pad in Connecticut, which he’s named Cascade. He goes there with Lori and Lyla, who have stayed on as his “nurses,” and they gawk at the opulent place, where everything is controlled by the telephone, sort of like the trailer in Operation Hang Ten. Saveman merely has to “dial up” whatever he needs, and it will happen, like for example gracing every room in the house with “the soft sounds of Quincy Jones.”

Remember how Saveman’s dad Doc got married in the previous volume and is now married to a blind lady Saveman refers to as “mom?” Well in case you’d forgotten, the authors remind us about it a bunch. This does lead eventually to a brief action scene at Cascade, as LeFleur’s goons attack the place. There’s a bit of gore as Saveman and his dad blow away a few of the guys, who try to escape on motorcycles. But it’s over too quick, and it’s back to the plot-building, dialog, and overly-described technological stuff, like we’re suddenly reading Robert Ludlum or something.

Even the sleaze element goes away – when Saveman screws one of the sisters in his Lambourghini while the other drives it, the authors telescope it. More sign of this is when Saveman boards a ZED-owned 707 and finds that the pilot is Myrna, that hotbod nympho who so eagerly (and graphically) screwed him back in Fools Of The Trade. The same thing happens here, but the authors do not describe it at all, just intimate that it’s about to happen…and then later inform us that Myrna’s flying her plane nude.

The action moves down to Montevideo, where Saveman parachutes out of Myrna’s 707. Here he stages a rescue of Wiley Claiborne, that 70 year-old millionaire whom we have just learned is one of “the 18,” ie the free agents of ZED. But Wiley’s been caught by one of the Russians who is also chasing Balencroft, and here we get another brief action scene, which culminates in Saveman and Wiley back on Myrna’s 707 and expressly ignoring Velasco’s orders to return to base. Instead, they head way south, where Balencroft has fortified himself in the antarctic.

The title of this volume has you expecting a bit of John Eagle Expeditor-style pulp, but sadly that is not the case. Even here the authors try to retain a feeling for “realism,”putting more focus on how our heroic trio have a hell of a time surviving the subzero elements, and less on the fun sort of escapism you want from these types of books. Even the titular “Crystal Fortress” turns out to just be a series of shack-like buildings Balencroft operates from, and unfortunately we don’t even get to see them, as instead Saveman gets in protracted battles from his downed 707, going up against hired thugs in Sno Cats and ski mobiles.

The ending is even anticlimactic, with everything centering around a toppling iceberg that Balencroft has fashioned his “fortress” upon. Meanwhile Wiley’s gotten his arm blown off, which sucks, because now he has to retire. The action here is at times nicely gory, as well as brutal, like when Saveman finally tracks down an injured DeFleur and slices open his thighs, there on the icy ground, and tells him, “Watch yourself die, mother fucker.” But these scenes are few and far between, and ultimately are lost amid the 220+ pages of tiny type.

Previous volumes have jumped around the place, style-wise, like in #3: Murder In Blue, which went from Blaxploitation-esque inner city crime to a supernatural finale straight out of The Mind Masters. The Crystal Fortress however stays true to its vibe throughout, but sadly it’s a bland and tepid vibe, with a too-perfect hero who does little to engender ready empathy.

Monday, September 16, 2013

The Smuggler #4: Mother Luck


The Smuggler #4: Mother Luck, by Paul Petersen
November, 1974  Pocket Books

Our cable lineup features a retro-programming network called MeTV; the other month they were playing a Donna Reed Show marathon, and after each commercial break they’d have a “Paul Petersen Remembers” segment, where Petersen would talk about being a child actor on that show. I bet I was the only person in the viewing audience who thought to himself, “Hey, that’s the guy who wrote that scene in The Smuggler #2 where a black sadist murdered a girl and then raped her corpse!”

At any rate the Smuggler series continues to search for a genre. Whereas the first volume was a boring origin story, the second installment was filled with clunky writing, outrageous sadism, and super-explicit sex scenes. Then the third volume veered from standard spy fiction to gritty, Narc-esque inner city crime before ending with Mind Masters-style supernatural stuff, all in the same book. Now this fourth volume is just a straight-up spy drama, with none of the sensational elements of the previous two novels. There isn’t even a single sex scene for poor old hero Saveman!

It’s curious that two volumes were published per month: volumes 1 and 2 both came out in September, 1974, and volumes 3 and 4 came out two months later. According to the copyright page (as well as the Catalog of Copyright Entries), the books really were written by Paul Petersen, along with a co-writer named David Oliphant (who was apparently an editor), but given this accelerated rate of publication and the disparity between installments, I figure these guys had to have been trading off on the writing duties.

Enough dithering -- Mother Luck is a return to the bland and boring nature that was the first volume. After the wild extremities of the previous two installments this one was really hard going; I kept waiting for some bizarre sadism or extreme sex scenes to occur, but there’s hardly anything of the sort…the narrative just plods along, Petersen (or Oliphant?) spending more time on character and scene-setting, as if he is writing a Robert Ludlum-style thriller instead of the latest volume of a series that previously featured a scene where a dude had a mask with a rat in it strapped over his face.

Eric “Smuggler” Saveman when we meet him again is deep in the icy water beneath a Russian gun manufacturing plant, where using his one-man sub he’s able to infiltrate the place, kill a pair of guards and stage their corpses so it looks like an accident, and finally gum up the manufacturing works. Meanwhile a young nuclear physicist named Michael Brock steals a shipment of radioactive waste, which contains enough plutonium for his mysterious needs. In a third and even more initially-unrelated plot, two older physicists are about to fly from Paris, and after receiving his latest orders Saveman is flown to Paris so he can catch the Pan Am flight they’re on.

But then the plane is skyjacked! This whole scene comes off as so arbitrary and just goes on and on. Saveman’s cover is as “Eric Nichols,” a qualified pilot who comes from money in Connecticut – all this will be further drilled into us later on. Also on the plane, posing as a stewardess, is Belinda, a gorgeous black agent who trained with Saveman back in the second volume. Anyway we see how much the times have changed; skyjacking is seen by Saveman and the others as an annoying fad, and the hijackers, Muslims from Oman, treat everyone nicely and promise that no passengers will die as they divert the plane to Algiers. There’s even a bit where Saveman doubts that the hijackers would kill themselves by crashing the plane; too bad these original-model terrorists were slowly fazed out by the current mass-murderers of today.

After killing the terrorists, Saveman talks the passengers into roping up the slain hijackers and tossing them out onto the tarmac as the plane passes over the Algiers airport, as a warning against future hijackings! I don’t see Pan Am being too hapy about this, but at any rate Saveman (still posing as Eric Nichols) is now a celebrity and we must endure endless and padded scenes where he talks to airline reps, the passengers, and finally reporters as they interview him.

The boring, padded nature continues as now the brunt of the narrative is concerned with Saveman’s new identity. He hooks up with his dad, Doc Saveman, who’s also part of the “Nichols” cover, and also Marge, a blind lady who is posing as Doc’s wife and thus Saveman’s mom. This bit is just bizarre because Saveman is so unsettled over the thought of having a mom again, as his real one died so long ago, and he keeps psyching himself up to go meet her in their cover home and etc, etc…I mean, like it’s all real life and not just part of a plan cooked up by General Velasco, the head of Saveman’s agency, ZED.

There follows more banal stuff as Velasco, whose ZED standing of course is top secret, comes out to the public in his normal guise as a reclusive multi-millionaire; he informs Saveman that all this is a ruse so as to get himself kidnapped. This finally goes down in one of the novel’s few action scenes, with Velasco captured and Saveman freeing himself long enough to blow away a separate detachment of kidnappers. But the boss of ZED has been abducted, and now Saveman has to find him, and plus there’s that cache of plutonium, and Michael Brock’s mysterious plans…by this point we are well over a hundred pages in, and the plot of Mother Luck still has not jelled.

Saveman spends the majority of the final quarter sitting in ZED headquarters and gathering data; finally they track the abducted Velasco to Oman, and Saveman heads there. Turns out a billionaire named Drummond is behind it all, and he’s looking to take over this portion of Oman and etc…then there’s this arbitrary WTF? part where Drummond gives himself a wine enema(!) while he orders the also-abducted Belinda to blow one of his men as he watches…and this guy Belinda’s blowing turns out to be gay – gay for Drummond, in fact – and this bizarre but brief scene gets even more bizarre as Drummond mounts Belinda and the gay dude mounts Drummond!

In fact Belinda gets more action (so to speak) than Saveman, taking out the villains with a broken champagne bottle; Saveman himself shows up after the fireworks. And that’s that! We go back to ZED headquarters for a long, anticlimatic denoument in which a traitor is outed…and meanwhile Doc Saveman’s really in love with Marge, his fake wife, so why not get married for real? It’s all just so…I don’t know, stupid.

Here’s hoping the next volume isn’t so bland and forgettable. I’d even be happy for a return to the outrageous sadism and kinkiness of the second volume after the snoozefest that was Mother Luck.

Monday, July 2, 2012

The Smuggler #3: Murder In Blue


The Smuggler #3: Murder In Blue, by Paul Petersen
November, 1974 Pocket Books

The Smuggler series continues to search for a consistent theme and tone as this third volume, as uneventful for the most part as the previous two, starts off like a James Bond-esque bit of international espionage before veering into an inner-city heroin-busting storyline straight out of Narc, before finally wrapping up in an overlong sequence about a Mayan cult, complete with supernatural stuff along the lines of the Mind Masters series.

Murder In Blue is not at all similar to its predecessor, Fools of the Trade. Also, there's some funny stuff going on here. Fools of the Trade featured our hero Eric "The Smuggler" Saveman rescuing a fellow ZED agent from a sadistic freak in the Caribbean. That volume ended with Saveman and the rescued agent, Kane, discussing their next mission, which would involve taking on poachers in Africa.

But here's the thing: Murder In Blue opens with Savemen in Russia, not Africa, smuggling out some intel and taking on the KGB. Once he returns to the US Saveman reflects on his past "three" adventures, Petersen serving up readers new to the series with recaps of what has gone on before -- and Saveman reflects on that poaching operation in Africa, a mission which apparently his father ("Doc" Saveman) also took part in.

On his official website, Paul Petersen states that there were 8 volumes in the Smuggler series. However only 7 were published. It seems obvious then that the original third volume featured Saveman in Africa fighting poachers; the way it is recapped here makes it clear that it was a full novel on its own, and besides, the finale of Fools of the Trade clearly set up the storyline. So what happened? Did Pocket Books just screw up and skip that volume, accidentally publishing Murder In Blue, which was supposed to be the fourth volume, as volume #3 instead?

That's one possibility, but I think there's another -- I think some behind-the-scenes manuevering was going on. Petersen's name is still on the cover, but Murder In Blue does not appear to be written by the same person behind the previous two novels. Fools of the Trade in particular was a clunky horror that traded off between red-herring plots, super-explicit sex, and sadistic torture-porn that was pretty damn shocking. Murder In Blue on the other hand is for the most part deftly handled in the narrative portion, with little of the clunkiness previously seen. Sure, it jumps all over the place story-wise, but still, there's none of the bizarre "touches" of Fools of the Trade (other than a sex scene midway through which, while being pretty explicit, still isn't as "Penthouse Letters" as the stuff in volume #2).

As I've mentioned, the copyright page states that this series was written in collaboration with someone named David Oliphant, and I'd still love to know how the writing duties were shared. Did he and Petersen switch off on volumes? Was Oliphant the "mastermind" behind Fools of the Trade? Or was the originally-planned third volume about hunting poachers in Africa just as bad as Fools of the Trade, and so Pocket Books hired some new ghostwriter in to "save" Saveman with a wholly-new installment?

It really doesn't matter, though, as I'm giving the series more thought than it deserves. While Murder In Blue is, as far as writing goes, better than its predecessors, the series as a whole just ain't up to snuff. Saveman is too perfect and the plots just aren't very gripping. And the plot-hopping mentioned above doesn't help much. The novel cannot make up its mind what it wants to be: the opening portion in Russia is entertaining, and again much slicker and more "mature" than those previous two books, with Saveman escaping the KGB by hiding in the wheel-well of a commercial plane.

But then the Narc-esque portion of the storyline is plodding, with Saveman on "vacation" in LA, where he wants to get to the bottom of a series of cult murders taking place. Mutilated bodies, painted blue and shot full of arrows, are turning up, and soon enough Saveman deduces that a heroin ring is behind it. This sequence is only saved by the presence of Amy Gazer, Saveman's old high school girlfriend, who runs a clinic. A raven-haired and voluptious beauty, Amy is sort of my ideal gal: fully part of the '70s New Age movement, she lives in a rolling estate where she sits lotus-style on a shag carpet and meditates, smokes dope, and consults her occult-themed library.

Saveman -- a smuggler, remember -- actually partakes of drugs this time out, a first for the series. After being shot up by a hallucinogen by escaping members of the cult, Saveman steers his car to Amy's place (she just appears in the narrative without much setup, by the way) and she instantly seduces him, a pretty steamy scene ensuing. Rather than the pages-long stuff in say the Baroness, which eventually bores the reader with its endless barrage of anatomical euphemisms, the scene here actually succeeds in generating a little heat.

After that, though, the storyline just gets boring. The third half of the novel features Saveman, Amy, and a professor deep in the Yucatan, searching for a Mayan temple in which the cult will stage their next big sacrifice. Here Petersen (or whoever wrote this) takes the opportunity to shoehorn in endless detail about Mayan history and customs, courtesy the blathering professor. Seriously, you can skip large portions of the narrative here. It's an obvious page-filling gambit.

Ironically the Mayan stuff is similar to another novel I recently read, John Eagle Expeditor #6: The Glyphs of Gold, which as you'll no doubt expect was much, much better. But here Petersen instills a supernatural element to the series which just doesn't jibe: Amy and the professor are caught, Amy stripped down and drugged, fated to become the cult leader's bride. A lurid scene ensues where, as part of the marriage ceremony, a group of priests masturbate on Amy(!) and then the leader takes her on an altar, his "engorged manhood" (which we are endlessly reminded is fucking huge) so incredible to Amy's drugged eyes that she basically just starts drooling with lust, giving herself completely to the Mayan cause.

Then Saveman shows up -- after the leader's had his way with Amy, by the way -- with an old Mayan priest who magically becomes younger and starts flying around, shooting blue balls of energy at the cult leader! I mean, what the hell's going on?? After which the priest tells Saveman that Amy's "gone," that she's not dead but not living, and must stay with the Maya -- oh, and she's probably pregnant with the cult leader's child. And Saveman basically shrugs and just leaves her there, high-tailing it back home to reunite with his dad and his superiors at ZED, so he can regale them with stories about how weird his "vacation" was.

Seriously, this was some weird stuff...but all of it was relayed in a clinical fashion, the style and narrative a lot more polished and professional than in the previous book. Now that I think of it, the style of Smuggler #1 might have been similar to this, so maybe Petersen and Oliphant just traded off on each volume? Who cares, I guess.

Monday, December 12, 2011

The Smuggler #2: Fools of the Trade


The Smuggler #2: Fools of the Trade, by Paul Petersen
September, 1974 Pocket Books

I've meant to continue reading this series for a long time now, but I've kept putting it off because it's so bad. And while this second installment is a bit better, it's still pretty stupid and ineptly written. By far this is one of the worst men's adventure series I've yet to review on this blog, down there with Tracker. And that's saying something!

Our hero is Eric Saveman, the Smuggler himself. Last time out we saw how he went from being a dope smugger to a globe-trotting spy. This volume changes things a bit in that Saveman has become basically a male version of The Baroness -- just like her, Saveman is a master of everything ever known to or created by man, and is perfect in every single way. He always comes out on top, not just when having sex, and just as in the superior Baroness series, there's tons of explicit sex scenes here, a lot more for sure than the previous installment, which as I recall was rather tepid in the sex and violence department.

Fools of the Trade (oh, what a title) though goes to the opposite extreme. Pages of graphically-depicted sex give way to moments of outrageous sadism. Truly depraved and twisted stuff which really makes the boring parts (of which there are a bunch) seem all the more boring. I mean, we have in this novel not only hot n' heavy moments where Saveman gets busy with a gorgeous lady scientist, but also bizarre stuff like where a hulking Haitian sadist whips people to death, complete with emasculating the men in the literal sense -- not to mention when he devises death-via-impalement for female prisoners...whose corpses he later takes back to his place for a bit of necrophilia.

And yet despite all of this, Fools of the Trade still sucks!! We meet up with Saveman as he's finishing his ultra-secret spy training; Saveman is somehow allowed to take part even though he isn't an official government agent and instead works as a freelance. (It should go without mentioning that he is of course that top student in his class and has beaten all past records, etc etc.) Meanwhile there's a subplot which at first seems important but instead spirals into oblivion: the government tracks its spies via a device implanted within their bodies; the technology behind this is compromised and the fear is that enemy hands will get hold of it and set off the "self destruct" mechanism which is apparently installed in all US government agents.

However the true plot concerns a handful of executives from the Canadian Spice Company (?) who are using a revolt-torn island in the Caribbean to mask their coffer-pilfering schemes (?). It's strange as hell, as the reader sets out prepared for one story but gets another, and the first story is the better one. Anyway Saveman eventually ends up on the island, Inagua, which is run by a useless local police force; the head of security is M'Bhutto, the aforementioned sadist who has brutally tortured, killed (and in some cases then had necrophiliac sex with) a few previous US agents.

Saveman is flown in by a female agent pilot who of course takes the opportunity to have sex with our boy while in flight. The average guy would be a bit exhausted after this, but Saveman's able to parachute out in the middle of the night and infiltrate Iguana. And hell, he's been here before, because he's totally perfect you see -- turns out he smuggled dope from the island back in his smuggler days. (Speaking of which, drugs are conspicuously absent this time out.)

M'Bhutto has another freelance agent imprisoned, Saveman gets caught but of course is able to free both himself and his fellow agent, yadayada...it all culminates in a lurid moment straight out of Blood Bath as M'Bhutto finds himself wearing a mask which has been outfitted with a wire cage compartment full of rats! And they chew their way through the wire and into his face and on through to the other side while M'Bhutto screams and screams, and the book still sucks!

Hard to believe, but five more volumes were to follow. Even harder to believe, I've got them and will eventually force myself to read them.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

The Smuggler #1


The Smuggler #1, by Paul Petersen
September, 1974 Pocket Books

The cover says "The Smugglers," but this is really volume #1 of the Smuggler series by Paul Petersen, onetime Musketeer and former child star on The Donna Reed Show. In 1974 Petersen made a deal with Pocket Books -- he churned out this 7-volume series for $75,000. However a tiny note on the copyright page states that a guy named David Oliphant helped out with the writing chores "on this and all succeeding volumes of the series," so I wonder if this was a Tekwar sort of thing -- ie, how that series was released under William Shatner's name, even though he himself didn't provide the actual writing.

The Smuggler is Eric Saveman, all-American guy who just happens to smuggle dope. This novel appears to be set in 1969, so there's a sort of majestic, countercultural air to it, flying marijuana up from Mexico in unchartered airplanes. Saveman's a college grad who served in 'Nam and now lives in opulence with two gorgeous and blonde twins, M'Liz and M'Lady (!). I had high hopes (so to speak) that this series would feature a dopefiend protagonist, but unfortunately Saveman himself abstains from drugs. Actually this makes sense, as dope and violence just don't mix...they're an impossible combination, as Bill Hicks explains 5 minutes into this clip.

Saveman's ritzy life is upended when he discovers that his father, Doc Saveman, got involved with some jewel-smuggling (smuggling appears to be a family tradition) back in WWII, and now Doc's the last surviving member of the circle: save for one other, a shadowy man long assumed dead, who apparently has killed off the remaining members of the circle in order to get the jewels for himself. And now this shadowy man is coming for Doc. It all reminded me of that episode of The Simpsons where Bart helped Grandpa find the lost cache of Nazi gold before Burns could get to it.

This first volume comes off more like an introduction to the series. Nothing much really happens; there's hardly any sex or violence. I mean, Saveman lives with two gorgeous twins who appear to worship him, but Petersen does little to exploit this. And what else are men's adventure novels but exploitation? The writing's also a bit clunky at times, and the majority of the characters -- particularly Saveman's smuggling pals -- are indistinguishable from one another.

At any rate The Smuggler #1 exists mostly to show us how Eric Saveman becomes the superspy of later volumes; imagine Johnny Depp's character from Blow meets James Bond and you'll have the tone of ensuing volumes in the series, which I plan to review as I read.