Fire In My Blood

Fire In My Blood, by Edward Hunt

No month stated, 1974  Manor Books

A few things first off about this obscure Manor PBO: the cover photo has nothing to do with the book, and my suspicion is that “Edward Hunt” was trying to get the book published by a more mainstream imprint and ended up selling it to Manor when there were no other takers. Also no idea who Hunt was/is; from my short research I discovered that an author of the same name published a paperback original through MacFadden-Bartell in 1971, titled Fortune Road.  There were a few parts where I wondered if it was a pseudonym of William Hegner, given the haughty bitchiness of the narrator, but overall Fire In My Blood does not demonstrate Hegner’s usual knack for snappy rapport or memorable situations. That said, there’s a part where the narrator’s father rapes her…and she enjoys it. 

That’s another thing: while credited to “Edward Hunt,” Fire In My Blood is narrated by a woman. Indeed, the conceit is that this book contains the unedited tapes of this woman’s life story, dictacted for an autobiography she’s been offered a tidy sum to write. This is because the woman, Marquesa Helen Giliberti, is the “queen of the jet-set,” daughter of a famous songwriter, wife of a famous entrepreneur, and later the wife of a famous Italian marquis. And also, she’s slept with about a zillion people. 

In former common parlance, our narrator Helen would be referred to as a slut. Today she’d probably be called an empowered woman. In the short, 193 pages of the book, Helen recounts how she has slept with practically everyone since losing her virginity at 14, sometime in the very early 1950s (I think; the author isn’t very forthcoming with dates). In an “Author’s Foreword,” which is actually by Helen and not the actual author, our narrator informs us that she’s been contracted to write about her torid life, and has insisted that she alone tell the tale, even though she has no writing background. She tells us that she’s about to speak of her life into audio tape, and the ensuing novel is supposed to be the ensuing recording. 

Edward Hunt, whoever he or she was, does properly convey the vibe of someone telling us this tale. There’s not much in the way of scene-setting or fancy wordplay. Also, curiously, there is hardly any sex. Yes, friends, this is another of those puzzling conundrums I encounter all too often in the world of sleazy ‘70s paperbacks: the “sexy novel” that doesn’t have any actual sex in it. Time and again “Helen” (which is to say Edward Hunt) ellipses the many and sundry sex scenes, usually telling us something as simple as, “it was a shattering experience” when reffering to the wholly off-page conjugations. And, given that the narrator is a woman, there’s none of the exploitation one would expect of the trash genre; I mean, it’s not like Helen keeps exploiting herself. (“My breasts were full, fresh melons, ripe for the plucking,” etc…hell maybe I should take a shot at writing the book.) 

Well anyway, this is also one of those novels where I wonder what the point of it even was. Helen is the darling of the jet-set and screws her way through a host of notables, but there’s no grand scheme to the narrative and no roman a clef moments that would fool the gullible ‘70s reader into assuming Fire In My Blood is the true story of some anonymous, real-world jet-setter. It’s a bland novel, is what I’m saying, and it’s more soap opera than trash. 

Humorously, the novel proper – after the facile “Author’s Foreword,” that is – opens with Helen complaining about 18th Century novels that would go into needless detail about the ancestors of the protagonists, or whatever, ie telling rather than showing…and then telling rather than showing is exactly what Edward Hunt proceeds to do over the course of the novel. Fire In My Blood gave me bad flashbacks to another bust of a “trashy novel,” Belladonna, which was similiarly sunk by an overbearing “this happened, then that happened” narrative that sucked all the life from the story. 

So basically, “Helen” tells us how she entered life as the daughter of a famous songwriter, a “virile” songwriter at that, known for his lusty conquests and whatnot. Plus there’s an older brother from a previous marriage of her father’s, Robert. Helen is sent off to live in a convent or whatever until she’s a preteen; her mother is dead, and she meets her father for the first time when she’s fourteen. She stays with him for a summer at Martha’s Vineyard, where Robert does her a huge “favor” by bringing her into the world of sex – not himself, but through a friend of his, a notorious “cocksman” who manages to take Helen’s virginity without much fuss. 

From here Helen goes full-on slut, sleeping with everyone (off-page, I should clarify). She bangs practically every boy in the vicinity; she tells us sometimes she takes on more than one at a time. Again, all this is told to us; none of these characters have a chance to breathe. One night Helen’s father catches her coming home late from her latest tussle, where she handled some guy on the beach. (Now that I think of it, perhaps this is the inspiration for the cover photo, after all.) Her father accuses Helen of whoredom (“Your teats are sagging,” being one memorable line in his savage appraisal of her post-sex physical state) and then…why then, he too has sex with her! 

After this, Helen’s father shuffles off in shame, and she tells us she never sees him again. Having gotten the ultimate taboo off his checklist, Edward Hunt quickly moves along, shutning Helen’s family to the narrative side; Helen summarily tells us in a few pages of her father’s death, years later, as well as her half-brother Robert’s death. Meanwhile Helen has latched onto the Kennedy-esque Bennet clan. 

Helen’s already told us she was in love with her father, claiming it was this unspeakable love that was the reason behind her whoring – doing anything possible for her father’s attention – but the author does little to explore this. Instead Helen becomes involved with a man her father’s age, family scion Jason Bennet, a widower who has spent decades ensuring his three sons have moved into politics and into law. 

Here too it’s very soapy; Helen comes into the fray because she first is with Ted Kennedy-esque Frank Bennet, even becoming pregnant by him. When she tells the elder Bennet that she’s with child, Jason tells Helen she is no longer to see his son…and then Jason asks Helen to dinner! We get more “tell don’t show” when Helen informs us that Jason Bennet, 51, is like an “old lion…insatiable” in bed. Oh and then Frank Bennet comes home unannounced one night and beats Helen in his rage, causing her to abort, but Helen never tells Jason Bennet about it. And Frank never finds out that Helen was pregnant with his child. 

Jason Bennet buys the farm shortly after, and though Helen is left the entirety of his estate, the three sons bully her out of it, leaving her with “only” a million. Off Helen goes to Swinging London – it’s apparently the mid-‘60s now, though Edward Hunt never specifies dates – and the whoring begins anew. “Before the night was over I would be under them, they would be inside me,” Helen tells us of the sundry men she sleeps her way through, making a name for herself as a world-class lay on the jet-set circuit. 

Here Helen makes her first friend, a wealthy widower named Sonia, but the character doesn’t contribute much to the story…other than to introduce Helen to The Steamrollers, a roman a clef Rolling Stones. “The Pop group,” Sonia clarifies, and Helen ultimately screws all five of them in one all-night orgy: “It was more like a wrestling match than a coupling.” Again, juicy details are threadbare in Fire In My Blood, a “Big Sexy novel” without any sex. 

The Steamrollers factor so meagerly in the tale that the book doesn’t even rate as a rock novel. Rather, Helen becomes involved with another guy, a wealthy British entreprenneur named Sir John Radlett; she meets him at an auction. This sequence is tiresome at best; Radlett has little interest in sex, and though Helen tries to be a good wife she can’t help but be attracted to the servants and whatnot. Given that Helen has screwed around a bujillion guys at this point, the reader won’t be too shocked at how this one plays out. 

The novel limps to a close with Helen in Italy, where apropos of nothing the famous Marquis Giliberti, an old Italian man of wealth, asks Helen to be his wife. But he’s another husband with little interest in her (Helen soon discovers the Marquis is more interested in little boys), and by novel’s end Helen is alone again. 

This is, of course, right where we met her, and Fire In My Blood ends with Helen proud of herself for accomplishing her task of telling her tale to the audio tapes…and informs us that this won’t be it for her: “In twenty years I expect to be writing a sequel.” 

As we all know, Fire In My Blood II: The Quickening was a worldwide success upon publication in 1994…okay seriously, it goes without saying that this obscure novel died an obscure death, and nothing was ever heard of Marquesa Helen Giliberti or Edward Hunt (whoever he or she was) again.

The Spook Who Sat By The Door

The Spook Who Sat By The Door, by Sam Greenlee

January, 1970  Bantam Books

(Original hardcover edition 1968)

Most likely known more for its film adaptation (below), The Spook Who Sat By The Door started life as this hardcover novel published by Sam Greenlee in 1968. According to the back cover of the 2020 edition published by Wayne State University Press, the novel has been “continuously available in print since 1968,” and what’s more it “has become embedded in progressive anti-racist culture.” Of course, “anti-racist” means the exact same thing as “racist,” but we’ll leave that alone for now. 

Actually, we won’t. The back cover of the Wayne State University Press edition also goes on to state, “As a tale of reaction to the forces of suppression, this book is universal.” To which, like pretty much all other “progressive” double-speak, I say bullshit. Indeed, the “hero” of this tale is such a craven, hate-filled bastard that I almost wondered if Sam Greenlee intended him as a lampoon of the whole “black rage” movement. But that might be giving more credit than is due, as there’s nothing to indicate Greenlee had any tricks up his sleeve; the novel is tiresomely serious, and the attempts at instilling a second-hand rage in the reader fails, mostly because the main character is such an iredeemable prick. He isn’t so much “reacting to the forces of suppression” as he is instigating a race war, for reasons that are decidedly self-centered. In fact the dude basically plans to have others do the fighting for him, while he lives in his bachelor pad sipping whiskey and listening to jazz on the hi-fi. 

The novel is also written in such a way that the reader must do all the heavy lifting; Greenlee has a tendency to write much of the narrative in summary, ie such and such happened, then such and such happened – like, it’s all nearly in outline format, with no drama or suspense to bring the characters or situations to life. And a lot of important stuff happens off-page, or isn’t exploited well enough to reap the full dramatic potential – something the filmmakers astutely corrected, as the movie is a lot better than the book, and not just because the soundtrack’s by Herbie Hancock. 

On the plus side, I was happy to discover that Greenlee wrote The Spook Who Sat By The Door in the style of the popular fiction of the era; this is not a “literary” novel, or something akin to Ishmael Reed. And at times Greenlee does capture a masculine vibe in his terse prose; I also appreciated the frequent mentions of music, with characters even visiting record stores. Jazz musicians are mentioned often, and particular albums are mentioned, but Greenlee, writing in the late ‘60s, has his characters listening to the pre-electric stuff. I mean, as I’ve said before, I like my jazz funky, electric, and from the ‘70s. In fact, I’m listening to Eddie Harris’s Bad Luck Is All I Have as I write this review. 

The novel is set in the same period in which it was published, though the action takes place over a few years, leading to the “it could happen!” sluglines that adorned paperback copies in the early ‘70s. Despite what the Wayne State University edition’s back cover wants you to believe (not to mention what a particular political party wants you to believe), the era in which The Spook Who Sat By The Door occurs is very different from our modern era. But then, that same political party stays in power by cultivating and harnessing race rage – or, really, any kind of rage – so on that note you could say the book is still timely. I guess rage just never goes out of fashion with the left. 

Confirming this, politics is not really a driver for our “hero,” Dan Freeman. Rage is. This is fine; I mean rage is the driver for most men’s adventure protagonists of the era. But at least with those characters, you can empathize with them. Freeman is kept at such a distance from the reader – and other characters – that it’s not until late in the novel that you even learn what drives him. This undermines the power of The Spook Who Sat By The Door, along with the passive, summary-style narrative approach. 

If anything, Freeman – which is to say, possibly, Greenlee – shows most rage for liberal whites. A disdain for “caring” whites runs through the novel, meaning those white people who pretend to care for the plight of the blacks but have ulterior motives. In other words, virtue-signallers as they would now be called. There are a lot of humorous parts where these hypocrites are called out for their hypocrisy. 

But then, just as much anger is directed at blacks. There is a lot of antagonism between Dan Freeman and other blacks; in his intro in the novel, he’s bickering and sniping at fellow blacks who have been chosen for a new CIA program. They don’t like Freeman because he doesn’t seem to fit in, and Freeman doesn’t like them because they all have Ivy League educations and fraternity pins. In other words, in Freeman’s mind they are pretend caucasians. 

Curiously, the one group Freeman – and, possibly, Greenlee – does not have a problem with is actual racist white people! Indeed, it’s subtly conveyed that Freeman respects these people for showing their true feelings…with the hidden inference that Freeman likes it because he himself is a racist. 

Unless I missed something, Dan Freeman is not the titular “spook” who sat by the door. Rather, it’s a black man who has been hired by a congressman as a sounding board for the black voting public, but who mostly “sits by the door.” He opens the novel, implying that he will be an integral character in the novel, but he disappears after this opening – and, what’s more, the idea that forms the plot of the novel doesn’t even come from him! 

Rather, it’s the congressman’s wife who proposes, apropos of nothing, that the congressman push for an integrated CIA as a way of currying support from “the Negroes.” I mean, the “spook who sits by the door” isn’t even the one who comes up with the idea! Perhaps this is Greenlee’s point, that even the “token negro” who has literally been hired to give the black viewpoint is ignored by the liberal whites who have employed him – rather, they listen to their fellow liberal whites instead. As I say, the book is downright timely in some regards. 

Nevertheless, the plan is put in motion, and thus we are introduced without much fanfare to our ostensible hero, Dan Freeman. We don’t learn much about him, only that he’s from Chicago and has gotten through the intense trials to become one of the few black men up for CIA membership. We learn that he harbors a lot of rage, and also that he has ulterior motives of his own – the implication is clear that he plans to use this CIA training to cause some hell. But Greenlee keeps him at such a distance from us that we don’t get a clear idea of what it is he plans. 

In the meantime, he fights with his black comrades as well as the racists in charge of CIA training. As I stated at the outset, The Spook Who Sat By The Door takes place in a different world, where “integration” was detested by the racist whites who ran everything. At least, according to this novel. As mentioned, the book itself is very racist: all whites here are bigots who harbor prejudices against black people and whatnot. But then again such fiction is taken as truth today. Personally I’ve learned after fifty years of life that skin color means not a thing – an asshole is an asshole, regardless of race. 

Greenlee occasionally veers outside of his summary approach and gives us actual tense scenes, like when Freeman takes on his racist judo instructor. This is a cool part and has that masculine, men’s adventure-type vibe; the instructor is a white man, the referee is Korean, and Freeman mops the floor with the bigot. But after which he scolds himself for letting his “mask” slip; again, Greenlee has this tendency to keep Freeman’s true inclinations hidden from not only other characters but the reader himself (or “themselves,” if you go that way), and this sort of neuters the impact of the narrative. 

The CIA is run by “The General,” another bigot who intends to drum out all of the blacks through rigorous training. But as expected, Freeman manages to pass until the end – and, instead of becoming a field agent, he’s given a desk job in DC. So essentially he too becomes “a spook who sits beside the door.” Over the next few years, Freeman becomes a key player for the Agency, traveling around the world with various politicians and learning to grease the wheels in other countries. 

Along the way he has some “side pieces,” like a black hooker in DC he retains over the years, and also an old flame who apparently is Freeman’s main girlfriend, though she’s thrust on readers so casually that at first I confused her for the hooker. The idea is that even from these women Freeman hides his true self, though via the hooker we learn of his revolutionary tendencies, in that he refers to her as a “Dahomey Queen,” a reference to Africa. 

But again, the reader must do a lot of the work to make the narrative come to life. In this way Greenlee is similar to author Cecelia Holland, who also refrains from providing the motivations for her characters; I’ve tried two times over the past six years to read her doorstep of a sci-fi novel, Floating Worlds, and have given up halfway through each time due to my frustration over not being told why characters were doing what they were doing. 

Anyway, the General gives a patronizing speech to Freeman over dinner one night, telling him how “you people…will take generations” to fully integrate, and etc, and Freeman keeps his “mask” on, only losing control when he excuses himself to the restroom, where he cries in rage – curiously, a scene that was left out of the movie. Again following his own unstated goal, Freeman abruptly quits the CIA and goes back home to Chicago, returning to his former job as a social worker; he sets up a nice bachelor pad and again integrates with the upper-crust (read: liberal) white society. And meanwhile he hobknobs with the Cobras, a Black Power guerrilla outfit (read: The Black Panthers). Freeman only now demonstrates his true goal: to instill his CIA training on these black freedom fighters, to start a war on whitey. 

Now, the cynic in me wants to accuse Dan Freeman of cultural appropriation. I mean, think of it – he’s been taught by white people, and now he wants to use their own stuff against them. It’s not like Dan Freeman is an originator. This is why I think Sam Greenlee might have had some tricks up his sleeve, as he constantly refers to jazz musicians – real ones, like Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt – and the implication is that these black Americans are originators, men who have broken away from their shackles (rather real or conceived) and have gone on to create instead of to destroy. 

But as we all know – and have learned – the left only knows how to destroy, not create. And this is what Freeman teaches the Cobras to do. All the hand-fighting, shooting, bomb-making, and etc tricks he learned in the Agency. As “Turk,” Freeman again wears a mask, not allowing himself to get too close to the Cobras, as he knows they’ll need to be expendable. Again, our hero is a prick. For Freeman plans to begin racial skirmishes across the country, his Cobras using all kinds of whitey’s tricks against them…while Freeman himself maintains his pose as the high-society “integrated negro” who lives in a cushy apartment, sipping whiskey and listening to jazz. 

Again, so much is told instead of shown. The Cobras hit a bank – we’re told about it. They dose a guy with LSD, we’re told about it. Indeed, for years I’ve had this jazz-funk DJ mix, which I blogged about on here many years ago: Pulp Fusion: Cheeba Cheeba Mix. Well there’s a sample in that mix, some guy saying, “I just met the most wonderful bunch of n—” (you of course know the word I mean), and I had no idea that line of dialog came from the movie version of The Spook Who Sat By The Door. And it’s in the novel, too – but unlike the film, it’s delievered in hindsight, capping off yet another summary-style excursion of “this happened, then hat happened,” so that, like virtually everything else in the novel, the line lacks any punch. 

Things come to a head in Chicago, where the riots begin, soon erupting across the country. And meanwhile Dan Freeman sits in his bachelor pad, posing as a member of integrated society. His “mask” is still firmly in place, as he lies to everyone – to the Cobras who serve him and look up to him, to the old girflriend who comes visiting. None of them know who the true Freeman is, and as mentioned even we readers never do, as his motivation is never satisfactorily delivered. Thus the novel’s intended downbeat ending – or happy ending, depending on your point of view – also lacks much punch.

In 1973 a film adaptation was released; I’ve come across speculation online that the CIA “yanked” the movie from theaters because it gave away too many secrets, and etc. Again: bullshit. This is a low-budget film, of a piece with the other independent Blaxploitation productions of the era, and I highly doubt the CIA was bothered by it at all. Episodes of Mission: Impossible gave away more “secrets.” 

The only things that elevate this film adaptation are Herbie Hancock’s soundtrack and the fact that protagonist Dan Freeman – as well as the other characters – is given a chance to breathe; we actually see things as they happen, and aren’t told everything in summary. If the Cobras – here named “The Black Cobras” in the movie – rob a bank, we see the bank robbery as it goes down, instead of reading a paragraph summary of the events. 

Also, Dan Freeman (portrayed by Lawrence Cook, who is very good in the role) is given the motivation he was denied in the novel. Indeed, the idea that he goes into Agency training precisely to start a race war is not evident in the film version; the idea is just as easily conveyed that his frustrations with lack of integration are what push him over the edge. As mentioned above, the part where the General gives his patronizing speech remains in the film version, but Freeman’s emotional breakdown after it has been removed from the adaptation, which I found curious. 

Sam Greenlee himself was a co-writer of the script, as well as a producer of the film, so one wonders if it was his attempt to rectify the passive tones of his original novel. Characters are still sort of thrust on us, like Freeman’s old girlfriend from Chicago who still throws him a casual lay every once in a while, but at least these characters are introduced more properly than in the book. Also the movie sports better characterizations for the Cobras, leading to memorable scenes – like the “yellow” Cobra (ie a light-skinned black) who chaffes that everyone thinks he’s white, leading to an emotional “I was born black, I’m gonna die black” speech – one that was sampled in yet another funk DJ mix I like a lot, Blaxploitation Mixtape by DJ EB. 

But as mentioned, the movie is clearly low-budget. The novel opens with a big cabinet meeting, but in the movie it’s three people in a small office. And hell, the titular “spook” who sits by the door has been turned into a woman in the movie, but even here it’s the politician’s wife who comes up with the “integrated CIA” idea. A lot of Freeman’s simmering schemes are left out of the movie, but the fight with the judo teacher remains. Overall, though, the feeling is that the producers were trying to make a legit movie, as The Spook Who Sat By The Door lacks much of what one thinks of when one thinks of a “Blaxploitation” movie. Indeed there isn’t even any nudity or much violence. 

One thing the film does have that is similar to other Blaxploitation flicks is a great soundtrack. Recorded right in the midst of his “Headhunters” phase, Herbie Hancock’s soundtrack features early versions of material that would come out on his Thrust LP. We’re talking jazz-funk with serious cosmic aspirations, courtesy far-out synth work with ring modulators and echoplex and a host of other sonic trickery. It’s a shame the soundtrack was never properly released, as what exists in the film sounds incredible, and for me the music was the highlight of the film. 

It’s taken me some weeks to write this review, mostly due to work and life commitments. In this time the race conflict has come even here to Frisco, Texas – on April 2nd of this year a seventeen-year-old boy was stabbed to death at a track meet by another boy of the same age. This garnered national coverage, but curiously race was never mentioned by the mainstream news outlets; the victim was white, the perpetrator was black.  Curious indeed that this racial element was not mentioned, given the corporate media’s obsession with “racial motivations” when it’s white-on-black crime.  (It was up to the “right-wing news outlets” to even mention the racial angle…which of course was yet more indication of their right-wingery, you shouldn’t be surprised to know.) 

Granted, race could very well have had nothing to do with the murder here in Frisco – it’s a horrific event regardless of motivation – but I bring it up because it illustrates, again, how different our world is from the 1968 of Sam Greenlee’s novel. How would the national media have responded if a black boy stabbed a white boy to death then? Indeed, per the incessantly-aggrieved pearl clutchers of social media, it’s racist to even consider that there was a racial motivation to the murder here in Frisco. Of course, these are the same people who took to the streets in “fiery, but mostly peaceful” protests in the summer of 2020.  Of course, race was never proven to be a motivation for the incident that sparked that particular outrage, either, but whatever.

Now that I’ve finally read The Spook Who Sat By The Door, I think it would only make sense to read Civil War II, written by Don Pendleton and published shortly after Greenlee’s novel came out; it appears to pick up where The Spook Who Sat By The Door left off.

UPDATE: I wrote this review over the weekend, and in that time the situation here in Frisco has quickly progressed.  Race has now been brought into it...but not by the side you might assume.  (Actually, if you have been paying any attention whatsoever to our collapsing modern world, you know exactly which side brought race into it).  That the murdered white kid has been demonized as a deserving victim says all that needs to be said about how far astray our society has gone.  But at least there are people out there like this young lady who see and speak the truth.  

Book Of Justice #3: Death Force

Book Of Justice #3: Death Force, by Jack Arnett

May, 1990  Bantam Books

Surprisingly, this third volume of the obscure Book Of Justice is more over the top than the previous two volumes: “zombis with Uzis” are the threat this time around, and that’s an actual quote from the book. Unfortunately, the same overly-conservative tone that sunk the previous two volumes is back, leading to a read that is more wearying than thrilling. It’s like the desire is there for Death Force to be crazy, but any craziness is constantly stymied by the author’s insistence on explaining every little thing…and stretching scenes way past the breaking point. But at least “main protagonist” William Justice gets laid this time. 

First off, a big thanks to the mysterious TheyStoleFrazier’sBrain, who left a comment on my review of the second volume that Mike Mcuay did not write that book, and indeed only wrote the first and the fourth volumes. Per this commenter, McQuay likely did some rewrites to volumes 2 and 3. This would explain why McQuay was the credited copyright owner of the first volume but not the second or third, which are copyright Justice Enterprises. I’m going to guess this series was McQuay’s, though, and it was his hand that guided it, as Death Force reads the same as the previous two books, indicating a strong editorial hand. 

But let’s also take a moment to focus on the altogether unsettling cover art, which per the copyright page is credited to George Tsui. I mean, what the hell? I’m assuming the guy on the right with the upraised knife is supposed to be Justice, but…I mean, what’s up with that placid expression on his face? He doesn’t so much look like he’s fighting for his life as he does he’s getting his rocks off, like he’s some sort of gay serial killer. I mean, note how he’s cradling his victim’s head – and man, the vacant expression on the victim’s face is another WTF? element. Not to mention how he’s got his hand in Justice’s hair, lending this “murder” an altogether homoerotic aspect! Anyway, it’s a strange cover, something that would be more at home on the cover of a Justin Perry: The Assassin installment. 

And yes, the villains are “zombis” this time, witout the customary “e,” because they are the voodoo type of zombis. And have no fear if you’re unfamiliar with voodoo and Haiti, as “Jack Arnett” will pagefill with abandon to fill you in on both subjects, usually using the Hadji-esque character Sardi for exposition. One of the many characters in the series, Sardi as you’ll recall is the former Indian politician who gave it all up to become the right-hand man of William Justice on the Caribbean island-nation of Haven. 

Luckily the large cast of characters is whittled away this time, but it still irks me that McQuay named the two main series characters with names that start with “J.” I mean, there’s Justice, ostensibly the series protagonist, and also there’s Jenks, Justice’s other right-hand man, a former Federal agent who now does most of the ass-kicking in the series. Indeed, Jenks acts more in the capacity of series hero than Justice does; while Justice is learning about voodoo and having sex on the beach (literally, not the drink), Jenks is blowing away zombis with an automatic shotgun. 

The automatic shotgun mixed with zombies of course made me think of the much-superior action novel Able Team #8: Army Of Devils, and given that Mike McQuay once wrote for Gold Eagle, I wonder if he “borrowed” the setup for his Book Of Justice series. It’s not outside the realm of possibility. But whereas G.H. Frost delivered a fast-moving, gore-filled romp that to this day is one of the best men’s adventure novels I’ve ever read, McQuay and his uncredited/unknown co-writer turn in a slow-moving yarn that’s never willing to go full-bore wild. Which is crazy when you think about it, as they’ve already given us literal zombis armed with Uzis, so why even bother with the charade of writing a “real novel?” 

As those of us who managed to stay awake will recall, The Zaitech Sting featured a subplot in which Justice got a lead on the murder of his wife, several years ago. Something about a car witnessed on the scene outside of Justice’s house, which shortly thereafter exploded, or something. This, we are told yet again, means that Justice is prone to “going crazy,” but hell if it’s once again all show and no tell. As I argued before, with examples, William Justice isn’t even close to being crazy in comparison to his fellow men’s adventure protagonists. But we sure are told he can act nuts, and it’s a struggle for him to maintain calm, etc. Sure. Because once again Justice comes off like a snowflake; indeed, it occurred to me that Justice himself could have been removed from his own series, and Jenks made the protagonist, and it would have made for a better series. 

Anyway, it’s some months later and Justice now has his first actual clue in the mystery of who killed his wife – a car rescued from a junkyard in a small Florida town. Of course, the way these things go, the car itself is destroyed but for a small item in it, which Sardi exposits for us is actually a voodoo trinket. This will ultimately lead us into the main storyline, which concerns a Haitian sadist named Colonel Moreau leading a zombi hit squad on a UN delegation in New York (and I stole “zombi hit squad” from the awesome Sugar Hill trailer, of course). 

But Book Of Justice has more in common with one of today’s overstuffed “thriller” paperbacks in that it can’t just focus on one protagonist, thus we have a lot of hopscotching around a vast platform of characters. There’s Jenks in Florida, following clues – and busting heads when necessary – and there’s Justice in Haiti, where the clues ultimately lead him. Later we’ll have sections focused on Sardi, and also on Kim, the hotstuff Eurasian ass-kicker on the team with her penchant for claiming she’s horny (but never following up on it), and her “small breasts.” (Curiously – for the genre, I mean – “Jack Arnett” has a thing for small breasts, as the sole other female character in the novel also is specifically noted as having them.) 

I don’t know what it is exactly about the series that rubs me the wrong way. There’s just this overly reserved air about it, and I guess it frustrates me because with Death Force the intent was at least there to get a little crazy. But also there’s just this tendency to make everything boring; there’s so much talking among the various characters, and too much description, to the point that forward momentum is constantly lost. So it takes a good long while for anything to happen, with the various characters going to Haiti under various guises to figure out what all this has to do on the assassination of Justice’s wife, years ago. 

Jenks and Kim spend the first quarter working together in Haiti, with Jenks posing as a representative of a Haven business and Kim as his “private secretary.” This entails a lot of sex-focused banter between the two; as we’ll recall, Kim likes to announce to all and sundry that she’s horny, and when someone tries to take her up on it, she balks – like last volume, where Jenks took the bait and Kim told him he didn’t have a rubber, so to forget it! This volume really takes the cake, though. There’s a part where Jenks and Kim are stuck together on a train car filled with comatose zombis, and they clutch one another for warmth and safety…and Kim takes off her shirt, baring her “small breasts,” and implores Jenks to keep her “warm,” and the scene ends with them kissing. The reader can safely assume the two are about to “do the deed,” as we said back in the ‘80s, even if it’s off-page. But folks, when we go back to Jenks and Kim…we learn that they haven’t had sex, and just kissed all night, because Jenks knows Kim has a crush on Justice!! 

At this point I almost chucked the book, disturbing cover art and all, but I perservered. Mainly because, at the same time Jenks is being given blue balls, Justice himself is getting laid – by yet another “small-breasted” and “lithe” beauty, this one a young Haitian native named Marie who is busy teaching Justice all the tricks of the voodoo trade. And it’s a fairly explicit scene as well, which makes it all the more surprising, as otherwise Book Of Justice has been a very chaste series. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Basically this one starts off in one direction before wildly veering in another; those keeping notes will recall that what sets everything in motion is a lead concerning the murder of Justice’s wife. But soon enough that plot is entirely forgotten and instead Justice and team are fighting a Haitian plot in which Uzi-armed zombies (following directions that play on their Walkmans) are to be unleashed on the UN in New York to blow away a bunch of politicians. And somehow cocaine is factored into the plot, but the bigger deal is the Uzi-bearing zombi force. 

And yes, what with those Haitian zombis and their Uzis, it does bring to mind early ‘90s action fare like Marked For Death (certainly my favorite Seagal movie) and Predator II. Unfortunately, Jack Arnett isn’t one for big action setpieces, so there’s nothing on the level of those movies or Army Of Devils; the closest we come is a cool scene where Jenks, armed with a “Jackhammer auto shotgun” (which apparently existed, though 3 of them were only ever produced), blasts apart scads of Uzi-wielding zombies on 42nd Street. 

Curiously, Justice is a detriment to his own series; it occurred to me when I finally finished reading Death Force that Jenks was clearly the proper series protagonist, doing all the things you’d expect an action series protagonist to do. (Except get laid, though to his credit he does try to.) Justice, meanwhile, does nothing in the novel. Indeed, he spends the entire “climax” as a zombi, having been dosed with “zomi-powder” and laying in a comatose state, until finally “unleashing the beast” (ie the insanity that lurks in him) to fight off the zombi nature. Meanwhile, Jenks has blown apart a ton of zombis with an automatic shotgun. 

The helluva it is, there’s a good, fun novel hidden in here. I mean you would think a novel that featured Uzi-toting zombis with Walkmans on their heads would at least be fast-moving. But no matter how much of a dogged reading effort I made, it was like the book just wouldn’t end. On the plus side, I did appreciate how Justice and team didn’t spend the entire novel questioning the reality of voodoo; they accept the existence of zombis pretty quickly. But then, there’s always been a bit of a New Agey vibe to Book Of Justice, possibly given Mike McQuay’s background in science fiction. 

Rather than the fast-paced action novel you’d expect, Death Force instead is a chore of a read, with constant cutting to and from the too-large cast of characters as they slowly advance the plot. The zombi element is delivered so casually and nonchalantly that it loses all impact, and the rampant exposition via Sardi doesn’t help matters. And again the series is too ghoulish; repeating the obsession of the previous volumes with a focus on kids getting killed, this one has the “good voodoo people” digging up the coffin of a recently-dead child and breaking off pieces of his body to create a potent voodoo concoction. Rather than be outraged, Justice and team just make quips. 

It’s also the same “good voodoo” chick who lays Justice. This too is unintentionally humorous, as it seems the author has, uh, inserted the scene so as to add some much-needed T&A to the series. Justice is being shown the voodoo ropes by young, “lithe” and “small-breasted” Haitian babe Marie, who abruptly tells him she wants him, and the two have a fairly explicit conjugation on the beach. Curious, given the complete lack of any sex in the previous two books. And also more curious is that Marie essentally slips into the narrative aether after this, only appearing a few more times – and not contributing much else to the plot. 

I had hopes that she would become some sort of ass-kicking voodoo warrior in the finale, but instead that role is given, apropos of nothing, to Kim. Again displaying the nonchalant approach this series takes to the metaphysical, Kim is plumb possessed by voodoo spirits, leading the charge against Moreau, the villain of the piece – a voodoo priest who can make a double of himself and who is also in charge of the sadistic Haitian secret police. And meanwhile, Justice himself is lying on the ground, “unleashing the beast” and fighting internally to overcome his zombie nature, once again leaving his compatriots to do the actual fighting. 

Also humorously, the entire point of the novel – Justice following leads on his wife’s murder – is virtually ignored for the entire book, only to come up again on the last page. One of the zombis is white, a man once named Walter, and apparently he was the owner of the car that was pulled from the junkyard at novel’s start – the car at the scene of the housefire that took Justice’s wife. Well, those voodoo spirits have struck again and Walter will eventually regain some of his memory, ie some of his memory from life, and thus Justice orders that he be brought back to Haven. In other words, the unwieldy chast of characters will become even more unwieldy; now there’s going to be a zombi on the team. 

But then, there was only one more volume of Book Of Justice to go; in fact, the final pages of Death Force contain an excerpt from it. The myserious TheyStoleFrazier’sBrain stated that this one, like the first volume, was written by Mike McQuay, which doesn’t bode well…at least for me. Back in October I did pick up a copy of McQuay’s standalone sci-fi novel Jitterbug, which has mostly favorable reviews, so maybe I should just read that instead.

The Red Berets

The Red Berets, by Tom Biracree

February, 1983  Pinnacle Books

Well folks, like a suicidal Looney Tunes cartoon character, now I’ve seen everything. For we have here with The Red Berets the world’s first – and hopefully only – attempt at a non-violent men’s adventure series. No sex, either! It’s of course not very shocking that there wasn’t a followup volume, though one was clearly intended; once upon a time (ie ten years ago, when I purchased this book), Amazon even listed a second volume of the series, though no copies were ever listed for sale. I cannot recall the title, and the book is no longer listed on Amazon, but it was there at one time, I tell you! Which I imagine means it was on Pinnacle’s publication schedule, which Amazon somehow picked up. 

Now, having read this “first volume,” which The Red Berets was clearly intended to be, I am in no way, shape, or form surprised that the series itself never came to pass. For one, it’s a bloated 342 pages! Granted, it’s got some big print, but still. That’s way too long for a men’s adventure novel. And also, it’s tepid, features a protagonist who comes off like a wuss, and did I mention there’s no violence? Or sex? You don’t need a DOGE task force to figure out why The Red Berets was expendable. 

Speaking of intrusive political tangents, The Red Berets is also notable because it has a left-wing vibe. This is likely the only ‘80s men’s adventure novel that bashes Reagan, and repeatedly at that. We’re given frequent sermons on how “the new administration” focuses on overseas shenanigans and whatnot, leaving inner cities to fend for themselves, and one can almost feel the author gnashing his teeth in hot-blooded Democrat rage. Sure, Butler was also left-wing, but at least Len Levinson was sure to include some good ol’ sex and violence in his books…not so Tom Biracree, who by the way still appears to be publishing today. 

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh on The Red Berets. Truth be told, it has a respectable setup: a ‘Nam vet becomes an unwitting hero of the people when he puts together the titular force of young men and women, which patrols the subways of New York for purse-snatchers and rapists and murderers, and along the way they run afoul not only of a crime kingpin but also the mayor and the transit authorities. 

We get an indication that The Red Berets won’t be your average Pinnacle offering when the novel opens in Vietnam in 1972, with a young Green Beret battlefield medic named Jim Knight deciding that he’s had enough of the killing and the atrocity and that he’s quitting the warfare game, court-martial or not, and he’s going to devote himself to saving lives. From there we flash-forward ten years and Jim is now in New York, where he runs a clinic on the Lower East Side – right in the hellzone that was Alphabet City (though I don’t believe Biracree actually uses that name for the neighborhood). 

It’s a strange setup for a would-be men’s adventure series for sure. Jim Knight, former ass-kicking vet turned bleeding-heart doctor in the inner city. The veteran genre reader will of course understand that such setups are usually just window dressing, and despite all the tree-hugging such a character will eventually start kicking ass. But crazily, such a thing doesn’t really happen in The Red Berets. Indeed, Jim constantly nags at his young wards, the titular Red Berets, insisting that they not engage in any kind of fighting. There’s also an unintentionally hilarious part where he tells them their “weapon” is a whistle – to call for help! 

It takes a while to get there, though. The first quarter of The Red Berets is devoted to establishing Jim’s life in early ‘80s New York; we get another indication that this dude isn’t your traditional men’s adventure protagonist when we learn that he has a crush on Dr. Sara Cummings, a pretty young lady who works in Jim’s clinic, a lady who happens to be married. It’s hard to imagine John Eagle having a crush on someone, but again, this isn’t your average men’s typical yarn. 

As mentioned we also get periodic sermons on how crime-ridden New York has gotten, which for some unspecified reason is the fault of President Reagan, and Jim stews at how dangerous the streets have become. Biracree often cuts to the perspectives of other characters, and through these sequences we learn there is a new gang that terrorizes the subway in particular; young kids who have cut their faces as a sign of their membership in the gang, calling themselves the Savage Skulls. 

Jim’s purpose in life begins when an old woman he knows is murdered by a Savage Skull in a subway mugging gone wrong; with the assistance of his friends, Jim begins riding the subway each night, to see if he can find the punks who killed her. Not to dish out any payback, but so as to get their descriptions and report them to the police! But through this Jim Knight ultimately begins a movement to make the subways – and New York itself – safe again. 

His two main accomplices are Renaldo, a mountain of muscle who happens to be a professional heavyweight boxer, and Baseline, a young black basketball player who drives a taxi and likes to rap his dialog. Yes, it’s the early ‘80s, folks, with the occasional mention of Ghetto Blasters to boot. Other characters will come into the fray – like a young black girl who is also a basketball player, and an old man who once as a Vaudeville comedian – but Renaldo and Baseline are Jim’s standbys. 

What starts as a simple act of vigilance – riding the subway and watching out for gang-bangers – turns into a movement that sweeps the city. When Jim and his colleagues stop a few muggings, already going beyond Jim’s “no engagement” policy, a female reporter comes along and turns Jim into a hero via a series of newspaper articles. This not only gets people interested in joining Jim, but it also pisses off the mayor and the transit cops, as it makes them look bad – ordinary citizens must defend themselves because the authorities are incapable. 

This is where “the Red Berets” are born; when Renaldo’s elderly trainer is nearly killed by thugs (you can just picture him as Burgess Meredith in the movie that plays in your mind), Jim and the team decide to adopt the old man’s trademark red beret as the “uniform” of their movement. And, let’s not forget, a friggin’ whistle will be their weapon. The action scenes follow more of a smallscale, non-lethal template, with mostly fistfights or people running from each other. What I mean to say is, there’s no gun-blazing action in The Red Berets. It’s all very anemic and G-rated, as if Tom Biracree got on the “kinder, gentler” vibe of the ‘90s a decade early. 

There’s no sex, either. Jim manages to hook up with both the married lady – who leaves her husband before offering herself to Jim – as well as the reporter. All the sex is off page, and folks even here Jim Knight comes off like a wuss. There’s a part where Sara asks Jim to spend the night and he balks at the idea, saying they should wait! But then, Jim is indecisive and weak throughout the novel; he even breaks the cardinal hero rule and tries to quit multiple times in the narrative, only to be pulled back into it by other characters. 

We soon learn of Anthony Brown, a local crime kingpin who is involved with the Savage Skulls and who also sets his sights on Jim and the Red Berets. But for the most part the team handles those who prey on innocents in the subway, like a memorable scene where they stop a rape in progress. And as mentioned they also become heroes to the citizens of New York, showing that if you stand together you can fight back against crime – quite an evolution for the men’s adventure genre, coming out of the lone wolf ‘70s. 

Teams were the thing in ‘80s men’s adventure, and in that one regard The Red Berets has something in common with its brethren in the genre. Otherwise, it’s no mystery why this “series” only amounted to one volume, and why the second volume was not published. Personally when I read a men’s adventure novel, I don’t want something less violent, less graphic. I want gore-soaked insanity with tons of lurid stuff. But as I’ve said many times before, that’s just me.

Seven Against Greece (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #25)

Seven Against Greece, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1967  Award Books

(Edition shown here circa 1974)

Nicholas Browne wrote four volumes of Nick Carter: Killmaster, and Seven Against Greece was his third one. It’s mainly interesting in how standard it is. This is basically a no-frills Killmaster yarn, Browne hitting just the exact bases that are expected of a series ghostwriter and not offering much in the way of innovation. I only hold him to a higher standard given that he featured an ancient Viking warrior in the last volume he wrote for the series. 

But there’s nothing crazy or outrageous aboutSeven Against Greece, other than my suspicion that the title was originally “Seven Against Thebes.” I say this because the published title has nothing to do with the story – if there are indeed “Seven against Greece” in the course of the book, I couldn’t name them – but Nick Carter makes frequent visits to a bar in Athens called Seven Against Thebes, a notorious hangout for a group of native terrorists. Well, who knows. 

Regardless of the title, Browne does indeed keep the action centered in Greece for the entirety of the novel’s 158 pages – 158 pages of incredibly small print, to the extent that I figure Seven Against Greece would at least be 250 pages if the print was a little bigger. Maybe longer. And the helluva it is, a lot of the narrative is listless, and given over to padding, so the book seems even longer. 

According to Will Murray’s incredible Killmaster research in The Armchair Detective V15 #4 (1982), Nicholas Browne was a merchant seaman who turned in a few Killmaster installments in the mid-late 1960s and then “sailed for parts unknown,” essentially disappearing from the face of the Earth. Maybe he sailed into the Bermuda Triangle. 

Murray appropriately makes it all sound eerie, but it’s only now occurred to me that the whole thing might have been a tall tale Murray was fed by series editor Lyle Kenyon Engel. Maybe there was no “Nicholas Browne.” Maybe these books were really written by Engel – who, per Murray’s article, claimed to have done extensive rewriting to “Browne’s” manuscripts. Looking at my 2015 review of The Bright Blue Death, the last of Browne’s four Killmaster novels but the first one of his I read, I see that commenter “halojones-fan” was a decade ahead of me, with his comment: “Was Nicholas Browne an actual person, or just a pseudonym for the Engels?” Good question, halojones-fan! 

At any rate, going into the book with an awareness of who Browne supposedly was, there is quite a bit of realistic detail on ports and sailing; Nick Carter hitches a few rides and there’s a lot of word painting about grungy seaside ports and whatnot, conveying a “been there, done that” verisimilitude to the narrative. So who knows, maybe there really was a Nicholas Browne who was a merchant seaman who wrote a handful of Nick Carter: Killmaster novels while sailing the seas, before vanishing. If Robert Stack was still alive, I’d beg him to do a segment on Unsolved Mysteries. While he was at it, maybe he could’ve also clreared up the mystery on who another series ghostwriter, “William Rohde,” really was. 

Another note is that Nick’s undercover pose this time is as an “able-bodied seaman,” so maybe there really was something to Nicholas Browne being a real person. But then, Nick has two guises in this one: he also pretends to be an archeologist, and even receives AXE training in the field. This dual-cover setup is not well executed in the narrative, and really just added more bloat to an already-bloated story. Nick has the archeologist guise because AXE suspects an Athens traveling agency of hooking visiting Americans up with young natives, in the hopes that marriage will ensue, and the natives will go to America with their new spouse. There seems to be something nefarious in the works, and an agent working this case is murdered at the beginning of the novel – now it’s Nick’s turn to figure out what is happening. 

Parts of Seven Against Greece are similar to the popular fiction of the era, with Nick hobknobbing with jet-setting elite in exotic locales. There’s also Princess Electra, “the most beautiful woman in the world,” with her “luxurious figure,” a former model who plays the field and sets her sights on “archeologist” Nick. Browne is not one of the more explicit writers in the field, but we do get copious mentions of the gal’s breasts. For the most part, though, Browne goes for more of a pseudo-literary style for the naughty stuff; for example, when Nick and Electra have their inevitable fun, Browne leaves it as, “[Nick] felt as if he had crashed through a boundary of the universe.” Well, sure. Okay. 

Then again, Nick’s already had his off-page way with another European beauty: Xenia, a portside whore in Athens, with her “perfect and vital young body.” She will turn out to be the main female character in the novel; Browne goes against the series mandate and “only” has Nick conquering two women in the novel, instead of the customary three. But even with Xenia our author keeps all the juicy details off page; what’s worse, Xenia starts to fall in love with Nick, even trying to get him to stay with her. 

Browne does have a gift for scene-setting. The port-side material in particular is vivid with description, and when it comes to the maritime stuff you can tell that this is an author who knows of what he writes. But still, it’s rather slow-going. Nick gets in a few fistfights here and there, but he stymies himself due to “keeping cover.” Meaning, when some hoods jump him outside of Xenia’s apartment, Nick can’t become full-on Killmaster and waste the guys, as he’s supposed to be a merchant seaman. 

There’s also a lot of suspense material. Browne has a lot of characters in the works, and there are frequent cutovers to their perspectives to fill up the runtime. I found a bit of prescience in the Obama Bin Laden-esque Gorgas, elderly leader of a Greek terrorist army. It’s his men Nick tangles with outside of Xenia’s apartment, and eventually Nick will learn that Gorgas and Princes Electra are in cahoots, working with an Onassis pastiche and a Chinese spymaster. Still, unless my math fails me, that’s only four against Greece. 

This early in the series, we are still apparently under the pretensions that Nick Carter is old enough to have fought in World War II, as established in the first volume. But even by 1967 it’s getting hard to buy. For example, Nick hooks up with an old Greek colleague he fought with during the war, a hardy old warrior who seems to have walked out of Homer, but the dude is old, and he and Nick keep talking about “the old days” and whatnot. But Nick is still young enough that he picks up young chicks like Xenia and has gobsmacking international jet-set beauties like Electra chomping at the bit to bed him. So it almost gives the impression that Nick Carter is a Highlander or something, an ageless immortal. It was a wise decision to gradually drop the whole “WWII vet” setup. 

We do still have the unintentionally goofy stuff from early volumes, though, like an axe tattoo on Nick’s arm…which designates him as a high-ranking agent of the top-secret outfit AXE, of course. I mean there’s nothing like just advertising who you are when you’re going undercover. One wonders why they even bother with giving Nick cover guises. 

When Nick does cut loose, though, Browne doesn’t disappoint. There’s a brutal fight with a couple thugs in his hotel room, which leads to some dark humor where Nick stashes their corpses in a closet…and then goes out for lunch. Browne also caters to the theme of Nick being captured and tortured; late in the tale he is tied, naked, to a pole in a grotto, one that fills with the tide, and all these fish and crabs and whatnot start nibbling on him. Things take a turn into horror when a giant octopus comes in and wraps itself around Nick, biting his chest – the finale here is particularly grisly, with Nick recalling how an old seaman once told him of being in a similar situation, and the way out was to bite the octopus in the brain. 

There’s also another good sequence where Nick and his old comrade are cornered like rats in some underground tunnels, and a guy with a flamethrower comes after them. But the finale is a bit too much like a mystery, along the lines of Browne’s previous The Chinese Paymaster, with Nick uncovering who exactly is behind the plot. Browne does have a good way of incorporating Nick’s trademark weapons, though; little gas-bomb Pierre is used twice in the novel, once when Nick throws it into the open bed of a truckful of soldiers, and in another crazy part where he uses it while he’s tied up in a plane that’s in mid-air(!). 

Overall though, the biggest takeaway from Seven Against Greece is the mystery of who Nicholas Browne was, what happened to him, and why he didn’t write any more Killmaster novels, as he did write some good ones, like Operation Starvation.

Black Samurai #6: The Warlock (Second Review)

Black Samurai #6: The Warlock, by Marc Olden

January, 1975  Signet Books

It’s hard to believe, but it’s going on 15 years since I reviewed this sixth installment of Black Samurai. This was the first volume of the series I read, and at the time I was unaware that it had been the source material for the film adaptation. I loved the book when I read it back in 2010, and reading it again now in 2025, I loved it again. 

For one, I’m a bit more familiar with the work of Marc Olden at this point, so I see how his style is so evident in The Warlock. Stuff that I might not have noticed in my first reading of his work, all those years ago. But it’s all here – the large cast of characters, the frequent cutting between perspectives, the occasional lapse into stream-of-consciousness as we dip into the thoughts of various characters. 

Yes, it’s all here, but this time Olden reins it in, to the point that very little of The Warlock comes off as padded. And it’s pretty impressive because Olden clearly indicates he has not become bored with the series; six volumes in, and he turns in the most entertaining installment yet, filled to the brim with crazy characters and situations. It’s almost like he took a brief survey of the mid-‘70s men’s adventure field, saw how lurid everything had become, and decided to turn the dial of his own series to 10. (Or 11, for you Spinal Tap fans.) 

But man, Marc Olden really threw in the kitchen sink with this one, and not to sound redundant, but it’s impressive. I mean it opens with Robert “Black Samurai” Sand being attacked by a pair of transvestite dwarves, for pete’s sake, with the dwarves wielding razor blades and slicing them at Sand. Not long after that our hero is attacked by “Lion Men,” brawny black dudes in leopard costumes, like they came out of a ‘30s Tarzan movie. (Tarzan And His Mate of course being the best of the lot – complete even with full female nudity in an underwater swimming scene…pretty impressive for a movie from 1934!) 

Again it surprises me that Al Adamson chose this volume to adapt for his movie version of Black Samurai. Reading the book again, after having finally seen the movie a few years ago (as mentioned in my review from back then, I was waiting forever for the uncut version to come out), I see how much content Adamson changed, likely for budgetary reasons…yet, at the same time, he added a bunch of stupid shit that wasn’t in the book that certainly increased his budget. Like a sportscar for Sand. Not to mention a friggin’ jetpack a la Thunderball. And even a moronic fight with a vulture. 

No, none of that stuff is in The Warlock. In fact, Adamson could’ve done a straight adaptation of the source material and he could’ve done it with the limited budget he was working with. He also toned down on the lurid element Olden brought his tale. Janicot, the titular “Warlock,” is a total freak in the novel, filming black magic snuff films for his jet-setting followers and making scads of money off the proceeds; as I mentioned in my review of the movie, the Janicot of the film comes off more like a poor man’s Uncle Arthur from Bewitched. 

Femme fatale Synne also suffers greatly in the movie. I’d forgotten how much Olden puts into her character in the novel: here she is a force of unbridled sex, a hotstuff black babe with silver hair and lipstick. In fact I wish she was in the novel more than she is. She’s Janicot’s second in command, and Olden has it that she’s so blown away by Robert Sand that she jeopardizes her standing with Janicot. That said, nothing much comes of this, and Sand bluntly turns down Synne’s offer for sex – indeed, Sand goes without for this particular volume. 

But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. Looking at my surprisingly-short original review of The Warlock, I see that I failed to note what the plot was about. Well, in this one Sand is tasked by his boss, former president William Baron Clarke, to take down Janicot, an Aleister Crowley type who runs a satanic cult. Janicot specializes in getting politicians in compromising positions in his sexual rituals, which are filmed for blackmail purposes, and an old colleague of Clarke’s has gotten in too deep. 

We meet Sand as he’s already in France, researching. As with most Black Samurai novels – and, come to think of it, a lot of Olden’s Narc books as well – the action takes place in Paris. I’m not sure if Olden lived there or was just fascinated with the place, but he constantly has stuff taking place in Paris. And that’s where Sand is as The Warlock opens, walking into an ambush courtesy a pair of leather-clad transvestite dwarves. 

Olden really brings home how sadistic these little bastards are; they are the bodyguards of Janicot, we’ll later learn – cross-dressing psyco dwarves who carry razor blades. The opening of the book features a great bit where Sand kicks one of the little bastards. Olden wisely keeps the dwarves a minor presence (lame pun alert); I don’t believe he even names any of them. Nor does he name any of the “Lion Men” who also serve Janicot – burly black men in leopard costumes who battle Sand in the opening sequence, but who then essentially disappear from the narrative. 

This is because Olden, as usual, has a ton of other characters he focuses on. As ever this means Robert Sand himself is lost in the shuffle, but the villains this time are so colorful the reader doesn’t much mind. I mean, there’s Bone, who serves as Janicot’s henchman, a gay albino sadist. There’s Rheinhart, a friggin’ werewolf, who was raised (as a cub?) by Janicot and is the most fierce fighter in the Warlock’s employ – and also we’re told of the creature’s various attacks on women, Olden building on the overall lurid tone of the narrative. 

There’s also Chavez, returning from the fourth volume; in belabored backstory that doesn’t make much sense, Chavez has hired Janicot to capture and kill the Black Samurai. We briefly met Chavez at the end of The Deadly Pearl, where he swore revenge for his brother’s death; the dude certainly has a roundabout way of getting revenge, as he’s hired Janicot to track down Robert Sand, capture him, drug him, and kill him on-camera in a black magic ritual or something…which is the sort of thing Janicot does. 

Reading the book again, I was impressed once more with how lurid Marc Olden got, particularly with Janicot…I’d forgotten the hinted-at backstory that Janicot was a Nazi in the war, one who renamed himself and gradually drew an international following as a mystic guru. Olden delivers a few jet-setter party sequences Janicot throws in Paris that could come out of a contemporary trash paperback. There are also a few scenes where Janicot kills off people who have run afoul of him or his cult, and Olden really brings to life the plight of the unfortunates; some of the material here could come out of the sweats of the era, focused on torture and suffering. 

What’s interesting is that Olden has enough for a novel with this setup, but he also throws in Toki, Sand’s Japanese beloved, not seen since (I think?) the first volume. Janicot has also been hired to blackmail a Vietnamese politician who has campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, and this dude just happens to be married to Toki. Janicot is supposed to get the guy and film him in some depraved satanic orgy to use as leverage on him. And meanwhile, Janicot has learned that this guy’s wife is also the love of the Black Samurai’s life (how Janicot’s learned this is left vague), so the Warlock figures he can get double bang for his buck – kidnap Toki and use her as Black Samurai bait. 

And yet even this isn’t enough for Olden; Sand is already on the trail of Janicot at novel’s start, unaware of the Warlock’s plans for Toki. This is because Janicot has pulled the same blackmailing trick on a French politician the Baron is friends with, and so the Baron has asked Sand to go over to Paris and get the goods on the Warlock. So in other words “it’s personal this time” for this particular installment; there’s no big global threat the Black Samurai is looking to stop. 

Curious, then, that director Al Adamson gussied up the plot with so much fluff. For those who have seen the film but never read the book: Sand doesn’t drive a sportscar. He does not, at any point, put on a rocket pack straight out of Thunderball. He doesn’t fight a vulture(!). And he doesn’t wear a tracksuit at any point of the novel. Indeed, watching the movie again after re-reading The Warlock, it blew my mind that Adamson was too foolish to just do a straight adaptation, as the ensuing film would have been more senastionalistic…and likely cheaper, too. 

One thing the movie did get right with its “fluff” is more in the way of sex and nudity. There’s little of either in the novel. Robert Sand does not have sex in this one, though the, uh, carrot is dangled – courtesy Synne, certainly the most interesting female character yet in the Black Samurai series, if not the entire men’s adventure genre. She’s a black beauty who serves as Janicot’s vassal (or something), a former hooker from the American South who was discovered by Janicot and turned into essentially the embodiment of sex; the Warlock uses her to screw VIPs, and though there is not a single sex scene in the novel, we’re informed that Synne can keep a man happy. Oh, and she has long, straight hair that’s been dyed silver, and also she wears silver lipstick and silver nail polish. This is something Al Adamson also chose to ignore in his film adaptation…but then, actress Marilyn Joi doesn’t look much like how Synne is described, anyway. 

Even Robert Sand is taken back by her staggering and exotic beauty; we are told that his stern, “samurai!” façade is tested by Synne. But it’s all simmer and no boil. Synne catches sight of Sand, and – in the frequent cutovers to Synne’s perspective that occur through the novel – we learn she’s developed a thing for the Black Samurai. He’s a real man, she can tell, and not like the sadistic brutes she has to screw to keep Janicot happy. Men like Chavez…who, by the way, engages Synne twice in the novel, off-page, as does another guy Janicot is keeping happy, a stuffy British doctor. 

As I mentioned in my original review, the Sand-Synne stuff is ultimately anticlimactic. They have a “meet cute” early in the book, when Sand, dressed like a movie cowboy with a Lone Ranger mask, crashes a Paris party of Janicot’s. He runs into the silver-haired Synne, and there’s a clear mutual attraction. But when they have their actual face-to-face, later in the novel, not much comes of it. Synne offers herself to Sand, but as usual he’s all business – plus at this point he’s learned that Toki is in danger – and Sand turns Synne down. Something that makes the silver-lipped beauty freak out in rage, as no one spurns her. But man, that’s it – there’s never another meeting between the two. 

Olden does deliver on the action front, though. And not since that first volume has Sand been so put to the test; he must rely on his samurai resolve quite often in the narrative, being outnumbered and outgunned at frequent points. There’s a fight with the werewolf late in the tale that’s pretty cool – again, shocking that Al Adamson, who made schlocky, low-budget horror movies, didn’t include the werewolf in his film adaptation – and, though brief, the fight is brutal, with the additional element that Sand is injured at the time, with a broken wrist. 

There isn’t a big fight with Chavez; indeed, Olden follows his usual template in that the novel is so busy that he must hurriedly bring everything to a close in the final pages. Chavez is for the most part a secondary character; in his frequent cutovers we see him mulling over how whacko Janicot is (which of course makes the reader wonder why Chavez hired Janicot in the first place), and also chomping at the bit for “the black man to die.” 

The action takes place for the most part in Paris, including an extended action sequence where Sand tries to kill Janicot at a small airport – leading to a tense capoff where Sand commandeers the plane on the tarmac. This leads to a strange bit where the Baron, all the way back in Texas, somehow knows that it wasn’t really Janicot at the airport, and it was all a fake-out to get Sand. Another strange miss is all the stuff with Toki; this is another bit Al Adamson made more of a deal of. But in the novel itself, Sand and Toki don’t even really have a moment together; Sand saves her, but she’s out cold at the time. 

Since I’m on a spoiler kick, skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know what happens. But the resolution with Synne is also lame. She’s killed off-page…by Chavez! Olden delivers one of his customary rushed finales with Janicot’s people all holed up in a remote house once the action has moved Stateside, and Sand leads a team of the Baron’s men into the compound to kill everyone. When Sand storms into the house, he catches Chavez as Chavez is coming out of a room. Sand kills him without much fuss – there’s no big dramatic payoff – and then Sand discovers Synne’s corpse in the bedroom. Material from her perspective has already hinted that Chavez is rough and sadistic in the sack, so this turns out to have been foreshadowing on Olden’s part; Chavez apparently killed Synne during some rough sex. Still, it’s a bit of a letdown. I wanted more from this unusual character. 

As mentioned in my original review, Janicot is still around at novel’s end; there’s a horror-esque finale where his ghostly voice calls to Sand in the dark of the night, and we’re to understand the Black Samurai is properly bugged out. But I do not believe Janicot returns; the series only lasted for two more volumes, and looking at the back covers I see no mention of the Warlock’s return. But then, villains not getting their comeuppance was a staple in Olden’s Narc series. 

Overall though, I enjoyed The Warlock just as much on this second reading, and I was very impressed with the level of insanity Marc Olden injected into it – comparatively speaking, it’s a lot crazier than the previous five volumes of Black Samurai, and displays a more pulpy side of Olden than those familiar with his work might expect.

The Terminator #2: Silicon Valley Slaughter

The Terminator #2: Silicon Valley Slaughter, by John Quinn

July, 1983  Pinnacle Books

The second volume of The Terminator is similar to the first: a somewhat slow-moving piece that is more focused on building tension and suspense than it is to catering to Pinnacle’s almost desperate declaration that they (still) are “the number one action-adventure publisher.” 

Dennis Rodriguez is again outed as the writer on the copyright page, which makes one wonder why the “John Quinn” by-line was even necessary. It’s not like Pinnacle’s contemporary Justin Perry series, where author Hal Bennett likely used a pseudonym (and didn’t put his name on the copyright page) so no one would think he was batshit crazy. As with the first book, Rodriguez turns in a book that’s very sedate and methodical in its delivery, at times more approaching the vibe of a hardboiled yarn than an action caper. 

What I find most interesting about Silicon Valley Slaughter is that series protagonist Rod Gavin – who by the way is never reffered to as a “Terminator” in the entire book – is revealed here to basically be a drunk. This was already hinted at in the previous book, where Gavin “fortified” himself with a bottle of booze while lurking in the trunk of a car, feeling “good” and “loose” when he finally came out for the big finale. 

Well, Rodriguez takes that and runs with it in this second volume. Gavin drinks his way through a lot of bottles in the course of the book, even recreating the previous volume’s bit by asking some goons to buy him a bottle of liquor so he can go to sleep and they won’t have to worry about him! I mean if this guy doesn’t have a problem, I don’t know what a problem would even be. 

Rodriguez also follows the template of the previous book in that the majority of the tale is at a slow boil, cutting across a swathe of characters, until reaching a harried finale. A curious thing about Silicon Valley Slaughter is that Gavin has no personal impetus in the plot; he isn’t out for revenge, and indeed only gets into the fray so as to help his friend Duffy (returning from the previous volume). Otherwise Gavin has no personal stake in the proceedings; ostensibly his goal is to rescue Duffy’s hotstuff, 20-something niece, but Gavin’s never even met her. 

The Terminator series is somewhat similar to the earlier Dakota in how Rod Gavin has a supporting group of characters, who appear in each volume. Actually, his “girlfriend” Kendall does not appear in Silicon Valley Slaughter, but she’s mentioned a lot. But there’s also Duffy, a Justice Dept. colleague of Gavin’s, and Dorn, a car mechanic who fixes up a beaten ’74 Trans Am for Gavin…even putting the very “1980s action” augmentation of an Uzi hidden inside of a center console. One can almost see Steven J. Cannell at his typewriter. 

As mentioned, Rodriguez likes to jump around a large group of characters. So for Sicilian Valley Slaughter we have material with Duffy (who is knocked into a coma after his intro, where he will remain for the duration of the novel), material with Duffy’s niece, Susan, and then stuff with both a high-level Japanese gangster as well as the American-born Japanese thug who works for him, with other characters besides. There is a lot of cutting between perspectives – and Rodriguez is good because he gives us white space or a chapter break to warn us of the perspective hopping – which ultimately means that Gavin comes off like a guest star in his own book. 

The plot concerns Duffy’s niece Susan being abducted, and the editors at Pinnacle do a great job of hyping the lurid aspects of this on the back cover, claiming that she’s about to be sent off into sexual servitude. However, author Dennis Rodriguez has much less lurid intentions. While it is mentioned, in passing, that the ultimate plan is to send her off into some sex slavery thing in Japan, for the most part Susan’s been kidnapped because she is working on some top-secret encryption device for an electronics firm in Silicon Valley. 

The novel is quite prescient in its talk of encryption and data, yet at the same time it’s not really the subject I want to read about in a men’s adventure novel. That said, Gavin himself is blithely unaware of all this mumbo-jumbo and tells people gladly that it’s outside of his realm. Regardless, he acts as a private investigator for the most part, trying to find young Susan as a way to pay back his injured friend, Duffy. 

Action is sporadic, and again has the vibe of a Gold Eagle novel from decades before; it’s mostly Gavin punching people. At one point an old Agency colleague gets him a P-38 pistol, a la the gun Gavin wields in the cover portrait on each volume – and also, the copyright page further states that the cover art is courtesy Bruce Minney. But honestly Gavin doesn’t use the gun much, and he’s more prone to hit the bottle than he is to shoot someone. 

Gavin does find the opportunity to get laid, though. While searching Susan’s place he discovers an attractive young woman hididng, fully clothed, in Susan’s shower. This turns out to be Hillary, a friend of Susan’s – a pretty one, naturally, with “full, upswept breasts.” Hillary has no idea who Gavin is – he uses a fake name throughout, claiming he’s a reporter – and later on there’s this unintentionally hilarious part where an injured Gavin needs to hide…and he goes to Hillary’s place and insists that she let him in, then tells her to go take a bath while he prepares dinner! I’ve seen a couple episodes of Dateline with this setup. 

But instead of telling Gavin to go away, Hillary opens the door and invites him in – this total stranger who is bleeding from an injury, who she met just a few days before, when he was snooping through her missing friend’s house. She even goes off to take a bath! Gavin makes a meal and the two eat and then they go to bed, but as with the previous book Rodriguez does not go into detail; indeed, the sex scenes seem to be incorporated merely so as to meet a publisher requirement. 

It’s the drinking, though, that makes me question how serious Dennis Rodriguez was about this whole affair. There’s actually a part where Gavin thinks to himself, “You can’t be on duty twenty-four hours a day,” and proceeds to get drunk. By himself. Then Dorn drives to California with the rebuilt Trans Am and Gavin gets drunk with him, too. Then there’s the part I already mentioned, where Gavin is caught by these yakuza thugs and he tells them to buy him a bottle so he can get drunk and won’t be “much trouble” for them! And it isn’t even some clever ploy, like Gavin throwing the booze on them and then flinging a match on them (which would totally combust in an action novel, there’s no reason to question “the science”). No – Gavin really does just drink until he goes to sleep! 

Another interesting thing is that Gavin keeps screwing up, thinking to himself that “the old Gavin would never have been caught” and that “the new Gavin [is] an amateur at this.” He’s an assassin – well, a Terminator, technically – and he’s been programmed to kill for the government. But acting on his own in a lone wolf capacity is outside of his experience, and he keeps messing things up and getting caught – even knocked out at one point, by nothing more than a bartender! 

As with the previous installment there’s a lot of cutting across the group of people, from the yakuza thugs to the treacherous employees of Susan’s company. And speaking of which, Rodriguez fills up so many pages with his scene cutting that Susan’s surprising fate is almost anticlimactically rendered, and the reader thinks he’s missed something. The worse thing is that Gavin is reduced to a supporting status, and we waste our time reading about one-off characters. 

But again it all is quickly wrapped up with an action scene that spans a few pages. And yes, Gavin does manage to get his Uzi out of his hidden Trans Am console, though the setup for this to happen is incredibly belabored and hard to buy. Rodriguez is again shy with the juicy details, though we do get occasional lines like, “One burst [from the Uzi] ruptured their chests, blowing pink meat against the walls.” 

Otherwise it’s a quick wrap-up after this, with Gavin dispatching practically all of his foes in a page or two. There’s not much in the way of a setup for the next volume – in fact, Gavin is essentially listless and without any plans for the future at all – but I did get a chuckle out of how the back cover proclaims that The Terminator series is “taking America by storm!” If that’s not hyperbolic copy, I don’t know what is.