Time Clock Of Death (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #58)

Time Clock Of Death, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1970  Award Books

Not just “yet another insallment of Nick Carter: Killmaster,” Time Clock Of Death is special for a few reasons: One, it features the last-ever appearance of Julia “Julie” Baron, a fellow AXE agent (and bedmate) of Nick Carter’s. And two, in a 1981 interview with Will Murray (published in Paperback Parade #2 in 1986), series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel stated, “I know I did that one,” referring to Time Clock Of Death.* 

Officially Time Clock Of Death is credited to George Snyder, and the book reads identically to the rest of his work. The only interview I’ve ever read with Lyle Kenyon Engel is Murray’s, and I’ve never seen it stated anywhere that Engel himself wrote anything. He was the idea guy, the one who would farm out plots or concepts to his ghostwriters. So either his claim of authorship for this book (and the others, noted below) was b.s. or maybe it was just exaggeration; maybe Engel just embellished the manuscripts in question. I would believe this one if only because Julie Baron, the hoststuff brunette AXE agent with “almond eyes,” is heavily built up in Time Clock Of Death and her previous adventures with Nick are often referred to. I would believe that the series producer would be more aware of these previous yarns than a contract writer would be. 

First appearing in Run, Spy, Run (ie the first volume of the series), Julie is presented as Nick’s equal in most ways, the yin to his yang and whatnot, and they’re clearly made for each other. In fact she is so empedestaled (I just created that word, btw – you can file it beside “embiggened”) that it’s almost ridiculous; not only is she in love with Nick, but Nick is in love with her! Besides Run, Spy Run (in which the two also seemed to fall in love), I’ve only read one other installment with Julie: Lew Louderback’s Danger Key, and it’s been so long ago I can’t recall how lovey-dovey the two got in that one. The way they come off in this one you wonder why they don’t just quit the spy game and get hitched – a proposition Julie actually makes in the course of the novel. And indeed, Julie was removed from the series for precisely this reason: In Will Murray’s excellent article on Nick Carter: Killmaster in the The Armchair Detective volume 15 number 4 (1982), he states that Engel “eliminated Julie Baron, Nick’s steady girlfriend,” because she “kept getting in the way of Nick’s love life, which became increasingly torrid after [initial series ghostwriter] Valerie Moolman left the series.” 

However the Engel embellishing – if indeed there is any here in Time Clock Of Death – is only partly accurate: Nick tells us that he’s been on “two assignments” with Julie, but meanwhile she appeared in a handful of volumes, this being the last of them. And yes, Nick “tells us;” we’re now in the series’s unfortunate first-person narration years, which, also according to Engel in the above Will Murray pieces, was a requirement of the publisher, so as to compete with the Matt Helm books. I personally hate first-person narration in my men’s adventure, but as I’ve mentioned before, George Snyder’s hardboiled narrative style usually comes off as first-person even when it’s not, like in the Operation Hang Ten series. 

And Time Clock Of Death is definitely the work of Snyder, or at least the majority of it is. It has all the hallmarks: a pessimistic hero, burned-out vibe, focus on fisticuffs and knife-fighting instead of gunplay, and a fair dose of misogyny, not to mention women getting killed. In fact the novel opens with Nick in bed with some chick, and someone comes in and blows her away while Nick’s sucking on her nipple! His life is literally saved because she offers him her “large breasts” before their latest round in the sack. A murdered woman almost always factors into a George Snyder novel (again, the hardboiled connotations), and this one’s no different. 

Nick’s already on the job when we meet him; he’s been handed an assignment so vague that you wonder how he even gets started. But Snyder barrels along so that the novel speeds by; as most others at this point in the series, it’s a mere 156 pages of big print. So Russia has revealed a new “super jet airliner,” a big passenger airliner that’s faster and more massive than anything America has. They were in the process of showing it off in New York when the thing plumb disappeared. Yes, someone managed to heist an actual airliner; we’re hastily informed that a new “antiradar” device onboard has prevented anyone from finding out where it has been taken to. So clearly the plot is implausible, but then also seems to predict the future real-life MH370 mystery (which doesn’t seem to be much of a mystery anymore; the wreckage appears to be in the middle of the Cambodian jungle). 

With this shaky setup Snyder still manages to deliver a fast-moving yarn with plentiful action and a lot of sex, most of it more explicit than earlier instances in the series. And all of it – save for a bit where Nick is raped(!) by a heavyset woman into whips and bondage – is with Julie Baron, again putting forth the notion that the two are a steady couple. Nick, following scant leads, heads over to London, where he gets in a fight with a hulking “Oriental.” This leads Nick to Hong Kong, where boss Hawk tells him that, conveniently enough, Julie Baron’s been working on a case, one involving a mysterious figure known as “The Colonel.” And wouldn’t you believe it, but the two cases soon coincide! Nick is actually excited to see Julie again, and the part where he meets her in a crowded Hong Kong bar is nicely done. 

In Snyder’s hands, Julie Baron is memorable indeed. She too has been looking forward to seeing Nick again, to the extent that she’s taken “the pill” in preparation for her first night with him! This bit is actually turned into a running gag, as Julie fears she’s “wasted” the pill, because duty interferes with the longed-for shenanigans; that “Oriental” from London is here as well, and Nick manages to knock him out and take him back to their hotel. Angered at this intrusion, Julie wants to be a “sadistic bitch” when the guy wakes up, toying with Nick’s stiletto and begging “please let me have him” to Nick in a sort of twisted good cop-bad cop routine. From here – their burning yearnings still unfulfilled – the two fly off to Singapore, trying to track down the Colonel. 

Snyder can’t be accused of spending much time on the plot, though. Nick and Julie, disguised as a traveling salesman and his somewhat-portly wife, merely go around saying they’re looking for “The Colonel,” and the villain comes to them. At any rate they get to the bedroom stuff straightaway. Snyder really pours it on thick here, with Julie telling Nick “I want you so bad I can taste it,” and Nick responding “I’m going to take my time having you.” And he certainly does, as the scene starts off pretty explicit so far as Nick’s oral explorations of Julie go, but then it takes a turn to the poetic, complete with a random bit of present-tense narration (“I’m always afraid I will hurt her,” etc), before getting into a fantastical vibe with stuff about a “cloud” the two are on in some metaphysical astral plane or somesuch. Another Snyder hallmark: “completion” is here and elsewhere used instead of “climax.” Nick and Julie are such a fantastic match that Julie actually cries afterward…not that this stops her from waking Nick a few hours later, for another somewhat-explicit bout. 

Snyder doesn’t let the lovey-dovey stuff get in the way of the random lurid factor, though. Soon enough Nick and Julie are captured, and Nick eventually finds himself naked and chained to a medieval torture rack. He’s now the captive of Fancy, a “husky” woman of indeterminate age (Nick tells us she could be anywhere from her 40s to her 60s) who dresses in an s&m leather getup and employs a legion of similarly-husky women, dressed the same, who wield whips and like to snap them in Fancy’s direction while she rides her latest victim. Fancy works with the Colonel, who of course turns out to be the mastermind behind the plot, coincidence be damned. The Colonel will get Julie, and Fancy will get Nick; both will die, it’s just a matter of how. 

So Snyder delivers this crazed, out-of-nowhere sequence where Julie, clearly harboring a secret plan, gets Nick all worked up so he can, uh, respond to Fancy, and then Fancy gets up on top of Nick and starts riding away while her “leather ladies” snap their whips at them! And then Julie sneaks off and gets a submachine gun. Folks it’s for insane shit like this that I will always prefer Nick Carter: Killmaster to the James Bond books. But unfortunately after this things sort of stall out for a while. First we have some nice running action where Nick and Julie, dressed like coolies to blend in with the other Asian soldiers in the place, blow away scads of goons with various weapons. But then they sneak on a freighter bound for Java and it’s back to that other perennial Snyder hallmark: excessive description of the characters sneaking into and out of places. 

Things finally come back to a boil when Nick and Julie find themselves in a remote location complete with a medieval-style castle. Plus the plane’s here. They set fire to the place to alert the nearby marines, which leads to this curious typo: “My eyes were stinging as I stepped away from me.” Ponder that, friends! Julie really does get in Nick’s way here in the finale; she certainly holds her own in the action scenes, and even proves she’s made of tough stuff when she walks off a major knife wound (actually she drinks it off, more like, thanks to a shot of bourbon), but of course Nick spends the climactic action scene afraid that she might get killed. Snyder has no qualms with his hero fighting female opponents, so we have some nicely-handled stuff where Nick takes on Fancy’s leather ladies, all of whom wear knee-high boots and leather cossets with holes for their nipples to stick out of, by the way. (Yet curiously Snyder buzzkills his own lurid imagination by constantly telling us how fat and ugly the women are!) Nick shoots them, beats them up, and even in one memorable bit repeatedly bashes the face of one of the bondage women into a brick wall. 

As for the Colonel, he’s not nearly as memorable as Fancy: he’s a Napolean-esque squat little guy with a bald head and beady black eyes. He too enjoys his time with Fancy; not content to just have this happen once in the novel, Snyder has Fancy again riding someone while her leather ladies snap their whips around, only this time the guy’s the Colonel and he’s apparently enjoying it. That said, Fancy’s sendoff isn’t very spectacular; Nick doesn’t kill her, at least, but he does as mentioned take her leather ladies through the wringer. Meanwhile the Colonel somehow manages to escape with a knocked-out Julie, and it’s up to Nick to save her. But again, Julie isn’t nearly a damsel in distress. Snyder is at such pains to put Julie’s fate in doubt here, even at one point having her fall off a cliff, that I thought she was going to be permanently removed. 

As it turns out, Snyder could’ve just followed through with the death threats, after all, as Julie wouldn’t appear again after this one. Instead Snyder ends the tale with Nick and Julie about to enjoy some more “down time,” as it were, and again the lovey-dovey stuff is so thick that you can’t comprehend how these two could even bear to separate. Interesting then that she wasn’t to appear again; certainly some readers out there wondered when Julie Baron would return. It makes Nick especially appear like a cad in that he’s clearly in love with her, even as mentioned telling her so, yet in the following books he won’t even mention her again! But then that’s only to be expected when you’re the product of a revolving cast of ghostwriters. 

*The other Killmaster titles Engel claimed to have written were: Cambodia, Ice Bomb Zero, and The Mark Of Cosa Nostra. Curiously, all four of the titles Engel claimed as his are officially credited to George Snyder.