The Cult Breaker

 

The Cult Breaker, by Andrew Sugar

No month stated, 1979  Manor Books

With some serious Clint Eastwoodsploitation cover art (uncredited, but I wonder if was by Anthony “Mondo” DeStefano), The Cult Breaker comes off like the first installment of a series, but there was never a followup volume – nor was there ever another novel by author Andrew Sugar. At least, I’ve never been able to find anything published by him after 1979 – under the name “Andrew Sugar” or under the name “Andrea Sugar,” which was the name Sugar was going by at this time. 

 

As mentioned in past reviews of Sugar’s work, Andrew Sugar reportedly had a sex change sometime in the late ‘70s; I learned this back in 2013 when I was briefly in contact with a person who had served as an “expert witness” in a lawsuit trial Sugar had launched on…well, on Clint Eastwood! Sugar felt that Eastwood’s Dirty Harry flick The Enforcer was an infringement upon Sugar’s earlier series The Enforcer, and took Eastwood to court – only, as my contact revealed, at the time of the trial (June of 1980) Sugar was no longer “Andrew Sugar,” but had become “Andrea Sugar,” a rather “handsome woman.” Learning this was kind of revelatory for me at the time, as it cleared up the mystery in the comments section of my Enforcer #1 review, where James Reasoner stated he’d heard Sugar was really a woman, and then a person named Ralph Blanchette, who knew Sugar in the ‘70s, responded that Sugar certainly was a man. The answer, of course, was that Sugar was both! 

Obviously Sugar had little ground to stand on in the lawsuit, no matter what name or gender he was going by. The trial took place after The Cult Breaker was published, and boy it would’ve been great if Clint Eastwood had been aware of the book. He could’ve just brought it into the courtroom as Exhibit A: “Your honor, who is ripping off who??” (Or would that be “Whom?” I don’t know…Clint would probably know, though.) 

But ever since I learned about that Eastwood lawsuit, I’ve kept wondering about the cover art on The Cult Breaker. Was Manor trolling Clint Eastwood? Did they think the trial would get more publicity and so tried to capitalize on it? Or was it just a fluke? 

I guess we’ll never know, but the important thing to note is that the cover is very misleading, as protagonist Johnny Baron is not described as looking like Clint Eastwood, and he doesn’t carry a gun – indeed, at one point he’s offered a .357 Magnum and flatly refuses to carry it or any other pistol. Instead he uses “shunkens,” or shurikens as they are more commonly known – Japanese throwing stars. He has them hidden in the buckle of his belt, and also in special necklace he wears. It’s the sort of gimmick you’d expect a series protagonist to have, but this was the only adventure Johnny Baron ever had. 

I wondered if this was a trunk novel, held off from publication for whatever reason, as there’s a few-years gap between the publication of The Cult Breaker and Sugar’s earlier Enforcer and Israeli Commandos work, as well as the Manor one-shot Yank. The Cult Breaker came out a few years after all of them – actualy, the same year that Manor finally got around to reprinting The Enforcer #4. But The Cult Breaker was clearly written in the late ‘70s, with a lot of topical mentions, and also at one point the date is firmly stated as being 1979. Random guess: Perhaps this book came out a few years later than the earlier books because Sugar was busy with that sex-change operation. 

Regardless of the real-life background, The Cult Breaker has the same macho vibe as Sugar’s other work. It’s also just as ponderous and weighted down with too much talking and bullshitting. Back when I started the blog, I raved about Enforcer #1 in my review, but something I don’t think I ever mentioned was that I re-read the book a few years later…and didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. I found it…well, I found it ponderous and weighted down with too much talking and bullshitting. I meant to do a “second look” review at the time but just couldn’t drum up the energy, and besides wanted my original reaction to speak for itself. 

This one, though, brings back the feelings I had when I read The Enforcer #1 that second time. It just spins its wheels for the majority of its 218, small-print pages, and there are a lot of similarities to the Enforcer series – which itself became more of a standard “suspense” yarn as the series progressed. In fact, The Cult Breaker is labelled “Suspense” on its spine. It’s not an action-thriller by any means, despite being packaged as one, and, just as Alex Jason in The Enforcer, Johnny Baron spends the majority of the text posing undercover, pretending to be who he’s not, as he gradually figures out what nefariousness a particular cult is up to. 

Like Alex Jason, Baron is a rugged individualist who is yanked out of his normal world and thrust into the role of action-series protagonist. For Jason it was because he was dying of stomach cancer and was given the chance to live again in a series of clone bodies. For Baron, he’s a former mercenary turned smuggler who is caught by a “famous detective” and offered two hundred thousand dollars to infiltrate the private island of the Shrine Of The Forgiven and rescue four people who have supposedly been abducted by the cult. The Objectivist leanings of The Enforcer have been toned down, and instead of the Jon Anryn Institute, Baron’s employer, Ashford Cory, runs a global organization with an army of employees and experts and etc at his beck and call. 

The overall vibe is still the same; just as The Enforcer squandered its pulpy setup by becoming more of a slow-going mystery, so too does The Cult Breaker. Indeed the entire plot, of Baron being hired to rescue four captives, is for the most part overlooked, with more focus placed on his infiltrating the cult. The book could’ve just as easily been titled “The Cult Joiner,” because that’s essentially what Johnny Baron spends the majority of the text accomplishing. Andrew Sugar really grinds the gears in this one, and the novel moves a whole lot more sluggishly than you might expect. I don’t exaggerate when I say that most of the book concerns Baron hoodwinking the Shrine of the Forgiven into thinking he’s a convert. 

Even the setup takes a long time to get underway; we meet Baron as he’s flying in to Corpus Christi from Mexico with his latest smuggling run – not drugs, but priceless artifacts that have been disguised as cheap souveneirs. He’s cornered by some men and starts going into kung-fu and “shunken” mode, not killing anyone but hurting them. He’s knocked out and comes to, to discover that it wasn’t cops surrounding him, but the employees of famous investigator Ashford Cory, who puts forth the $200k job. This sequence alone takes up the first quarter of the novel. 

From there it becomes even more of a long-simmer yarn; Baron’s been offered the gig because one of the top Shrine members is a former mercenary pal of his named Danny Lanz. But, per Cory Lanz has gone crazy, as evidenced by grisly photos Cory shows Baron of the infamous killing technique that was used by a native tribe Lanz and Baron served with during their mercenary days in Africa. Also called the “head peel,” the technique involves slicing the flesh at the back of the neck and then pulling the flap of skin up over the skull until the entire face is ripped off, to be shown to the victim, and if the victim has lived long enough to get to this part he – or she – will immediately die of a heart attack. 

Baron can’t believe that Lanz himself would perform the head peel on people, but Cory assures him that Lanz is full-bore nuts now and is not the same man Baron knew a few years ago. So Baron takes the job and heads to New York, where he’s to “just happen” to run into Lanz and pretend to be sickened in his soul and looking for some purpose, etc, etc. In other words, to make himself a target for the cult. The Shrine of the Forviven runs a sort of commune on 50th Street and some nights they give free booze to old vets at a local bar, one run by another old mercenary pal. 

Sugar often doles out a lot of trash-talk and arrogant posturing in the overly-macho dialog he gives his male characters, and that’s on full display here. But things liven up with the appearance of Oy, an attractive brunette who shows up at the bar and is there to serve as a paramedic but is part of the cult. This scene goes on and on with Baron drinking as part of his guise but getting progessively drunker and afraid he’ll blab too much, then Danny Lanz shows up – wilder looking but still happy to see Baron and get drunk with him – and the “macho dialog” runs rampant as they try to outdrink each other and bet on who pukes first and etc. 

Sugar goes for a poetic approach in the inevitable sex scene between Baron and Oy – like talking about their bodies becoming “one” and such – and also dials way down on the breast obsession seen in the earliest Enforcer novels. In fact, Oy is hardly exploited at all, and about the most we get is she’s pretty and a former hooker who was saved by the Shrine. She will also be Baron’s sole conquest in the novel, and in fact essentially becomes his girlfriend, having him live with her when they repair to the Shrine’s private island in the Bahamas, Eden Cay. But Sugar has a hard time explaining who Oy is, as she isn’t a brainwashed sheep like the other cult members on the island, and seems to do her own thing. 

Meanwhile there’s the cult leader, Uncle Ted, whose schtick is he “looks like someone’s uncle” but can hypnotize you with his eyes, and also insists that everyone toast each other with a special drink of milk every morning. We get lots of stuff about Baron puking his guts out when drinking this milk, given his allergy to dairy or some such shit…it really gets to be a bit much. Plus the dude’s real slow on the up-take because he wonders why every cult member seems so fazed and then only at the end of the novel does he put it together that it’s the damn drink literally everyone on the island drinks every single day. 

But the “cult life” stuff just goes on and on. Baron exploring the island, getting the lay of the land, seeing how the cultists are split into different jobs and etc. And also meanwhile he gets the gig of helping Danny Lanz with island security…but man, even the subplot about Lanz isn’t really exploited. Sugar seems to get bored with it and quickly resolves it just a little over halfway through the novel, with a bizarre shootout Lanz and Baron get in with some rivals in upstate New York, and Lanz going crazy suddenly for no reason. We don’t even get an explanation for the “head peel” stuff, which also is brushed under the narratorial carpet. 

Most importantly, the four people Baron’s supposedly here to rescue aren’t even mentioned. Instead the plot changes to a “doomsday device” Uncle Ted has apparently put together, using toxic waste or something. Suddenly we have stuff where Baron knows how to defuse bombs because he was a demolitions expert in the army and then, with the word count quickly approaching, Sugar does a whole Jonestown Massacre thing with Uncle Ted abruptly revealing that some senators are on the way to the island. Just a few pages later and the senators are dead and Uncle Ted is forcing his flock to commit suicide; I mean it’s like Jonestown on speed. 

Even here Sugar loses the plot thread and instead focuses on Baron trying to defuse that damn doomsday device. In the hugest miss of all, Baron takes no part in the action finale; in fact, a pair of women do all the work (hmmm…), toting guns and blasting at their former cult-friends as Baron tries to take care of the doomsday device. Seriously, Baron hardly does anything action-like in the finale, instead directing a few cult members who miraculously show up out of the woodwork and have just the skills Baron needs a that time – medical, military, etc. Worse yet, the main villains are dispatched off-page, and not even by Baron. 

It's all very underwhelming, and perhaps the indication is that nothing more came from Sugar because he’d lost the spirit. The Cult Breaker is listless and confused, starting off in one direction before veering off in another, sort of like a certain political figure I won’t name. Even the finale is confused, but humorously so. Baron passes out a few times in the final pages, and the very end of the novel features him about to be put under for some quick surgery for injuries he’s sustained, and he’s certain he’ll wake up from it. But the novel ends cold here, and given that Johnny Baron never appeared in another novel, one gets the impression he really didn’t make it through the surgery. 

Back in 2013 James Reasoner and I discussed Andrew Sugar via email, and James turned up the info that an “Andrea Conrad-Sugar” had died in 2010, in New Windsor, New York, which is near the Hudson River – and Ralph Blanchette commented on my Enforcer #1 review that Andrew Sugar had lived in the Hudson Valley. Conrad-Sugar was born in 1933, which seems to line up with Andrew Sugar’s supposed age. James pondered if Andrea Conrad-Sugar and Andrew Sugar were one and the same. But unless we hear from one of Sugar’s children, I guess this will just be a mystery, as Sugar himself – or herself – disappeared from the publishing world after the publication of The Cult Breaker in 1979.