Donovan’s Devils #2: Blueprint For Execution

Donovan's Devils #2: Blueprint For Execution, by Lee Parker

No month stated, 1974  Award Books

It’s been some years since I read the first volume of Donovan’s Devils, and fair to say I didn’t enjoy it much at the time. Judging from my review, I found it dull and too focused on scene-setting and character-building. So, I’m happy to report that this second volume is much better – though still nowhere in the leagues of the author’s other series, The Liquidator. 

As I mentioned in my review of The Liquidator #1, an author named Larry Powell was responsible for both The Liquidator (as “R.L. Brent”) and Donovan’s Devils (as “Lee Parker,” and again, thanks to James Reasoner for figuring that out, years ago). He also wrote two volumes of Nick Carter: Killmaster. All of these books were published by Award, so fair to say someone there liked Powell’s work. And it’s not hard to see why, as he’s a very talented pulp writer, with a strong prose style that gives just enough information to keep the story moving, and doesn’t get bogged down. I have been continuously impressed with his work on The Liquidator, of which I only have one more volume to read. 

But, having read Blueprint For Execution, I can see what Larry Powell’s kryptonite is: he’s not as good when he’s writing a “team” book, particularly one with a military focus. Judging from the hardboiled, lone wolf tone of The Liquidator, Powell is much more confident when he’s writing about one guy up against a handful of enemies, with more of a focus on tension and suspense than all-out action. Handling a cast of seven characters on a global stage, he seems very much out of his element. I understand now why the first volume of Donovan’s Devils was so focused on setting up the storyline; it afforded Powell the opportunity to handle one character at a time. 

Because as it is, he does the same sort of thing in this second volume: whereas The Assasination Is Set For July 4… spent most of its narrative introducing the cast of characters and bringing them together, Blueprint For Execution spends most of its narrative with the team split up, with Powell alternately dealing with each separate group. As with the first book, only in the very final pages does Donovan’s Devils actually work together as a unit. 

It’s the same cast, this time; at least Powell doesn’t have Donovan setting up a new team each book. Powell clearly likes some characters more than others; Bogan, aka “the black guy on the team,” is so barely-featured that the poor guy’s name is misspelled as “Bogon” in the pseudo-report from Donovan that opens the book. I mean the boss himself doesn’t even know the guy’s name. There’s also a big biker named Randolph who doesn’t do much at all, until the very end – where, despite being in a warzone in Jerusalem, manages to get hold of a motorcycle. I suspect that Powell was catering to editorial and/or publisher demands with this cast: “We need a black guy in there. Oh, and make sure there’s a biker in there, too. Bikers are big now!” 

Even Donovan himself isn’t in the book much; despite being the protagonist, there’s a large portion of the narrative where he’s unconscious from a head wound. Rather, Powell’s favored character is clearly Quinn, a cipher-like living weapon who acts as Donovan’s right-hand man…and who is very much like Jake Brand, the Liquidator. Quinn’s background is a mystery to the others – Quinn isn’t even his real name – and he’s essentially Bucher in all but name. With his penchant for carrying two guns and staying cool in the heat of battle – not to mention his occasional smart-ass quip – Quinn is clearly the sort of character Larry Powell is more comfortable writing about, a guy who fights mobsters instead of terrorists. He’s actually more of the star of Blueprint For Execution than Donovan is, as when the teams split up Quinn is put in charge of one group and has to make all the decisions. 

There’s also Houdini, the master thief, and Carey, a cardshark (or something) that the others don’t like because he’s a coward (or something). These two vie with Quinn as the main characters, with Carey in particular taking up the spotlight midway through. There’s a long but involving scene where Donovan and Carey get in a firefight in the desert, and Carey gets behind a machine gun that’s mounted on the back of a jeep and, Rambo 2008 style, blasts everyone to smithereens. After which he engages some “desert flower” babe in fairly explicit sex. 

Yes, that’s another thing that’s better about this second volume: Larry Powell ups both the action and the sex quotients. While the novel is never outright gory – just as The Liquidator books aren’t – the surprisingly-frequent sex scenes are quite graphic. Carey gets busy with a “full-bossomed” terrorist chic in the desert (she offers her body in exchange for her life), Joe Dean (the expert driver who is the last member of the Devil’s I haven’t yet mentioned) bangs two native babes in the short course of the novel, and Donovan himself gets it on with a “full breasted” Israeli spy-babe in the very final pages…like I’m talking six pages before the end of the book, Powell clearly catering to another publisher mandate. I mean folks, what an incredible world to have lived in, where publishers required authors to insert a certain number of sex scenes in their manuscripts. Those days are long gone, and it’s no wonder our world has gone to shit. (Though fortunately we do have Tocsin Press, at least…) 

The novel features an effective opening – another Powell specialty – in which Houdini discovers that the Devils contact in Jerusalem has just had his throat slit…and soon enough Houdini himself is captured by the Arabic bastards who did it. This sets up the “split up the team” dynamic that runs through the entire novel: Donovan and Carey go look for Houdini, while Quinn, Bogan, Randolph, and Joe Dean hold down the fort…and get in firefights of their own. Powell fills the pages with a few big setpieces that sort of go on and on…and it becomes clear, at least to me, that he does so because he’s uncomfortable writing about a group of six fighting men all together at the same time. 

To confirm this, Powell excels in the scenes where he’s just featuring one character: the bit with a blood-crazed Carey behind the machine gun is the highlight of the novel, as is his conquest of the “desert flower” (in true men’s adventure fashion, Carey has the girl panting and screaming, breaking through her icy “I’m just doing this to live, not because I want to” façade). Quinn seems to be the hero of another men’s adventure series who has somehow wandered into the book; the scenes from his perspective are terse and taut, and have him reflecting on the mobsters he killed. One suspects Powell would have turned in an even better series if all the characters, including Donovan himself, were jettisoned, and Quinn was featured as a globe-trotting lone wolf commando. But then, that’s essentially what The Butcher gave us, and again I find it very curious how similar Quinn and Bucher’s backgrounds are. 

I’m not sure what the title has to do with the story; again, I get the suspicion Award Books ran the show and gave Powell the title and the gist of the storyline, and he filled in the details. There’s no “execution blueprint” per se, and Donovan and team spend most of the novel hunting down a terrorist named Karem. He’s part of a group called ALF...which of course made me chuckle, imagining Donovan’s Devils up against furry little Gordon Shumway: “Hey, Willie! They’re tryin’ to kill me! HA!” 

This ALF is the Arabic Liberation Front, and overall it’s another sad reminder of how ‘70s Muslim terrorists were of an altogether tamer breed. These Muslim terrorists fear for their own lives – as mentioned, the “full-bossomed” terrorist babe gives herself to Carey precisely so he won’t kill her – and there’s a sad bit (sad because it’s a reminder of much saner times) where it’s explained how the ALF terrorists will blow up airliners…but parachute out of them before they go down, and etc. In other words, even in the violent world of mid-‘70s men’s adventure, the idea of a fanatical and suicidal terrorist was too much of a stretch. 

More evidence of Powell’s true forte is Donovan’s intro, which has him meeting with his boss, cigar-chomping and lame-legged General Brick Blaine. They sit by the poolside, the two men appreciating the “full-breasted” young beauty who is swimming in the general’s pool while they discuss the assignment. It all just has the same ring as the stuff in The Liquidator, just that cool, hardboiled ‘70s pulp that Larry Powell was so good at, that you wonder why the guy is such a mystery. 

Where he sort of fails, though, is in the action scenes. When it’s just one guy, like in The Liquidator, it’s fine. But Powell cannot seem to handle big action setpieces, and thus resorts to almost “See Spot Run” type of description, giving flat, declarative description of what happens: 

This sort of thing comes off as almost outline-esque to me, and lacks the immediacy of an action scene that is more relayed from the point of view of the person doing the fighting. What I mean to say is, it just comes off like bald description of what happens; you don’t feel the impact of the bullets, or the tension of the battle. Again, I’d say this is because Powell is outside of his element, trying to relay a battle from the perspective of seven characters – and, also, he does not have this problem in The Liquidator, where it’s only Jake Brand who does the fighting. 

That said, Powell keeps the action moving, though some of the middle sequences do get bogged down. There’s an interminable part where Quinn and the others, wondering what happened to Donovan, try to strong-arm their way into an Israeli army encampment, and it comes off as padding…indeed, it comes off as Powell trying to figure out how to cater to the “team” dynamic of the series and show the other characters doing something. And this “large team” setup also robs other characters; early in the book, Donovan and Carey run into a hotstuff Israeli babe (whose boobs are so nice that multiple characters refer to them), and Donovan develops a simmering, bantering relationship with her – capped off by him knocking her out. 

The lady, Reva, is a spy, sent along to shadow Donovan and team, but she essentially disappears from the text because Powell is busy catering to the other members of the team. Humorously, she casually gives herself to Donovan in the final pages – right before the climactic battle – so that Powell can check off another publisher mandate: ensuring the protagonist himself gets laid. But then, this too is a fairly explicit sequence, and Powell furthers the “bantering after sex” vibe that he had with Jake Brand and his latest girl in The Liquidator #4. 

As for the climactic battle, it’s so, uh, anticlimactic that it, too, is humorous. Powell has so page-filled with all the character-jumping that he rushes through the final battle in a few harried pages…and, again, it’s more on the “military fiction” tip, with Donovan’s crew leading a paratrooper assault on an ancient Crusader castle. It’s over and done with in a few pages…Powell just as humorously giving us another brief Donovan-Reva conjugation on the very last page. 

I’m only nitpicking because Larry Powell is a damn fine writer, and it’s a shame he was given a series with a setup outside of his comfort zone. He was clearly better at a lone wolf sort of hardboiled setup, as evidenced by the much superior Liquidator series. But even here in diluted form, his writing is a cut above the genre norm, and I also appreciated how he’d take characters and situations in unexpected directions. 

There was one more volume of Donovan’s Devils to go, and I’ll check that out, as well as the two Killmaster novels Powell wrote for Award around the same time: The Butcher Of Belgrade (apparently co-written with the lackluster Ralph Hayes) and The Code.

The Amazing Spider-Man: The Ultimate Newspaper Comics Collection Volume 2 (1979-1981)

The Amazing Spider-Man: The Ultimate Newspaper Comics Collection Volume 2 (1979-1981), by Stan Lee and John Romita (with Larry Leiber)

No month stated, 2015  IDW Publishing

I was happy to discover this big hardcover collection of vintage Spider-Man newspaper strips. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, perhaps because it was so refreshing after the decade-plus of too cool (and, lately, too woke) Marvel Studios franchise, which has zero in the way of the geeky charm of the actual comics that inspired the movies. 

Perhaps that sentence didn’t make sense. If not, I don’t care. What I mean to say is, I was a comic geek when being a comic geek wasn’t cool. Indeed, I remember the days when you had to hide the fact that you read comic books from others, especially girls, lest you be ridiculed as a loser of the lowest order. It’s hard to believe, folks, but once upon a time you couldn’t buy about a zillion comic character t-shirts at Wal-Mart, or see people wearing comic character t-shirts at the office. There was a time when the average teenaged girl (the pretty ones, at least) had no idea what Spider-Man’s secret identity was, and for that matter they couldn’t have cared less. 

All those days are gone, and likely forgotten, and no doubt have been gone and forgotten for quite a while. I remember being in Miami in 2007 for a vacation or something, and we went to the mall, and at the bookstore I was floored to see a bunch of teenaged girls sitting there reading comic books. And they weren’t ugly girls either. (Not that I was checking them out, honestly I wasn’t: I’m just noting for clarity.) It was literally one of those times where I looked up at the sky and shook my head: “Thanks again, God.” 

This was before the Marvel Studio franchise even got rolling, and of course now we live in a world where these characters are more popular than ever…but, then, it’s the movie versions people now know. It’s debatable how well these fans of today know the actual original comic versions of the characters. It’s debatable that any of these modern fans know the geeky charm of Silver Age comic books, when the world of Marvel was a secret one that losers and geeks and nerds would escape to and dream about how they, too, could be just like Spider-Man or the Hulk or whoever. 

But then, there’s an entire generation that thinks Mary Jane Watson is a flat-chested, curly-haired, overly sarcastic girl of indeterminite race (and, perhaps, gender). They have no idea that Mary Jane Watson is supposed to fucking look like this: 

That’s another thing I liked so much about this book: it was also refreshing to see such unbridled and wonderful “toxic masculinity” in a product that was produced for the masses. It’s also hard to recall that there was a time when popular fiction and comics and movies were produced with a straight male audience in mind, and the male gaze was not subverted, but was catered to. Yes, it does seem like a million years ago, doesn’t it? 

Speaking of “a helluva long time ago,” I guess I mainly got into comics due to my childhood obsession with Spider-Man. I was such a Spider-Man fan that I even had a themed party, for my fifth birthday:

This party was likely on my actual fifth birthday – October 6, 1979 – as according to Google, October 6 was on a Saturday in 1979. But anyway, that’s obviously me standing in front of the Spider-Man cake in the first photo; I have no recollection of the names of any of the other kids at the party, save for the blonde-haired girl I smugly have my arm around in the second photo. (Don’t hate the player, hate the game!) Her name was Julie Bowen (not the actress!), and her mom was also a teacher, and in the years before we started school Julie and I were both watched by an old couple named Mr. and Mrs. Crohn (who, so far as I am aware, did not have Crohn’s Disease!). Julie moved away when we were in the Fourth Grade, I seem to recall…I also recall seeing Happy Gilmore in the theater in 1996, and when the name “Julie Bowen” came up in the credits I was like, “Could it be?” It wasn’t that Julie Bowen, of course, but the movie was great! In fact my brother (the older kid who is so unhappily holding my Spider-Man birthday cake in the above photo) liked that movie so much he’d rent the video every week or something at Blockbuster. Not sure why he didn’t just buy a copy. 

Well anyhoo, I go into this belabored backstory so as to set the scenery that I was a rabid Spider-Man fan as a kid…and, sometime around the late ‘70s, maybe in this same year of 1979, we took a family vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. This is where practically the entire East Coast vacationed in the ‘70s. When we were down there, my dad got the local newspaper…and I was shaken to my core to discover that there was a Spider-Man comic strip! 

There was no such strip in the newspaper back home. And yet, this one and only encounter with the newspaper version of Spider-Man made enough of an impression on me that I still recalled it, all these decades later…and, when I saw that some of these strips had been collected in hardcover, I dutifully ordered a copy from Interlibrary Loan. (Hey, it’s not like I’m going to shell out a couple hundred bucks for a copy! I mean, that’s hooker money!) 

Collecting three years of strips, the book is certainly hefty, running to 315 pages. Stan “The Man” Lee handles all the writing, and does his usual fine job, and John Romita (back before he was “John Romita Sr.”) handles the artwork, which is great throughout. Toward the very end of the book, Romita steps out and Larry Leiber (aka Stan Lee’s younger brother) takes over, and truth be told his art is so similar to Romita’s that you might not even notice the change. That said, there’s certainly more sex appeal in Romita’s work – if he isn’t sexing up MJ or Carole (another of Peter Parker’s conquests in the book), he dutifully inserts some random sexy chick in a panel: 

What’s cool about this newspaper strip is that it caters to the established Marvel mythos, but puts a bit more of a “mainstream” spin on it. As with the films of the 2000s, Spider-Man is the only superhero (at least in New York), he’s wanted by the cops, and the cast of villainous characters is much whittled down from the comic books. Peter Parker, in college in these strips, is no longer the nerd of the Lee-Ditko originals, and in fact does pretty well for himself with the ladies…perhaps the biggest change to accommodate the broader (and no doubt male-slanting) newspaper readership. 

In fact, I was somewhat surprised that Lee and Romita often let us know, in no unsubtle terms, that Peter Parker has gotten laid: 

I mean, “help me bone up?” Stan the Man! Sure, that’s what students said when they were trying to study (or at least they said it in the 1950s), but still…you don’t have to be a total sleazebag to assume there’s some serious hanky-panky occurring between those panels. 

Granted, Peter Parker’s still the sad sack of the comics, where nothing works out perfectly for him, or he’s caught in some Three’s Company-esque miscommunication, or whatever. But he’s a lot more sure of himself with the women…and, in the hands of John Romita, these women are smoking.  In fact, I kind of wanted to reach into the comics and punch Peter Parker, because he’s constantly running away from these women, even when they’re in the process of giving themselves to him. Time and again in these collected strips, Carole or MJ will make an advancement on Peter, and he’ll either have to run off because he’s seen some crook in action, or he’s riddled with some soul-searching over if he wants to keep being Spider-Man or some other shit. As for the former, it’s kind of laughable – but again refreshing – how Peter is so quick to jump into the fray when he sees bankrobbers, or muggers, or whatever; yes, altogether refreshing to see someone so selflessly ensuring law and order in our postmodern era of “fiery but mostly peaceful protests.” 

But at the same time, even here I was constantly pulled out of the action…thinking of stuff I never would’ve thought of as a five year-old. Like, Peter Parker apparently wears his Spidey suit under his clothes…and he’s always in pants and a long-sleeved shirt and a coat…even in the stories that are set in the summer! I mean, with a Spidey suit beneath all that? The dude must be broiling. That enough would make me quit the whole super-hero game, which Peter attempts to do in a few stories collected here, with predictable results. 

“Predictable” sums up many of the plots here…but you know what? That’s just fine. Stan Lee tells a story the way only Stan Lee can, that corny but earnest and altogether endearing style that is Stan Lee’s alone, and never once did I find any of it hackneyed. Okay, maybe the final story collected here tried my patience, where Peter Parker decides that Spider-Man himself will become a criminal, to finally get a taste of success…and predictably fails in the process. It’s a fine setup, but lamely delivered; Spidey steals a jewel, then tries to sell it to a diamond dealer (who turns out to be a gangster), and then Spidey has to figure out how to get the diamond back into the museum. 

Other than that latter gaffe, the other stories here are all fun, and kept my attention more than I thought they would. To be honest, I thought I’d just peruse the book and return it to the library, but I read the whole thing! There is not much variety to the format of the strips, which I think works for it and against it at the same time. For it, because it essentially becomes the comics version of what fat people call “comfort food:” the Monday-Saturday strips run three panels each, and are black and white, and the Sunday strips are full color, and generally run six panels. Only occasionally does this change. 

There’s also a lot of stalling. Forever in the 315 pages of this book we’ll have Peter Parker decide to do something…then a few pages later he’s recapping what he plans to do…a few pages after that he’s gonna do it, by God…and then a few pages after that he might get around to doing it. This does admittedly become wearisome after a while, but then I read the book over the course of a few days. I bet if you took your time with it, and read maybe an arc at a time, it might not be as egregious. 

As for the story arcs, there are a bunch of them: Spidey framed by a lookalike Spider-Man (courtesy the Kingpin); the Loomis Love Cult (a Jim Jones commentary piece that seems to go on forever, but is probably the darkest story in the collection); the Prowler (a guy who wants to make a name for himself as a clawed supervillain but has a heart of gold): Kraven the Hunter (who inexplicably tries to fool people that Spider-Man is an alien so that he can fight Spidey on TV and beat him); the return of the Loomis cult (even more annoying without their boss); the return of the Kingpin (not as fun as the first time); and even a guy in a hat who wields a whip and tries to lean on Aunt May (and also hits on MJ). 

Between all this we have soap opera stories where Peter Parker questions his sanity, or if he wants to still be Spider-Man, or if he should tell Carol Jennings that he’s Spider-Man because he loves her and wants to marry her(!), or if he should commit to MJ, or if he should go bad and reap the profits as a villain himself. Or even if he should go on a That’s Incredible! type show to make a thousand bucks. 

I had forgotten how funny Stan Lee is. Throughout the book his tongue is firmly in cheek, but there’s none of the postmodern, too-hip sarcasm of today; you can tell Stan believes in his creation (as well he should), and he treats everything with respect. Peter Parker is so earnest that you have to respect him, even though he generally brings most of his problems on himself…sort of like fellow newspaper strip protagonist Charlie Brown, now that I think of it. 

And speaking of topical references, the book is filled with it: the late ‘70s aren’t as exploited as I’d like, but all the guys wear open-collar shirts, have big hair, and the girls all wear revealing, cleavage-baring tops, and they go to a roller disco at times (though this isn’t brought much to life, either). John Romita takes a lot of relish in putting famous faces in the backgrounds of various panels, like this particular Sunday story, which among many others even features a cameo by my man Johnny Carson: 

I like it that the Spider-Man newspaper strip lives in its own continuity; Stan Lee and John Romita did a great job bringing the geeky comics to a more widespread audience, playing up the melodrama a little more than in the comics, and toning down on the costumed super-battles. Otherwise everyone’s mostly the same: Spidey himself is a motor-mouth, either expositing what he’s doing as he does it or tossing one-liners at villains as he fights them – and again, Stan Lee’s humor shines here. MJ is a flirty bombshell, J. Jonah Jameson is a Spidey-obsessed villain (he clearly has Spidey Derangement Syndrome), and all the villains have unique personalities. Only Carole Jennings, the other bombshell in Peter’s life, is lame…personality-wise, at least. Romita is sure to draw her in such a jawdropping manner that you figure poor Peter Parker must be in a permanent lust-filled daze when he’s around her:

IDW has reprinted the Spider-Man newspaper comics through the ‘80s, and I think I might check them out sometime – particularly the first volume, as I’m hoping it would be even more ‘70s-tastic.

Death Merchant #23: The Budapest Action

Death Merchant #23: The Budapest Action, by Joseph Rosenberger

July, 1977  Pinnacle Books

Friends, like The Ninja, this is a read that has been years in the making. How many years? Nearly forty years. Was it worth the wait? Of course it wasn’t, it’s a Death Merchant novel by Joseph Rosenberger! 

To quote The Jimmy Castor Bunch, “What we’re gonna do right here is go back, way back, back into time.” Back to the mid-late 1980s, to be exact, when yours truly was first caught up in the world of men’s adventure. It was probably around 1987, but not much later, and not much earlier. This would have been the height of my men’s adventure fandom, around when I wrote a letter to Gar Wilson. In fact, I no doubt looked very much like this. 

Back then I did my shopping for new men’s adventure paperbacks at the WaldenBooks in the Country Club Mall, in LaVale, Maryland. I have not been in that store in over thirty years – I haven’t even been to Maryland in over twenty years – and the store has been gone at least since 2011, when WaldenBooks folded, if not before. But I went to that store so many times that even now, as a fifty year-old “adult,” I can close my eyes and see the exact layout of that bookstore, and I can walk through it in my mind. 

The men’s adventure paperbacks were along the left wall of the store, almost all the way in the back. Probably a fitting place for them, the cynic might observe. Actually, sci-fi was all the way in the back; it was when heading for the science fiction paperback section in October of 1985 that I finally stopped to look at the action paperbacks that were placed on a shelf right before it. This was how I discovered Phoenix Force, specifically Night Of The Thuggee, which was my gateway drug into the world of men’s adventure. (I really should get a copy of that book and re-read it someday.) 

But for older men’s adventure novels, like earlier installments of Phoenix Force or the other older Gold Eagle stuff, I went to a used bookstore near the mall: The Paperback Exchange. This place was run by a lady who seemed “old” to me, but I’m probably older now than she was then. It had pretty much everything a prepubescent geek like me could want: a robust selection of second-hand books, particularly paperbacks (as you might guess), plus a large assortment of comics, new and old. Indeed, in my teen years, when I moved out of men’s adventure and more so into comics (though I had always liked comics), I would only go to Paperback Exchange for my comics shopping. 

Today I can only imagine what great stuff that lady had in her Paperback Exchange in the mid-to-late ‘80s. Back then, though, the older stuff – ie the stuff from only ten years before, the ‘70s – wasn’t as highly valued, at least by me. I remember going through her “old” copies of The Executioner, which as I recall were half off the cover price, and buying one or two of them out of obligation – #3: Battle Mask in particular I recall buying. But they just seemed so old to me, so outdated, and I had no interest in them – at the time, I just wanted the ‘80s terrorist of the week stuff, specifically the Gold Eagle stuff, and if you could throw that ninja guy John Trent in there, so much the better. I had no interest in reading about Mack Bolan’s Mafia war, which seemed like ancient history. 

But one day at the Paperback Exchange I saw this particular copy of Death Merchant in the men’s adventure paperbacks section, and the cover grabbed me, even though the book seemed so old. As mentioned above, I was already a comic book fan, and I was a sci-fi fan, so this cover – credited on the copyright page to an artist named Dean Cate – fired my imagination good and proper. It looked so cool! A dude in a red jumpsuit with a facemask, a mad scientist on the top of the cover, a lot of uniformed goons getting blown away…it had the potential to even be better than Phoenix Force (though not one of the ones with John Trent, of course). 

I snatched up the book and took it to my mom and she bought it for me; my mom, as a single mother on a teacher’s assistant salary, didn’t have much money, but she always bought me books. And looking back on it now, I never even valued it at the time that she would buy me books that she clearly knew were written for adults, but she bought them for me anyway because she knew I loved to read. I never had to make a sales pitch or anything. I’d just run with the book over to my mom and ask her if she’d buy it for me, and she’d buy it for me. 

So, I can say I was pretty excited to read this one. I’m not sure if I knew about the Death Merchant at the time. I want to say I didn’t. As mentioned, I was squarely into the new stuff. It’s funny that I thought these ‘70s books were so old at the time, but even looking at them today I can see why I thought this – the ‘70s paperbacks were taller, the paper was pulpier, and overall they were less glossy than the ‘80s men’s adventure paperbacks. They just seemed to be from a different, altogether rougher time. 

But regardless, Death Merchant 23: The Budapest Action grabbed my attention, what with its cover promising some guy in a red jumpsuit with a visor over his face blowing away a bunch of uniformed guys with a Luger. Whoever this Death Merchant was, he clearly had “incredible adventures,” at least per the cover. 

Then I went home and tried to read the book. 

No, this was not Phoenix Force, not by a long shot. This was just weird. And it was almost indecipherable, at least for a twelve year-old like me. Who this Death Merchant, aka Richard Camellion, really was, I couldn’t figure out – it just opened with him in action, and he stayed in action for the rest of the densely-written, small-print 202 pages of the book. After some dogged reading, I finally gave up and tried to root through the book for the scene depicted on the cover, before failing on this as well. Ultimately The Budapest Action went on my bookshelf, neatly arranged with all my other men’s adventure paperbacks…but continnuing to loom in my imagination. For nearly four decades. 

A long time ago I picked up another copy of the book – I guess all of my old men’s adventure novels are boxed up at my mom’s place, and I’d love to get them all someday – but it too sat unread in a box with a bunch of other books. I’m not sure why I didn’t try to read it sooner, opting instead for other Death Merchant novels. I guess I just didn’t want to finally read it and get verification of what I knew as a twelve year-old: that the book wasn’t very good. But I finally decided to read the damn thing, which was a curious experience – not the least because, even as a fifty year-old, I still found The Budapest Action nearly indecipherable. 

But first of all, and really a note to the twelve-year-old me: the cover does not illustrate anything that happens in the novel. At no point – at least no point that I caught – does Richard “Death Merchant” Camellion put on a red jumpsuit with a clear visor, arm himself with a Luger, and shoot up a bunch of uniformed guards. Presumably artist Dean Cate was given his assignment by the editors at Pinnacle – who probably didn’t read Rosenberger’s manuscript, either, I mean life’s just too short – and proceeded to illustrate what he thought would be a scene in the novel. 

It’s funny when you think of it; that cover image has stayed with me for decades. I’ve even subtly referred to it in some of my own writing. And now I finally discover that the scene isn’t even in the book! Actually this makes me think of a quote from none other than Rosenberger himself, I think from one of his Mace books, something to the effect of, “As surprised as a kid who went downstairs on Christmas morning to discover that Santa Claus was really a child molester,” or something like that. 

While Dean Cate’s cover art might be misleading, the title itself sure as hell isn’t: this one’s nothing but “action.” I don’t exaggerate when I say that the vast majority of the 202 pages concerns Camellion fighting his way into a castle in Budapest in which a special psychedelic gas is being stored. The entire novel is focused on him trying to get into this place, and he doesn’t even get there until the final pages. 

I determined long ago that there are two kinds of Death Merchant novels: the ones where Joseph Rosenberger bothers to achieve his own potential and the ones where he doesn’t give a shit. The Budapest Action is one of the latter. Examples of the former are rare, but they exist; see, for example, The Cosmic Reality Kill or The Burning Blue Death. Both of these actually live up to the outrageous premise Rosenberger creates. But more likely you get something like Hell In Hindu Land, where the outrageous concept – friggin’ ancient aliens – is nothing more than a Maguffin that Rosenberger uses to tie together several action scenes that seemingly go on forever. 

The back cover, which also did a great job of luring the twelve-year-old me in, has it that Richard Camellion must go to Budapest to destroy a new psychedelic gas that has been developed by a Commie scientist; to be used, of course, to conquer the world. I mean, surely that wild-eyed, vaguely Slavic-looking, lab-coated and beaker-toting sub-Lenin on the cover is supposed to be this mad doctor. Too bad, then, that we don’t even meet him, but spend more time in go-nowhere chapters devoted to General Barthory, who is in charge of security for the remote castle in which the experimental psychedelic gas is being stored. 

I’m not sure if it’s the take I got as a kid in 1987, and it probably wasn’t, but reading the setup now, as an “adult,” I can only think of scenes where the gas is let loose, and people start freaking out, and we see their delusions and the madness that ensues. Sort of like, now that I think of it, The Deadly Spring. But as I mentioned above, this is one of the volumes where Rosenberger doesn’t give a shit; the setup is just there to allow him to lazily tie together several action scenes. 

The novel opens with Camellion breaking into a government building in Budapest to find the plans for the psychedelic gas, only to discover the safe is impossible to break into. This leads to a near-endless action scene, after which Camellion hooks up with his contacts in Hungary, a group of resistance fighters. They are hiding out with some monks, and throughout Camellion disguises himself as a visiting cleric, wearing makeup to make himself look like he’s in his late forties – which we’re told is ten years older than Camellion’s actual age – with a splotchy face and a bald head. Presumably this is how Camellion looks throughout the interminable action scene that takes up the final half of the novel. 

There’s a big annual festival in which the faithful climb the nearby mountains upon which is perched the castle that has the psychedelic gas. So Camellion and his group – one of whom is an American CIA agent – go along with the faithful, secretly toting weapons. Camellion doesn’t bait the monks as much as you’d think, but we do get a little of Rosenberger’s bizarre “Fate Magazine” type stuff, like a random assertion from Camellion that the ages of man are determined by the weather, and we’re heading into a “heat” phase, and etc. It’s goofy, but really not much different from the proclamations of the average climate change “expert” of today. 

But the bizarre stuff too is a Maguffin. The focus is solely on action. That’s really all it is. There’s a lot of stuff devoted to Camellion and team, in the mountains, commandeering a Hound helicopter. Also, before this sequence, there’s another endless action scene that prefigures the later Super Death Merchant, where Camellion commandeers an Armored Personnel Carrier and drives it through the streets of Budapest. But with the Hound, it’s used to fly them over the walls of the castle – and folks, this scene goes on forever. 

Like a fool, I kept waiting for the part where Camellion would pull on his red jumpsuit, don his clear visor, and go charging with Luger raised into the swirling mists of psychedlic gas, blasting away uniformed soldiers. It never happened. As the final page got closer and closer, and more and more time was spent on Barthory freaking out that his defenses had been penetrated, or Camellion landing the Hound where it could easily be gotten into again, I realized that the entire novel was nothing more than getting into the castle. The stuff I wanted – the stuff Dean Cate illustrated on his cover – only happened in my imagination. 

In fact, the psychedelic gas is such a Maguffin that more time is spent on how to destroy it than seeing its effects. Granted, destroying it is Camellion’s entire mission, but still…the reader deserves more. The reader deserves more than just page after page of Camellion and his friends gunning down “AVO” soldiers, ie the Hungarian version of the KGB. Seriously, “AVO” is repeated so much in The Budapest Action that you could make a drinking game out of it. 

As the final slap in the face, Rosenberger is so checked out that he rushes through the finale…and on the very last sentence, apropos of nothing, Camellion is thinking about how he’ll be on his next mission “in less than a month!” It’s like even the friggin’ Death Merchant himself just wants it all to be over, so he can get on to the next one. I can only assume this is how his creator felt. I mean Joseph Rosenberger, of course, not the Cosmic Lord of Death. 

I’m sure it wasn’t fun turning out so many of these books a year, every year, and we know from the Joseph Rosenberger letter that Stephen Mertz sent me many years ago that Rosenberger wasn’t even getting paid very much. So I try not to be too hard on these men’s adventure writers of old. To be honest, I envy them. I mean, Joseph Rosenberger might have been paid squat, and he might have turned out turgid, soul-crushing banalities (though not always)…but at least he was creating something, something that I’m here reviewing nearly five decades after he wrote it. Today, at my work, I wrote the creative brief for a piece of email marketing I’m going to send out in a month. Who’s going to remember that in fifty years? Who’s going to remember it five minutes after opening it? 

So, this is one to mark off my “bucket list,” if that phrase is even still used. It took me nearly forty years, but I finally got around to reading The Budapest Action. I’ll prefer to remember it as the story I originally envisioned, all those years ago. And I’ll hope the next Death Merchant is better. But I won’t count on it.

Barca

Barca, by Lou Cameron

July, 1974  Berkley Medallion

The first of a handful of paperback originals Lou Cameron published with Berkley in the mid-late ‘70s, Barca is like the later The Closing Circle in how it clearly seems to take the work of Lawrence Sanders as inspiration. Indeed, Cameron is at such pains to produce a “legitimate crime novel” that, again like The Closing Circle, he undermines his own pulpy premise and turns in a tale that is much too staid for its own good. As it is, Barca is a slog of a read, a 256-page, small-print slog that is more focused on dialog than it is on thrills. 

Reading the back cover copy of Barca, the reader is promised a tale in which the titular tough-guy cop is shot in the head but survives, and now is on a trail of revenge. The reader will be frustrated to discover that this is not the novel he actually gets. 

Rather, the reader gets a lot of talking in Barca. A lot of talking. Hell, folks, even after waking up in the hospital bed with a bullet in his friggin’ brain, even here Barca gets in a pages-long conversation with his partner, Crane, and his boss, Lt. Genero. And they aren’t just talking about the bullet in the brain, either! It’s almost like a proto-Seinfeld in how their conversation just roams all over the place. 

And this is how it will go through Barca. It was the same thing in The Closing Circle, of course, and it occurs to me now that this was the same thing Herbert Kastle was doing in his own contemporary crime novels – lots of “salty, realistic chatter from jaundiced cops” stuff. I’ve only read a few novels by Lawrence Sanders – and I’m ready to rank The Tomorrow File as my favorite novel ever, these days, surpassing even my old top favorite Boy Wonder – but from what I’ve read, his novels too were dialog heavy. And yet, at least from the ones I’ve read, they didn’t come off as stultifying chores, like these two Cameron novels. 

So here’s the deal: Detective Sergeant Frank Barca is a New Jersey cop with twenty years of experience in Homicide. At novel’s start he and his younger partner Crane are providing protection for a guy in the hospital who is about to turn evidence against the Roggeris, a mobbed-up family with tentacles all over Jersey. Then when Crane goes out for cigarettes and Barca’s alone with the guy, someone sneaks into the room and shoots Barca in the back of the head, then puts the rest of the gun’s bullets into the would-be witness. 

In material seemingly taken from a medical textbook (like Sanders, Lou Cameron wants us to know he’s done his research), we learn how the bullet did a ton of damage to Barca’s neurons but came to rest in his brain in such a way that he survived – and maintained all of his physical abilities. However, the bullet has also come to rest in such a way that to retrieve it via surgery could result in Barca’s death. This too is explained in copious detail, as Barca exposits back and forth with a neurosurgeon some months later, after coming out of therapy. 

Barca struggles with some memories, like when a pal from the Korean War calls him to wish him well, and Barca cannot remember the guy for anything. Barca’s bigger problem however is that it is only a matter of time until his brain rejects the bullet that is embedded in it. When this happens Barca’s mind will blank out, and meanwhile his body will go into convulsions and he will ultimately die. This too is covered in copious expository dialog. 

The premise is interesting: Barca gets the chance to solve his own murder, and he has to do it fast, before his brain explodes. Instead of Plot A, however, we get Plot B: Lt. Genero, reluctantly accepting Barca back on duty, puts Barca on another case, because it would look bad for the force if Barca started investigating his own shooting(!). Which Genero assures Barca the force is totally doing, it’s just a question of manpower and whatnot… 

So Barca gets the case he was working on before he was shot: looking into the hit-and-run death of a guy named Fantasia. It’s maddening in a way; the back cover and first pages set you up for one story, then Cameron pulls the narrative rug out from under you and soon Barca’s looking at the corpse of a dead young black girl who hooked for some boys who lived above Fantasia’s pharmacy, kids who were mostly into a dope and booze scene and not so much into heavy drugs. In other words, you get another story entirely than what was promised. 

Barca’s old partner, Crane, has moved on to a new gig after being promoted, but Barca will occasionally head over to his place to engage in dialog – because, gradually, it becomes clear that the Fantasia death might be connected with the Roggeris, ie the mobbed-up family that was going to be ratted on by the guy Barca and Crane was guarding the night Barca was shot in the head. 

It takes a long while for this to develop, though. For the first half of Barca we have a methodical procedural in which Barca interrogates a cast of characters who knew Fantasia; most memorable is Wrong Way Corrigan, an 18 year-old punk child of wealth who is known for crashing expensive cars. During this Baraca becomes acquainted with Beth Wilson, an (apparently) pretty blonde social worker who was helping the young black hooker who died of an OD. 

For a writer with a pulp background, Lou Cameron is curiously chaste. At least in the novels of his I’ve read. That he pulled off such prudery in the sleazy ‘70s is quite a feat. But there’s zero exploitation of the female characters and there is zero sex; Barca notices that Beth gradually begins to grow feelings for him, but when she asks him on a date late in the novel he turns her down – he doesn’t want her to start to like him and then have her feelings crushed when he suddenly dies. Personally I thought Barca was coming on as a little too self-important; just because a girl asks you out doesn’t mean she’s going to fall in love with you. 

We fare slightly better on the action front, but even here Cameron fails to deliver what he promises. Due to his condition Barca is not allowed to drive a police car, so he finds a workaround and starts driving a motorcycle. It’s a Honda, not a Harley, but Barca also starts wearing “leather togs” and packing two pistols, making the reader think of Chopper Cop, or better yet the bike-riding cop from The Blood Circus. 

But man; we only even know Barca looks like this because other characters mention it (again, the majority of the novel is relayed via dialog), and Cameron does precious little to deliver on his own pulpy conceit. I mean Barca drives the Honda around here and there; at no point does he turn into the leather-wearing, bike-roaring hellraising cop the veteran pulp reader might want. 

The novel’s sole “action scene” is over before we know it; following leads, Barca ends up at a garbage dumb outside of town, and none other than one of the Roggeris pull up. One of the guys with him’s a coked-up “junko,” and Barca shoots him with his Colt Cobra when the guy rushes him. But this scene too is played up more for the suspense angle, as Barca soon learns that there was more to this situation than he expected. 

But then overall Barca is more of a procedural than a thriller. Sometimes it’s unintentionally humorous, like the many and confusing tentacles that make up the Roggeri family. I mean there’s the one who was going to be turned against, the one who is a legitimate businessman, the one who became a priest. Then there’s the old crone who might be the most cruel mafioso of them all. And it’s all talking, talking, talking; even parts where Barca goes to talk to his old priest and they get into various theological debates. 

I mean a part of me can see Lou Cameron enthusing over all this, turning in a meaty and weighty “crime novel” that has more in common with John Gardner (the American, not the Brit) than Don Pendleton. But it comes off as so ponderous, especially given that so many scenes have no bearing on the outcome of the novel. The bantering between Barca and Lt. Genero also gets old after a while, and there are so many parts that are dumb – like Barca figures out another workaround, how to keep his gun even when he’s temporarily removed from the force, but when Genero tries to give Barca back his gun officially, Barca tells him to forget it! 

Probably the biggest issue with Barca is Barca himself. He’s nowhere as interesting as Cameron seems to think he is. There’s a lot of muddled stuff about his Italian upbringing, and how he could’ve been in the Mafia, but again it’s all just dialog with no payoff – like when Barca tries to ask that old priest of his about “omerta” and all this other stuff. None of it amounts to anyting other than making the book seem even longer. 

So, the reader can forget about the plot promised on the back cover of Barca. The concept of a tough-guy cop with a bullet in his brain going out for revenge on the mobsters who tried to kill him sounds like a great story, but it’s not the story we get in Barca. Instead, we get a tough-guy cop with a bullet in his brain who…investigates a hit-and-run death and talks to a bunch of people. Only gradually does he get around to solving who it was who almost killed him – and even this doesn’t have the emotional payoff the reader might want, Cameron going for more of a ‘70s-mandatory downbeat ending. (But an unsurprising one, as it should be obvious to even a disinterested reader who shot Barca.) 

I wasn’t very crazy about The Closing Circle, either, as it suffered from a lot of the same stuff. But that one was marginally better because the subplot about the killer at least kept things moving, and there was certainly more of a sleazy overlay – not via sex or anything, given Cameron’s prudishness, but in the wanton description of people shitting themselves when they’re strangled. To this day when I watch Dateline or whatever and it mentions a victim being strangled, I’m like, “Why aren’t you telling us they shat themselves?!” I mean, it’s the one thing I learned from The Closing Circle. 

Cameron wrote a few more of these “realistic cop novels in the vein of Lawrence Sanders” for Berkley; curiously, one of them is titled Tancredi, a name that appears in Barca. It’s not a cop or even a character in Barca, but a building where one of the Mafia capos operates out of, “The Sons of Tancredi.” There doesn’t seem to be any connection between these novels, so maybe Cameron just liked the name and decided to use it for his next book. But I’ll probably read that one next, and hope that it’s better than these first two.