The Specialist #11: American Vengeance

The Specialist #11: American Vengeance, by John Cutter

November, 1985  Signet Books

Boy, I forgot all about The Specialist, didn’t I? The first volume was one of the first reviews I posted on this blog, back in the summer of 2010; I bought the entire series from a single seller back then, and at the time I had no idea it would take me sixteen years to read all eleven books. 

It’s been over six years since I read the previous volume, and unfortunately American Vengeance serves as a direct sequel. I’d pretty much forgotten the entire story, but John Shirley (aka “John Cutter”) does a good job of catching up readers who missed the previous book – or, like me, who just plain forgot it. Long story short, Jack “The Specialist” Sullivan is all fired up to take down Hassan the Red, an Iranian terrorist who was responsible for every Iranian attack on American citizens. 

Yes, this was a timely read. But in a way it was a refreshing reminder of how once upon a time America understood that the terrorist-supporting regime of Iran was evil, something our leadership has forgotten in the ensuing decades...with such notable “progress” as sending Iran billions of dollars and even helpfully putting them on the path to attaining nuclear arms. Gee, what could go wrong? 

Indeed, author Shirley dedicates American Vengeance to “the resistance fighting for freedom in Iran.” One wonders if he still supports the Iranian resistance, or if TDS has rotted away his brain (as it has for so, so many others). Some years ago I attempted to read Shirley’s Eclipse trilogy from the ‘80s – I dutifully picked up the original paperback printings many years ago – and as I was reading it I happened to come across a recent interview with Shirley (I think this was around 2019 or so). Eclipse is about characters in a cyberpunk future fighting a fascist government, and folks if you think Shirley in the 2019 interview compared his fictional future fascist government to the Trump administration, you win a no-prize. He even did the old leftist trick of comparing populism with fascism, when the two are altogether different (but then people today conveniently forget that the Nazis themselves were socialists…“Socialist” was even in their damn name!!). 

Does the Iranian resistance get any love today? We get stories and stories about the people suffering in Ukraine, even the friggin’ king of England proclaiming we must defend Ukraine to the US Congress(?!!), and yet not a peep about the countless thousands who have been butchered in Iran. It’s curious, isn’t it. Back in the late ‘90s I dated a girl from Iran, and for several years her dad had been a prisoner of the regime, kept in a cell and beaten. Somehow he’d managed to get free and immigrated to the US with the rest of his family. What was most curious was how blasé they were about it: “That’s my dad. He was a prisoner in Iran for a couple years. Hey, you wanna watch The Nanny?” But anyway even then, as a non-political idiot in my 20s, I wondered why the US still hadn’t taken that goddamn tyrannical regime down. 

Anyway I digress. It just makes me sad when smart people say stupid things, and Shirley’s TDS comments were enough to make me drop reading the Eclipse books. (Plus I found the first volume ponderous and lacking any of the spark Shirley brought to the men’s adventure novels he was writing at the time, so there’s that.) But this political digression has a point: there was a time when the despotic government of Iran was seen for what it was. It’s unfortunate it has taken so many years – and so many presidents – to finally address the situation. And I’m curious if the people who felt so strongly about stopping Iran back in the ‘80s have become so brainwashed by their own leftist bullshit that they no longer feel that way today. I mean, it’s not like the Iranian regime has become a kinder and gentler government, is it? How many protesters did they butcher last year alone? Then again, we live in a country where losers can stand beside a Starbucks with a “No Kings” sign for a couple hours and declare themselves heroes of democracy, so clearly we’ve lost all sense of what heroic struggle actually means. 

So since nothing was being done then, Shirley has his hero Jack Sullivan taking on the brunt of “American vengeance,” squaring things away with an almost mythical Iranian terrorist leader called Hassan the Red. Sullivan’s been chasing the bastard since the previous volume, and as American Vengeance opens he’s busting into the hotel room of a pair of Hassan’s followers, a scene artist Mel Crair depicts on the cover. 

Hassan’s army is called the Warriors of Islam, and a lot of them are in France; the majority of the novel plays out in Paris. It seems to be not too long after the previous volume – merc Merlin is still in the hospital, we’re told – yet it’s long enough that a little time seems to have passed. Sullivan’s colleagues this time are a group of Israeli Mossad agents (yet more timely material! One wonders if you’d encounter heroic characters from Israel in today’s woke publishing landscape…). 

I wonder if Shirley knew this would be the final volume. There isn’t much indication he did, other than a random part where Sullivan calls Bonnie, his hotstuff girlfriend back in the States…and tells her he loves her. This is usually a bad sign for things, either for the series overall or just for that particular character. Also, we are informed the two have “unofficially adopted” the little orphan girl Sullivan saved a few volumes ago. One wonders if, had there been another volume of The Specialist, either of these characters would have encountered a rough time. 

Humorously, just a few pages after telling Bonnie he loves her, Sullivan is having somewhat-explicit sex with a beautiful Israeli secret agent named Sabra. While reserved when compared to the overdone sex scenes of earlier volumes, it still has such humorous lines as, “Sullivan slowly lowered her onto his prong.” Which of course made me think of the metal band. 

The problem with American Vengeance is that it lacks the pulpy fun of earlier volumes; this one is a standard “terrorist of the week” yarn, similar to innumerable other Gold Eagle publications of the day. In fact I wonder if Shirley wasn’t given orders from the publisher to cut back on the weird stuff and do what Gold Eagle was doing. 

Thus, a lot of the book is repetitive; Sullivan will track down Hassan in Paris and just miss him, lending everything the unintentional (or not) vibe of a Looney Tunes cartoon. It happens over and over in American Vengeance, with the wily terrorist bastard setting bombs in the places he was staying, resulting in several innocent bystanders getting killed. And each scene caps off with Sullivan becoming even angrier and more determined to kill Hassan. 

The climax takes place in Iran, where Hassan has managed to get a nuclear bomb. Again working with Mossad, Sullivan is able to slip into Hassan’s base and prevent nuclear Armageddon, and the bomb actually goes off, but humorously Shirley quickly retcons everything that “it wasn’t a big bomb” and thus the damage is only relegated to Hassan’s patch of Iran – in other words, the poetic justice of the terrorist blowing up his own country. But again, American Vengeance was written in the days before Muslim terrorists strapped bombs to their own children, so the finale doesn’t have the impact today that it likely did then. 

The last we see of Jack Sullivan, he’s on an airplane, looking down at the nuclear blast, affirming to himself that America has been avenged. And this is the last we’ll ever see of him, as no future volumes of The Specialist were forthcoming. The book does not promote itself as the final volume, so I’ll wager that low sells quietly killed the series; the question is whether Shirley wrote any further volumes that went unpublished. 

Overall The Specialist was mostly entertaining, particularly the middle of the run, when Shirley had fun with various crazy things like Sullivan achieving “Hulk power” or fighting Satanic subway mutants. But as the series progressed it appears that he was asked to write more “standard” fare, and the series suffered as a result, coming off like too many of its contemporaries.