The Black Gold of Malaverde

The Black Gold of Malaverde, by Richard L. Graves
November, 1974  Bantam Books

I’ve recently been watching the old Mission: Impossible TV series, something I’ve wanted to do since I caught a few episodes in syndication as a kid in the late ‘80s. The show lasted for seven seasons, running from 1966 to 1973, and most fans prefer the first three seasons, when the IMF team took on spies from fictional ComBloc countries. But I much prefer the later seasons, where they took on “the Syndicate,” ie the mob in all but name, and the IMF fashions took a funky ‘70s turn.

As mentioned, the series came to an end in 1973, which coincidentally enough is when The Black Gold of Malaverde was published in hardcover. I’m willing to bet that author Richard L. Graves was a fan of Mission: Impossible, as this novel follows the same sort of caper approach, with a highly-skilled covert team running a con on foreign soil. The protagonist, Hugo Wolfram, is not only an emotionless mastermind of plotting, but he’s also described as a tall, lanky individual with a shock of white hair – sounds like Jim Phelps (aka Peter Graves) to me. (And if that isn’t enough…I mean, Richard Graves!)

Wolfram doesn’t even appear until about 80 pages in, though. The first quarter of The Black Gold of Malaverde focuses on the political turmoil in Malaverde, a fictional country in South America. Mercado, the self-proclaimed “Liberator” of Malaverde, has wrested control of the country and is kicking out the “imperialists,” ie the Americans who in fact created the country in the first place, Malaverde being nothing more than a banana republic. Mercado has the backing of DePrundis, an obese Greek pirate in all but name – a powerful but shadowy figure in the economic world. As the novel opens they take control of an oil field, imprisoning Bradford, the American head of the oil operation.

Bradford’s here in Malaverde overseeing his company’s oil interests, which both he and his father developed. DePrundis wants control of the oil, thus his backing of Mercado. The Liberator meanwhile proves to be a thoroughly despicable character, a diminutive bastard who tries to act like a big man as he screams orders at his underlings and threatens Bradford. To be honest this sequence goes on much too long, with Bradford enduring a farce of a trial. At the end though he is sentenced to death, and hung, the US government not even bothering to intercede on his behalf.

Bradford Senior meanwhile has been trying to save his son. First he approaches the Bank, a mysterious economic intelligence group, who tell Bradford he should comply with Mercado’s ransom demands. Bradford does, but Mercado just ends up taking the money and going on with his planned murder of Bradford Jr. This time the Bank puts Bradford Sr in touch with Wolfram, with whom Bradford has before worked – in a background Graves leaves mysterious, the two men were covert operatives in WWII, and in fact Bradford trained Wolfram, “removing his conscience,” but Wolfram far exceeded his teacher in plotting and ruthlessness.

Wolfram currently works as an explosives expert, helping companies destroy and dismantle properties. This dovetails with the mission Bradford desires of him; Bradford wants Wolfram to basically destroy Malaverde’s economy, blasting away the oil rigs Bradford’s company created. He also wants the country’s sole shipping line destroyed. Plus he wants it all to look like an accident. Wolfram goes to work putting together his plan, and Graves undercuts the later suspense here, with we readers learning every element of the scheme in blueprint detail.

The narrative starts to move as Wolfram next puts together his team. True to genre form it’s an unusual bunch: a Japanese actor, a black American ship captain, a Cuban scuba diver (who insists upon bringing along his former prostitute of a “sister”), and a jaded helicopter pilot. Wolfram, very cool and aloof, respects each of them because they are technical experts. He’s worked with them all before, and there’s another mysterious backstory in that a diver on his previous mission got killed, so the team is understandably concerned that history might repeat itself.

The caper itself unfolds in the final quarter of the novel. Magraw, the ship captain, manages to crash a vessel in Malaverde’s port, thus blocking it, and Wolfram and the helicopter pilot pose as representatives of the Cosmo Construction Company (another element Graves leaves mysterious; the intimation is this fictitious company is just a CIA front). Meanwhile the two scuba divers create the waterway diversion which allows Magraw’s ship to block the channel.

But here Graves doles out the laziest killing off of a character I’ve yet encountered, with Esposito, the lead scuba diver, deciding for absolutely no reason not to wear his wetsuit! After being cut up by barnacles he’s later attacked by a small shark and thus bleeds to death. It’s supposed to be a “complication” Wolfram must work around, but instead it comes off as comical, given how avoidable it was – especially when one considers how anxious Esposito had been about the mission, given that a diver died on the previous one. I mean, you’d figure the guy would be overly cautious.

One of the many things that was great about Mission: Impossible was that it followed the time-honored “show don’t tell” philosophy; other than a very brief planning scene early on, each episode unfolded with the caper playing out for the audience the same way it did for those being conned. Graves however both tells and shows; Wolfram painstakingly unveils his plan for Bradford early in the book, and when the caper finally goes down later on, it goes down exactly like Wolfram outlined it. Hence, other than the stupid death of Esposito, there are no complications, no surprises. Also there are no intricacies to the plot, none of the elaborate disguise work or role-acting of Mission: Impossible; instead they just crash a ship, blocking Malaverde’s port, and set it to blow up!

There isn’t much characterization; Wolfram is notorious for his emotionless nature, and about the most we get is a little squabbling among his team. Mercado is the only memorable character in the book, mostly because he’s so cartoonishly evil, a "midget" blowhard who stomps around blathering over his own self-importance. Also the book is basically rated G; no cursing, no sex, and minimal violence. (Once again just like Mission: Impossible!) The end is also a bit anticlimatic; we spend the entire narrative wanting to see Mercado get his comeuppance, but Graves delivers it off-camera.

Overall I found The Black Gold of Malaverde an entertaining read, but I do wish there had been a bit more tension and suspense. At any rate Hugo Wolfram returned for three more novels, which I will be reading eventually.

The Price Of The Phoenix

The Price of the Phoenix, by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath
July, 1977  Bantam Books

Toward the end of the ‘80s I became less interested in men's adventure novels and more into sci-fi, in particular Star Trek. Luckily I never became a full-on Trekkie, but there was brief a time when I was heavily into the show, watching reruns, buying the movies on VHS, and even catching The Next Generation in its debut season. (I only managed to last for that one season, though.) Soon enough my bookshelf wasn’t just crowded with men’s adventure novels, it was also filled with Star Trek novels.

I haven’t read one of those novels since then, but the other day I was in a used bookstore and happened to be in the science fiction section. In the “series” area I was floored to see how many Star Trek novels they had – I mean, one whole shelf was devoted to them, and it was a big shelf. I ended up buying a handful, this being one of them – I liked the ‘70s look of the paperback and the plot sounded nice and cerebral, a little off the beaten Star Trek path.

Later I learned there was a bit of controversy around this book, with fans split down a sharp divide – they either love The Price of the Phoenix or they despise it. Marshak and Culbreath were members of the first wave of Trek fans, appearing at conventions and editing fanzines. They also edited a few Star Trek anthologies Bantam published around this time. Which would imply that they would at least know the characters from the show, wouldn’t it? Reading this book, you’d never think so.

Happily, I was unaware of something known as “slash fiction,” where Trek fans write fiction that plays up on a supposed homosexual relationship between Kirk and Spock. Sometimes the authors leave it subtle, unspoken, but others blow it up to laughable extremes. This book was my entry into this weird little fiction niche, as Marshank and Culbreath are very heavily in the “slash” category, and they’re also ones who take it to those extremes. But after reading the book I kind of wished I could go back to the time when I didn’t know what slash fiction was.

Okay, the novel opens with Kirk dead. Killed on some “hole in the wall planet” as he attempted to save a woman from a burning house (?). And yet this is all apparently a ruse of evil Omne, a muscle-bound humanoid with black hair and black eyes, who likes to go around in a black jumpsuit with gloves. Omne’s power and muscles are often described and he brings to mind Arnold Schwarzenegger. But beyond this he’s not human, and has more power than even a Vulan -- even a Vulcan, I stress, because the authors for some reason keep playing up the superawesome physical powers of Vulcans throughout the novel.

Kirk’s dead on the first page, and the book starts from Spock’s point of view, as he rages outside of Sickbay, waiting on an official word from Bones. As I said, other writers “subtly” play up the supposed Kirk/Spock relationship, but Marshak and Culbreath make it glaringly obvious; Spock rages and storms and weeps as if he has lost a spouse. And what makes it all the odder is that others are conscious of protecting Spock, of ensuring he doesn’t have to see Kirk’s dead body, of putting him through the horror of losing a loved one…I mean it’s just weird. And as the novel goes on, it gets weirder.

And I don’t say it’s weird due to any homophobic reasons; rather, it’s very unsettling how the authors treat Kirk and Spock throughout this novel, just downright creepy. Spock is constantly portrayed as the heartsick beyond-human who must overcome his desire to lash out in rage, trying to protect his meek and cuddly little Kirk. Speaking of which, there is a concerted effort throughout the novel to make Kirk seem weak and defenseless, and part of Omne’s master plan is to not only make Kirk cry (!), but also to get Kirk to kneel to him (!!) so that “alpha male” Kirk will know he is well and fully mastered. And yes, “alpha male” really is a term thrown around in the text, a lot.

It seems pretty obvious that The Price of the Phoenix is nothing more than a post-feminist revisionism of the Star Trek mythos, with a good heaping of homoeroticism overlayed. If that’s your thing, you’ll love the book. Otherwise, like me you’ll be pretty goddamn puzzled throughout. Seriously, it was like watching a car wreck, reading this book.

I guess I should get around to the plot. Omne has invented this sort of transporter which can pick up and store the complete psychic being of a person as he or she dies, basically the soul, and just as a transporter can reform physical molecules, Omne’s transporter can recreate the entire being, a perfect and exact duplicate with all of the same thoughts and etc as the original product. This is how the novel opens; Omne has arranged the death of Kirk and now unveils his replica (pretentiously referred to as “the Human” quite often in the narrative; just one of the authors’s many pretensions, in fact).

Omne tries to barter off this replica Kirk, offering him to Spock, who simmers and holds back his rage – again, the creepy connotation here being that Kirk is a dead spouse and Spock is going mad to get him back. But not content with this, Omne also barters the replicant Kirk to The Commander, a female Romulan starship captain who apparently appeared in an episode of Star Trek and so was quite popular with early fan fictioners due to her strong will and all that jazz.

The authors definitely have a knack for the kinky, even though they don’t elaborate on it. For one there’s the whole Kirk/Spock dynamic, but also they state quite obviously (and often) that The Commander wouldn’t mind having Kirk and Spock in her bed, at the same time. Anyway the authors insinuate that Kirk and the Commander had something going on after that episode (plus she also has the Romulan hots for Spock), and now Omne is offering the Commander her very own Kirk, in exchange for all sorts of pretentious and over-analyzed trade-offs.

But it develops that Kirk did not die – Omne transported him out of the burning house and now has him somewhere in the labrynths of his defense-shielded planet (which is decorated like the Old West complete with Romulan guards in “black levi’s” with six-shooters strapped to their belts!). Once Spock and the Commander are aware that the real Kirk lives, it sets up what proves to be the main portion of the narrative: the four characters plot against Omne while often stopping all action to stand around and discuss philosophical issues.

Actually what The Price of the Phoenix most reminded me of was those dialog and philosophy-heavy early episodes of The Next Generation; all cerebral masturbation and no action. We’ll get blocks and blocks of paragraphs as Omne will arrive on the scene and trade speeches with our heroes, and this goes on throughout. Every once in a while the authors will deliver a pretty sadistic fight scene, but they’re spare and brief and the violence is neutered by the psuedo-literary style.

The fights the authors provide the most detail for, of course, are the man-on-man brawls between Omne and Spock or Omne and Kirk, with lots of words spent on each thrust and slap and grunt. Pretty soon I got some sick enjoyment out of seeing how far these ladies would go in their quest for homoeroticism; the pinnacle is probably when Kirk takes away a mega-beaten Spock and rubs his entire body with a healing liquid of Omne’s, stripping Spock down and lathering him up good and proper from head to toe. My god, just kiss already!

Only toward the very end do the authors realize they can capitalize on the fact that they have two Kirks, and here the fun and goofy spirit of the original TV series returns as Kirk banters with himself.  In these few scenes the authors whittle back on their revisionist designs and allow the characters to breathe a little, and it lets you see how much fun this novel could have been. 

The novel’s only 182 pages but it seems a lot longer, and not just because of the tiny print. Marshak and Culbreath have a very affected style, with characters who talk solely in obfuscation. I kept reading how these two, given their diehard fan status, knew the characters so well, but to me these characters seemingly had nothing to do with the ones on Star Tek. Also their fan fiction roots shine through in that no one in the galaxy apparently matters other than Kirk and Spock – everyone seems to know of them, and as mentioned Omne’s whole plan is to master either or both of them, never mind that he’s created a device that could change the fate of the entire universe.

Marshak and Culbreath end the novel on a cliffhanger; they followed up the book two years later with The Fate of the Phoenix, which god help me I also bought. And by damn I’m going to read it. One of these days.

Once Is Not Enough

Once Is Not Enough, by Jacqueline Susann
July, 1974  Bantam Books

I’ve referenced her here and there in my reviews, but this is the first actual Jacqueline Susann novel I’ve read. This was also her last published work, the hardcover coming out two years before her death from cancer in 1975. Along with Harold Robbins, Susann ruled the world of mainstream fiction in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and like Robbins she’s been mostly forgotten in the past years – though unlike Robbins her novels have recently been reprinted by a major publisher.

Writing wise I’d say Susann is a slightly “better” author, but she lacks the outrageous firepower of Robbins. But you do get a bit more characterization, and her characters don’t just come off like walking stereotypes. Also she is very much in the soap opera/category romance arena; parts of this book were like a novelized episode of As The World Turns, endlessly detailing the love lives of bland but photogenic protagonists. There are long stretches of Once Is Not Enough that are pretty boring, without even a bizarre-and-unexpected sex scene (as in Robbins) to liven things up.

This is mostly due to the main protagonist, who herself appears to have walked out of a category romance. January Wayne is our hero, and despite being in her early 20s right at the height of the free love era, she has all of the morals and mindsets of a 1950s housewife. This isn’t all her fault, though; coddled by her father Mike, a famous and successful Hollywood producer, January grows up with significant Daddy Issues in that she is so in love with her dad that no other man will ever be able to win her heart.

But this is only one of her issues. Susann opens the novel with a harrowing scene in which January, just turned 18, goes to Italy to spend time with her father, who is shooting on location. Jealous of the Sophia Loren-type actress who is hanging on her father (January’s mother committed suicide years before, jealous herself over her husband’s frequent affairs), January grudgingly goes on a date with an Italian gigolo. When the guy tries to sleep with January but discovers with shock that she’s still a virgin, he races her home on his motorcycle and crashes, and January is seriously injured.

This part is shocking enough, but also serves to draw you in enough that you care about January throughout the book, something that can rarely be said about Robbins’s protagonists. At any rate, she spends a handful of years in some exclusive rehab center in Switzerland, effectively cut off from the rest of the world. While she’s away the ‘60s become the ‘70s and the world changes in numerous ways, though January doesn’t know this. When she can finally walk again and leaves the clinic, she finds the world vastly different than the one she new.

Meanwhile her father has fallen on rough times and has married uber-wealthy Dee, so now he’s a kept man. He’s done all of this so as to save up a nest egg so January can have a nice life – turns out Mike’s luck ran dry right after January’s accident, and after diminishing returns on his next films he found himself without any more jobs in Hollywood so has had to take desperate measures to continue living the lifestyle he’s grown accustomed to.

January wants to make her own way in the world, and gets a job at an up and coming magazine which is run by an old school friend named Lisa, the only character in the book who brings to mind the antics of Valley of the Dolls. Foul-mouthed, opinionated, and sexually carefree, Linda is everything January isn’t, and Susann continuously hammers us with the differences between the two, Linda’s modern woman values (or lack thereof) up against January’s old-fashioned prudishness.

Really though the novel plays out like a soap opera, and January is very much in the vein of a romance comic book heroine. Everything shocks her, she just wants to find true love, and she’s completely in love with daddy. This is the other theme Susann plays up in the book, the true love story being between January and her father, but like the characters this theme comes and goes; Susann often introduces concepts or characters and then drops them for a few hundred pages.

For example, there’s Karla, a Greta Garbo analogue who is a retired and reclusive screen idol; David, Dee’s cousin and January’s ostensible paramour (he takes her virginity one disastrous night but they decide to only be friends) carries on a secret affair with her, but we learn later that Karla is having an affair with Dee, too. But Karla, given so much focus in early chapters (complete with an unecessary and incidental sequence covering her pre-stardom life in Europe during WWII, a sequence which features a wholly-exploitative scene in which a bunch of nuns get raped), just disappears for like a few hundred pages, suddenly reintroduced toward the end as if she’d never left.

January sort of muddles around while life goes on around her, doing her romance heroine schtick and searching for true love. This eventually occurs in the person of Tom Holt, a famous and rugged author who is Hemingway in all but name. But more importantly he’s actually a few years older than January’s dad Mike, so now she has the perfect daddy replacement.

This storyline takes up most of the novel, with January falling in love with Tom and following him to LA and getting sex tips from Linda. It was all very much like a romance novel, and I kept wondering where the Jacqueline Susann I’d read about had gone; where was the lurid stuff, the crazy stuff? Other than January’s addiction to “vitamin shots” (which turn out to be laced with meth), there isn’t even any of the campish charm of Valley of the Dolls.

But in the last hundred pages things change in a major way. After a plane crash takes out some major characters (and I wonder how that plane crash sequence went down with vacation-bound readers of the novel??), Susann apparently regains her sordid powers and launches into overdrive. Coming very quickly here, we have rampant drug use, a ritual orgy, more rampant drug use, and a full-on psychedelic ending which features UFOs!

The ritual orgy is lots of lurid fun, with January attending a hippie party, getting blitzed on LSD-spiked punch, and having sex with some random dude while she and he are hoisted up in the arms of the other hippies, with chanting and clapping going on all about them. I should mention that this random guy is only the third man January has ever had sex with, the other two being David (a one-time only deal), and Tom Holt (who, in pure let’s-skewer-Hemingway’s-rep fashion, lives his roughneck, boozer lifestyle in order to overcome the fact that he has the equipment of a prepubescent boy). The climax of this sequence is the highlight, with January orgasming, screaming “I love you, Mike!”, and then passing out. I can bet you Susann was chortling to herself as she wrote it.

But the UFO stuff is even better. Still frazzled on drugs, January goes to the beach and sees one in the night sky. Through the final hundred pages of the novel Susann works in this theme where January keeps seeing a blue-eyed man in her dreams, a man who bears a vague resemblance to her father. But this ghost proves dangerous, at one point a dazed January almost falling out of her skyline apartment to be with him. And now he appears to her on the beach, beckoning her into the waves…

The finale of the novel sticks with you, and leaves you unsettled. Susann masterfully writes it so that January’s fate is up to you – did she die of drowning, or did she get spirited away to some other world? Interesting to note that Susann’s original ending for the novel was completely different; the Mike-looking figure turned out to be an alien, who took January away with him into space, where the novel turned into a star-spanning love story! And it wasn't just some dream sequence or drug trip; according to the biography Lovely Me, Susann wrote fifty pages of this, most of it taken from her then-unpublished novel Yargo, which was written in the early 1950s but went unpublished until after Susann's death. Indeed, many fans believe that Yargo can be read as the sequel to Once Is Not Enough.

I find it hard to believe that this alternate version of Once Is Not Enough has never been published. I’d love to read it. As vapid as she can be, as lovestruck or spineless as she comes across, you actually get to like January, even to feel sorry for her. As such, you wish she’d been given a happier end. (For Susann’s part, when asked in interviews about January’s fate, Susann claimed it was her interpretation that January died. What a bummer!) But then, the ending Susann delivers does affect you more than anything else in the novel, so it’s a fair compromise.

As for her prose, Susann certainly likes her ellipses and hyphens. I’m not exaggerating when I say this book reads like a 1970s romance comic, like My Love or something; the characters all speak in that same sort of breathless and melodramatic style. Susann’s narrative style reminds me more of Burt Hirschfeld than Robbins, and having read one of her novels I can now see where Hirschfeld got a lot of schtick. (I still prefer Hirschfeld, though.)

Anyway, an enjoyable novel for the most part, but a bit too long for its own good (this Bantam edition is over 500 pages, with tiny print). One of these days I’ll definitely read Yargo, if only to see if it provides “the rest of the story.”

Logan's Run

Logan's Run, by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson
May, 1976  Bantam Books
(Original publication 1967)

I really enjoy the 1976 film Logan’s Run: the kitsch, the camp value, the retro sci-fi style and design. I’ve even got it on Blu Ray. Mostly though I love how it plays up on the psychedelic fallout of the 1960s, with sequences of hallucinogenic excess – Logan and his friends getting high on some sort of red smoke in Logan’s ultra mod pad, or Logan and Jessica 6 fighting their way through the delirium of the psychedelicizing love mists during their escape from the City.

So imagine my surprise to find none of that stuff in the source novel. This is one of the few cases where I can say the film version is better than the novel -- much better. (Another instance would be 2001: A Space Odyssey.) Published in 1967, Logan’s Run is straight-up pulp sci-fi, 150 pages of clunky narrative and paper-thin characters. It bears little relation to the film other than the theme, but even that is slightly different.

Anyone who has seen the film knows the story: in this ultra-mod 23rd Century, there’s an enforced life cutoff when you reach 30 years of age. As goofy as that concept is, the source novel is even goofier; here the life sentence ends at a mere 21. Obviously then the novel is a wild extrapolation of the Youth Movement of the 1960s, taken to insane and illogical extremes, but still…it’s very hard to imagine a world being run by those under 21. The film was at least slightly more believable in this regard.

We meet Logan as he’s a ripe old 21, soon to experience his LastDay, after which he must voluntarily submit himself to Sleep, ie death. But that’s it, here. None of the Carousel stuff from the film, where LastDay supplicants would put on white costumes with weird hockey masks and walk around, hoping to be zapped and reincarnated (or whatever the hell was going on in that scene). The book does have the famous crystal flower implanted in the hands of each character’s hands, and when they go black the person is ready to die. If they don’t voluntarily go to Sleep, then Logan, a Sandman, is called in to waste them.

Our hero is a bit more troubled in the novel. As you’ll recall in the film version he has a few years added to his life by the City computer, as a ruse to go undercover among the radicals; again, nothing like this is in the novel. Instead, Logan begins to fear his imminent mortality, so he is intrigued by the mention of “Sanctuary” on the lips of a Runner who is killed by gang members before Logan can get to him.

The dead Runner had a twin sister, Jessica 6, and Logan attempts to track her down. This entails a bit of action within the City, which turns out to be Los Angeles, though it is not the self-contained world as seen in the film. The novel operates on a much larger scale, with Logan shuttling around the entire country; the City of the novel is not closed off from the rest of the world like in the movie, and there’s no mention of the world beyond being a nuclear wasteland.

Indeed, we briefly learn that this world of the novel was created by Youth Movement riots, which blew up in 2000, resulting in a mass youth overtaking of the world, with the guru leader of the movement choosing to end his own life at 21, and his acolytes following suit. The unstated idea being that, since old people created the mess that was the 20th century, then an old-free world would be a much more pleasant place.

The psychedelic haze of the film is still here, if a bit subdued; within the first few pages Logan has visited a “hallucimill” where he ingests a favored LSD concoction, before stopping by a glasshouse orgy den where he has sex with some random female amid flashing hallucinogic lights. But this stuff is brief, and not played out as it is in the film. (And the sex scenes, by the way, are barely there; a quick mention of some girl and the authors fade to black.)

The authors also have a bit of trouble determining Logan’s motivations. He at first becomes interested in Sanctuary because his own LastDay is fast approaching, but later he mentions that his goal is to find the place and destroy it, so he can go to Sleep in a blaze of glory. Whatever the reason, the novel follows the same angle as the film, here, with Logan following a batch of clues to find the mysterious location that is Sanctuary.

It’s after Logan escapes the City, with Jessica in tow, that the book really veers off into its own thing. For one, Jessica and Logan don’t meet until immediately before they escape; the producers wisely built up their relationship in the film. But as mentioned the novel operates on a broader global sweep, and soon enough Logan and Jessica are taking Mazecars to various destinations, from an abandoned factory beneath the sea to a spot in the midwest upon which stands a colossal statue of an American Indian warrior.

The narrative portion here seems excised from the material that came before. Logan’s quest is lost for a bit and it becomes a sequence of unrelated action scenes, Logan and Jess showing up at some abandoned spot, meeting the locals, and getting into a battle. And sadly these action scenes are pretty dumb, not to mention goofy, particularly one where they meet a teenage gang that could’ve come straight out of Doomsday Warrior, their 16 year-old Attila the Hun giving Logan a trio of gorgeous women in exchange for a night with Jessica. (Humorously enough, while Logan partakes of the favor, Jessica keeps the gang leader at bay.)

Along the way Logan and Jessica are followed by Francis, Logan’s former Sandman colleague. Jessica and Logan meanwhile develop the expected feelings for one another, but the authors don’t have anything happen between them, despite their vows of love for each other late in the game. The romance element is just as harried and dashed off as the action.

In the ruins of Washington, DC Logan meets Ballard, legendary leader of the Runners, an actual “old” man at 42. But unlike in the film he’s not some wizened sage, and instead tries to kill Logan, just for being a Sandman. Another escape, more unrelated action stuff, and Logan and Jessica end up in the Florida Keys, where they discover that “Sanctuary” is a space station orbiting around Mars, and Francis is really Ballard (who poses in various Cities to monitor potential Sanctuary candidates), and Logan and Jessica hop on board the rocket and it takes off. The end.

So then, none of the payoff stuff from the film is here – no triumphant return to the City, no confrontation with the diseased computer which runs the place. Like I wrote above, the film is just so much better thought out and entertaining, and publisher Bantam doesn’t help out the authors by inserting 16 pages of photos from the film in glorious color into the book; one can’t help but compare these shots – which detail incidents that don’t even occur in the novel – to the book itself, and find the book lacking.

William Nolan penned the sequel by himself: Logan’s World, which not-so-coincidentally was published in 1976, the year the film came out. He followed this up with Logan’s Search in 1980. During a trip to a local used bookstore the other day I picked up all three novels for a pittance; I’ve read that Logan’s World in particular is in a men's adventure novel vein, so I’m looking forward to it.

If you'd like to see a similar concept given much better treatment, be sure to check out Peter Breggin's After The Good War.

Flicker

Flicker, by Theodore Roszak
April, 1993 Bantam Books

This hefty book was first published in hardcover in 1991, then brought out in an "expanded" trade paperback edition in 2006, featuring a new appendix and fragments of material cut from the original version. But regardless this original print (shown here in its mass market paperback incarnation) is long enough, and will already be a mostly-trying read for the average reader, even if like me you're fascinated by Hollywood's golden era of the 1930s and '40s.

Film critic Jonathan Gates narrates the tale, which spans the late 1950s through the late 1970s. Gates is the foremost authority on once-forgotten filmmaker Max Castle, who left his native Germany in the age of the silents to make films in Hollywood. After a notorious, overbudgeted flop, Castle was from thence on relegated to quickies or horror films, in particular churning out stuff for Universal. He progressed through the talkie era on through the '30s, finding opportunity to instill his own art into the schlock he was forced to film. Finally in the pre-WWII years he was announced dead, his ship destroyed while he was on a European voyage to acquire funds to produce a film of his own.

Gates relates for us how he came to discover Castle's work, and this provides the meat of the tale. A college student in late '50s California, Gates begins going to The Classic, a dank little theater run by Clare Swan (ie Pauline Kael), an opinionated critic who provides copious notes for each film shown on the Classic's small screen. Here Gates encounters the nascent French film movement, all the cinema verite so popular at the time. By chance Clare gets hold of a beaten old vampire flick, an old Universal film none of them can place. This turns out to be one of Castle's many forgotten films, and is Gates's introduction to the man and his story. Clare reacts negatively and leaves all of the Castle research to Gates, who she nevertheless continues to tutor in her own private little way.

Clare has taken a shine to Gates and has made her his latest consort/pupil. After instilling her harsh opinions on practically every film ever made, Clare takes Gates to the next level and continues to teach him while they're having sex. Seriously, she will blab on and on about Sergei Eisenstein or whoever while they're making the beast with two backs. I would say this is the very definition of a bore, but regardless Gates (and therefore Roszak, his creator) wants us to believe this is a wonderful way to soak up all sorts of esoteric film lore. (But then if film classes were actually taught this way, I probably would've gone to UCLA.)

The reader must be prepared to wade through thick paragraphs of in-depth film chatter, as Gates meets one industry person after another. I have never had any love for the cinema verite of the '50s and '60s, so this stuff was hard going for me, as Gates will indulge in endless chatter with students and whatnot. Finally though he gets to the more interesting material of Castle; the best parts of the novel are when Gates details many of Castle's classic horror pictures, all of which sound pretty great. (One of them, Zombie Doctor, sounds supiciously like the real movie Island of Lost Souls -- out now on Blu Ray, by the way.)

In some ways these early parts of Flicker are fascinating because they show how simpler life is for the classic film fan, these days. Gates and his friends must search high and low for prints of the films they want to see, usually coming up with nothing but beaten 16mm chain prints that are barely watchable. Meanwhile today one can find pretty much anything on DVD -- and if it hasn't been officially released, there's always the gray market of DVDRs.

Gates finds that he and other viewers often react with horror to otherwise-innocuous scenes in Castle's work. For example Clare, who shows a particular revulsion, though she can never understand why. Gates discovers why with the appearance of the awesomely-named Zip Lipsky, a midget curmudgeon who worked as cameraman on most of Castle's films. Lipsky has managed to hang onto "uncut prints" of all of Castle's released films; Gates begins visiting the man regularly to watch them. During these showings Lipsky relates the story of Castle, how he had so much struggle in Hollywood and how he always inserted another level into his films. Producing a "Sallyrand," a "stripper" Castle named after the actual stripper Sally Rand, Lipsky shows Gates how if you look through the viewer you can see another film buried within the shadows of the main film. Gates sees grisly imagery of decaying flesh and even pornographic moments which never would've gotten past a censor, then or now.

The Sallyrand allows a viewer to plainly see this hidden footage, but to the naked eye it's invisible. However the viewer still unconsciously sees it, and this explains the feelings of revulsion and etc which set in upon viewers of Castle's work. Subconsciously they are seeing a spectrum of revulsion, only they don't realize so on the conscious level. The question remains, of course: why the hell was Castle going to such trouble?

Gates is determined to find out. After Lipsky's passing (which is unfortunate, as he's the only memorable character in the novel), Gates determines to meet up with others who worked with Castle. This leads him eventually to Orson Welles himself -- Gates learns that Welles, when he came to Hollywood with a full ticket in '39, personally sought out Castle, as he was such an admirer. The two men devised the idea to film Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (something Welles himself did in reality), and Castle and Lipsky filmed a lot of jungle footage before the project was dropped. Welles, regaling Gates and the reader for pages and pages in Clare's NYC apartment (she's since gotten famous as a newspaper film critic), goes further to mention that Castle also provided a bit of assistance on Citizen Kane, and that he even worked with John Ford on The Maltese Falcon.

On Gates goes, searching for the truth behind Castle's esoteric work. He goes to Holland, where he meets the still-ravishing Olga Tell, Castle's girlfriend in the '30s; it was her nude form cavorting in the "hidden layer" of many of Castle's films. Roszak continues the "teaching via sex" bit as Olga, despite her vast age difference with Gates, teaches him a bit of New Agery she learned from Castle while they engage in bouts of sexual congress. Here the novel begins its gradual freefall, as Gates eventually learns that Castle's religion, which he hid in his films but still promoted subconsciously, was that of the Cathars.

Early editions of Flicker compared the novel to The Name of the Rose; no surprise that the newer edition compares it to The Da Vinci Code. For that's exactly what it resembles, only of course it's a hell of a lot more literary. As the novel winds into its third half it becomes more focused on esoteric religions and less on film, which isn't a bad thing; it's just that it sways off into fantasy, as Gates finds himself a target of a shadowy religious sect which runs a global chain of orphanages. He visits one of them -- Castle, you see, was raised in such an orphanage -- to find that the children are being taught how to edit film. The entire aim of the orphanages is to teach children how to work in film and thereby promote their cause.

Castle disappears from the novel for large sections as Gates becomes fascinated with a teenaged albino who makes grindhouse gore films on dime budgets; the kid also was raised in one of these orphanages and is himself an admirer of Castle. Finally all of it spirals out of control as Gates discovers he is in more trouble than he could've imagined, eventually finding himself a prisoner on an island off Malta; a fully-staffed island, as it were, with Gates treated like a guest. It's all just, I don't know, goofy. And you'll never guess who Gates's fellow prisoner is on this island. (Actually, you will guess; you'll see it coming miles away.)

By turns enthralling and boring, Flicker is nevertheless an interesting "other side" of Hollywood history. It is a bit annoying that Max Castle is presented as such an influential film personality (who nonetheless went forgotten), with a hand in pretty much any classic film you could name, which seems to me to take a bit from the actual filmmakers themselves. (I'm sure Ford wouldn't have taken kindly to the novel, let alone Welles.) The Cathar stuff seems a lame and unnecessary draw; easy to say in this post-Da Vinci Code era, but there could've been a more compelling "truth" behind Castle's hidden layers of film than the usual "forbidden religions" angle of Foucault's Pendulum and others.

The Dolly, Dolly Spy

The Dolly, Dolly Spy by Adam Diment

July, 1968 Bantam Books

(Original UK publication October, 1967)

I'm surprised I've only now discovered the work of Adam Diment, who, starting in the late '60s, published four novels about the exploits of a dopesmoking sort of anti-007, Philip McAlpine. Diment proved to be similar to his protagonist, and the press hyped him accordingly -- a 24 year-old British youth who listened to rock, smoked dope, and surrounded himself with a bevy of miniskirted London "birds." Indeed, the media coverage made Diment seem more outlandish than his hash-loving secret agent of a protagonist.

As a guy who spent a semester of college in Holland, I can assure you that dope and physical violence are an impossible combination -- and it's something Diment too knows, as his hero Philip McAlpine only relaxes with a bit of hash here and there in The Dolly, Dolly Spy, the first of the four novels. As usual, the media and the back-cover blurbs oversell McAlpine's drug life; the novel is more of a parody of the spy genre, with an overly-arch narrator who does his best to kill all of the escapism one would expect of a James Bond-type of world. The idea here is moreso of a Swinging London-type who is manipulated into the world of international espionage, rather than a drug-fueled satire on the genre, a la Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius material.

The Dolly, Dolly Spy is more of an introduction to the series than a straight-up novel. It concerns itself mostly with how McAlpine is recruited into this world. Actually he's instead blackmailed into the world -- during a raid on his place a brick of newly-bought hashish is discovered. The person who called the raid and now holds the hash is Rupert Quine, an overbearing gargoyle of a man who claims to head up CI-6, a subset of British Intelligence. Quine offers McAlpine a choice: either go to prison for the hash or work for CI-6.

The job, as Quine presents it, is too simple. McAlpine is to apply for a job with International Charter, Inc, a non-aligned sort of FedEx which acts as courier for all the world's Intelligence agencies and even the Mafia. They fly agents, documents, prisoners, the works, and all under the radar. Quine wants McAlpine to answer an innocuous ad in the newspaper to become a pilot for a small firm: the firm is International Charter, and Quine is certain that McAlpine, with his pilot's license, his devil-may-care attitude, and his general insubordinance will be a perfect fit for the role. At length McAlpine complies and, after a lenghty series of interviews -- all of which are relayed for us -- he is offered the position.

After some intensive pilot training in Texas, McAlpine is sent to a remote island named Dathos, off the coast of Greece. Here he flies various missions for International Charter, his commander a former Nazi Luftwaffe ace. McAlpine bides his time, occasionally going for "vacations" where he relays what he's learned to various CI-6 women who visit, posing as cousins or other relations (McAlpine is sure to inform us that these women are always unattractive and they always want to sleep with him -- he bets it's yet another twist of the knife courtesy Rupert Quine). But eventually he gets so used to his now-mundane life that McAlpine's girlfriend comes to stay with him in Dathos for some fun in the sun, Dylan on the turntable, and plenty of hash.

Soon Quine re-enters and McAlpine discovers why he's been infiltrated into International Charter: a mission comes up in which McAlpine is tasked with picking up three men and flying them to another destination. It develops that the leader of these men is Detmann, a former Nazi honcho who is described as "The Angel of Death." Quine orders McAlpine to pick up Detmann but instead deliver him to Quine's men rather than the designated drop-off point. After a US agent tries to keep McAlpine from taking the job, he knows he's lucked out: all he must do is sequester this Detmann somewhere and then make his demands to Quine -- he'll be rich and he'll be free.

The novel saves its action for the final half. At 154 pages, The Dolly, Dolly Spy is a quick read, but it's hampered by the narration. In short, McAlpine comes off as a total pisshead, bitching about things that have no bearing on the narrative at hand. Seriously, long sections of this novel are given over to digressions -- endless ones at that. (No doubt courtesy the dope Diment himself was smoking.) The climax however is appropriately thrilling, with McAlpine squaring off against Detmann, who comes off as a true James Bond-type villain. Anyway, the climax is thrilling if too short: Diment rushes through it and doesn't fully play out the potentials.

I've got the next three volumes and they appear to be more of the "psychedelic spy" sort of thing I expected. As for Adam Diment, these were the only four novels he published and they've gained a cult following; word is the man himself dropped out of the publishing world after 1971's Think Inc and never looked back.

The Lovomaniacs

The Lovomaniacs, by Rona Barrett

August, 1973 Bantam Books

Okay, I really did judge this book by it's cover -- I mean, look at it! The cover of this mass market paperback taps right into the early '70s occult revivalism, complete with naked chick worshipfully sitting before an astrology chart. It's a cover NEL Books would've been proud of. (High praise indeed.) Even the original hardcover printing from 1972 retained this theme, featuring a drawing of a nude woman kneeling with arms upraised. So it all had me hoping for something like "Harold Robbins meets Kenneth Anger." Sadly, it's nowhere close...hell, it's not even close to Harold Robbins.

I don't get much enjoyment bringing these forgotten books to light and then bashing them, but sometimes the job must be done. Rona Barrett is mostly forgotten today (I only discovered her via this book, which itself is forgotten), but at one time she was quite famous. One of the original "gossip queens" who it seems godmothered our current "celebrity worship" culture of Entertainment Tonight, Inside Edition...hell, even the regular news is nothing but celebrity gossip these days. Barrett was one of the first of these types of TV hosts, also publishing a monthly magazine all about celeb gossip. She then branched out with her first (and I think only) novel, The Lovomaniacs, which of course was duly hyped as a roman a clef from a woman who knew "the true story" of what went on behind the scenes.

Only, Barrett forgot to give the novel any sort of drama or excitement or depth. It's all as bland as bread, with a storyline that would be considered too dull for a TV movie, let alone the "torrid blockbuster" of the cover blurb. This is one of those novels where you read over a quarter of it and wonder why the hell you're wasting your time...but you perservere. But when you're over halfway through and you're still wondering, then you know you're in trouble. Especially when the novel runs to nearly 500 pages.

One thing the novel has going for it is that Barrett tells the tale in an unusual style: rather than a basic third-person narrative, she instead hops from the minds of one character to another, getting us right into their heads. This almost gives the novel the feel of an oral biography, sort of what James Robert Baker did in his 1989 opus Boy Wonder (to this day the greatest work of trash fiction I've ever read, and a novel I need to re-read again and review here). But here's the big problem: each and every one of the characters in The Lovomaniacs sounds exactly the same. All of the characters have the exact same Mommy or Daddy-issues; all of them have the exact same fears and hopes and opinions.

There's no tonal variety as we hop from the thoughts of Johnny Valentine, a Frank Sinatra-type singer-cum-movie mogul, to the thoughts of Irving Dahlberg, Johnny's nemesis and himself an old- school movie mogul. The sons of these two men, Buddy Valentine (a wanna-be singer with a talent for flying airplanes and engineering studio recordings) and Jack Dahlberg (the presumed new president of his dad's movie studio, but a little dweeb consumed with self doubt), also sound identical. Then there's David Strauss, by far the most wearying narrator in the book...a washed-up drunk of an actor with homosexual tendencies who spends his sections whining about his life. You'll learn to hate him quick.

The two female characters, thankfully, are a bit better. First there's Sandy Hallowell, an astrology-practicing stewardess (I assume that's supposed to be her on the cover) who falls in love with Buddy Valentine and is really the only likeable character in the novel. And second there's Dolly Diamond, a rail-thin singing sensation who carries on an affair with Johnny Valentine. Dolly's scenes are the only in the novel that come close to what we expect from trash fiction, as she tokes dope, performs autosex with "The Lover" (aka her vibrator), and drops acid with her in-crowd friends. If there'd been more of Dolly and her escapades, the novel might've been more enjoyable. As it is, though, this is just a tiresome trawl in banality.

The dramatic thrust is nonexistent, but here's the plot in a nutshell: Johnny Valentine wants to own a movie studio and he's currently locked in a deal with Irving Dahlberg, who himself wants to make an old-time epic about WWII, and tasks his son with getting it together. Jack Dahlberg however wants the studio to make big budget X-rated films (hey, it was the '70s). There's a lot of scheming between all parties concerned, and Buddy Valentine, the perpetual loser, comes up with a harebrained scheme to get his mom and dad back together. But it's all so boringly presented.

One of the main rules of fiction is "show, don't tell," but Barrett "tells" us in each and every case. The opening of the novel is a data-dump of hellish proportions, as each character tells us right off the bat their history, their thoughts, what they hope to do. And this follows throughout the novel -- so many interminable scenes of characters telling us their plans. The novel is so "tell"-crazy that even when Buddy and Sandy fall in love, their romance is glossed over; we get the sequence where they spend time together on Christmas Day...but then in their next sections they're suddenly in love, reminiscing about their new sex life, etc. Why couldn't we have seen it happen? But this is the problem throughout The Lovomaniacs. The old saw is that nonfiction writers can't do fiction, and I have to say that Barrett proves the theory true here. It's like we're reading a overlong gossip column throughout, but one that's not very enticing or torrid.

The astrological basis promised by the cover is delivered mostly through Sandy Hallowell, who knows from her charts that she'll die before 30 on, possibly, an overseas flight. Also the novel itself is relayed in astrological "houses" rather than chapters -- ie "The First House," "The Second House," and so on that the characters experience, complete with bolded "predictions" courtesy Ms. Barrett on the outcome each character will face. In a preface and postcript, Barret, speaking as herself, further informs us how these characters are all caught up in the same astrological tapestry. The way she handles this throughout is incredibly contrived. Each section begins and ends with a hyphenated sentence, the character's thoughts beginning and ending en media res, with the next character picking up the thread; each of course thinking about something different but using the same word or phrase as the previous character. This goes on throughout this endless novel and it gets to be laughable fast.

Finally, for a "sensational blockbuster" about the jetsetting Hollywood elite, The Lovomaniacs is quite pedestrian. No glamorous parties or lavish villas or any of the other expected tropes of the trash fiction genre. Instead pretty much everything takes place in nondescript houses or hotel rooms, with characters sitting around and talking to one another. So much for the escapism one would expect from a novel like this. Even the mandatory sex scenes are tepid, again killed by Barrett's "tell, don't show" style -- we never read anything as it happens; we only get a character's thoughts after the acts have occurred.

The learning here I guess is that sometimes you really shouldn't judge a book by its cover. It's a shame, though. Makes me want to write my own novel based on that cover. "Harold Robbins meets Kenneth Anger"...

A note on the title: The book is titled The Lovomaniacs, no hyphen. However it's displayed as "The Lovo-Maniacs" on the cover, which means that online booksellers have the novel listed under either title. I've also seen it listed as "The Love Maniacs" by one seller who totally didn't get it.

The Kung Fu Avengers, by Michael Minick

The Kung Fu Avengers, by Michael Minick

1975, Bantam Books

(Original UK printing, 1973)

I discovered this obscure novel by a total fluke, researching the Bruce Li movie Kung Fu Avengers (aka Soul Brothers of Kung Fu). This Michael Minick novel came up in a search result and I instantly bought it, due to my lifelong obsession with what I've coined "Bell Bottom Fury," aka '70s-tastic kung fu thrills.

Ben and Jade are blonde-haired causcasian youths raised in a Buddhist temple in China after the death of their missionary parents. Despite their alien looks the siblings are treated as normal members of the Silver Forest temple, and are trained in the sect's powerful kung fu style. But when an attempt to escape Communist China, to teach "The Way," results in a fatal battle with Chinese soldiers, Ben and Jade find themselves uprooted and returned to their "true" home in New York City.

Here the novel jumps ahead a few years to 1975, where Ben and Jade have settled into this new life. Trouble looms again when their friend, a sort of Martin Luther King for Asian Americans, is murdered by the Black Phoenix tong. The siblings again find themselves in the thick of it, fighting off wave after wave of kung fu-fighting thugs, eventually working for the CIA to take out the leader of the Black Phoenix. (This finale it must be noted is at odds with the rest of the book, with Ben and Jade outfitted with a variety of gadgets, including rocket packs!)

My main problem with this novel is how wordy it is. It's not so much an action-adventure as it's a lecture on kung fu philosophy. The novel also lacks many thrills. Minick jumps to and fro in the narrative, even going back to the 1940s after the escape-from-China opening, and he has a habit of over-explaining everything. Not only that but each character speaks in the most verbose fashion possible; this is one of those novels where no one uses contractions and speak in tones so lofty even Roy Thomas would be embarrassed. And the fights are repetitive to the point of monotony.

I also don't understand who this novel was for. What concerns me most is something printed on the flyleaf -- basically, the age ranges this book is acceptable for. In other words, Kung Fu Avengers is a junior reader's novel, despite the back cover's blurb of drugs and death and other sordid details. Apparently the novel was published by Corgi's children line in the UK! This is not mentioned anywhere in the Bantam edition, which actually makes Kung Fu Avengers appear like some martial arts-centric men's adventure novel.

But then when one considers how there's no cursing in the novel, no overt violence (indeed, Ben and Jade go out of their way to merely knock their opponents unconscious), and absolutely zero sex (other than a brief mention of the "sordid" things the Black Phoenix leader has his slave-girls perform with one another for his entertainment), then it all clicks. It's strange, because according to the author bio Minick was an editor and writer for True Action and other men's adventure magazines, so one would expect the novel to be a bit more lurid.

Believe it or not, I'd actually recommend Joseph Rosenberger's kung fu-fighting Mace series over this.

Confessions Of A Hope Fiend

Confessions Of A Hope Fiend, by Timothy Leary

1973, Bantam Books

Here's a book that went through a lot of byzantine channels on its path to publication, a book Timothy Leary received an advance of $250,000 for (though apparently he didn't receive much of the money), a book that went straight to mass market paperback to get to as many people as quickly as possible. A book that shortly thereafter went out of print and has remained so since its publication in 1972.

This book was co-written by Brian Barritt. A fellow psychedelic traveler and Leary's pal in the early seventies, Barritt published his own bio decades later, 1996's "Road Of Ecstasy" (only published in the UK and mega rare and expensive these days). He's not credited anywhere in "Hope Fiend" (though of course he's featured as a character in the book itself), but parts of this book are so similar to the writing in "Ecstasy" that I asked Barritt via email if he had in fact ghostwritten a lot of "Hope Fiend." He kindly responded that he had.

But I wonder how much so. The thing is, this book is very well-written. It's almost too artsy for its own good. Parts of it seem cribbed from William Burroughs, other parts from James Joyce. Oft times the narrative breaks out into flight-of-fancy literary turns of phrase that I assume are meant to convey the rush of ideas awarded by LSD, and there are word tricks straight out of Joyce (ie "Eye sprang to the window."). According to Barritt's book (and "Hope Fiend" itself), Leary's early drafts of this book (all now lost, according to Barritt) featured even more of the Joycean puns, but I'm convinced the Burroughsian writing is Barritt.

Barritt's influence (or just Barritt himself, ghostwriting) can also be seen in the metaphysical/magickal connotations. This first shows itself in Leary's references to his wife Rosemary Woodruff. Never once does Leary refer to her by name. Instead, she is always mentioned as "She" or "Her," with the first letter capitalized. The same way a mystic would refer to the Goddess - the same way Barritt refers to her (uh, I mean "Her") in "Road Of Ecstasy."

Detailing the years 1970 to 1971, the book opens with Leary jailed in a minimum-security prison in California, busted for possession of a minor amount of marijuana (which according to lore actually belonged to his then-wife, Rosemary, though Leary doesn't state this in the book). He bides his time, meeting his fellow prisoners, one of whom in a literary wink is named Burroughs. Leary skews reality by introducing Barritt into the narrative early, even though the two really didn't meet him until Leary had escaped prison and fled to Algeria. But books need to be more fantastic than bare reality (right?), so Barritt here shows up while Leary's in prison, helping Leary plan his escape and giving him a copy of his manuscript "Whisper." Only...it's not really Barritt! No, in a weird "surprise twist" that's never explained, this Barritt turns out to be an imposter, an albeit well-wishing stranger who just wants to help Leary escape for the kicks.

Leary was really escaped by the Weathermen, which he acknowledges in the book, but the money for the escape was provided by the LSD-as-sacrament group The Brotherhood of Love, something Leary does not acknowledge in the book. Anyway, the book presents the escape as it supposedly happened, Leary climbing the high fence during a minor break in security - all shortly before his fiftieth birthday, an admirable feat in itself. From there he's whisked away incognito by a group of Weathermen, all of whom Leary rhapsodizes about in the most idealized "freedom fighters for the soul of America" style possible. He briefly meets Weathermen leader Bernadine Dohrn, another recipient of Leary's gobsmacked idolatry (he describes her like some raven-haired beauty from a Hollywood blockbuster...after consulting a photo of Dohrn I can't say I agree with the good doctor).

Under an assumed name and wearing a disguise, Leary flies to Algeria, where Eldridge Cleaver, co-ruler of the Black Panthers, awaits him in his kingdom. The idea is, Leary, with his counterculture clout and heavy support from the white kids in the colleges of America, will unite with Cleaver, with his streetwise power and heavy support from the black kids on the streets of America, together engendering a nationwide insurrection in the US, leading to a better tomorrow. Unfortunately (?), it didn't happen.

If a movie's ever made out of Leary's life, then this chunk of it, with Leary and his wife ensconced within the paranoid confines of Eldridge Cleaver's Black Panther palace, would make for excellent material. It wasn't so excellent for spineless Leary, though. No, he allowed the increasingly-sullen Cleaver to harass and eventually imprison him - Cleaver, a lifelong con, had trouble getting away from the "cops and robbers" game, and there in his Algerian kingdom, realizing he was the ruler and no longer the "robber," decided he'd need to play "cop." It was the only game he knew, and Leary's LSD methods had no effect on him; Cleaver disdained drugs. So as you can see, this was not the dream-team that would bring about a new, psychedelic era of peace and love.

But yeah, Leary was spineless. We read dumbstruck as Cleaver bullies Leary to no end, and Leary offers no resistance. He puts up with it, offering us the lame excuse that Cleaver's people were imprisoned by whites for 400 years, so why should Leary get upset about being confined to lockdown in his hotel room for 4 days? But it just builds and builds, Cleaver outright threatening Leary, telling him what to do and when to do it, even installing a female Black Panther in Leary's apartment to keep an eye on him. Meek Leary accepts it all. You can't help but wonder how that other acid guru of the sixties, Ken Kesey, would've reacted. I figure Kesey would've taken Cleaver to the floor with a chokehold, forcing LSD down the Panther king's throat.

The real Brian Barritt shows up, having driven to Algeria to meet Leary and get him to pen an introduction for his book "Whisper," written while Barritt was imprisoned in England for carrying drugs. This is something else Leary doesn't mention, having presented "Whisper" earlier in the narrative as an already-published book. A few others come by to visit the safeguarded Leary, among them a reporter who apparently sells out to Cleaver, blaming Leary and his wife for ruining Cleaver's trust. It all comes off as a rather dry and rote political thriller, only the Burroughsian drug-trips in the desert saving it from total boredom.

The book ends right when it gets interesting. Leary escaped from Cleaver to Switzerland, where he became involved with the German krautrock scene. This is yet another fascinating period in Leary's life, recording the album "Seven Up" with German rockers Ash Ra Tempel and Brian Barritt (who provided his own view of these days in his "Road Of Ecstasy"). At the same time Leary and Barritt became fascinated with Aleister Crowley, with Leary even thinking he was Crowley reincarnated. But Leary's narrative features none of this, save for the title, a witty combination of Crowley's "Diary of a Drug Fiend" and his posthumously-published bio "Confessions."

Regardless, "Hope Fiend" cuts off with the arrival of "Goldfinger" (who literally shows up in the last sentence of the book): a millionaire drug dealer/arms financier who got Leary the $250,000 payment for this book...though in exchange Goldfinger himself retained the rights to it (just check the copyright), as well as the rights to all future Leary publications.

It would be great to have a republication of "Hope Fiend," with an afterword detailing what happened to the major players. After his brief tenure with krautrock (and "Seven Up" is one of my favorite albums), Leary was caught by US Feds and imprisoned again, this time in solitary confinement. Upon release he was more of a Robert Anton Wilson-type than his former "Tune In" self, talking about outer space colonization rather than inner space exploration. Barritt supposedly went into a decade-long heroin binge which provoked a falling out between he and Leary that wasn't repaired until Leary was on his deathbed in 1996. And Cleaver had the strangest of all fates, from a Black Panther leader crying out for Communist revolution to a staunch Republican in his final years.

The truth is stranger, and all that...