John Eagle Expeditor #7: The Ice Goddess

John Eagle Expeditor #7: The Ice Goddess, by Paul Edwards
August, 1974  Pyramid Books

This volume of the Expeditor series marks the debut of Paul Eiden, the third author to serve under the “Paul Edwards” house name. Eiden’s writing is very similar to the other series authors (Manning Lee Stokes and Robert Lory), so it’s easy to see why series honcho Lyle Kenyon Engle gave him the gig. But man…Eiden takes an awesome and lurid plot and turns it into what is by far the most padded and boring installment yet.

What makes it so frustrating is that the last 50 or so pages of The Ice Goddess are so twisted and lurid. But to get there the reader must endure a snoozer of an opening 110 pages; this is the only book I know of where you could skip the first hundred pages and it wouldn’t make a difference. What makes it more sad is that the novel is only 172 pages long.

Anyway, this time John “Expeditor” Eagle is called in by his boss Merlin because Merlin’s people have detected something unusual going on in the Arctic…something about polar caps melting away, the possible eventual calamity that might ensue…something like that. Honestly, the threat here is so vague that you wonder why Eagle is even called in. There’s also the possibly-related detail that scientists are going missing; over the course of the past two years several top ones have just disappeared. (This is almost a retread of the inciting incident in #2: The Brain Scavengers.)

So Merlin sends his one-and-only Expeditor up into the Arctic on some vague wild goose chase…oh, and he puts Eagle in “the weasel,” a mega-expensive and mega-dangerous prototype snow-tank-vehicle sort of thing. Pages and pages ensue of Eagle driving the thing around; we’re endlessly reminded how dangerous it is, giving its inability to stop quickly on the ice and snow. Then Eagle spots a wayward Eskimo, being chased by a bear, and goes to help, destroying the weasel in the process.

Now Eagle is stuck with the Eskimo, who turns out to be a 14 year-old girl. She lives in an igloo with her husband, an 18 year-old with a bear-mauled leg. After dinner the husband offers his wife to Eagle, and Eagle accepts! My friends, you know it’s ‘70s pulp when the hero has sex with a 14 year-old girl. Eiden tries to play it up that the girl looks and acts much older than her years, and how Eagle has difficulty even thinking of her as being so young, but still…

That same night a bear attacks and Eagle kills it with an axe, but not after the husband has been killed. Now ensues like fifty pages where Eagle just sort of dicks around with the Eskimos, building igloos, fishing with the men, and living with the young widow! You could honestly cut out pages 40-96 because they ultimately have nothing at all to do with the story itself…just endless detail about life among the Eskimos.

Eventually Eagle comes upon an American-owned trading post not far from the Eskimo village, but even here Eiden spins wheels. I shit you not, there are endless pages in which Eagle just plays chess with the store owners! Have I mentioned that by this point a hundred pages have elapsed and Eagle hasn’t yet gotten into a single fight?

Anyway, after a full month Eagle is able to get back in touch with Merlin’s people, who send in an airplane to pick him up – cue more page-filling banality. Now, finally, around page 110 the novel begins. Eagle is given a one-man atomic-powered submarine (!) and sent into the Arctic Ocean, to research the area Merlin’s people have deemed suspicious. (Humorously, Eagle’s destruction of the expensive weasel – all to save some Eskimo’s life – goes unmentioned.)

Eiden fills up more pages as Eagle zooms around the freezing depths. Finally though he finds the culprit behind the shrinking Arctic crust – a city built beneath a dome of ice, a city filled with jumpsuit-wearing women who plot the destruction of all men! Now this is trash fiction gold, and it boggles my mind that Eiden took so damn long to get to it. But what’s even worse is that he rushes through it – Eagle scouts out the place in his chameleon suit, trying to figure out who these women are. How much better it would’ve been if Eagle had scouted the place early on, been captured or something, and then spent the entirety of the narrative here in this depraved place.

For it truly is depraved – dubbed the “Amazon Queendom” by its ruler, a gorgeous and statuesque blonde of Scandanavian descent named Julianna, the place is an all-female compound in which men are forbidden; those few men who are here have all been (willfully) castrated, or have had sex-change operations, or are gay.

Not that this stops our ruler from having fun; as Eagle watches from a closet, Julianna lounges on her massive bed with a few transsexuals and castrated men who take turns orally pleasing her, before she has full-on sex with a gay male (one of the few men here who hasn't had "the operation"), encouraging him with a bit of cocaine. Actually the coke flows freely throughout this scene, and it’s only after Eiden has described the proceedings in full that he has Eagle turn away in disgust!

It’s all so crazy, especially coming after so many, many pages of banality. This section is the most lurid yet in the Expeditor series, even moreso than anything in #5: Valley of Vultures. I guess the only thing missing in this one is the fact that Eagle himself, for once, doesn’t have sex while on the mission, even after running into a pretty kidnapped scientist named Irene, who helps him escape in exchange for her own freedom. (Eagle’s only bit of hanky-panky this time is before the mission, and interestingly enough it’s with his American Indian girlfriend Ruth, whom we’ve heard of before but never actually seen – and it turns out Eagle treats the poor girl like shit, screwing her, leaving her to cry when he says he “might not return” from this mission, then wondering about what “real woman” he’ll someday marry, and then screwing Ruth again once she’s stoped crying!)

But still, Eiden does little to build up this Amazon Queendom. He pours on the action at the end, with hordes of jumpsuit-clad women coming after Eagle with assault rifles. Eiden doesn’t get much into the violence factor, though Eagle takes out a bunch of these women, doling out clean kills with his ever-present dart gun. (And also, I have to admit being a bit unsettled with the image of our hero blowing away a bunch of women, but then again the guy did sleep with a 14 year-old earlier in the book, so what the hell.)

The expected confronation with Julianna is underwhelming; whereas the other two series authors likely would have played up some sort of lurid relationship between Eagle and the “Ice Goddess,” Eiden instead merely has the woman threaten Eagle and run away from him. I mean, the potential was there, dammit…that lurid scene with Julianna and her consorts proves she was looking for a “real man,” and per Eagle’s past exploits we know he has no problems with getting busy while on a mission.

But then, the entirety of The Ice Goddess is really just missed opportunity after missed opportunity. Even the ending is stupid; after blowing up the Queendom (giving the women a chance to escape beforehand), Eagle gets in a fight with a few of Julianna’s (male) martial arts champions, kills them, and then tells Julianna that her empire is over. Instead of fighting she just shrugs and blows herself up with her handy grenade! Eagle takes off with Irene in his one-man sub and that’s it.

Eiden’s next contribution, #9: The Deadly Cyborgs, sounds like another pulpy plot, something about android Yetis(!), so let’s hope in that one he gets a better grip on how to write a men’s adventure novel. As it is, the endless padding and inessential detail really overwhelmed the lurid quotient of The Ice Goddess, turning what should’ve been a phenomenal installment into a total bore.

John Eagle Expeditor #6: The Glyphs of Gold

John Eagle Expeditor #6: The Glyphs of Gold, by Paul Edwards
February, 1974 Pyramid Books

Robert Lory returns as "Paul Edwards" for another installment of the Expeditor series, and, like Lory's previous two offerings, The Glyphs of Gold is a bit too padded, a bit too rushed, a bit too unfinished. But then, practically anything would pale in comparison to the previous volume in the series, Valley of Vultures, by Manning Lee Stokes.

The Glyphs of Gold also displays this series' lack of continuity. In that previous volume, our hero John Eagle traveled to South America where he took on neo-Nazis and also "jungle savages." In this installment Eagle does the same thing -- heading into uncharted regions of Mexico to find a lost Mayan city filled with gold, going up against Nazis and "jungle savages"...and for some inexplicable reason it never occurs to Eagle that it's all so similar to his previous mission.

But then, that's one of the drawbacks of having more than one author handle a series. Really though, the Expeditor lacks much continuity at all. That's not to say I don't enjoy the series, though. As I've said before, this is one of my favorites. It really captures a "pulp for the '70s" feel, with Eagle the alpha male of alpha males, his high-tech costume and gadgetry putting him in a sort of superheroic realm. And, as I've also mentioned before, the Expeditor recaptures the macho/misogynist feel of the old sweat mags of the '50s and '60s, with Eagle flung about to exotic locales around the world while conquering anything that stands in his way.

The narrative starts off a bit involved, but as it plays out The Glyphs of Gold is the simplest offering yet. It develops that three centuries ago a band of Mayan priests and warriors escaped with a cache of gold, taking it into the jungle to hide it from the invading Spaniards. Over the years a legend has developed, that there's a "lost city" somewhere in the Mexican jungles, a lost city teeming with all of that gold. The Tikal Zero codex, left behind by some anonymous Mayan scribe, serves up vague clues on where the city might be. A German scholar believes he has cracked the code...but then he is captured and murdered by his insane (and Nazi) brother, a callous fellow given to grandiose speeches of pristine grammar who travels about with an electric cane and a hunchbacked henchman.

A small circle of Mayan scholars were also on the path to cracking the code, and one by one each of them are turning up dead, murdered by the Nazi. Eventually the story makes its way to Merlin, wheelchair-bound boss of John Eagle. Merlin has a meeting with the Secretary of State; if there is a city of gold in Mexico, and if the Chinese or Russians are also attempting to locate the place, then it would behoove the US to send someone in there, find the gold, and get it out before some enemy power could take it. (Of course, that the gold doesn't even belong to the US is brought up -- by Eagle, of course -- but Merlin brushes it off.)

All of this is setup, and soon enough Eagle is on the scene, posing as a scholar in a crime-ridden hovel of a city in Mexico. Nevertheless he manages to meet a gorgeous gal: Juanita, raven-haired daughter of another of the murdered scholars. It's another of the goofy joys of this genre that Juanita, prompty after meeting Eagle, lets him know that she plans to have sex with him. What makes it even more goofy -- and again displays the chaveunist tone of this series -- is that Eagle treats Juanita like shit for the rest of the book...and she loves it, still coming to his bed every night on the trail as they make their way into the jungle.

And really, that's the brunt of the story. Eagle, safe and cozy in his bullet and weather-proof chameleon suit, travels through the jungle with a local guide and Juanita, who has forced her way into Eagle's party due to her connections with the local police. Along the way they encounter bandits and even a Russian party, one which Eagle quickly disposes of. The Glyphs of Gold follows its predecessor in another way: Eagle makes little use of that chameleon suit and his fancy gadgetry, coming off like a regular men's adventure protagonist rather than the super hero-esque character he was in the first installments.

Once they arrive in the lost city, Lory sort of drops the narrative ball. All along our impression has been that Eagle is hurrying to find the lost city before the murderous German and his hunchback can get there, but once Eagle arrives in the city the story instead becomes a drawn-out deal where Eagle is challenged by the war chief. Why? Because the war chief has the instant hots for Juanita, and so challenges Eagle for "his woman." Again the series displays its leanings as Juanita doesn't have a single line of dialog throughout this sequence, as if her opinion on the situation (or its outcome!) doesn't matter. Which of course it doesn't.

So we have this long fight scene where a nude Eagle must balance himself on a narrow platform, suspended high above sharpened stakes, as he battles against a well-trained foe who basically grew up doing this sort of crap. I kept wondering if the Nazi and his hunchback had taken a wrong turn or something. Even the finale, when it finally arrives, sees a still-nude Eagle fighting against the hunchback as he tries to climb up a pyramid to get Eagle. In other words, the climax too lacks the thrill of its predecessors.

As far as the writing itself goes, Lory holds true to the Expeditor style, in that it can be a little too ponderous and fussy at times, at least as far as the genre is concerned. There is the occasional tendency to over-explain things and to go on for too long, sort of like I do in these reviews. And yet, this "lofty" tone serves to elevate the series in a way, and definitely makes it stand out.  It's an unusual mixture of literature and pulp. I've also found that, while it might seem to drag at timest, I find myself pulled into the narrative moreso than in the other men's adventure novels I've read.

All told, this was an underwhelming installment, with little of the lurid or "cool" factor of previous books. About the only memorable thing was the consistent and frequent usage of the "male mystique" which has been central to the series since the first volume.  I'm looking forward to the next installment, though, which features the debut of Paul Eiden, third and final of the three "Paul Edwards."

John Eagle Expeditor #5: Valley of Vultures

John Eagle Expeditor #5: Valley of Vultures, by Paul Edwards
December, 1973 Pyramid Books

Author Manning Lee Stokes returns to the Expeditor series with what is by far the best volume yet. Stokes's previous volumes came off as a bit too padded, wheel-spinning until the trademark finale where hero John Eagle would don his fancy chameleon suit and, armed with his dart gun, would launch an assault on some enemy fortress.

Stokes here dispenses with the repetitive nature of the previous four volumes of the series and turns in an incredibly lurid tale about a former Nazi concentration camp doctor who now runs a place in Ecuador where he hacks off the testicles of "jungle Indians" and surgically transfers them onto the bodies of rich old men! And there's more lurid stuff besides...lesbian porno movies that are filmed while John Eagle watches, a nymphomaniac German lady who "services" Eagle moments after meeting him and thereafter wants him all of the time, flashbacks to bizarre concentration camp sex experiments, even an Israeli secret agent who hides a metal tube in a certain part of her anatomy, and needs Eagle's assistance to get it out!

The only thing missing from Valley of Vultures is the expected tropes of the series: John Eagle wears his chameleon suit for only a page or two toward the very end of the novel and then buries it, and he doesn't even fire his dart gun once. Plus he has none of the fancy gimmicry of previous volumes; no exploding shoes, explosive arrows, mini-bike, anything. Indeed Eagle goes on this mission completely unarmed, and so must survive solely with his hands, feet, and wits.

Eagle's boss is Merlin, wheelchair-bound codger who lives in a high-tech fortress built into a Hawaii island. Merlin has a "double" who poses as him, living under Merlin's real name in Scotland. The double receives a sales-pitch from a clinic on a remote island in Ecuador which promises to give the old man new balls, literally. Merlin expects it's a joke but strange reports are coming out of Ecuador, including the deaths of various Israeli agents. Merlin also suspects that it has something to do with oil, as Merlin -- via his double -- owns a large portion of Ecuadorian oil interests. In other words, he figures this company is playing on the lustful minds of rich old men, offering them a chance to be young again but in reality luring them down to Ecuador so they can get control of them.

Merlin also knows that many Nazis escaped to Ecuador after the war, and he suspects their involvement in the scheme. Stokes here reveals a bit of a left-wing slant, which is unusual given the genre. While mulling over the increasing fascism of the world (with even a veiled dig at Nixon), Merlin delivers the following comment, which is especially ironic when you consider US foreign policy over this past decade:

There is little we can do about it in the large scale -- we are hoist by our own petard of democracy and can hardly send in an expeditionary force to enforce democracy on those who do not want it.

Ha! Safe to say, Merlin wouldn't have gotten much consulting work from the Dubya Bush administration.

Merlin sends in John Eagle, who appears very early in the tale, again a departure from previous volumes, where he didn't show up until midway through. He heads to Ecuador, posing as the young assistant of Merlin's double. Eagle decides to play his role as a smart-ass cynic, and he doesn't fail to piss off the Germans who run the place. (But as stated, he also succeeds in turning on the nymphomaniac, and how.) The place is run by the creepy Doctor Six, an old lecher who we learn was once a concentration camp doctor. Six's testicle-replacement operation actually works, and Eagle meets a wealthy old former Senator who is the only patient currently at the clinic; the man's undergone the surgery and can't wait to try out the improved equipment, so to speak.

A third of Valley of Vultures plays out more like a lurid and trashy novel, with hardly any action, yet it's still pretty engrossing. Stokes is a fine writer, too, never once POV-jumping and doling out a host of ten-dollar words. He has a great ability to set a scene and delivers several taut sequences, in particular when Eagle learns that Merlin's double has actually died (of natural causes), and so now Eagle must escape the island.

This whole sequence is the best in the novel, starting off with Eagle getting in a mortal-combat boxing match with a former Hitler Youth commander, later slitting the throat of another German, then getting intel from the female Israeli agent (who is posing as a whore on the island -- kept there by the staff to film movies to test the new equipment of patients before they engage in full-on sex), then watching as a porno is filmed, before finally making his escape! Certainly an eventful day in the life of John Eagle.

What's strange is, the last quarter of the novel seems to come from a different manuscript. Returning to headquarters in Hawaii, Eagle delivers the intel he received from the Israeli agent; Merlin reads it and it appears that Hitler has a son, one who now lives in a small German-only village in the jungles of Ecuador. Eagle is sent back to Ecuador, his assignment to assisnate Hitler's son. Doctor Six disappears, despite being set up as the villain of the piece -- in fact we learn of his death only later in the book. Now the novel appropriates the adventure-writing feel of previous novels, with lots and lots of jungle description and Eagle living off the land.

What's even stranger is that Eagle drops into the jungle with all of his equipment, including his bullet-proof chameleon suit, but quickly disposes of it. For some reason I didn't quite get, Eagle instead treks through a few hundred miles of jungle while posing as one of the natives. Why he couldn't just keep his suit and gadgets is beyond me; I suspect though it had more to do with filling pages (as with previous novels, Valley of Vultures is around 230 pages, well over the men's adventure norm).

During his jungle trek Eagle of course runs into more native Indians, as well as a pretty female Indian who latches onto him. This character, Chikka, is actually pretty fun in that she speaks in a patois of jive-talking English. But all things considered, this last quarter of the novel just seems like more of the same stuff we read in previous Expeditor novels from Stokes. It's to his credit then that he ends the novel with a literal bang, Eagle finally arriving at the German village, watching it from afar with a sniper rifle, and only seeing Hitler's son in the final two pages of the book.

For the record, this series is one of my favorites, despite its occasionally repetitive nature. Also as I've mentioned before, the Expeditor series is quite similar to The Baroness -- the same sort of literary style, the same sort of pulpish plots, even the same creator (Lyle Kenyon Engel). The difference, of course, being that Eagle is a guy, but also that he works alone whereas the Baroness needs a team. The biggest difference, for me at least, is how much better the Expeditor series is, in comparison; all those who enjoy the Baroness are heartily encouraged to give the Expeditor series a try.

John Eagle Expeditor #4: The Fist of Fatima

John Eagle Expeditor #4: The Fist of Fatima, by Paul Edwards
September, 1973 Pyramid Books

To cue the old cliche, "this time it's personal" for John Eagle, aka the Expeditor. In the previous three novels Eagle was sent on missions that had little to do with him personally, but this time out he himself instigates the job. A cadre of Islamic terrorists murder a pair of US ambassadors in Libya, and one of them turns out to be Eagle's college pal. After the President speaks at the funeral for these men, there follows a neat scene where Eagle himself corners the President and "requests" that he call Mr. Merlin, aka Eagle's boss, and "suggest" an assignment of retribution for the Expeditor.

Another thing different this time out is that Eagle is present from the opening; in the previous books we had to wade through half the novel before our protagonist even became involved in the story. This is good in that it gets the ball rolling, but what's unfortunate is that, as usual, this volume of the Expeditor is so incredibly padded. It's really just a bunch of page-filling until the inevitable finale, in which John Eagle once again dons his bullet-proof chameleon suit and stages a one-man raid on the enemy compound.

Around this time the men's adventure magazine market was drying up, with the majority of the magazines either folding or becoming nudie magazines in the vein of Playboy. But the spirit of the "sweat mags" lived on in the pages of John Eagle Expeditor. For here the "macho mystique" reigned supreme: this series is about nothing so much as man conquering...everything. The white man in particular. Eagle arrives in the Libyan desert and insinuates himself into a party of Touregs, desert warriors who themselves have a score to settle with the Islamic terrorists who murdered Eagle's friend.

And to become one of the Touregs Eagle proves his manhood in a variety of men's adventure magazine-type ways. He kills a few terrorists. He makes friends with the elderly leader of the Touregs, drinking tea with him and going to the trouble of sleeping with the man's daughters -- both women at the same time. (And this sex scene, as is mandatory for the series, is again presented as a struggle itself, between man and woman, with man victorious.) Next Eagle tames a wild camel, which in true Alexander the Great fashion has been too wild for any of the Touregs to tame. He practices and masters the Toureg fashion of firing a long rifle from the back of his camel. Finally he challenges a prick Toureg who has been antagonizing him to a bout of mortal combat, and Eagle of course slices the prick up.

So really, this entire middle half comes off like a sequence of men's adventure articles. Each section could easily be separated from the novel and plunked into one of those magazines, with an appropriately-lurid title: How I slept with a pair of desert wenches -- at the same time! But as expected it all fizzles out, having at length nothing to do with the finale; despite all of the work of ingratiating himself with the Touregs, preparing to fight with their growing army against the enemy stronghold, it ends up with Eagle the lone survivor, again trusting to his own devices to serve up some bloody payback.

The enemy boss is unimaginatively named "Leader," a hulking African who calls himself "The Black Death." He has assembled his terrorists under "The Fist of Fatima," which takes the familar Hand of Fatima and turns it into a symbol of war. From his mountain stronghold he sends out his men on missions of terror and murder. Armed with his high-tech bow, vials of explosives, and dart gun, Eagle infiltrates the place and kills everyone in a drawn-out and entertaining finale.

I've long suspected that Sylvester Stallone was/is a fan of men's adventure novels -- it was Stallone's film The Specialist that "outed" John Shirley as John Cutter, after all -- and The Fist of Fatima adds more proof. For one, the entire novel is quite similar to Stallone's unsung masterpiece of '80s action, Rambo III. Sure, in the film Rambo was saving an old friend, not avenging him, but otherwise it's all pretty much the same, with the protagonist becoming friends with desert warriors who do battle against a larger and better-equiped army. In fact, I'm betting John Eagle Expeditor itself played some part in Stallone's version of Rambo.

I know, David Morrell created the character, but Morrell's version of Rambo was a scrawny, bearded kid who had been trained to be a killing machine without a soul. As screenwriter for all of the films, it was Sylvester Stallone who created the Rambo character we all know, giving him more depth and humanity. Also, it was Stallone who, in First Blood Part 2, introduced the concept that Rambo was partly of American Indian heritage; further that he was fond of using fancy bows and arrows...explosive-tipped arrows at that!

And finally...there's even a scene in The Fist of Fatima where Eagle, who has just blown a pair of helicopters out of the sky (with those explosive-tipped arrows, just like Rambo), gets on the horn and growls a threat to the enemy leader, back in his base. All Eagle needed to say was "I'm your worst nightmare," and the picture would've been complete.

Anyway, maybe it's all coincidence. And by the way I'm not claiming all of this just so I can whine that Stallone "ripped off" John Eagle Expeditor...hell, if it turned out to be true, I'd just think Stallone was all the cooler.

This was Robert Lory's second appearance as "Paul Edwards," and again he does a good job of keeping the story moving, despite the inordinate amount of padding. There isn't as much lurid stuff this time out (other than the scene involving Eagle and the perpetually-horny Toureg sisters, who despite it all become increasingly annoying as the novel progresses), but the action scenes are tautly done.

All told, The First of Fatima is more of the same for John Eagle Expeditor, but for whatever reason this is still one of my favorite series.

John Eagle Expeditor #3: The Laughing Death

John Eagle Expeditor #3: The Laughing Death, by Paul Edwards
July, 1973 Pyramid Books

This was Robert Lory's first go as "Paul Edwards," and his entrance provides a definite boost to the Expeditor series. I enjoyed the previous volumes, which were penned by Manning Lee Stokes, but I found them a bit too padded out, with an uninvolving protagonist and anticlimatic finales. To be sure, The Laughing Death is still a bit too padded -- unnecessary padding seems to be a staple of this series -- but Lory does a much better job of weaving the extranneous bits of sociological and cultural information into his narrative.

The threat this time out is "The Final Laughter of the Celestial Bliss," aka a lethal laughing gas which works much like the stuff the Joker used in the '89 Batman film. It leaves a twisted leer on the corpse's face and everything. The gas has been devised by Father Tan, an aged Triad ruler who was believed dead. Instead Tan has been operating behind the scenes for the past few decades, and now attempts to unite the various tongs into one organization. The weapon to unite them in their goal of global domination will be this gas, which Tan has created in a secret fortress in the jungle wilds of Sumatra.

All of this is relayed in the first half of the book, which hopscotches back and forth from the perspectives of various minor characters. Once again, John "Expeditor" Eagle himself plays a supporting role in the first half of his own book; we meet him in the opening pages when he challenges a former trainer to mortal combat, crippling him. Then Eagle disappears while Lory builds up the suspense via several Chinese and Sumatran characters.

This is the same thing Stokes did in his volumes, but Lory does it better, though the overwhelming cultural detail gets to be grating. The main character here is Mary, a chemist who happens to be an undercover Communist agent; she is captured by Father Tan and used to work in the gas-making facility in Sumatra. There are also a few Sumatran natives who buy it in drawn-out sequences, as well as Hsui, Father Tan's right-hand woman, a former prostitute whom Tan has remodeled into a haughty destroyer-of-men.

Following the template of previous volumes, Eagle is finally called into action in the middle half. His boss, Mr. Merlin, locates the Sumatran fortress and sends in his one and only Expeditor. The following sequence is very Rambo: First Blood Part II, with Eagle slipping into the fetid jungle in the middle of the night and hooking up with his native guides. Eagle expected only one guide, but the man has brought along his sister; she immediately makes herself available to Eagle in the curtained-off area of their boat as they make their way downriver. Lory writes the ensuing sex scene in exceedingly purple prose, which makes it all the more entertaining.

Once they're on foot in the jungle the action gets underway. As in previous volumes, Eagle must fight local forces unrelated to the major plot as he makes his way to his objective. But as usual Eagle has all of his high-tech equipment. If any men's adventure protagonist could've been turned into a Mego toy, then it would've been John Eagle: he has his fancy bow and dart gun of instant death, as well as an assortment of vials which blow stuff up real good. But most importantly there is his "plastic suit" which can't be punctured and which keeps Eagle's body temperature at the perfect level. There's also a "chameleon device" which when activated blends the suit into the background, meaning that Eagle is basically The Predator several years before that film. Lory introduces a few changes to the suit: now Eagle also has an "opposite setting" for the chameleon device, which makes the suit glare against its surroundings. This function is to allow Eagle to stand out when he's being picked up by air transport, but here he uses it to scare the bejeesus out of some superstitious locals. And finally Lory changes the headgear: rather than the visored helmet of Stokes, Lory gives Eagle a hood and face mask with infrared goggles. If you check out the bottom right of the cover, you can see the artist's interpretation of Eagle's suit.

The final assault on Tan's compound is well-staged, if a bit anticlimatic. Not as bad as in the Stokes volumes, but close enough. The reason is because Eagle's missions always go off without a hitch. Sure, he has unexpected setbacks with armed locals attacking him on his way to his objective, but Eagle always kills them with little fuss. And when he infiltrates the enemy base, he again accomplishes his missions with no major problems. I guess this is why Merlin hired the guy, but still, it makes for few thrills for the reader.

However the same can't be said for Eagle's accomplices. In true men's adventure fashion, the protagonist's friends suffer whereas the protagonist himself does not. Both Sumatran guides buy it in gory fashion, the girl especially. Lory piles on the lurid stuff in the very end, with the girl caught in an elaborate Chinese torture device, sort of like an Iron Maiden, with each "level" filled with different deadly things: a pack of starved rats on one level, poisonous snakes on the next, etc. It's a definite creepy crawly moment; the worst bit is the section devoted to the genitals.

I guess this is another staple of the Expeditor series, as each novel gets more and more lurid as it goes on. When Eagle first infiltrates the base, he runs into Hsui, Tan's concubine. He shoots her up with a hypodermic to interrogate her, but doesn't realize the experimental serum has an unexpected aphrodisiacal side-effect. This serves to make the already-horny Hsui demand that Eagle take her...right there and then. So Eagle does as ordered, screwing Hsui on the floor, right here in the middle of his "penetration" (sorry, couldn't help it) into an enemy base.

As I wrote before, the Expeditor series is almost like a blast of testosterone. The "male mystique" is prevalent here; Eagle is the alpha male of alpha males, and sex is always presented as a nigh-on battle, with Eagle conquering women with his manhood. The women who aren't throwing themselves at Eagle instead try to destroy him...only to find themselves falling into his arms regardless. And Eagle himself cares little for them; in early sections we again hear about Eagle's "girlfriend" (whom we've yet to meet), an American Indian girl he plans to marry someday, but who lives a few hundred miles from Eagle's forest retreat. Despite his (tepid) love for this girl, Eagle early in the novel still plans to go into the city to find a woman for some quick and casual sex. As if he needs to go to the trouble; he gets enough tail on his missions.

The action scenes here are well done, but this series doesn't delve much into the gore. Eagle goes for quick and clean kills, either using his trusty dart gun or blowing people up with his explosive vials. And with his chameleon suit, which as stated is bullet and blade-proof, he's pretty much indestructable, and cuts an easy swath through the ill-equipped enemy forces. In a way it's like the old TV show Airwolf, where the high-tech 'copter was always going up against outdated Hueys or whatever. It's like zero competition.

I sound like I didn't like it but I really enjoyed The Laughing Death. Hell, I'd even go so far as to say the Expeditor series is one of my favorites. I like how it combines international intrigue, pulpish plots, commando action, spy-fy gadgets, purple-prosed sex, and a lurid vibe. It's also fun to read such a non-PC book. Once again we get all sorts of introspection from Eagle about his "savage nature" -- ie, his Apache Indian upbringing (though Eagle is of 100% Scottish heritage, he was raised by the Apache). So there are long snatches where Eagle belabors over the difficult meshing of his "white man civility" with his "Indian savagery."

Speaking of Eagle, Lory does a good job of making him (somewhat) human. In the Stokes books all Eagle cared about were his missions, and we got little feel for his thoughts or emotions. Lory still has Eagle as a primo shit-kicker, a guy who will get the job done no matter the cost, but he plays up his warring internal nature and also has Eagle afraid that he may someday become a "thrill-killer." This is why Eagle challenges his old trainer to mortal combat in the opening pages; Eagle is so action-starved that he needs to feel some bones crush beneath his fists. He prays for a new mission, so he can get out into foreign terrain and test himself against enemy forces. This leads to an intriguing idea: what if someday Eagle himself went haywire, and Merlin was forced to send someone after him? Hell, it happened in the Lone Wolf series.

Lory served up the next volume as well, trading off with Stokes and Paul Eiden (who doesn't enter the picture until #7: The Ice Goddess) through the rest of the 14-volume series. I look forward to reading more of his books.

John Eagle Expeditor #2: The Brain Scavengers

John Eagle Expeditor #2: The Brain Scavengers, by Paul Edwards
May, 1973  Pyramid Books

Manning Lee Stokes serves as “Paul Edwards”  for the Expeditor series once again, dropping us back into John Eagle’s life a month after the events in the first volume of this series. And once again Stokes delivers a novel as if from another age, filled with terrain description straight out of Jack London and reeking of a male chauvinism unheard of even in the rarefied world of '70s men's adventure novels.

And like the first novel, The Brain Scavengers takes forever to get going. It’s also longer than the average men’s adventure novel, coming in at 220 pages. Stokes could've cut a lot of this stuff; indeed our hero John Eagle doesn't even appear until page 60, and the entire novel is basically him preparing for his mission.

In a way The Brain Scavengers is padding in its worst form; Stokes fills pages by hopping from one character’s POV to another, but it's all immaterial because their thoughts and actions have little bearing on the novel. In particular he wastes a lot of space detailing the life of Suthinya, a gorgeous (of course) Russian scientist who lives in a hidden base in the midst of Siberia; here Suthinya heads a team who has extracted “insane” scientists from the US and other capitalist countries, where they aim to repair the damaged brains and coax the newly-sane scientists to work for the USSR. But rather than providing details on her scientific methods, Stokes instead focuses on Suthinya's romantic woes with a Russian commander.

It takes our heroes endless pages to discover this latest commie threat and devise a plan of action. Mr. Merlin, wheelchair-bound director of the Expeditor program, calls in his one and only Expeditor: John Eagle. Again the rudiments of Eagle’s training and prep are glossed over, and he’s sent out into the Siberian wasteland. Once more in his chameleon suit and armed with his needle gun and trusty bow and arrow, this time Eagle has a new gadget: a nuclear grenade which can destroy six square miles. But the novelty factor of the previous volume is gone.

Indeed, the action half of the novel goes down without any big fuss; Eagle treks through the frozen wasteland, kills a few Russian soldiers, and gets into the hidden base. But then he meets Suthinya, and here the novel appropriates all the lurid charm you’ve been waiting for. For Suthinya has already rebelled against her Communist leaders and wants to escape with Eagle, only she fears him, and in fact threatens to break down entirely. So what does Eagle do? Realizing that women are “the weaker sex," he knows that only one thing will calm down this complete stranger: “bed medicine.” Yes, Eagle takes Suthinya into a side room – moments after meeting her – and coaxes her into sex, where his manly passion will of course subdue her womanly fears. I couldn’t believe what I was reading!

Of course it works, and Suthinya comes out of it worshipful of Eagle and ready to help him in any way possible. But really, that's about the extent of the action in the novel; even the escape is handled in a perfunctory manner, with Suthinya doing the big work while Eagle waits, using her credentials to smuggle the nuclear grenade into the depths of the hidden complex. Eagle himself only pulls off a few kills, and I must mention he comes off like a heartless bastard this time out, killing everyone – even those he promises not to kill – in order to accomplish his mission.

At any rate, this was Stokes’s last Expeditor novel for a while, so I'm hoping the next author opens up the series a bit more.

John Eagle Expeditor #1: Needles of Death

John Eagle Expeditor #1: Needles of Death, by Paul Edwards
January, 1973  Pyramid Books

The 14-volume John Eagle Expeditor series answers the unasked question: What if Jack London had lived in the 1970s and wrote men’s adventure novels?

Born to a Scottish couple who moved to America and then who both died while he was still an infant, John Eagle was raised by the Apache. Now as a man in his late twenties he’s the sort of character who only exists in men's adventure novels: a perfect balance of both heritages, a capable man of action who knows all the tricks and trades of the American Indian, yet who also received an Oxford education.

For reasons this first installment, Needles of Death, fails to explain, Eagle answers an ad in the paper asking for men of adventure looking for dangerous but rewarding work. After three years of training (none of it described – like most men’s adventure novels Needles of Death skips over all of the backstory and instead focuses on the mission at hand), Eagle is now a full-on Expeditor, working for the shadowy Mr. Merlin and sent about the world to stop various threats against the United States. Mr. Merlin is a billionaire who lives in a sprawling estate overtop a dead volcano in Hawaii; he answers only to the US President and he has created the Expeditor program in order for the US to quickly take care of incidents with little notice. Eagle is the first (and so far only) Expeditor. In the entirety of Needles of Death the two men never meet; Mr. Merlin keeps his identity hidden from all save the President (whom Eagle does meet – checking the publication date this could only mean, then, that Eagle met with Richard Milhous Nixon! I wonder if they took a photo of the two shaking hands, like Elvis and Nixon?).

For his first mission Eagle's dropped into the barren desolation of the Gobi desert. The Red Chinese have taken over an ancient lamasery in Mongolia, where they appear to be developing a laser weapon which can blast airplanes from the sky. Eagle is armed with a clutch of devices, all of which reminded me of the accessories that would come with an old GI Joe or Big Jim doll: a skin-tight chameleon suit which is bullet and blade-proof; a mini-bike which can be assembled in seconds and runs on tires inflated with poisonous gas; a metallic longbow and steel arrows; a gas-powered gun which fires “needles of death;” shoes stuffed with an experimental plastique which can blow apart an entire city block. And that's just the tip of it: Eagle also has pills for food, pills for water, and a batch of other stuff which fits in the innumerable hidden pockets in his chameleon suit (which also features a motorcyle-type helmet with visor that allows him to fully meld into his surroundings).

Eagle meets with his contact, who of course turns out to be an attractive woman: a Mongolian named Mary Choja who kills with the stoic reserve of an Apache and who keeps right up beside Eagle in the freezing hell of the mountains, despite not having a heated bodysuit of her own. Eagle treats Mary roughly throughout; we never really get in the man's head, find out what makes him tick, but we quickly learn that he’s so dedicated to his mission that all else pales to it. So he pushes Mary along with force, getting angry with her if she wants to rest, or that she wants to free her brother (who it turns out is Eagle’s other contact, and who has been captured by Mongolian bandits). There's an aura of “male mystique” to Needles of Death, of the type found in 1970s men's magazines: Eagle feels himself superior, the strong white male who can retain the “savagery” of his “Indian nature” due to his western side; however Mary, a Mongolian, cannot. There are all sorts of ethnic snap-judgements throughout Needles of Death; whole sections of it would be considered unpublishable in today's tepid world.

Thanks to Justin Marriot’s Men of Violence magazine I’ve learned that Manning Lee Stokes served as “Paul Edwards” for this installment of the series as well as the next. Needles of Death in its way perfectly captures the nature of its protagonist and the series itself. Like Eagle the novel melds two natures: adventure fiction, with picturesque descriptions of mountain crags and rough terrain, and action fiction, with gunfights and commando raids in the dead of night. It’s not a particularly violent novel, with Eagle killing quick and efficiently, but there is a bit of sex.

However there’s no real sense of danger. Eagle is presented as such a marvel of manhood that there's never any question if he might survive this first mission. The novel also lacks a strong villain; actually there is no villain, Eagle instead fighting anonymous soldiers and bandits as he plots to destroy the laser station. But despite this it's still a good novel, with strong writing, good dialog, and wonderful depictions of the hellish Mongolian environment; in fact it reads like a “real” novel and not just a first volume in a series, and, like Peter McCurtin’s The Killing Machine and Andrew Sugar’s The Enforcer, it works just as well as a standalone novel.