The Lady Lost Her Head

The Lady Lost Her Head, by Manning Lee Stokes
No month stated, 1950  Phoenix Press

Proving my belief that “if it came out in hardcover, you can usually get a copy via Interlibrary Loan,” I was able to read this mega-scarce early novel by Manning Lee Stokes, thanks to the kind folks at UTA Austin. Also released in a paperback edition that’s just as scarce, The Lady Lost Her Head is one of the more obscure novels by the prolific Stokes, and all I could find out about it was that it’s protagonist was a comic book writer, as Stokes himself was at the time.

Written long before he began his association with book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel, The Lady Lost Her Head (which is written in third-person, by the way) is still classic Manning Lee Stokes, a somewhat-lurid mystery with action that’s more so internalized than external, egregious padding, and a protagonist who constantly puzzles over this latest setback in his life. And yet for all that it’s still enjoyable for the most part, at least for me. I will say though that Stokes is better, I think, when he has a more action-oriented protagonist; I think the proactive mindsets of say Nick Carter or Richard Blade compel Stokes to have things actually happen in the narrative. But when your hero is a comic book writer slowly going to seed, there’s only so much action you can believably deliver.

Such is the case with the middling “hero” of The Lady Lost Her Head, portly, 33 year-old Martin Frost, current comic book writer, former “literary” novelist, his only book published “several years ago,” before the war, in which Frost served as an intelligence officer. Stokes shoots himself in the foot with this one; folks, if all the army’s intelligence officers were on the level of Frost, it’s a wonder we even won the war. The dude bumbles through the novel, veering between inaction or stupidity, trying desperately to clear his name for a crime he didn’t commit but shouldn’t have even been dumb enough to be blamed for in the first place.

Stokes does sort of ramp up the tension, as the novel occurs over a twenty-four hour period: July 13th, 1949. Frost wakes in the bed of Laverne Richardson, cougar wife of Frosts’s boss, Harry Richardson; she keeps an apartment of her own here in Manhattan, mostly to entertain the countless men she likes to screw behind her husband’s back. Frost is just her latest conquest and he’s only worked at the comic studio for a few weeks, finally giving in to the open invitation offered by mega-babe Laverne, who might have the personality of a vulture but has a body that just won’t quit. The novel was published too early for Stokes to indulge in the sleaze that would eventually become his forte – there’s no sex at all in the novel – but we get enough reminders about Laverne’s glorious protuberances and such.

But as for Laverne, we don’t get to know her at all: she’s the titular headless lady. Frost wakes up covered in blood, Laverne’s corpse on the floor beside the bed, the neck nearly shorn from the head. By the corpse is the instrument of Laverne’s death: a “Jap sword” gifted to her by an earlier conquest, a guy who served in the Pacific front and brought back this officer sword, wich usually hung on the wall of Laverne’s bedroom. Someone used it to chop off the lady’s head sometime in the few hours since she and Frost stumbled back to Laverne’s place after a night of heavy drinking and barely-remembered sex before both passed out.

Frost proves to readers posthaste what kind of a sap of a protagonist he’s going to be. Having woken up by the corpse of his cuckolded boss, Frost…takes a shower, smokes a cigarette, makes some coffee, eats some breakfast. Then he gets around to searching the apartment for clues behind the grisly murder. He finds a small tin box behind a console radio (the HDTV of the ‘40s), but before he can research further he hears the elevator doors open down the hall and the unmistakable sounds of cops on the way. Whereas the average person would’ve suspected immediately that this was all a setup, Frost only now gets with the program, and beats a hasty retreat, running across the rooftops in his successful escape.

This is another of those crime novels that occurs in a New York suffering from blistering summer heat, and Stokes often reminds us how sweaty our hero is – I felt bad for the dude, as this was in the days when the three-piece suit and hat was standard everyday wear and when air conditioning was a luxury. Frost heads to the offices of the comic publisher, so as to get the .45 automatic he left there the other week, borrowed by his boss Harry or somesuch. Friends, this bit with the gun was enough to drive me nuts, as Frost carries it around for the entirety of the novel…and never even uses it! Anyway here we get the one brief glimpse of comic writing in the novel; Frost hates the work, finds it mindless, and mostly writes scripts for a series about Red Condor, a flying costumed crimefighter. 

But anyone approaching The Lady Lost Her Head with hopes for a peek into what the life of a comic writer in the ‘40s was like will be disappointed. Stokes provides no details about the craft, focusing solely on his murder mystery; that Frost is even a comic writer is an arbitrary point, and the dude could’ve been a garbage man for all the connection his job has to the plot. While sneaking into the office Frost is surprised by the early appearance – it not even being 9AM yet – of his boss, Harry, who clearly is unaware that his wife is dead…not to mention that she spent the previous evening drinking with and eventually screwing Frost.

Frost beats another retreat, just as the cops call Harry to inform him of Laverne’s murder. On the crowded Manhattan streets Frost runs into another comic employee: Joan, a pretty young artist Frost intends to marry – not that Joan is aware of this. No, Frost has only known her the six weeks he’s worked for Harry, and after a few dates and one chaste kiss, Frost has decided that Joan’s going to become his wife. He tells her all about the previous night’s horrors – Frost (and Stokes) seems to gloss over the fact that Frost is admitting to the girl he intends to marry that he just screwed another woman the night before – and gets Joan’s promise to secretly help him out, mostly via money she promises to get for him by the evening.

Our hero is a hunted man throughout the novel, slinking through back alleys of Manhattan and finding more and more information about himself being published in the papers – Frost has now been named as the top suspect in the case, and a manhunt is out for him. He checks into a nice hotel, giving the fake name of Joseph Merlin, which I found exceedingly interesting; this appears to indicate that it was Stokes who later came up with the name Mr. Merlin, ie John Eagle’s wheelchair-bound boss in the John Eagle Expeditor series that was created and produced by Lyle Kenyon Engel. But it’s a one-off of a fake name, with neither Stokes nor Frost explaining the “Merlin” part nor why Frost even came up with it.

In the hotel room Frost breaks open that box from Laverne’s apartment, and inside finds a bunch of old checkbooks which show that the lady was well off, even before she married the wealthy Harry Richardson. Frost also finds a nude photo of the lady. It appears that she was being blackmailed, and Frost puzzles over some notes scrawled in the most recent book, referring to an “MC” and an “AI.” But Frost is once again a fool, paying a young page to go out and get him some new clothes – and not even questioning it when the kid comes back and turns down Frosts’s tip, hurrying out of the hotel room.

Yep, the kid’s called the cops, and Frost once again beats a hasty retreat in the nick of time. He slips into the conveniently-unlocked door at the end of the hall, finds himself standing over a half-naked brunette asleep on her bed. Through the most brazen deus ex machina I’ve ever read, Frost is able to convince this young woman, Aurora “Rora” Hunter, to help him. How? Well, Frost clamps a hand over Rora’s mouth before she wakes, telling her he’s not going to hurt her and that he’s hiding from the cops but is innocent. Rora goes over to her luggage…and comes back with a copy of Frosts’s novel, published all those years ago!

Friends, I couldn’t believe it. Rora just happens to be reading Frosts’s novel, which we’re informed wasn’t even a big hit or well known. An aunt just happened to give it to her to read on her trip here to New York – Rora was to be married this morning, but her fiance snubbed her at the last minute, and she’s been on a crying jag since, here in her hotel room. Despite the snub she’s a lovely creature with “small breasts” and she’s game to help Frost because she’s got nothing else going on. Besides, she figures that anyone who has written a book must be not only smart but also incapable of murder(!?), so she’s certain Frost was innocent of killing Laverne Richardson.

Rora proves smarter than our hero, helping him figure out the clues in Laverne’s books. Eventually they get to Greenwich Village, where a mysterious individual named Horsely might provide information on what exactly Laverne was into in the war years, and who might’ve killed her. He greets them at the door in makeup – “The man was a fairy.” But after getting roughed up a bit Horsely turns out to only be posing as such – again, Rora is the one to figure this out – and the makeup’s just there to cover his recently-shorn beard. For a bearded man was also seen at Laverne’s apartment the night of her murder, and it turns out to have been Horsely, who had come by to collect owed money from the doomed woman. Turns out she was in the blackmail business with him during the war years, and owed him a thousand or so.

Action is so sparse as to be nonexistant. Early on Frost runs away from a dumpy guy in a cheap brown suit who chases after him in a crowded subway station; our dumbass hero still doesn’t even realize until much later that it clearly wasn’t a cop after him. Hell, it takes Harry Richardson himself – who shocks Frost by being at Joan’s apartment that night – to explain to Frost that the murder was setup, given the phone call that alerted the cops to it in the first place! But anyway Frost proves to be further stupid, as Harry and Joan themselves are having an affair, so there goes that “I’m gonna marry Joan” stuff…and Harry calmly explains to Frost and Rora that he believes Frost is innocent, that his wife was a slut, and that Frost should turn himself in. He claims no knowledge of this “MC” or “AI.”

What makes Frosts’s foolishness so much more humorous is how Stokes often reminds us that Frost has a “writer’s mind,” meaning he’s able to suss out things a common man might miss. But Frost just comes off like a prime buffoon here; he even mopes to the nearest bar with Rora, tells her he’s failed to clear his name, and that he might as well turn himself in like Harry said. After a brief tiff – Rora has clearly fallen for Frost, but he can’t even see that – the jilted Rora sulks back to her apartment. That Frost might be putting her in danger is something he doesn’t even consider – but then Stokes himself ignores this, so it’s a moot point.

Closing in on a full day since the nightmare began, Frost finally gets a few breaks. Another mysterious dude’s following him, and this time Frost realizes it isn’t a cop. He beats up the guy in one of the novel’s pitifully few action scenes and conveniently enough finds a business card in the guy’s wallet. From this he learns the dude is a private eye, one hired by Harry Richardson to trail Laverne. Same goes for the guy in the brown suit Frost lost back in the subway station. Now we finally learn all – the “MC” of Laverne’s note refers to a Dr. Michael Cosgrove, an abortionist who also does the “reverse procedure” and who artificially insimenated Laverne – ie the “AI” of her notes.

The climax occurs back in Joan’s apartment, where everyone has gathered. Stokes, having successfully padded out 200+ pages, has his friggin’ hero bound to a chair while the villains exposit their motives and then shoot each other. Frost does nothing throughout. Since the book’s so scarce I’ll spoil it for you: Laverne got Cosgrove to impregnate her so as to force Harry to marry her, but Cosgrove went on to blackmail her. Somehow Harry found out about all this, freaked out that his seven year-old kid wasn’t “really” his (the kid btw spends the entire novel “off visiting his aunt and uncle” in another state), and had Laverne followed to expose her harlotry. On the night Frost was with her, Harry snuck into her apartment – and in a fit of rage chopped her head off. He then lied about this to everyone, framing Frost, even lying to the sleazy private eyes.

So in other words, the murderer turns out to be exactly who you thought it would be.

The last chapter is a nightmare of exposition in which a friggin’ police lieutenant who has never before appeared in the text stands over Frosts’s hospital bed (our hero injured due to a beating) and explains to him everything that happened, and why. It’s so lazy as to be hilarious. Frost himself has done nothing to solve his name and in reality did more harm than good, even beating up a random cop and a cab driver in his time on the run. But he does at least score Rora, who shows up again on the last page to declare her love for him.

I was curious what an early Stokes novel would be like, and I found out – unsurprisingly, it’s almost identical to his later novels, even down to the overwhelming amount of exclamation points in the narrative. But all the stalling and repetition customary of future Stokes novels is already here – there are at least three parts in which Frost recaps for himself all he knows about Laverne’s murder: clear page-filling at its worst. One thing missing from those later Stokes novels is any action, or a capable hero, but then Frost is supposed to be a regular guy and not an action hero. But I still do enjoy Stokes’s novels…maybe they’re like the literary version of blood pressure pills, just sedate, calming books that can lull the reader into a stupor of relaxation.

Stokes had a weird writing career…his earliest novels, all of them mysteries, were hardcover editions, but eventually he was paperback only. Then he started doing sleaze under pseudonyms, before becoming a house ghostwriter on various Engel productions, before moving on to a few film tie-ins under his own name. At the end of his career (and life) he was finally able to publish again under his own name, though both were paperback originals produced by Engel: The Evangelist (a book so scarce that the copy I ordered the other year was literally the only one listed on the entire internet), and Corporate Hooker, Inc.

John Eagle Expeditor #14: Silverskull

John Eagle Expeditor #14: Silverskull, by Paul Edwards
December, 1975  Pyramid Books

I hope you’ll all shed a tear with me – I’ve now come to the final volume of my all-time favorite men’s adventure series, John Eagle Expeditor. I can’t believe it’s taken me nearly seven years to read these 14 books, particularly when you consider that the entire series was published within the span of three years! But to tell the truth I just didn’t want the series to end. I like it so much I even lobbied to name my son “John Eagle Kenney,” but I was quickly shot down.

Manning Lee Stokes wrote this final volume, which is fitting, given that he also wrote the first volume. But anyone hoping for a fitting conclusion to the Expeditor saga will be disappointed. Sadly, Silverskull could almost be an installment of practically any other series Stokes worked on. For, as he did in his previous entry The Green Goddess, Stokes turns in an installment lacking the science fiction-tinged adventure pulp of the earliest volmes, coming off more like a slow-boil crime-thriller. In fact, there are trace elements that make me wonder if it started life as a manuscript for another Stokes series, The Aquanauts.

For something weird happened with Stokes on John Eagle Expeditor. He turned in the first and the second volumes, which established the series formula that would last for the next several books: hero John Eagle, equipped with his high-tech gear and his “Apache cunning” (tempered of course by his white heritage, let’s not forget), would venture deep into some exotic locale and blow up an enemy installation. But with the fifth volume, Stokes dispensed with this formula and turned in a lurid thriller that had little in common with his first two books; despite which, Valley Of Vultures was still one of the best volumes in the series.

Then Stokes disappeared for two years, and the series was in the hands of Robert Lory and Paul Eiden, who for the most part stuck with the formula Stokes had devised in Needles of Death (a formula which more than likely was the work of series creator Lyle Kenyon Engel). But when Stokes returned for the 12th volume, The Green Goddess, it was as if he’d forgotten what the Expeditor series was even about. That one was another lurid thriller, but it was completely lacking any of the standard elements of the series; whereas Eagle at least donned his “plastic suit” (if only for a moment) in Valley Of Vulures, in The Green Goddess none of Eagle’s fancy bags of tricks made an appearance or were even mentioned. As I wrote in my long-winded review, it was almost as if Stokes had forgotten about all of it.

In fact, it’s now occurred to me that The Green Goddess and Silverskull were more along the lines of the slooow-moving thrillers Stokes was writing for The Aquanauts. It’s possible that both these books started life as installments of that series, which was cancelled in 1974 – one compelling indication is that Silverskull is stated as taking place in late June, 1974.

Len Levinson once told me it took “about a year” to see his series manuscripts appear as paperbacks in the ‘70s, so this could just be the case here, that Stokes wrote the book around June of ‘74 and it wasn’t pulished until a year and a half later. But another compelling clue is that the titular villain of Silverskull has his own submarine. As noted below, this submarine is excessively built up before being dropped abruptly, so could it be possible that Stokes’s original vision was to have this submarine engage in combat with Aquanauts hero Tiger Shark’s KRAB?

It could also be that Stokes was just in burnout and was churning out scripts to meet deadlines, with little thought to any grand design. By this point Stokes had turned in many, many books for Lyle Kenyon Engel, having begun his worker-for-hire writing duties for him a decade before, with The Eyes Of The Tiger. I wonder if Silverskull was the last novel Stokes wrote, as he died in January of 1976. In Will Murray’s 1981 interview with Engel, published uncut in Paperback Parade #2 (1986), Engel makes the tantalizing comment, “Manning is dead you know, and he was one of the greatest writers I ever had. It’s just a shame he died when he did because we were both on the track of something very very big when he died.” I’d love to know what this was, but unless Will Murray happened to write it down, I guess no one will ever know.

As for Silverskull, it unfortunately sticks to the lurid mystery vibe of The Aquanauts and The Green Goddess, with none of the cool stuff I so love about John Eagle Expeditor – other, that is, than a very late appearance of Eagle’s “plastic suit” and “gas gun.” Otherwise the book could almost pass for one of Stokes’s earlier Killmaster novels, only a lot more bloated and slower-paced. At 191 pages of small, dense print, Silverskull crawls along, and sadly is one of my least favorite books in the Expeditor series. Another thought: perhaps Engel felt this way, too, and the book was really written earlier (ie June of ’74), only held back from the publishing schedule for reasons of quality. 

Despite the padding and the lack of action, Stokes as ever invests himself in the writing, no matter how menial or tedious the events transpiring are. He also again busts out his Oxford Dictionary, delivering a brace of ten-dollar words you won’t often encounter in the men’s adventure genre. But the thing with Stokes is, these fancy-pants words are so naturally employed that you know without a doubt that Manning Lee Stokes was a well-read, intelligent guy. He just suffered a bit when it came to gripping plots; his books are more akin to sprawling affairs in which a central event is built up and up and up to the breaking point, and then everything quickly and anticlimactically comes to a close.

The villain of the piece, Silverskull, is a Flemingesque creation if ever there was one: Sir Rodney Hamilton, 51, a British billionaire with a fringe of red hair and a “polished silver plate” that is “the top of his skull.” As a racer in his youth, Sir Rodney suffered a serious crash which shaved off the top of his skull; it was replaced with this “silver tonsure,” which he polishes every night. Sir Rodney’s fortunes are slipping, and as the novel opens he has hit upon a scheme to become richer than ever: to kidnap the no-good son of Carlos de Ojeda, oil minister of Venezuela, and force Ojeda into giving Sir Rodney the controlling interests in a new oil field deep in the jungle (or something).

Stokes is never the best when it comes to main villains, so I was happy that here for once he gave us a memorable one – I mean the guy is the closest this series has ever come to a Goldfinger. But after getting a merciless stooge to kidnap de Ojeda’s twentysomething slacker kid (and kill all the witnesses), Sir Rodney proceeds to…fret over his plan, and meanwhile masturbate to X-rated fantasies of his mega-hot babe of a daughter, Jennifer, who is 22 and an infamous jet-setting nympho. Sir Rodney’s lust for his daughter is overly exploited by Stokes, leading to some intentionally humorous lines, like, “[Sir Rodney] thought a father was not supposed to notice his daughter’s breasts even when they were swinging ripe and full a few inches away.”

But ultimately this is just another go-nowhere digression on Stokes’s part; Jennifer and Sir Rodney don’t even have a face-to-face meeting in the entire novel, and all this incestual stuff is here so Stokes can indulge in sleaze. I’m a lover of sleaze, but not when we’re talking about a few pages of a silver-skulled guy jerking off at the thought of his daughter. And sadly this is the most XXX-rated scene in the book; even when Eagle has his mandatory sex-action, later in the novel (with Jennifer, naturally), it’s actually given less focus, over and done with in the span of a paragraph.

Eagle is called in to Venezuela to meet with old Simon de Ojeda, all the while wondering why he’s been handed this assignment. This is yet another Stokes novel in which the protagonist puzzles over why he was given his mission from first page to last, and you can’t blame Eagle – the assignment has nothing to do with the Expeditor setup. Stokes has it that Mr. Merlin, Eagle’s wheelchair-bound boss, owes an old colleague of de Ojeda’s a favor, one that Mr. Merlin has owed since he was a young man. Otherwise there’s no reason at all for Merlin’s top Expeditor to head to Venezuela to look into a kidnapping case.

Further proof that Stokes has forgotten what he himself wrote for this series is proven later in the book, when John Eagle phones Merlin, back in his underground labrynth in Hawaii, and gives him a “sitrep” on the action. Stokes just has the two speaking to each other plainly, clearly having forgotten that Eagle has no idea who Mr. Merlin is (Merlin’s true identity is kept even from the readers).

More importantly, Eagle has never heard Merlin’s real voice; previous books have stressed that Merlin, who gives Eagle his assignments over an intercom, electronically disguises his voice when he speaks to his Expeditor. And yet here Eagle acts like he’s quite familiar with Merlin – even knowing that he smokes cigars, when recall the two have never been in the same room. This could be more indication that Silverskull started life as another series book…the Eagle-Merlin relationship here being similar to the Nick Carter-Hawk relationship of Stokes’s Killmaster novels or even the Tiger Shark-Admiral Coffin relationship of The Aquanauts.

The book’s first half is very slow, very much in the suspense mode, as Eagle monitors the situation from de Ojeda’s palatial villa. Supposedly the man’s son is being held captive by a jungle guerrilla named the Wild Dog, and there’s a part early on where Eagle captures one of these men and tortures him (off-page) for info. But Eagle, that “assassin extraordinaire” (as he was dubbed on the back cover of some of the earlier volumes), doesn’t even kill anyone until page 132. He spends most of the novel hitting the buffet in de Ojeda’s villain, smoking a “rare cigarette,” and fretting over how the assignment is getting out of control.

Rather it’s all like some slow-boil mystery as Eagle gradually ascertains that Sir Rodney “Silverskull” Hamilton is behind the de Ojeda kidnapping, and that it has something to do with oil fields. Eagle, again sans any of his fancy gadgets or gear, poses as de Ojeda’s assistant and tries to set up a trade with Joe Garm, the sadistic old mercenary who carried off the abduction for Sir Rodney. Eagle devises a plan to hold one child for another, and flies off to London to kidnap Jennifer. Here follows more of Stokes’s patented sleaze, as Jennifer of course is nude when Eagle springs upon her in her bedroom, oggling her “medium size, pink buttoned” breasts and her “abundant brush of luxuriant red-gold pubic hair;” further, Eagle thinks she is “one of the most attractive females in the world.”

After the expected sexual shenanigans, Jennifer clings to Eagle and wants to help him – she hates her father and knows he lusts for her. Back they fly to Venezuela, where Jennifer tries to jerk Eagle off beneath a magazine, but he tells her no and “remains limp”(!). The helluva it is, after all this time spent on setting up the “one kid for another” bluff – it falls apart instantly! Eagle fails to fool Garm with the fake finger he claims is Jennifer’s, and thus Eagle is back to “square one.” Meaning we’ve spent about 50 dense-print pages on a veritable red herring of a subplot. But that’s Stokes for you.

At least we here get the first bit of action, with Eagle taking out a few men and escaping from Sir Rodney’s island in a sequence that brings to mind Stokes’s earlier Killmaster novel Mission To Venice. Here we also get the sole glimpse of Sir Rodney’s yellow(!) submarine, which is much talked up but ultimately forgotten; we’re told sleazy parties are held aboard, but Eagle just glances at it and steals a convenient inflatable raft from the cargo supplies. All that buildup for nothing. This sadly is just one indication of the sloppiness of Stokes’s plotting throughout. The novel is rife with heavily built-up, quickly tossed-aside subplots.

In fact, the kidnapping of Carlos de Ojeda – the act which got Eagle involved in the first place – is itself forgotten, for we learn that the kid has in fact been adbucted from his abducters; in hazily-rendered backstory we are informed that the Wild Dog’s soldiers have been mistreating the headhunter Indians in the nearby jungle, and these Indians, the Jivaro, launched an assault on the Wild Dog’s fortress and stole away Carlos de Ojeda, somehow knowing he was an important preson. 

Harkening back to the final quarter of Valley Of Vultures, John Eagle parachutes into the Venezuelan jungle to find the boy. Here, on page 145, we get the first mention of the usual Expeditor trappings: Eagle wears his insulated “plastic suit” and is armed with his “gas gun,” which fires needles. Finally, I thought to myself, we’ll get some of the stuff I love about this series – Eagle using his chameleon device to take out his enemies, along with the other high-tech gadgets and gear he usually employs. Instead, Eagle just pulls regular clothing overtop the plastic suit and just trudges through the jungle, pretending to be an oil prospector or something.

He hooks up with a Motilone Indian tribe led by pidgin-speaking Rauni, who reveals that his tribe is in the possesion of…the severed head of Carlos de Ojeda! Folks, that was pretty much it for me. The entire friggin’ purpose behind the entire friggin’ story has already been dispensed with, off-page…Eagle is informed the Jivaro killed the boy (and ate his body!), and Rauni doesn’t want his people to be blamed for it. He gives Eagle the head, and even offers him a 13 year-old girl that night; Eagle turns her down, despite being “tempted.” Eagle finally makes a few more kills, gunning down some Jivaro headhunters from cover, but for the most part our hero spends the “climax” running and hiding while other characters do themselves in for him.

Stokes can’t even give us an Eagle-Silverskull scene; Eagle becomes obsessed with glimpsing the elusive Sir Rodney, and ventures to his mansion, deep in the jungle. He arrives just as the Wild Dog’s men are pulling an assault on the place. Then, convenient plotting be damned, Jennifer just happens to parachute onto her dad’s property (Stokes earlier covering his ass by having Jennifer – that jetsetting nympho – declare that she’s fond of skydiving!), and Eagle pulls her away from the guerrilla soldiers who chase after her. There’s a clear Doctor No riff as the two run and hide from an armored marsh buggy; Stokes even refers to it as a “dragon.”

But friends, Eagle just hides in the tall grass and watches as the Wild Dog’s men and Sir Rodney’s men kill each other…and then the friggin’ Venezuelan air force arrives, and fighter jets blast all of them away – while Eagle just watches! I kid you not…when Eagle inspects the carnage afterwards, everyone’s dead, even Sir Rodney himself – killed off-page by a jet attack, the jets having been ordered by a vengeful Simon de Ojeda, who has somehow learned of his son’s death. That’s it! It’s all so lazy and hamfisted that I think there might be good possibility that Engel did in fact hold this one back from publication, only publishing it once the series’s fate was sealed.

Let’s recap: in the course of this novel, John Eagle beats up a henchman, kills a couple guys in combat, guns down a few Indians from afar, smokes one of his “rare cigarettes,” and gets laid by a hot nympho with an “abundant” bush. And yet we’re informed at the close of Silverskull that Eagle’s nerves are so rattled from this particular assignment that he’s told Polly Perkins, Mr. Merlin’s secretary, that he’ll be hanging a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door of his Arizona ranch…for at least two months! (And speaking of Polly Perkins – I don’t believe we’ve previously been informed Eagle was even aware of Polly, which is perhaps more indication that Stokes had forgotten about his own series.) And here the novel as well as the series comes to a close, fittingly enough with Merlin hoping that Eagle will indeed get a chance to rest.

Plotwise the book is subpar, but as mentioned Manning Lee Stokes as ever invests himself in the writing. Nothing much might happen, but at least the writing’s good. It’s lacking some of the thematic elements of other Stokes installments; for example, the foreboding nature of The Green Goddess is gone – and for that matter, Stokes doesn’t pick up the subplot from that earlier book of whether Eagle’s foster mother survived her battle with cancer. Eagle himself seems a little blah throughout, lacking even the “macho mystique” which is usually standard for any Stokes protagonist. Save that is for a bit of TMI we’re given about Eagle’s youth:

Back on the Apache reservation, growing up with his friends, and at an age when such things were compared, [Eagle] had been known as kaki somn gunt – the well hung one. There had been the usual juvenile jackoff club with the chiefdom going to the one who could spurt farthest. Joe Thunder Horse had come in second there, too.

I used to figure that John Eagle Expeditor wasn’t really cancelled; it was just a casualty of Pyramid Books going out of business sometime in 1976. But only just now have I learned that, in 1977, Pyramid Books became Jove Books. This was news to me! So then Robert Lory was correct when he stated that the Expeditor series was in fact cancelled, thus denying us the novel Lory was considering, with John Eagle avenging the rape and/or murder of his girlfriend, Ruth Lame (sometimes “Lone”) Wolf (who by the way goes unmentioned this volume).

As I’ve gone on at length elsewhere, I really enjoy Stokes’s writing, but honestly I think he was my least favorite writer on this series. My favorite of the three who served as “Paul Edwards” would be Robert Lory, who for the most part stuck to the formula and who even made stabs at continuity, something neither Stokes nor Paul Eiden seemed to care much about. As for Eiden, the guy was wildly uneven in quality, and like Stokes seemed to sometimes forget the series he was writing for (ie Poppies Of Death), but despite which I still think he did a better job of sticking to the formula and delivering what I wanted from the series.

Well, now that I’ve finished the series, there’s only one thing left to do – the same thing I’m doing with The Baroness, just start reading it again!

Speaking of the Baroness, my own pet theory is that, after a few more years of adventuring, John Eagle and The Baroness hooked up, retired from the spy biz, and opened up a bed and breakfast somewhere on the coast of New England.

Spy Castle (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #12)

Spy Castle, by Nick Carter
January, 1966  Award Books

Manning Lee Stokes turns in another Nick Carter: Killmaster, and this might be my favorite of his yet. Other than a few snags, Spy Castle displays why the ‘60s installments of Nick Carter have become some of my favorite men’s adventure novels of all. Plus, this one (sort of) answers the question: “What if Nick Carter met James Bond?”

It’s early November, 1965, and a nuclear warhead is fired from some mysterious place in Scotland to the North Pole, setting the various world leaders into a panic. From this tense opening we cut to the Killmaster himself, who is musing over the nude bod of his latest sexual conquest, an Irish opera star named Melba – “She had magnificent breasts, had Melba.” Indeed Melba is so stacked that she sends Nick (which is to say Stokes) off on this humorous little paen to her boobs:

Nick fancied himself something of a connoisseur of breasts. Melba’s were of the Celtic type – what else in a girl from Dublin? – half pear and half globe and hung low on the ribcage with nipples tilting high on the upper round of flesh. Velvety, satin-soft flesh, pink budded, with just a hint of blue vein tracery in marmoreal perfection. Soft-firm-hard-soft! Exquisite. They might have been carved from Carrarra!

Good grief! And as you can see, Stokes’s bizarre overusage of exclamation points is catching; the dude finishes practically every other sentence with one, to the point where you wonder if he pounded out this manuscript riding high on amphetamines. It seems that Stokes was prone to this in his early Killmaster books, and given that the exclamation-point onslaught tapers off in his later series books, it makes me wonder if Lyle Kenyon Engel himself either edited them out or told Stokes to ease up a little.

Nick is called from his posh digs to the DC HQ of AXE boss Hawk via codes Doomsday and EOW, aka End of World. This is the first time Nick has ever heard of these two codes used together, so he knows something major is up. A concerned Hawk explains that a Scotland-based supervillain going by the name Pendragon is threatening to nuke Russia, making it look like America did it, so that the two superpowers can then destroy each other in a nuclear confrontation.

This explains the opening – the North Pole nuke was likely fired from the island of Blackscape, “a little northeast of Sanday” on the northeast coast of Scotland; the island is owned by Lord Hardesty, a notorious billionaire-cum-religious leader who commands an army of “Militant Druids.” Pendragon is his Druid name, and his ultimate goal is to destroy Russia, given his ultra-hatred of Communism. 

British Intelligence has been investigating Hardesty, and a rep from Scotland Yard named Ian Travers briefs Nick along with Hawk. Nick is to be loaned to the British; Travers explains that even the famed “Double Os” of British Intelligence have failed (“They have a license to kill…well, they got killed!”), to the point that only one of them, the legendary “James Stockes,” still lives. This gets Nick’s attention, as Stockes is “nearly as much of a legend in the counter-espionage world as Nick Carter himself.” Gee, I wonder who Stockes is supposed to be?

But given the abject failure of the British agents, it’s up to Nick Carter of AXE to save the day; Hawk and Travers stress (a bit too much) that this is a lone-man job, despite the fact that the fate of the friggin’ world hangs in the balance. So off Nick goes to the coast of Scotland…where he initially poses as a native fisherman stuck on a boat in the cruel, stormy sea. As usual Stokes pads out the pages with go-nowhere digressions, in particular the various bullshit cover identities Nick briefly assumes and quickly casts aside throughout the first half of the novel.

He’s united with his local contact, a gorgeous redhead named Gwen Leith of the Special Branch, a babe who is “big and busty, high and hard breasted.” There we go with the boobs again! But Gwen spurns Nick’s advances – the Killmaster’s jaw hits the floor practically every time he looks at her, just oggling those breastesses – telling him she is in a serious relationship and no funny stuff. And plus there’s that threat of imminent nuclear armageddon.

Gwen’s staked out near Blackscape island, and has been working the area with James Stockes himself, but the old boy has gone missing. Those hoping for a Nick-Stockes team-up will be disappointed, to say the least. Nick and Gwen disguise themselves in purloined black cloaks with hoods and attend a Druid Black Mass with five hundred other costumed believers outside Hardesty’s castle on Blackscape. This sequence is pretty cool, Stokes pulling out the black magic goods like a ‘60s version of the Mind Masters installment Shamballah.

Some of the satanic hijinks include a Druid in a devil costume hoisting a two-foot “phallus” and using it to goad the onlookers; with a start Nick realizes that it’s a woman beneath the devil costume. Meanwhile Gwen is “caught up in the toils of raw pagan lust.” Nick knocks her out of her lusty mood by prodding the edge of Hugo, his stiletto, up her ass! Then the Druids on stage pull out a bound man and set him on fire as a sacrifice – and it turns out to be James Stockes. Nick shoots the poor bastard in the head to put him out of his misery. Well, so much for the James Bond analogue.

Nick prefigures later Stokes hero Richard Blade in the ensuing escape; Nick, still wielding Hugo, slices and dices sundry black-robed Druids as he and Gwen race for safety. But Gwen falls and hurts her ankle and Nick has no choice but to abandon her. Hey, nuclear armageddon is imminent, all agents are expendable! (Except Nick, of course.) The ensuing chapter “Sex Duel” is another of the novel’s highlights; escaping on the Daily Mail train, Nick wakens to find a brunette beauty with “small breasts” sitting in his cabin – and here we learn one of the Killmaster’s sexual quirks is the sound of nylon stockings rubbing together.

The woman is Lady Hardesty herself, notorious ex-wife (then wife again) of Lord Hardesty, aka Pendragon. Dubbed by Ian Travers as the “nympho to end all nymphos,” Lady Hardesty in today’s era would have her own reality TV series and famous sex tape. But she is complicit with Pendragon and ultimately will turn out to be the main villain of the piece, as it is she who truly wants to nuke Russia and start WWIII. She also wants Nick to give her some of that good Killmaster lovin’, having heard through some grapevine about Nick Carter’s legendary skills in the sack.

The Lady also reveals that poor Gwen has been tortured by snakes back at Blackscape, including the lurid insinuation that one of them was slipped into a rather delicate part of the poor girl’s anatomy. A disgusted Nick hates Lady Hardesty but can’t help getting all hot and bothered by her: “She was a bitch in heat and he was a brute male!” The open challenge is for Nick to make her orgasm, something no man has ever done before, and then perhaps the Lady will make Nick her co-ruler in the aftermath of WWIII.

Stokes gets fairly graphic in the sex scene, which takes up most of the chapter, about as explicit as he got in the earlier The Eyes of The Tiger. And no surprises, Nick helps the Lady achieve that elusive orgasm, have no fear. We go from the sex directly to the action, as Nick takes out a few of the Pendragon goons who shadow Lady Hardesty; this time Nick has a few gadgets that could come out of the Bond film franchise, including a lighter that sprays napalm. He crisps off the face of one goon with it and Stokes well describes the gory horrors that ensue.

After all this cool stuff, Spy Castle loses its way with a digressive bit where Nick must pose as an Irish convict so he can gain the confidence of one Alfie McTurk, a Militant Druid who was jailed for some offense. Stokes builds up this hard-to-swallow plotline that Alfie might provide the lead to where exactly Pendragon is hiding and where his nukes are. But rather than just torture the bastard into talking, Ian Travers et al come up with this lame ruse where Nick must pose as a fellow convict on the van ride to prison; a car crash is staged, and the two are to “escape” into the woods with the intent that Alfie will somehow tell his new convict buddy all about Pendragon.

It’s a page-filling gambit pure and simple, and it does go on a while. It turns into an extended sordid sequence in which the two come across a good-looking young woman alone in her home while her husband’s off at work, and Nick tries his best to keep Alfie from raping her. Alfie eventually makes a phone call to Militant Druid HQ for a helicopter to come pick him up(!), but then Nick falls asleep and Alfie rapes the poor girl after all – and accidentally strangles her while doing so, continuing to hump her corpse! Believe it or not, this is a recurring theme in Stokes.

Nick briefly bluffs his way into a temporary membership in the Militant Druids before he’s uncovered and imprisoned. Lady Hardesty returns, turning out to be the power at Blackscape; she shows Nick a bound and nude Gwen and orders him to drop a live snake on her for more of that snake torture that so turns on the Lady. Afterwards Lady Hardesty wants more Killmaster sex: “She looked [to Nick] like all the crazy whores in the world.” Nick makes the Lady think he’s about to do her again, then forces a bunch of whiskey down her throat until she’s pass-out drunk.

Stokes doesn’t give us a big action finale – none of the Stokes Killmasters I’ve yet read have matched the finale of his Web Of Spies – but instead goes for more of a drawn-out affair with Nick and Gwen (Nick having knocked her out and then saved her from the snake in time) running around the tunnels buried beneath Pendragon’s headquarters. There’s only periodic action, like Nick strangling one dude with his bare hands to Gwen hefting a subgun and mowing down some goons. We also get a terrific catfight between Gwen and Lady Hardesty: “Red head and dark head, spitting and clawing and scratching and gouging!” Indeed, Gwen even makes the kill while a tired “Killmaster” just sits there and watches.

The finale is a cool setpiece with Nick, back in London, infiltrating an abandonded movie lot, one owned by Lord Hardesty. This it turns out is where he has been hiding the whole time; as usual with Stokes, the main villain spends the majority of the narrative off-page. Pendragon has made his home in a fake Camelot, and Nick has a brief confrontation with the wheelchair-bound villain, telling him he’s under arrest. But Pendragon gets the drop on Nick (in the dumbest manner possible – asking for Nick’s Luger so he can kill himself!) and shoots him. Luckily Nick has on “plastic body armor” and is unfazed; he once again whips out trusty Hugo to finish off Lord Hardesty for good.

Oh, and have no fears on the Nick-Gwen score; the novel ends with the two on a coastal vacation, where Nick’s about to get good and lucky with the redheaded babe. All that stuff about her having a steady flame was a lie; Gwen too is a nympho after all, and knew as soon as she saw Nick that she wanted to screw his brains out. But she tried her bestest to keep him away, hence the lie.

I enjoyed Spy Castle and it would be one of my favorites if not for the occasional padding and the “Alfie McTurk” nonsense. Otherwise Stokes delivers just what we expect of him, with a brutal, macho hero and a plot that hopscotches from point A to point Z. The guy’s one of my favorites.

The Eyes Of The Tiger (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #9)

The Eyes Of The Tiger, by Nick Carter
September, 1965  Award Books

For his first volume of Nick Carter: Killmaster, Manning Lee Stokes turns in a slow-moving espionage story along the muted lines of his later Mission To Venice. The Eyes Of The Tiger was also the first book Stokes wrote for series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel, and initiated a writing partnership that would last between the two until Stokes’s death in January 1976.

Per Will Murray in his Killmaster article in The Armchair Detective (volume 15, number 4, 1982):

After [original author] Valerie Moolman dropped the series, Engel advertised in the New York Times for adventure writers. Award had found that Killmaster sold so well that at least six novels could be published per year. The ad was answered by an industrious and hard-drinking writer named Manning Lee Stokes. Stokes, who in the past had written a little of everything from porn novels to Classics Illustrated, had been inactive for a while and anxious for work. His first Nick, The Eyes Of The Tiger, was published in 1965. It introduced a more macho – almost brutal – Killmaster than the Moolman version had been. Over the next six years, Stokes churned out a total of eighteen Nicks, sometimes carrying the series solo for extended periods. He also wrote the first novels for other Engel series, including The Aquanauts, Richard Blade, and John Eagle Expeditor.

Stokes was not only amazingly prolific but could write solid fiction against tight deadlines. Even when he did not adhere exactly to the approved outline, usually the result was just what Engel needed. His was the first Nick to be written in the first person. This was 1969’s The Red Rays. It’s not clear how the first-person device was introduced into the series. As Stokes remembered it, it was his idea. He had used it in hardboiled mystery paperbacks in the ‘fifties and thought it lent itself to Nick Carter…Nevertheless, the first-person voice became standard with The Cobra Kill [another Stokes installment] in 1969. It became a bone of contention between Engel and Award for the rest of their association.

Inevitably, Manning Lee Stokes grew weary of Nick Carter and did other Engel projects – which he wrote right up to his death in the mid-‘seventies. 

I love that description, “industrious and hard-drinking.” I included all of this because it’s practically all I’ve ever been able to find out about Manning Lee Stokes; it doesn’t appear that he ever gave any interviews, and Murray revealed in the uncut Engel interview (which appeared in Paperback Parade #2, 1986) that he himself had never met Stokes, only talked to people who knew him. In other words, Stokes is kind of a mystery, and I’d love to know more about him – he is mentioned in this very brief biography, where it’s revealed that he and his wife never had children.

But anyway, The Eyes Of The Tiger is where it all began, and the seeds for many later Stokes-Engel gems are planted here. In fact a throwaway mention of Nick’s brutal annual training at PURG, held in a “quasi-hell in the American Southwest,” is almost identical to the more fleshed-out sequence of John Eagle’s harsh training in the first Expeditor novel, Needles Of Death. But unfortunately, Stokes’s soon-to-be-customary digressive plotting is also here; it takes a damn long time for much of anything to happen. While the writing is strong, the thrills are few. However Stokes certainly has done his homework, so far as the main characters and situations go; one would have a hard time guessing this was in fact his first installment of the series.

Anyway, Nick’s in Zurich, posing alternately as a grungy sailor and a portly American businessman named Frank Manning – Stokes already employing his customary in-jokery within the first few pages of his first Killmaster novel. When we meet Nick he’s standing over the comatose form of a gorgeous, stacked blonde whom Nick has given a mickey finn; the woman made a play for him in his sailor guise, and a suspicious Nick took her back to his hovel of a hotel room…and promptly knocked her out! (Be prepared for the egregious usage of exclamation points that mars most of Stokes’s early Killmaster yarns, by the way.)

This will ultimately prove to be the Baroness Elspeth von Stadt, lovely West German secret agent who carries derringers in her garter belts and the photo of a hanged man’s face in her locket. Nick’s boss Hawk has sent the Baroness to meet up with Nick and join him on his latest assignment, which has him plotting to steal a tiger statuette with diamond eyes from a Swiss bank. Old Axis comrades Shikoku Hondo and Max Rader also plot to get the statue; Rader killed the Baroness’s father back during the war years (it’s her father’s face in that grisly locket photo), and the Baroness, who is consumed with vengeance so far as Rader goes, is the only person who knows what the old Nazi’s new face looks like.

So The Eyes Of The Tiger limps into action; it takes a good 40 or so pages of super-small and dense print to learn all this. The short bit of early action occurs when Nick finds Hondo about to rape the Baroness’s comatose form; Stokes here doles out hordes of racist stuff which is pretty unusual for him, referring to Hondo as everything from an “ape” to a “lustful little Nip” to even a “saffron-faced monkey.” Anyway Nick barges in, saves the Baroness’s honor, and then tosses Hondo out the window after savagely kicking him in the crotch. So much for Shikoku Hondo, promised on the back cover as one of the novel’s main villains.

While the book lacks much in the way of action until the final pages, The Eyes Of The Tiger is surprisingly more robust in the sexual hijnks, which is particularly interesting given the publication date. Stokes here is more explicit than he is in later volumes, with Nick and Elspeth’s initial boffing given an elaborate three-page sequence that, while never outright hardcore, leaves nothing to the imagination. More importantly, this sex scene prefigures every other sex scene Stokes wrote: it’s sexual mortal combat, man versus woman, Nick “mastering” the female, who of course has never had a real man and thus never had a proper orgasm. We also get the memorable detail of Elspeth “leeching at [Nick’s] manhood.”

All this occurs on a lakeside villa near Zurich, owned by a wealthy lesbian friend of Elspeth’s and staffed by a grossly obese butler named Osman (whom Nick thinks looks like the Michelin Man) and a “pleasantly plump” horny maid named Mignon (who insists Nick have sex with her…mere hours after his herculean bout with Elspeth, but Stokes leaves this one to our imagination). Osman turns out to be working for Rader, and we have a tense and long knife fight between him and Nick on a clifftop.

As Will Murray states above, Stokes’s version of Nick Carter is certainly brutal at times; he ends up using Elspeth as bait, same as he will use other sexy sirens as bait in later Stokes novels. When she’s taken captive, Nick is contacted by Rader’s men and informed that Elspeth is in the bowels of a medieval castle, where she will be tortured if Nick doesn’t turn over the part of the key he stole from Shikoku Hondo, which Rader needs to open the Swiss vault with the tiger statue. Stokes delivers one of his effective scene-setting moments where Nick, stripped to swimming trunks, his face and skin blackened, infiltrates the castle during a heavy storm and plants his weapons in the torture chamber. 

The finale also prefigures another mainstay of Stokes’s later fiction: the “bluff or brawn” gambit, where Nick, alone and unarmed, bluffs his way into Rader’s castle and tries to con the old Nazi sadist into giving up Elspeth and letting them both go. He fails, and Stokes delivers in the final pages the moment promised on the first-page preview: Elspeth is stripped and put on the rack, hot pokers about to be applied to her by Rader’s men. But Nick’s planted trusty Wilhelmina and Hugo beneath the rack, and Stokes doesn’t cheat us out of an action-packed finale.

In many ways, The Eyes Of The Tiger is like Stokes’s version of Casino Royale. Mostly in how Nick, like Bond in that first adventure, here begins to fall in love with a woman he’s uncertain he can trust – the Killmaster, you see, is shocked to discover he’s developed feelings for Elspeth, and wonders if he might want to quit the spy game. Admittedly this is some lame telegraphing, but Stokes handles it well, and of course it leads to the expected outcome – Elspeth is like Vesper Lynd in that she is hiding a few things from our hero. Her finale is also similar, with her proclamations of love falling on deaf ears; this leads to a nice bit, and another indication of the brutality of Stokes’s hero, where Nick leaves Elspeth “one last bullet” – for herself.

It moves a lot slower than its 159 pages would imply, but The Eyes Of The Tiger is still pretty enjoyable. One can imagine that Lyle Kenyon Engel was certainly happy that this particular writer responded to his ad. I’ve managed to pick up all of Stokes’s Killmaster installments and look forward to reading the rest of them.

Mission To Venice (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #21)

Mission To Venice, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1967  Award Books

Manning Lee Stokes is in pure Ian Fleming mold in this installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster. While it still has Stokes’s usual literary flair, Mission To Venice lacks the more outlandish elements of his other installments, sticking to the “real world” for the most part. It also has some trace elements of Fleming’s From Russia With Love. But I definitely enjoyed it – mostly because, this early in, Stokes was clearly still enjoying the series, unlike later dialed-in deliveries, a la The Red Rays.

This one’s also a short 156 pages and moves throughout, proving again that the shorter the word count, the better Stokes was. There’s no action intro for Nick Carter; he’s on vacation in Paris with a young “sex machine” named Georgette when he’s called into AXE boss Hawk’s office in Washington and given the latest assignment. A US plane carrying an H-bomb has gone down somewhere over the Adriatic Sea, and the US figures the Yugoslavs have found it. Their goal will likely be to use it for leverage against the Italians in the long-running Yugo-Italian rivalry for control of Trieste.

Nick (as he’s referred to in these early volumes) is told his companion will be an “international courtesan” who was once an Italian princess but who now works as a part-time AXE agent; he is to meet her on the Orient Express, which is where the From Russia With Love feel comes in. (Nick’s also given a special briefcase courtesy Poindexter of AXE Special Effects & Editing, a suitcase much like the one Bond was given in that novel.) Hawk informs Nick that the man behind the Yugo plot is Vanni Manfrinto, head of Yugoslavian intelligence; Hawk makes it clear that he wants Manfrinto dead by mission’s end.

Manfrinto is a “satyr” with a “woman a day habit,” thus AXE is using the former princess as a “stalking horse” to lure in Manfrinto so Nick can spring the trap on him. The princess is Morgan de Verizone, a beautiful brunette with delicate features who in fact looks more like a princess than a whore – Nick, disguised as a travelling businessman from the midwest, can’t get over how beautiful she is as he secretly watches her onboard the Orient Express. For reasons Stokes muddles around, Nick doesn’t outright present himself to Morgan as her AXE contact, even though he’s supposed to; instead he just bides his time.

Not that this stops them from the expected sex; in a complete disregard for plot contrivance, Stokes has Morgan sitting beside Nick on the dining cart that evening and promptly presenting herself to him, just thinking he’s a good-looking dude and looking to pass the night in memorable fashion. The sex scene is vague and not as explicit as such material in later volumes. Whereas the typical guy might be a bit winded after all this, “Killmaster” instead allows himself to be captured by the two thugs who have been shadowing the princess. Once he’s learned they’re Yugoslavian agents, he kills them quite brutally – bashing their heads together.

When Nick and the princess get to Venice Stokes really goes for the Fleming vibe. It’s all fog-clouded, cobblestoned streets and men in suits lurking in doorways as Nick secretly follows Morgan around the city, eventually tailing her to The Lido, where it turns out Manfrinto has stationed himself, operating out of a closed-down casino. This is where the majority of the action takes place, particularly in one sequence where Nick scouts out the casino while Morgan’s “entertaining” Manfrinto. Nick, infiltrating the henchman-infested casino, takes the time to spy through the keyhole to Manfrinto’s bedroom, where he sees the man “going after [the princess] like an oestrual goat.” 

Nick is eventually cornered, and after killing another man he has to escape, with the thugs closing in on him floor by floor. The suspense is ultimately runined with the deus ex machina presence of a long rope up in the attic, which conveniently enough goes all the way down to the ground, six floors below! There’s also a nice bit where Nick has to elude a “radar truck” that pursues him. All that accomplished, however, he gets shot in the leg the next day while again stalking the princess through the fog-bound streets, killing the Yugo agent who shot him.

Only here does Nick reveal to Morgan who he is, with one of the greatest dumb lines I’ve ever read: “Forget the theatrics. You’re a prostitute and I’m a secret agent!” One of these days I’m going to try to work that line into everyday conversation. Anyway this leads to the veritable climax, as Nick, for once not boffing the gal (who is limping due to being so worn out by that oestrual goat), instead again uses her as prey, sending her off to the casino that night to distract Manfrinto. Oh and by this point Morgan has told Nick she loves him and wants desperately to get out of the spy game and be with Nick forever and etc, in some of the lamest telegraphing ever.

The action stuff doesn’t really occur until the final quarter, and for the most part it’s briefly rendered. Manfrinto’s casino is near an “isle of the dead,” ie a cemetery-filled island which is being used as a forward base for the Yugo and Russian scuba divers who are searching this section of the Adriatic for the H-bomb plane. Nick sneaks onto the island, hiding in the muddy graves and whatnot, until he is “a mud-plastered statue of a latter-day Hercules,” who runs roughsod over the foreign agents. As ever Stokes’s version of Nick Carter is particularly cold, blowing up a bunch of scientists with a few grenades and then gunning down unarmed soldiers with a stolen tommy gun.

Stokes takes us into the homestretch with the expected development – Nick is captured, and easily, at that. It’s that damn attic rope again, which is still hanging outside the casino, and like a dumbass Nick decides to chance it and hefts himself up there, only of course to realize it’s a trap, after all. And, sure enough, the bastards also have Morgan, whom they’ve been torturing for fun. She’s bound and topless, and they have a grand old time jabbing lit cigarettes onto her abdomen and breasts.

In a twisted bit reminiscent of the even-more-twisted finale of Stokes’s The Golden Serpent, Manfrinto and his men have Nick strip and cajole him to get on top of the now-catatonic princess, and screw her for their viewing pleasure! Stokes doesn’t get as outrageous as in that earlier installment, but still it’s pretty crazy. And even though he’s “balls deep” (as a friend of mine in college always put it) and surrounded by armed goons, Nick still manages to grab away a tommy gun and start, uh, blasting. He even manages to capture Manfrinto, chasing him over to that muddy island of death and beating the shit out of him.

In the climax Stokes delivers a few reveals; for one, Manfrinto expected “someone else” to come for him, instead of Nick Carter. This turns out to be Hawk himself, who for once is here on the scene of action – Nick realizes with a sinking sensation that he himself has been used as the stalking horse, all along. Hawk and Manfrinto were best friends during the war, Hawk reveals, until Manfrinto went over to the Nazis and sold out their OSS team. Also here Stokes introduces the tidbit that Hawk’s full name is David Alexander Hawk, a name so seldom used that “Nick had almost forgotten it.”

The finale is the usual rush job of quick info that Manfrinto was tortured into revealing the whereabouts of the H-bomb, after which Hawk’s left orders for his death. And meanwhile the princess is nuts, but she’ll be taken care of in a sanitarium and given a new name and new life when she gets out. And that’s that – lots of Fleming suspense and atmosphere with occasional thrills and a too-quick action finale.

But Stokes is on form throughout, and as mentioned keeps the ball rolling. Interestingly, he mentions that Nick is “thirty-odd years old,” which is much younger than the World War II vet of the first volume. Stokes also occasionally delivers on the pulpish, perhaps-intentionally goofy stuff also expected of him; for example this time he writes “Killmaster” not only without the “the,” but in all caps, ie, “KILLMASTER ran down the corridor,” and the like. And while Stokes goes easy on the spy-fy gadgets this time, he does at one point have Nick wearing gloves made of skin flayed from the hands of executed criminals!

Richard Blade #5: Liberator Of Jedd

Richard Blade #5: Liberator Of Jedd, by Jeffrey Lord
October, 1973  Pinnacle Books
(Original publication 1971)

The fifth installment of Richard Blade is once again courtesy Manning Lee Stokes, who appears with this series to be writing his own Voyage to Arcturus. Liberator Of Jedd takes all the macho themes and subtext of previous books and brings it all so to the fore that even Richard Blade himself notes it – indeed, Blade notices here how each “Dimension X” he visits is basically the same as the last, and that his exploits in each dimension all follow the same pattern.

Surely this is yet more commentary from Stokes on his own work, but as ever the man has invested so much of himself in his writing that you enjoy it all despite the repetitive nature. And Stokes, normally known for his high-brow style, appears to have challenged himself to use even more obscure words this time around; the novel is peppered with highfalutin words and prhases that you won’t encounter in too many other Conan ripoffs, that’s for sure.

More importantly, where other writers might be content to churn out a piece of hack-and-slash fantasy, Stokes goes to great lengths to make Liberator Of Jedd something more, with Blade this time ascending from the stone age to a bizarre future, all in the same world. It comes off like an allegory or even a myth – again, very much like Voyage To Arcturus. (Which also was a big inspiration to literary heavyweight Harold Bloom, whose Flight To Lucifer was inspired by it; several years ago I exchanged a few emails with Mr. Bloom, who was kind enough to provide more details about his obscure, overlooked novel.)

Liberator Of Jedd opens six months after the previous volume, the events of which aren’t even mentioned here. These opening quarters of the Richard Blade books are the only parts to feature any continuity; here we learn that Blade ventures to Dimension X once every six months, this rule enforced by MI6A boss J, much to the chagrin of the project’s chief scientist, Lord Leighton. But Blade has had a rough go with these sixth months of rest, and is now basically a drunk, given to “satyriasis,” which we’re informed is an all-consuming drive for sex.

In fact Blade when we meet him is shacked up in a cottage in the country, eagerly boffing latest bedmate Viki (who has “spectacular breasts”), to the point that the poor girl can’t take anymore of his good lovin’ (“You have made me so sore now I can hardly walk,” she complains). But no fear, as Viki is an “accomplished fellatrice,” and thus can take care of Blade in other ways – as ever, Stokes throughout treads the line between sleaze and literature in the infrequent sex scenes.

The opening half of Liberator Of Jedd is a bit different from what’s come before; Blade is strapped into his chair and about to be sent again into Dimension X – Lord L hopes for a return to Alba – but something goes screwy and instead something from Dimension X is brought over here. It’s a “hairy demon” that almost tears the control room apart before Blade smashes it down. Gradually – Stokes as ever takes his sweet time, so that the book really does appropriate the feel of an epic – we will learn that this creature is akin to very early proto-humans, sort of like the monkey-men in the “dawn of man” sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lord L will name the creature “Ogar,” after the sound it makes when hungry. Incapable of speech, Ogar has the rudiments of intelligence. Lord L insists upon studying him, leading to the strange outcome of Blade, clad only in a loincloth, living with the thing for a full month in a faux cave built beneath the Tower of London(!). Like a very bizarre sitcom or something.

After this month of bonding Ogar sufficienty sees Blade as his master, so it’s high time for the two of them to head back to Dimension X and exploit the hoped-for “mineral wealth” of Ogar’s home, wherever/whenever that might be, to of course be exploited for “H Dimension,” ie “Home Dimension,” use. But true to Stokes’s usual template, Ogar, despite such heavy buildup, is casually dispensed of, eaten by a strange beast mere moments after returning to his home dimension. Liberator Of Jedd also eschews the template of previous novels, with Blade this time venturing into more of a Stone Age than the faux-Hyperboria of earlier books. It’s a wild planet, populated by slavering, blood-hungry beasts, and the only humans Blade can find appear to be subservient to more apes, these ones more along the lines of the ones in Planet of the Apes.

Stokes indeed appears to be writing his own variation of that Pierre Boulle classic, only to change his mind midway through; indeed, these apes, which live along the coast and use humans as their slaves, are quickly cast from the book. (And they’re a sadistic bunch, too, even beating a female slave to death while Blade secretly watches and then gang-raping her corpse!) Instead Stokes focuses on a busty, nubile slave-babe who escapes the apemen, running of course right into Blade, who has sequestered himself in a hollowed-out colossal statue shaped like a man which lurks over the coast. The hot runaway is named Ooma, and when Blade catches her in one of his snares Stokes delivers one of his patented WTF? bits that are so strangely endearing – not to mention a reminder of the strange vibe of the series:

At that moment the breeze backed around a point or so. Blade stepped back a pace and sniffed at it – her odor was that of musky female secretions, natural, and not subject to the lavage of H-Dimension antiseptics. He sniffed again and felt desire rise in him. And knew that he was, at last, fully adapted to this particular X-Dimension.  

As we’ll recall, Richard Blade’s brain is uniquely suited to adapting to any dimension, thus he can communicate with the natives in their own language. He learns the girl’s name is Ooma and successfully cows her with his manliness, she being unable to defend herself in the savage wilderness. Indeed she will learn to call him “Blade master,” particularly after she tries to run away from him…and then has to come crawling back to him, more terrified of the forest monsters than Blade himself. The subjugation of the female is the central edict of the Richard Blade series, but this time out I also noticed another bit of subtext Stokes has so cleverly worked in – namely, that Blade can only fall in love with Dimension X women. This of course leads to a patented Stokes sex scene, which per his usual style goes from sleaze to profundity:

Ooma had none of Blade’s reservations. The more she caressed him the more her ardor grew. Her voice went high-pitched and her breath sobbed and whistled in her throat. She licked his body with her moist tongue and murmured words he did not understand. She stroked his swollen testicles with her fingers, performed a brief, but avid, fellatio, and then dug her hands into his hair and pulled him down atop her. She guided him into the sleek, wet, tight and rough-walled grotto. Blade was huge and Ooma small and the fricative sum was an unbearable agony of pleasure. It seemed to Blade, trying to prolong the blissful pain, that Ooma spent incessantly without ever losing her grip on him. Her muscular control was beyond anything he had ever experienced; she squeezed him and milked him and, when he could struggle no longer, she took the final gush of his sperm with a high-ringing cry of pleasure that skewered the forest night.

Blade lay on top of her, sweating and panting, still twitching and mindless, fighting his way back from the little death. It had been sex such as few men were privileged to know – barbaric and primitive sex with a unity, a wholeness, a lack of inhibition that even Richard Blade did not often come by. He was grateful. He was also wrung out, depleted, wasted and weary. His massive body was a cocoon nurturing an ennui and death-longing beyond all measure or telling. The past was blotted out, the present did not exist, the future would never be. The great lie of living was over. He could rest now. Sleep now – rest now – die now – 

Boy, no wonder Blade only falls in love with Dimension X gals! Ooma sticks with Blade for the majority of the middle half, which for the most part is a very long sequence of survivalist fiction; Blade and Ooma make their way through the dangerous forest, ascending to higher and higher terrain. The allegorical nature of the novel is brought to the fore, here, with Blade himself reflecting on the fact that, the higher he climbs on this strange world, the more advanced its people become. So that by the next time they meet foes, this time they’re of a higher evolutionary level than the apemen of the coast: these are the Api, 8-foot tall creatures that are a “cross between a gorilla and a baboon,” who go about wearing horned helmets and carrying swords (ie the cover image, perhaps once again drawn by Tony Destefano).

Here Blade has his first major action sequence in the novel; the Api are hired mercs who protect the land outside Jeddia, ie the capitol of Jedd, Ooma’s home. But the Api are notoriously bloodthirsty. Ooma is certain that they will kill Blade and rape her to death – the Api, monstrously endowed, are known to rip their female captives right in half. Thus begins the other main motif of the Richard Blade series, again aptly summed up by Blade himself: “Dominate or die.” As I wrote before, this series could almost be a balm for the rampant male emasculation of the modern day; Richard Blade, with his casual misogyny, his constant resort to “bluff or brawn,” has nothing in common with the domesticated heroes of today’s liberalized and feminized popular entertainment.

So Blade fights the Api leader, despite that the creature is much bigger and stronger than him, first bluffing that he, Blade, is an important notable on his way to Jeddia – and you damned apes will kindly keep your dirty paws off the girl. This goes on for quite a while, the Api not sure if they should believe Blade’s story or not, but it culminates just like you expected it would: Blade and the Api captain engage in mortal combat. This fght’s cool, with Blade even knocking the poor bastard’s eyeballs out before finishing him off. Afterwards it’s back to the “bluff,” with Blade, gifted with a silver tongue (among other things), succeeding in making the other Api fall for his story.

The land of Jedd continues with the evolutionary concept, as it’s somewhere in the Iron Age, per Blade’s reckoning. It’s also a dying city, the Yellow Plague having hit it recently. People turn yellow and then die cackling insanely. Blade stays with Ooma’s uncle and aunt for a while, and then ditches the girl, deciding to head on to the capital city of Jeddia – and hope you enjoyed Ooma while she was around, because she’s jettisoned from the narrative posthaste, never seen again (sort of). Instead Blade heads into Jeddia and checks out the scene: the ancient Empress is dying, and a grand vizzier sort named Nizra appears to be scheming for her power. There’s also “Child Princess Mitgu,” sequestered in her palace, who will supposedly assume control of Jedd.

Even here Blade muses how similar this is to all the other Dimension X worlds he has visited. In fact the guy is such an old hand at dealing with these situations that he immediately succeeds in his plan: gutting a few innocent guards and coating himself in their blood, he wakes up Nizra in his private chambers, presenting himself as the blood-spattered “avatar” of myth who was long ago prophecized to come save Jedd. This itself is yet another recurring theme – it’s amusing to think that all these dimensions have similar setups because all the worlds are the products of Richard Blade’s limited imagination, but the presence of Ogar earlier in the book negates that (not to mention the Russian agent who went to Dimension X, last time).

As in previous installments, Liberator Of Jedd becomes real heavy in the court politics in its final quarter, with Blade working a deal with Nizra. If the vizzier presents Blade as the promised avatar, then Blade will confer power to Nizra upon when the old crone dies. Of course, the two men will harbor great distrust for one another. When the Empress meets Blade, she tells him that, upon her death, he must marry the Child Princess and then take the Jeddians north, to the Shining Gate. Blade promises to do so; then he gets a gander at Mitgu, who you won’t be surprised is a little sexpot who likes to flounce around nude and promptly offers herself to Blade. He turns her down – due to the little fact that Mitgu’s like ten years old! But, as Blade’s Jeddian friends keep telling him, young Jeddian girls are much more mature than their years…indeed, only now does Blade realize that Ooma herself was barely in her teens, if that.

The biggest action scene is also the last one. Blade is lured into a trap, told that Ooma needs him – Blade has told no one of the girl and thus should have suspected something. But Blade, despite all that “bluff and brawn” and macho mystique, isn’t too sharp at times; more than likely this is more sly subtext from Stokes, the subtle chink in his hero’s armor. It’s a setup, courtesy Nizra; Ooma’s family is dead of the plague, forcibly given them by the Nizra-loyal Api, and plus poor Ooma herself has been gang-raped by the Api and tossed in the charnel pits! Good grief! It’s a hellish, desperate battle, as Blade and just a few loyal men are holed up in the cottage of Ooma’s family, heavily outmanned by the attacking Api. It’s a brutal fight, too, with Blade coaching his men on defensive strategy and whatnot.

As for Ooma, the poor girl’s dead when Blade finds her, but enough about her – he’s got to get to marrying Mitgu and all. Stokes at least wisely skips over describing the sexual shenanigans of the wedding night, what with his just having killed off Ooma so horribly. (Have no fear, he gets to it eventually, once he’s given his readers a moment to regather themselves – and the sex scene isn’t as long as the one with Ooma, and besides which it’s unsettling because Stokes has constantly reminded us that Mitgu’s a prepubescent…though with a “woman’s body,” of course….) Anyway it’s two weeks later and Blade has led the Jeddians to the Shining Gate, the captured Nizra and Api in tow. The Gate turns out to be a stainless steel wall – protected by a disintigrator ray!!

As mentioned, Liberator Of Jedd is very allegorical; now Blade has ascended into a future, sci-fi realm. Having made Nizra and the Api the unwitting guinea pigs for that disintigrator ray, Blade determines he and he alone is the only man who can safely enter the Shining Gate, ie the land of the Kropes – who turn out to be robots! But Blade, entering the silent, still city, is suddenly sick – he has the Yellow Plague(?!). He stumbles along, coming to a moving sidewalk, and approaches a mile-high tower fortress in the distance. A voice speaks in his mind, guiding him – a voice that claims to know who Blade is and where he has come from.

The voice belongs to a massive brain that rests alone inside a 40-foot tall metal tank on the top floor of the fortress. The brain relays it’s long story to Blade – the Jeddians of old were much more advanced, and built robots to do their work. The Jeddians would dispose of old parts, and thus tossed an old robot brain into a pond(!?)…the brain, you see, somehow kept its sentience, and slowly grew more powerful. Somehow it was able to gather the other robots together in revolt, to the point that the Jeddians were kicked out of their own advanced city and regressed over the centuries into this Iron Age.

But the brain, which grew bigger and more powerful, now has a problem – a tumor has been growing within it. The brain wants Blade to hop in the tank and cut out the tumor. In exchange the brain will turn off the disintigrator ray, open the Shining Gate, and welcome the modern Jeddians back into their ancestral home. Blade, half-dead from the fast-acting plague, hops in the tank with sword ready – and decides to hell with it. If he’s learned one thing, it’s that you can’t trust a giant robot brain that started life lying discarded in a pond. So he starts slicing and dicing, brain matter splattering everywhere – and at that moment he’s zapped back home by Lord L, who has been trying unsuccessfully to summon Blade home for weeks.

The finale of Liberator Of Jedd is given to J, who when we last see him is drunk as a lord and being shown home by a kindly police officer. It’s a week or two later, we learn, and Blade when he materialized back in the control room beneath the Tower of London was almost dead of a plague so unknown that specialists from America had to be flown in to combat it. But the old boy’s okay and expected to pull through – J you see thinks of Blade as a son, we learn this time, and has grown very protective of the guy.

And that’s that. No doubt written to a tight schedule like all the other installments in the series, Liberator Of Jedd nonetheless burns with a weird fire unexpected from the average Conan ripoff. Hell, if a known or even “literary” author had written this novel, academic eggheads would be debating the “hidden meanings” to this very day. But instead Liberator Of Jedd has been consigned to the dustbins of fiction like the rest of Stokes’s work, and more’s the pity – the guy, despite the inordinate padding of his books, the casual disregard for plot and payoff, was a damn talented writer, and I always look forward to reading his work.

The Aquanauts #4: Sargasso Secret

The Aquanauts #4: Sargasso Secret, by Ken Stanton
No month stated, 1971  Macfadden Books

The fourth volume of The Aquanauts is pretty oddball; for the first hundred pages author Manning Lee Stokes appears to be under the impression that he’s writing a murder-mystery – indeed, a murder-mystery starring a septuagenarian Navy admiral! Once again one must wonder if series creator/producer Lyle Kenyon Engel figured he might’ve hired the wrong ghostwriter.

At any rate Stokes’s writing, despite the padding, stalling, and general lack of anything “aquanautical,” is still so readable, at least for me, that I find I don’t really mind the fact that not much at all is happening. Perhaps Engel felt the same, and just let Stokes do his thing. Regardless, the first half of Sargasso Secret will be hard-going for most, especially those who are eager for the Thunderball/Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea underwater action promised by the series’s concept.

For once again Stokes has taken a series about a kick-ass Navy frogman codenamed “Tiger Shark,” his billion-dollar high-tech submersible KRAB, and turned in a story that really has nothing much to do with any of it, sort of like in the first volume. As mentioned Tiger’s boss, “Old Crusty” Navy admiral Hank Coffin, is the star of the show for the first hundred pages – and my friends, this is perhaps the longest Stokes offering yet, coming in at 224 pages of small print with hardly any white space. Stokes was both prolific and industrious, you have to give him that.

Some unspecified but short time after the previous volume, Admiral Hank Coffin is flying to Hawaii under orders of the President to look into a potential solution to the growing threat of world famine. Sargasso Secret is heavy with the doom and gloom prophecies of the ‘70s, with “world starvation” at one point stated as being a certainty by the ‘80s. Coffin as we’ll recall is chief of SUS, ie the Secret Underwater Service, and he has no idea why the President would task him with this assignment. This is another hallmark of Stokes’s writing – the protagonists are constantly wondering why they’ve been given their latest mission. One wonders if this was Stokes himself bemoaning his latest ghostwriting duty through his characters.

Tiger and his immediate boss Captain Tom Greene are already here in Hawaii; Stokes as ever does well with bringing to life his trio of main protagonists, with Coffin and Greene, closer due to age, bickering and bantering, and alpha male Tiger chomping at the bit to get back into action. They’re here to meet Dr. Lee Choon, a chain-smoking marine biologist of Hawaiian-Chinese descent who, we gradually learn, has formulated a way to synthesize proteins and vegetables out of seaweed. In fact he’s called the Navy reps here to his mansion to eat “thousand dollar steaks,” ie steaks that were created by seaweed harvested at great cost from the Sargasso Sea, near Cuba.

Also here is Choon’s wonderfully-named stepdaughter, Poppy Choon, a free-spirited, vixenish “Eurasian” gal with “large-apple size breasts” who informs Tiger posthaste of her plans to screw him silly. Stokes does get to the good stuff, though per his usual wont it’s only after much dialog and narrative detailing Dr. Choon’s seaweed-harvesting. But our pal doesn’t cheat us when it comes to the sleazy goods; the books are only becoming more explicit as they go on, though Stokes is still his literary self even during all the wanton activities, with lines like, “[Tiger was] providing the phallus on which she immolated herself.”

In fact Stokes is in even more of a “literary” mood than usual in Sargasso Secret; you know for sure this isn’t The Marksman when you come across descriptions like “the soft druggets of radiance cast by the lanterns.” But Stokes is one of the few genre authors I’ve encountered who can write like this and still get appropriately sleazy and pulpy, so the high-brow narative style just adds to the charm. I’ve said before how much I enjoy the guy’s work, and an enjoyment of Manning Lee Stokes’s writing is about the only way you’ll be able to endure the first half of Sargasso Secret.

It’s all in a suspense and mystery mode as Stokes dwells on just a few characters here at Dr. Choon’s mansion. Besides those mentioned there’s also Charles Wong, Choon’s assistant who is obsessed with Poppy and thus instantly jealous of Tiger, and Hideki Sato, a “Jap” agent who has been sent here by his government in coordination with the US, as Japan too has been seeking a means of cultivating food from seaweed. Yet Coffin recognizes Sato and remembers him as a Japanese spy in the pre-WWII years, one who was kicked out of the US.

Eventually we readers see that Sato is pressuring Dr. Choon to turn over his formula to Sato personally, the man acting for himself and blackmailing Choon with his knowledge of some bad stuff Choon was once involved in. All this stuff plays out in very slow-moving prose, with the “action” happening off-page…after Sato delivers his threat to Choon, in the next chapter we learn that a post-coital Tiger took a dip in the pool, only to find Sato’s murdered corpse. One of Choon’s guards has also been killed.

More pedantic time-wasting occurs as, instead of it happening in forward-moving narrative, we’re instead treated to a lot of summarized backstory as the hapless CIA agents tasked with monitoring Choon try to figure out what happened at the doctor’s mansion. Long story short, the place was burned down and everyone disappeared. At long last we’ll learn that Coffin Tiger, Choon, et al likely escaped in a jeep, which they drove to a beach, and then perhaps got on a sub. Of course, this was all the plotting of Hank Coffin, though why he went to such extreme lengths is unstated. When the narrative switches back over to Coffin we learn that “Old Crusty” wisely suspects Choon of killing Sato and the guard.

Finally, on page 118, Stokes remembers that he’s writing a series titled The Aquanauts. Tiger Shark returns as our protagonist and mostly stays for the duration. It’s six weeks later and he’s onboard KRAB, monitoring a prototype “monster sub” named the USS Narwhale as it lurks in the Sargasso Sea. Dr. Choon, Poppy, and Charles Wong are on board the sub, “guests” of the US Navy, as they gather and harvest the Sargasso seaweed. The aqautic stuff we want from the series sporadically returns, like when Tiger gets in his special gear (a black “light metal helmet” and a black “neoprene wet suit [with] five zippers, but none in the right place”) and “fins” around the murky sea.

Admiral Coffin suspects Dr. Choon of somehow sneaking info to Chinese or Russian agents posing as Cuban fishermen in the boats that trawl the Sargasso. Tiger quickly figures out that Choon is firing messages via speargun, to be later collected by the pseudo-fishermen. Once Tiger’s had dinner onboard the Narwhale – and gotten a blowjob from Poppy – it’s time for him to suit up, stalk the area once the big sub leaves, and collect one of those errant spears before the Commies come to collect them.

All the plot threads from the first half of the book awkwardly come together as Charles Wong, on Narwhale, takes Capt. Greene captive, phoning his demands to Admiral Coffin on nearby sub Poseidon. Wong we’ll learn is a double agent, working for the “Chinese Commies” and the Russians; Dr. Choon himself is aligned with the Chinese, his assignment to use US resources to perfect his protein manufacturing before delivering the whole thing to China on a silver platter.

But Choon has escaped – oh, and Charles has accidentally killed Poppy!! Stokes flashes back so that we readers can witness the poor nympho’s sad demise as Charles Wong bashes her head to pulp with the butt of his gun; as an extra twist of the knife Stokes even informs us that Poppy has fallen in love with Tiger and fantasizes about marrying him!

For the hell of it, Stokes then throws in a new subplot – Admiral Coffin tasks Tiger with killing a new Shark (ie a junior SUS frogman, Tiger being the only Tiger Shark). The guy has the convenient name Battenkil and Coffin’s just learned he’s a Russian secret agent. Tiger is assigned to kill the spy while the two men speed in KRAB after the Cuban fishing boat Dr. Choon has escaped on, which is taking him to Havana. Now we’re getting to the material we want as Tiger, in his “special wet suit,” which has “thousands of tiny suction cups” on it, affixes himself to the bottom of the Cuban boat as it speeds through the waters and slowly pulls himself aboard, ready to kill some Chinese Commies and capture Dr. Choon.

But Choon’s already friggin’ dead!! Once again Stokes builds up a plot and dispenses with it off-page; Choon, miserable over how he had a chance to save Poppy but instead ran for his life, shoots himself in the heart with a Luger(!?) and dies as Tiger watches. The Cuban sailors proving to be pretty damn easygoing, Tiger then takes the corpse, gives it a sea burial, and returns to KRAB. Meanwhile Charles Wong has gotten onboard a Russian sub, and it’s now angling to shoot a torpedo at the Narwhale, just as Coffin suspected. Tiger’s mission is to destroy the Russian sub, and kill fellow Shark Battenkil.

The final dozen or so pages are gripping and entertaining and damn if only the rest of the book was the same. It culminates with Tiger and Battenkil in desperate battle beneath the waves, and then a trio of Russian frogmen come after Tiger. Our hero once again doesn’t get to use his “Sea Pistol,” that bizarre weapon introduced in the first volume but not used since then (I think); this time it’s knocked out of his hand before he can fire. The fight with the Russian frogmen is especialy gripping because Tiger has planted a bomb on their sub and he has to keep them from seeing it – plus Battenkil managed to cut Tiger’s oxygen supply, so there’s an extra layer of desperation as Tiger frantically swims for KRAB before he runs out of air – and before the Russian sub blows. 

Ponderous and slow-moving, more focused on mystery and suspense than Cold War aquatic thrills, Sargasso Secret is really only enjoyable for fans of the series or fans of Stokes’s work. I’ve found with this particular series to not hope for any action or lurid thrills or whatever – or if so, only hope for it in small doses – and instead just appreciate it for what it was: a skilled and capable author winging it as he bangs out his latest contract assignment.