The Black Eagles #1: Hanoi Hellground

The Black Eagles #1: Hanoi Hellground, by John Lansing
September, 1983  Zebra Books

I used to always see copies of this long-running series on the racks of the local WaldenBooks store when I was a kid, but it looks like these days the Black Eagles series is relatively forgotten. I had a few volumes back then but never read them; the series was set during the Vietnam War, and I much preferred the “modern” men’s adventure series. However the covers were great and basically designed to capture a young boy’s attention: awesome paintings of headband-wearing skulls with weapons crossed behind them.

I’d read that someone named Patrick E. Andrews mostly served under the house name “John Lansing,” but Mike Madonna recently told me that this first volume was actually written by Mark Roberts. Well, I instantly had to read it. I hoped for another blast of Soldier For Hire-style patriotism and commie-bashing, and for the most part that’s exactly what I got. However the impact was dilluted over the 330+ pages of small print – I really have no idea why Zebra Books insisted on making their series novels so damn long.

The Black Eagles is the name of a CIA-backed squad of special operatives formed during some unknown part of the Vietnam War (I had a hard time figuring out when Hanoi Hellground took place). They are formed around Major Robert Falconi (don’t you love those convenient last names for protagonists?) and are made up of Americans from each branch of the US military as well as soldiers from South Vietnam and even Korea. First though a little more information on the series, courtesy Stephen Mertz:

That series was a Bill Fieldhouse operation. I don’t recall if Bill actually wrote any of the books solo but he did develop the series, and then farmed out those titles to his buddies. Lansing, by the way: my favorite of Bill’s work is a series of novellas that appeared in Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine from 1979-1982, about a US Army CID officer in Europe named Major Lansing. There’s 10-12 stories in that series and they’re all worth tracking down. MSMM was a digest but in reality was the last of the pulps, with a “Mike Shayne, private eye” story in every issue. It’s a place where a handful of us then new guys (me, Fieldhouse, Lansdale, Reasoner, etc) were first published regularly.

Knowing this helped explain the acknowledgements page, where author “John Lansing” thanks WL Fieldhouse (“a gifted creative artist”), Michael Seidman (“a terrific editor”)…and Mark Roberts (“scribbler extraordinaire”)! This might be the very definition of post-modernism, an author thanking his own psuedonym. Anyway I believe this was the only volume of the series Roberts wrote, and it’s a strange thing because throughout it tries so hard to be what it’s not: namely a big and bloated piece of “war fiction,” complete with unecessary and digressive backgrounds on each and every one of the many, many characters.

This first volume lays the groundwork for the series. Falconi is called away from his already-successful strike force to helm another one, this one a multinational squad that will report to the CIA and handle black ops affairs. The first target is sort of like the Nazi pleasure castle that was the target of The Dirty Dozen -- a pagoda deep in ‘Nam that is run by the depraved General Song, a pleasure palace where all of the lurid needs of the NVA elite can be met in private. The focus though is Song’s recently-acquired Russian descrambler, which allows him to intercept Russian and American coded broadcasts or something like that. This detail was a bit vague, but anyway it was a MacGuffin so who cares.

Roberts really fills some pages with background on the many characters who are assigned to the Black Eagles. The only memorable one is Andrea Thuy, a pretty young Vietnamese lady who hates the VC and lives to kill them. Thuy is basically insane but this is only hinted at by Roberts; she was raped as a teen and her family slaughtered, and now she finds joy in murdering the commies. She even gets off on using her looks to ensnare them, happily relating a story to Falconi of how she once got a high-ranking VC on a date and then took him back to his place and, instead of giving him the offered blowjob, instead emasculated him, put a dagger in his heart, and then stuffed the severed organ in his mouth! All of this related, by the way, on Falconi’s and Andrea’s first date!

Falconi and Andrea you see take an instant shine to one another, and Roberts delivers one of his gut-busting sex scenes between the two. Nothing as hilarious as in Soldier For Hire #8, but still pretty great. In fact there are a few graphic sex scenes in Hanoi Hellground, like an endless scene midway through where General Song enthusiastically screws a young VC-lovin’ gal in his pagoda. (The girl is later blown away by Andrea when the Black Eagles storm the pagoda, which I actually found a little off-putting, given that she was just some innocent kid who had nothing to do with anything…plus she was just standing there nude and confused when Andrea wasted her; another sign of Andrea’s insanity, perhaps).

Anyway once a lot of jump-training goes down the team finally undertakes the mission. HALO-jumping into the jungles of Vietnam they slowly work their way to Song’s pagoda. Even here during the mission Roberts still intersperses background info on the characters, which really makes for a slow read. The assault on Song’s pagoda is well staged (despite the aforementioned bimbo-killing), and again much like The Dirty Dozen, with the Black Eagles mowing down undressed VC and NVA who are in the midst of all sorts of shenanigans. Song meanwhile manages to escape.

The only thing is, the pagoda-assault takes place just a little over halfway through the book, and there’s still a long way to go until the end. The rest of Hanoi Hellground is anticlimax of the worst sort, comprised of the Black Eagles trying to track down Song and also escape Vietnam. It just goes on and on, finally culminating in a good action sequence as the Eagles attack an NVA base, taking on superior numbers with their advanced training. But it’s too little too late, and besides which Roberts just ends the novel like he hit his (unwieldy) word count and said to hell with it – Falconi and squad just barely getting on some US ‘copters and taking off to safety.

So it’s muddled and digressive, but on the whole Hanoi Hellground still offers quite a bit of Mark Roberts’s patented goofiness. Such as…

Pointlessly-detailed gore as Black Eagle medic Malpractice blows away a VC he was just trying to save:

He saw the movement via the corner of his eye and ducked away from the Viet Cong’s knife thrust. The blade missed him by more than an inch. Malpractice drew his issue .45 Colt auto while the VC tried a backhand slash.

Muzzle blast singed off the Viet Cong’s eyebrows and crisped the skin around the entry wound. Hot gasses, added to hydrostatic shock, bulged the would-be murderer’s eyes until one popped free of the socket to dangle on his powder-flecked cheek. His head seemed to explode and bits and pieces of the ungrateful Cong splattered on Malpractice’s hands, arms, and face.

“Shit. Now I gotta clean up,” the medic complained.

Dialog that would make Stan Lee cringe, followed by more gore, as a VC tries to get Andrea Thuy to help the Cong effort:

“…Throw down your arms and join us in the struggle.”

“Not likely, son of a snake,” Andrea returned coldly.

“You are a betrayer of the masses! A camp-following whore! Daughter of a diseased sewer rat!” he screamed on, adding more insults.

“I am an orphan whose parents where killed by the Viet Minh. Whose refuge was destroyed by the Pathet Lao, who also raped me. All in the name of liberation. You are a traitor and the son of a traitor. The excrement of a leper smells sweeter than your foul, lying breath. You are going to die in the name of liberation, but you will be no martyr. No one will know your name.”

Slowly, deliberately, Andrea shot him in the groin. The man squealed like a wounded pig, dropped his rifle and clawed at his bullet-ravaged genitals. Massive shock blocked out the nerve passages and Captain Muc sat down abruptly, stunned and immobile. Again Andrea took aim and shot him in the stomach. Then she turned the selector switch to full auto and emptied the magazine into his face.

Headless, the ambitious Muc became truly anonymous.

Soldier For Hire #5: Libyan Warlord

Soldier For Hire #5: Libyan Warlord, by Mark K. Roberts
No month stated, 1982  Zebra Books

This was the first of four volumes Mark Roberts wrote for the Soldier For Hire series, and it’s just as over the top and Team America-esque as the last one he wrote, #8: Jakarta Coup (which unfortunately was the last volume of the series – Mike Madonna told me that a Zebra editor once informed him that Soldier For Hire was canceled due to low sales, by the way). Libyan Warlord is just as unhinged as that later volume, featuring lots of gory action and goofy but explicit sex, mixed with frequent Right Wing sermons and random rants against commies and liberals.

Our “hero” is JC Stonewall, a white-haired ‘Nam vet who now works as a soldier for hire (he hates the word “mercenary,” by the way, referring to it as a “communist” word). I wonder how Stonewall fared in the hands of the first author who worked on this series, Robert Skimin, for in Roberts’s hands Stonewall is a complete bastard, a loudmouthed know-it-all dick who rants and raves and doesn’t listen to any opinion but his own. He is in every way an awesome spoof of the typical men’s adventure protagonist, but I don’t think Roberts intended him that way.

Also we learn that Stonewall is just an outright murderer. I knew from Jakarta Coup that something happened in Stonewall’s past to make him hate communists so much; here we learn that a squad of Pathet Lao soldiers killed a woman he loved (and was married to?) during the Vietnam war. She was hacked apart and mutilated in horrible ways before dying, and Stonewall gained vengeance by destroying an entire village of suspected Viet Cong supporters, killing “every man, woman, and child.”

This is shocking enough; even more shocking is how Roberts shuffles this under the carpet and instead plays it up that fortune was on Stonewall’s side in that he pulled this before the My Lai massacre – another ‘Nam atrocity that Roberts implies was justified, and was only played up as a “massacre” by the Liberal press – and thus was able to get away with it scott free. There’s a part in Libyan Warlord where Stonewall gets in one of many arguments with Left Wing reporter Melissa Gould, and he uses this butchery of his wife to explain his hatred of commies and liberals…and I always love how these rabidly Right Wing sentiments are always based off of fictional inciting incidents.

Anyway, we get a bit more detail on Stonewall’s operating parameters here. His contact is an older Texas millionaire patriot who goes by the handle “Trojan” and hooks Stonewall up with missions all over the world. The usual deal, those high-priority missions that the regular military can’t handle due to all of the goddamn liberal bureaucrats who get in the way. This time word’s come to Trojan that Qaddafi is currently putting together a nuclear plant somewhere in Libya along with a missile-launching service that could carry out strikes on the US. Helping Qaddafi are a few rogue US soldiers and CIA agents, one of them the infamous Marc Tolliver, an officer in Vietnam who came under fire for openly praising the VC and their methods.

Stonewall’s mission is to destroy the nuclear plant and kill Tolliver and his men. He decides to bring along only one man: Hank Polanski, apparently a muscle-bound type who comes off as a complete clone of Stonewall. I really couldn’t tell them apart, other than that Polanski only has about 10% of the narrative. Also, Polanski prefers to drink beer while Stonewall hammers scotch; indeed Stonewall comes off like quite the lush, always worried about when his Black Label is going to run out.

Much like John Eagle Expeditor #4, Stonewall holes up with some Tuaregs in the desert of Libya and trains them into a strike force. The military feel is not so prevalent here as in Jakarta Coup, parts of which came off like military fiction; the training isn’t given as much focus this time and Roberts instead doles out action scenes more expected of a men’s adventure novel, with Stonewall usually going up solo against Libyan forces while on recon missions or whatnot. However it seems that part of the schtick of this series is Stonewall training native forces in proper military conduct, so there is some of that here.

Stonewall’s weapon of choice this time is a Sidewinder submachine gun, which I couldn’t find much info about online. Roberts actually dedicates Libyan Warlord to the creator of this gun, and has Stonewall enthusing about it throughout the narrative. Roberts also displays his usual gift for in-jokery by mentioning that Stonewall has heard of the Sidewinder before, reading about it in “articles written by that guy Roberts,” ie Mark Roberts himself. (I wonder what magazine this was in??)

And this volume of the series wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t have frequent sex scenes. Stonewall scores with a whopping five ladies this time out, starting with his blonde beauty of a girlfriend (a lawyer who argues with Stonewall over his political views); a stewardess (who does him right there on the plane, drawing some curtains around his first class seat for privacy!); another beauty who happens to work in a consulate in Cairo and throws herself at Stonewall immediately after meeting him; Najeed, the “liberated” daughter of a Tuareg sheik who also throws herself at Stonewall; and finally the liberal reporter Melissa Gould, who garners the most narrative time, arguing long and often with Stonewall over his political views. It’s to Roberts’s credit that he doesn’t have these two go at it until the very end of the novel, even though you know it’s headed that way as soon as Melissa appears and Roberts mentioned that she’s not only, you guessed it, beautiful, but also that she has large breasts, another prerequisite for a guaranteed Stonewall shagging.

One thing I’ve found typical about veteran pulpsters like Roberts is that they have a steady command of their narrative, chugging along and doling out action, sex, topical detail about the environment and customs of whatever place they’re in, and etc, but when it comes to the climax they rush right on through it. Which is to say the finale comes off as too hurried, which is odd given the amount of page-filling stuff earlier in the book about various desert-crossing trips Stonewall takes (all of which feature action scenes, thankfully).

To wit, Roberts basically forgets about Tolliver and his band of turncoats until the very end, having Stonewall deal with them rather quickly. Strangely though, it isn’t until this time that Roberts decides to fill us in on who exactly these guys are, giving us pages-filling backstories that have no bearing on anything. So by the time Roberts gets to the long-simmering Stonewall/Melissa sex scene, he blows right through it in a sentence or two and then has Stonewall back in the US in the very next paragraph. He also just barely remembers to tie up a lingering question about someone who set up Stonewall at the beginning of the novel, but the resolution is pretty great, with Stonewall and Polanski hurling the poor bastard off of a rooftop.

The action scenes occur frequently and are filled with lots of gore, moreso than in Jakarta Coup. Stonewall kills hordes of Libyans with his new toy the Sidewinder, and also gets in a lot of close-quarter fights with an assegai tribal knife he picked up on an earlier adventure. He uses this thing to lop off several heads, and Roberts is sure to provide ample colorful detail about the ensuing carnage. Also worth mentioning is that Roberts is just as enjoyably detailed in the many sex scenes, leaving nothing to the imagination.

These Soldier For Hire books remind me a little of Norman Winski’s The Hitman series, with that same sort of ultra-heroic protagonist and overall goofy vibe. I prefer this series, though, just because Roberts is even more unhinged than Winski, delivering a nutcase “protagonist” who rants and raves against commies and liberals with such venom that he’d even put off Richard Camellion.

So I say again, if you are a fan of the movie Team America, you should check out this series, as it hits many of the same points…only it seems that the author of this one wasn’t being satirical. Which actually just makes it all the more entertaining!

The Penetrator #17: Demented Empire

The Penetrator #17: Demented Empire, by Lionel Derrick
November, 1976  Pinnacle Books

This volume of the Penetrator is all over the place, filled with carnage and lurid subplots, which is a little surprising given that it’s by Mark Roberts, who generally delivers the more “grounded” installments. In fact Demented Empire reads like one of the crazed installments churned out by Roberts’s co-author, Chet Cunningham…and given Roberts’s penchant for in-jokery as displayed in previous volumes, I wonder if this was his attempt at writing a Chet Cunningham-style Penetrator novel?

Whatever the case, Demented Empire is a lot of twisted fun, and probably my favorite Roberts volume yet. (Most likely because it’s like a Cunningham volume, given that I like the crazy stuff.) The plot’s just as wild as the action, starting off with Mark “Penetrator” Hardin in southern Florida, where he’s looking into a land fraud scheme…but then somehow he’s tracking up through the country hunting down a nascent crime ring, and by the novel’s end he’s gone down to Guatemala, where he stages a daunting raid on a kingpin who calls himself The Poet.

The plentiful action scenes are filled with gory deaths, starting off with Hardin’s attack on the land schemer’s headquarters. You’d figure it would just be a regular office, and it is, but it’s filled with goons, and Hardin mows them down. Here he comes upon a new submachine gun, apparently custom built by these guys, which Roberts expounds upon throughout the book. A wicked little .22 caliber-spitter, Hardin pries the gun from a corpse and uses it from there on out, blowing away scads of scum. I have to say, I’m no gun nut but this weapon sounded pretty cool, especially how Roberts described it.

The novel is almost surreal in how it comes off like a fractured series of barely-connected storylines, all tied together by Hardin as he comes into some new place, kills a few people, and moves on. To continue with the Cunningham parallels, it must be noted that Hardin is pretty savage here, moreso than normal in a Roberts installment. He shows absolutely no mercy to his enemies, no matter how low they are on the criminal empire’s totem pole. There’s one unsettling scene where he murders a crook while the man’s wife sits nearby, and at the climax he leaves another villain to suffer a horrible fate in the grip of an anaconda.

Roberts also packs on the lurid and exploitative stuff. The biggest instance is a subplot concerning Malcom Stone, one of the Poet’s executives, who runs a porn ring out of Nebraska. But this is porn of the sick and warped variety; Hardin comes upon a few films and watches them in disgust on a rented projector. Roberts continues to build upon the twisted element here, culminating in a bizarre scene where an actress is apparently blown up on film. Throughout these movies a gorgeous redhead constantly appears, usually wearing nothing but go-go boots and sporting a whip, which she uses to lash the other actors, spurring them to greater lengths of depravity.

This turns out to be a lady named Nila Dennis, Malcom Stone’s secretary. Nila is a protype for the later Roberts villainess Margot Anstruther (from Soldier For Hire #8), and just as depraved, though unfortunately she doesn’t get as much narrative time as I’d like. (Due no doubt to some psychological quirk, I love female villains, the more depraved the better.) But here Roberts delivers on the scene he denied us in Soldier For Hire #8, having Hardin and Nila spend some quality time together. This scene is probably the highlight of the novel, with Nila so overwhelmed by Hardin’s skills in the sack that she forgets to call in Malcom Stone, who’s waiting outside for Nila’s signal to come in and kill Hardin!

Actually there’s a pretty strong focus on sex here, again moreso like what you’d expect to find in one of Cunningham’s Penetrator novels. Hardin gets it on with two different women, the first time with Nila Dennis and then later on with the beautiful proprietor of a hotel in Mexico…this scene is particularly Cunningham-esque, with the woman coming on to Hardin mere moments after meeting him, offering her Jeep in exchange for some good lovin’!

The sex scenes are just as purple prosed as you’d want, but more fun is how Roberts keeps reminding us of them throughout…both women continuously marvel over how good Hardin was, including an unforgettable bit where Nila, days after the event, reflects over “the warm glow in her loins.” Wow! I guess Hardin calls himself “The Penetrator” for more reasons than one. (Sorry, couldn’t resist…)

There’s enough material in Demented Empire for a few books, from Hardin’s entry into a knife-throwing competition(?), to an attack on Hardin by a group of bikers, to even the familiar old saw about the small-time sheriff who quickly figures out who Hardin is but decides to help him anyway. Not to mention a random scene where Roberts details how difficult it is to pilot a small plane through a heavy thunderstorm, nor a subplot where Hardin’s old pal Tony Rossi (from #12: Bloody Boston -- a Cunningham novel, by the way) tries to get Hardin to work for the Mafia! Even the last chapter of the novel is sort of arbitrary, with Roberts delving into full-on gun-porn as Hardin, back in his HQ, goes over what weapons he’s used on past missions and how each performed, and also designs his own machine gun for use in future missions.

So while it lacks much direction or control, I still think Demented Empire is one of the most entertaining entries in the series yet. Roberts is more focused on delivering a string of sex and violence-heavy scenes than on delivering a taut story, but when those scenes are so well done, who can complain? At any rate Demented Empire is leagues above the previous volume, which was by Cunningham…meaning that Roberts bested Cunningham by delivering a sort of imitation that’s better than the original.

Back in my review for #9: Dodge City Bombers, I wondered if Roberts’s mention of a character in Texas named “Crawford” might’ve been an in-joke reference to Texas-based Pinnacle house writer William Crawford, aka the man who penned the infamous 16th installment of the Executioner series, Sicilian Slaughter, as “Jim Peterson.” It must’ve been a reference to him after all, as Roberts actually dedicates Demented Empire to Crawford.

The Penetrator #15: The Quebec Connection

The Penetrator #15: The Quebec Connection, by Lionel Derrick
July, 1976 Pinnacle Books

This volume of the Penetrator finds our hero Mark Hardin going all over the place, from Quebec to France, seeing a lot of action along the way. Author Mark Roberts appears to combine a few separate plotlines here, with The Quebec Connection starting off like just another tale of Hardin's tracking down and killing the members of a terrorist group, but then ends like something out of TNT, with Hardin fighting a trio of dwarves atop the Eiffel Tower. Even Hardin himself in this volumes wonders "what the hell he'd gotten himself into."

A group of hippie terrorists dubbed the 23 May Liberation Front is bombing places both in their homebase of Quebec and in the States; the novel opens with a pretty female member of the group planting a bomb in a Buffalo, New York bank. In addition to this the group is dealing a drug called Ziff, no relation to Artie Ziff, which appears to have the same effects as Ecstasy, just a decade or so before that drug existed. Only Ziff has a bizarre side effect which Hardin doesn't learn about until later.

As usual Hardin's method of research is pretty basic: he beats people around. In one out-of-left-field sequence, probably there just to boost the action quotient which is a bit lacking in the first quarter of the novel, Hardin poses as a priest and is jumped by a gang of street toughs, whom he kills after a protracted and brutal fight. Eventually he makes his way to Quebec (one of my favorite places in the world is Montreal, by the way), where he has tracked the movers and shakers in the 23 May Liberation Front.

Here the action picks up, with Hardin "penetrating" terrorist bases, killing guards and planting bombs. The hippie terrorists prove little threat, and indeed Roberts must've realized he already had Hardin kill a bunch of hippies back in #9: Dodge City Bombers, so he opens up the plot. While Hardin's tracking the French-Canadian terrorists, a separate group is tracking him: a Chinese villain who suffered fallout from Hardin's crime-busting way back in #3: Capitol Hell is finally getting around to his revenge, and so has sent out various teams of Chinese killers to waste Hardin.

There are some fun action scenes throughout, from Hardin taking on the first wave of Chinese assassins to another drawn-out sea warfare sequence with Hardin, in a commandeered yacht, launching a surprise attack on the hippie terrorists while they're engaged in a drug drop. After this battle the Feds appear, having been tracking the hippie terrorists themselves, and despite Hardin being a wanted man the Feds propose that he work with them on the case! Joanna Tabler, Hardin's occasional girlfriend, is with them; I'm pretty sure this is the first time she's appeared in a Roberts-penned installment of the series. (In fact, Roberts ends the novel with Hardin realizing that he'll have to break off relations with Joanna!)

After a laughable sequence in which we learn that Hardin has purchased a bullet-proof business suit, he flies to Marseilles, France, where a la The French Connection the Ziff has been imported from. Here those dwarves appear: the side effect of Ziff is that it corrupts the biology of the user so that his or her offspring will be born a dwarf. Masterminded by a trio of sadists who think dwarfism is normal and who hate the "giants," Ziff is created here in France and funnelled out to the 23 May Liberation hippies, who themselves are unaware of its damaging effects.

The Chinese have followed Hardin even here, and there follows a scene in which his bullet-proof suit is put to use, followed by an even better scene where Hardin gets his revenge. Meanwhile he closes in on the Ziff manufacturers, blowing up their plants and killing more terrorists. The finale is by far the best part, with those dwarves -- who, by the way, are dressed like the Three Musketeers at the time -- taking on Hardin atop the Eiffel Tower. (And yes, there's a part where Hardin grabs one of them and hurls the little bastard right off the Tower!)

While it was for the most part entertaining, I just felt that The Quebec Connection went on too long, and despite the abundance of plotlines it just seemed to drag at times. But then, I've found that I much prefer the sadistic, fast-moving installments written by Chet Cunningham.

Soldier For Hire #8: Jakarta Coup

Soldier For Hire #8: Jakarta Coup, by Mark K. Roberts
No month stated, 1983 Zebra Books

I learned about this series through Michael Newton's 1989 book How To Write Action-Adventure Novels. Newton ranted and raved about this particular installment of the series throughout that book, going on about the author's not-very-veiled political commentary, the "repulsive" female villain and her weird sexual quirks, and on and on, even mentioning a scene where blustering hero J.C. Stonewall (!) cursed at the sea for nearly drowning him, thus almost robbing him of the chance to "continue killing commies." (In point of fact, I've discovered this scene doesn't actually occur in Jakarta Coup; it's in the fifth volume of the series, Libyan Warlord.)

Anyway, Newton's comments had me raring to read this book, which by all accounts sounded like full-on parody. And the book really was everything I wanted it to be -- just an over the top explosion of Right Wing sermonizing and terrorist killing, with a lot of goofy and explicit sex thrown in. The book is more Team America than Team America, and reading it you'd never guess that this is the same Mark Roberts who wrote the even-numbered volumes of The Penetrator. The tone, style, and antics of the protagonist are wholly different than anything I've read from Roberts in that earlier series, so the question is, was he just hamstrung by Pinnacle Books, or did Zebra Books ask him to go over the top with Soldier For Hire?

The series was actually begun by a different author, Robert Skimin, who wrote the first four volumes. Mark Roberts took over the series with the fifth volume, writing it all the way through to this last installment. The "hero" of the series is the aforementioned J.C. Stonewall, white-haired Vietnam vet who basically lives to kill Communists. Seriously, the man has such a red-hot burning hatred for them that even Richard Camellion would be taken aback. Stonewall's wife or something was killed by them, and now every Communist Stonewall kills is seen as a retribution for her murder. But then, Stonewall is very liberal in his definition of what a Communist is -- terrorists, criminals, Democrats; they're all commies, and they all deserve to die.

Reading Newton's scathing (but curiosity-generating) comments about this book had me certain that it had to be a parody. Understand then my shock when Mike Madonna, owner of The Fabulous Mrs. Poopenplatz blog, told me that it was his understanding that Roberts did not intend the Soldier For Hire books as a parody! Mike knew Roberts pretty well and has shared with me a lot of great information about him and other action-series authors he has known over the years (including the interesting tidbit that Dan Schmidt, whom Mike also knew, was pals with Joseph Rosenberger!). Anyway, Mike has told me that, though Roberts had a sense of humor, he was quite serious in his political views, and was not using the Soldier For Hire books as a way to spoof the Right Wing mindset or anything else.

But reading Jakarta Coup, though...to quote Frank on Everybody Loves Raymond: "Jeez oh lou!" If you sat down and tried to come up with a list of things to spoof in an action novel, you still couldn't top this novel. Stonewall, our "hero," is a chauvinistic blowhard who hates everyone, picks up ladies and casts them aside, lives to kill commies and terrorists, and takes every opportunity to rant and rave against his arch-enemy Senator Ned Flannery, a far-left Democract who is in no way similar to Senator Ted Kennedy, at all.

Mike Madonna has also told me that Kennedy's people actually found about about the blatant Kennedy-bashing in the Roberts installments of this series, and I guess word made its way to Roberts, who was told to ease up, but he didn't -- though he doesn't appear in Jakarta Coup, Flannery's name is invoked by not only the Liberal politicians but even by the terrorists, both of whom admire the guy. Hell, the Liberals even openly side with the terrorists, complaining about "the savage" currently in the White House -- ie Ronald Reagan, whom the good-guy Right Wingers lovingly refer to as "Good ol' Ronnie!"

The plot is really just a framework for the Kennedy-bashing and the frequent sex scenes, which I will get to posthaste. Stonewall's m.o. is that he hires himself out to whoever needs him, and if he can use the job as a means to kill more commies, then so much the better. Stonewall is hired by the Indonesian government to train an anti-terrorist taskforce; a Communist-backed terrorist force called KAM is causing dissent in Jakarta, and the government needs help in dealing with them. Stonewall has a team, apparently, but this time he only brings along two of them: Theo, a black soldier (and boy, are we reminded every time he appears that Theo is black), and Ed Cotter, a nonentity who I think only had about four lines in the entire book.

A goodly portion of the novel is given over to Stonewall training the Indonesian task force, and it all reads like some WWII novel. Indeed, much of Jakarta Coup is similar to a war novel; even the action scenes come off in that regard, in particular the finale, which finds Stonewall and his men making a beachhead assault, complete with mortars and tanks. But the pulpy stuff makes it all more than worth it. Also worth noting is that Roberts doesn't play up too much on the gore. In fact I believe the Penetrator books of his I've read are actually a bit more gory. But then, none of them I've read have been as laugh-out-loud funny as Jakarta Coup.

Special mention must be made of the villains. Leading the KAM faction is Pomo, an Indonesian rebel with dreams of conquest but who takes the opportunity to run from every fight. Most enjoyably though we have Margot Anstruther, an 18 year-old blonde Australian beauty who was raised by left-wing parents who sent Margot to a radical terrorist camp in the Middle East when she was 13. While there, we learn in a brief background, Margot discovered sex and "practically raped" the few-hundred men and boys in her camp. Now she gets off on combat, becoming sexually aroused while fighting and killling. It was this character whom Newton found so "repulsive" in his How-To book, but, as you could no doubt guess, her scenes were my favorite in the book -- I consider warped and evil female villains to be the very essence of pulp fiction.

As for the sex scenes...again, above and beyond anything else I've read by Roberts. Stonewall is described as a veritable mountain of muscle, and apparently irresistible to the lady folk. While in Singapore in the opening of the novel, Stonewall manages to pick up "the only white woman" in the city, and Roberts writes a graphic scene between the two (quoted below). Then, just a few pages later, Stonewall, now in Jakarta, picks up another lady, this one a cute Indonesian model named Lisa who joins our hero for an even more explicit scene -- one complete with "pearls of heaven," which Lucy inserts into various of Stonewall's orificies...that is, after she's given the man an apparently 30-minute blowjob...!

Anyway, I'm just gonna start quoting stuff, because the book sells itself.

Not-very-veiled Ted Kennedy-bashing:

"At least he won't be running for President," Theo observed.

"Don't fucking count on it," Stonewall snapped. "He said the same thing last time, then campaigned like mad for it. It was the same old shit four years before that. He's just angling to get the loyal party hacks to beg him to take the nomination."

"The Flannerys do seem to think they are the rightful pretenders to the throne of North America," Ed allowed.

"Yeah. King Ned the First," Stonewall shot back. "King of the sewer rats, if you ask me."

Jaw-dropping sex scenes with equally jaw-dropping dialog:

Audry did something at the side of her surong and it fell away, revealing her ripe, alabaster body. She came to him in a rush, fingers flying to undo his belt and open his trousers. She let them drop and pressed her naked flesh against the bulge that distorted the front of his undershorts. Her blonde-thatched mound, glistening with moist readiness, throbbed against the pulsing organ separated from her center of passion by a thin weave of white cotton cloth.

"You are the stuff of my dreams, J.C. Hurry, fill me with that enormous phallus before I lose my cookies right here."

The depraved female villain, complete with incorrect ammunition detail (AK-47s actually fire 7.62mm "slugs"):

They entered a wall-less, roofed-over drying shed and sprinted to the other side. Margot raised her AK-47 and sent a squirt of 5.56mm slugs at the legs of a soldier who stood with his back to them.

He uttered a short, harsh cry of pain and fell to the ground. With an effort the man rolled over toward his enemy. Grinning wildly, Margot raised the muzzle of her Soviet-made weapon and fired again, trashing his genitals. A gasp of passion, that sounded more like a sob, escaped from Margot's lips and, with her left hand, she began to grope her crotch. Pomo shook his head and turned away.

Political commentary, courtesy our learned protagonist, with additional not-very-veiled Ted Kennedy bashing:

"Bullshit. If it weren't for fuzzy-brained, pseudo-intellectuals like you, with your heads stuffed full of Liberal crap, terrorist slime like Pomo wouldn't last five minutes in anyone's country. Christ! I don't know why I'm wasting my fucking time with you. You're no better than that Leftist bastard from Iran who joined forces with the anti-gun pricks in California last year. You both do an excellent job of reflecting the philosophy of that bunny-bashing wimp who gave you your posts."

There are only two disappointments in Jakarta Coup. For one, Margot Anstruther talks Pomo into allowing her to seduce Stonewall, who has never met her. Margot's plan is to take Stonewall to a nearby hotel room, where Pomo's soldiers can come in and kill Stonewall while Margot is "frigging him." While Roberts sets up this scene, he has Pomo's men act too early, thus we never get the scene that would have undoubtedly been the most fun in the book. Secondly, Roberts intimates that the next volume would feature Stonewall in action in the US -- and possibly going up against Ned Flannery and his armed goons as well.

So far I only have one other volume of the Roberts-penned installments of the series: #5: Libyan Warlord, which was his first. I can only hope it will be as enjoyable (for all the wrong reasons) as Jakarta Coup.

The Penetrator #13: Dixie Death Squad

The Penetrator #13: Dixie Death Squad, by Lionel Derrick
March, 1976 Pinnacle Books

This volume of The Penetrator is all about action. Mark K. Roberts turns in what is certainly the most gun-blazing installment of the series yet. His version of Mark "Penetrator" Hardin still isn't as sadistic as co-writer Chet Cunningham's, meaning Roberts doesn't dole out anything as excessive as Cunningham, but for all that he certainly writes a better action sequence. There are many inventive setpieces in Dixie Death Squad. In fact there's so much action that the plot itself just seems to disappear.

The book gets our attention from the outset, opening with our hero Hardin blowing away a bunch of cops with his Mac-11. Eventually we learn that these are dirty cops, hired by the mysterious Colonel King as a sort of invading party that has taken over a small town in Georgia. These "cops" are members of a large private army controlled by Colonel King, an army composed of mean sons of bitches, many of whom spent time in prison. They are slowly infiltrating and taking over various small towns in Dixie, a sort of warm-up exercise before a larger invasion is launched against the US itself.

The novelty is that Colonel King is a woman, an attractive blonde who served in the WAC (Women's Army Corps) but was drummed out of the military due to her gender. Discharged from the real army, Linda King decided to start her own. Beyond her army of delinquents, King also has a grander scheme -- posing as a pillar of society, she runs an orphanage for wayward kids. In reality though she is training these kids in guerrilla warfare and crime. Her plan, which on the face of it is kind of brilliant, is to use these kids as an undercover army. Say a government official was assassinated, or a bank was robbed...who in their right mind would suspect a child?

King's adult army of criminals trains the young army, and upon learning of this, Hardin is both sickened and outraged. Concocting a cover story, he poses as a soldier who spent time in the brig and is able to get drafted into King's army. He of course quickly comes to the lady's attention, handling himself better than anyone during drills and practice. To test him, King sends Hardin out with a team of men on an assassination job. The target is an African dignitary and Hardin's team will attack his entourage along the freeway.

This is the first of many action scenes. Hardin of course foils the plan, taking out his "comrades" and preventing the dignitary's death. He returns to King's headquarters beaten and bruised, claiming that the mission was compromised and that he was the only member of the team who was able to escape. King is as expected overwhelmed with Hardin's bravery and soon latches on to him.

Here Roberts inserts some weird stuff where it turns out that Linda King is even more insane than expected, in that she sometimes slips into another personality where she believes she is a southern belle living in antebellum Georgia. Most surprising is that this leads to a sex scene, I think the first full-on sex scene we've yet received in the series. A sex scene that contains the unforgettable line: Linda struggled and squealed, seeking to escape the hugeness that was forcing its way inside her. Yikes!

It's also pretty funny that Hardin, after a few hours of lovin', discovers that King has sent another team out on a mission of infiltration; they're planning to take over yet another town at midnight. Hardin drugs King, sneaks out, drives 90 minutes to the town, and systematically kills each and every member of the invasion party in yet another well-done action scene. After which he drives back, sneaks in, and lays down beside the still-sleeping Colonel King!

Gradually though the plot evaporates. Rather than play out Hardin's undercover work, Roberts instead has the Penetrator launch a full-on war against King's army. Literally the last half of the novel is an ongoing action scene. It's overwhelming, but it's still pretty great, beginning with Hardin blitzing his way through the compound. Some of the kid soldiers come after him, and Hardin goes to great lengths not to kill them. He of course shows no mercy to the adult soldiers.

From there the action proceeds to downtown Atlanta where King, her army in rout, unleashes her fallback plan: she sends out a squad of snipers to blast away at civilians. Urban warfare and chaos ensues, with a Federal SWAT team taking up the fight against King's soldiers. Here a subplot gets buried; the SWAT team has been officially tasked with scouring the nation to find the Penetrator, so they just happen to be here in Atlanta, and of course the commander eventually meets Hardin face to face and realizes he's a great guy, after all.

In his previous installments Mark Roberts was sure to always include an in-joke to other novels in Pinnacle's men's adventure line. This time he doesn't, but as I thought about it, it occurred to me that he might have done something a bit more involved this time out. In short, Dixie Death Squad is all action, from first page to last. Action scene after action scene, and during the battles Roberts documents every path of every bullet and the gore which proceeds from their impact. The book is very much in the vein of another Pinnacle series, Joseph Rosenberger's Death Merchant.

So rather than peppering his book with a few minor in-jokes, is it possible that Roberts intended the entirety of Dixie Death Squad itself is an in-joke, a parody of Rosenberger's action-heavy series? Probably not, but it's fun to consider.

The Penetrator #11: Terror In Taos

The Penetrator #11: Terror In Taos, by Lionel Derrick
October, 1975 Pinnacle Books

Finally the Penetrator series gets back on track with the best volume in a long time. Mark Roberts in my estimation had been slacking off a bit in his last few contributions to the adventures of Mark "Penetrator" Hardin, but this time out he comes back with a renewed vigor, delivering a breezy, action-filled tale filled with the violence and in-jokery one has come to expect from this author.

With a nod to Wounded Knee and the American Indian rights movements of the early '70s, Terror In Taos concerns a militant uprising of American Indians in Taos; they've taken over the city in their demands for equality while meanwhile the mafia is murdering their holy men and stealing their priceless jewelry. Hardin, who we are reminded every volume is half-Cheyenne, infiltrates the police barrier and gets involved with the militants, proclaiming himself as one of them. Here Roberts serves up some in-jokes, as Hardin "proves" he is a member of the tribe by reading passages from Sapir and Murphy's The Destroyer series in the Cheyenne language.

Hardin finds an old comrade among the militants: Gil Otero, who went through Intelligence training with Hardin years before. Hardin tells Gil that he is in fact the infamous Penetrator -- which is never a smart thing for a men's adventure protagonist to do, because the reader knows well what will eventually happen to the person he has just told. (It's sort of like when Charles Bronson tells a lady he loves her in the Death Wish films -- expect a funeral soon.)

The mafia thugs make for an enjoyable cast. There's Snuffer Weiss, a little fellow given to Yiddish outbursts, Il Lupare, a hulking brute who learned English from sleazy paperbacks, and most importantly Rammer Norton, a thug whose name has been mentioned throughout the series. Norton was the guy who inadvertently sent Hardin on the path to becoming the Penetrator; a decade ago Norton was the bastard who set Hardin up for a tumble, ending a promising football career. As soon as Hardin discovers that Norton is behind the shaman-killing, jewel-stealing activities in Taos, he is even more determined to see the mission through to its bloody end.

Roberts provides a lot of nice setpieces. There's an actual New Agey mystical trip (which was the style of the time) as Hardin drops peyote with his Cheyenne "brothers." This otherwise-unrelated scene is well done, with Hardin preparing to go through the mystical rites of becoming a full-on "son" of the head shaman, but Roberts drops this storyline. Even better is Hardin's infiltration into a mob-ruled medieval castle in the middle of the desert, built there a century before by an oil tycoon (shades of TNT #6: Ritual Of Blood).

There's even a bit of "sweat mag" stuff when Gil's fiance, a Cheyenne beauty, is captured by the mobsters and taken to a secret dungeon within that castle, where she's stripped down and put on a torture rack. Here a group of "turkey doctors" (Roberts borrowing a phrase coined by Don Pendleton) prepare to make mutilated "Indian turkey" out of the girl, before Hardin of course shows up with his combat shotgun.

All told, this is just an enjoyable, well-rendered installment. Hardin is back to his likeable self, even indulging in his previously-abandoned penchant for disguise. This is another goofy but fun scene where Hardin dresses up like an old Indian so he can berate some government reps who have come to Taos to speak with the militants; one of the reps happens to be the head agent in charge of tracking down Hardin himself.

The novel ends with some unintentional humor as Hardin, flying away from Taos in his personal plane after another successful mission, already begins to plan his next mission! It's a nice way I guess to remind readers that the series will continue with more and more adventures, but it has the unfortunate effect of making Hardin appear like some vengeance-programmed android.

The Penetrator #9: Dodge City Bombers

The Penetrator #9: Dodge City Bombers, by Lionel Derrick
June, 1975 Pinnacle Books

The Penetrator series continues to wear thin in another fair-to-middling Mark Roberts installment. Last time we got to read about Mark "Penetrator" Hardin wasting cops; this time he wastes a slew of young hippie terrorists who are destroying the crops of America's midwest. It's hard not to see Dodge City Bombers as the vengeance of the older set against the long-haired rabble of the youth movement.

But then, the hippie terrorists presented in the novel are pretty cruel. Apparently they're spread across the US, but Hardin focuses on the cell operating around Kansas. The terrorists are killing animals, crops, and even the farmers who work the land, and Hardin is called onto the scene by a farming acquaintance of Professor Haskins. The novel opens with an interesting scene in which Hardin, deep in trance, relives lost moments from his childhood. Unfortunately this doesn't play out anywhere in the novel; I was starting to hope we'd get a little character development for our protagonist here, but it didn't happen.

Hardin packs up his hardware and ventures into Dodge City, where posthaste he's wasting punks left and right. Once again his opponents prove little match for the Penetrator. The series is becoming quite one-sided at this point, with Hardin more of a superhuman than the damaged being we met in the first volume. And again coincedence reigns supreme, as Hardin discovers his enemy immediately upon arrival in Dodge City -- indeed, right as the punk bastards are in the process of killing an innocent real estate agent!

A sadistic tone arises halfway through Dodge City Bombers: during one of their farm-raids the terrorists murder a young farmer. Hardin becomes familiar with the widow and kids, vowing to gain vengeance for the murdered man. But meanwhile the terrorists are following him, and once he's left they go in and torture the kids! There follows an uncomfortable scene in which one of the boys gets a finger cut off. What makes it all the more uncomfortable is that Hardin shows up a bit later and takes the children to a safehouse -- all while he and the widow laugh and flirt with one another, as if the lady's child hasn't just been tortured!

The same uneven tone runs through the entire novel. As expected a romance develops between Hardin and the lady...the lady whose husband hasn't been dead a week yet. The only thing that really salvages the novel is a goofy subplot in which Hardin discovers that the local FBI are after him; there's a funny bit where Hardin, in disguise, attends a meeting in which they give a rundown of "the Penetrator's" appearance (which isn't correct) and warn everyone how dangerous he is -- in a plot that doesn't pan out, the FBI is accusing Hardin himself of the crop-destruction.

There are many spectacular scenes of violence and destruction, which is another plus. Roberts makes the terrorists despicable, even the female of the bunch, a lady who gets off on torture and death. There's also a bit more of a focus on gore this time out, with lots of detail on wounds and grisly deaths. Hardin again gets hurt somewhat badly, which is a consistent happening in these novels. However it only serves to increase his bloody wrath.

Another consistent with Roberts's novels is the in-jokery; in Dodge City Bombers the name of the terrorist leader is Mack Colan. A more obscure in-joke occurs early on, when Hardin is researching the crop-destruction issue with Professor Haskins and David Red Eagle; Haskins mentions that he's gotten information from "a guy named Crawford down in Texas." I'm betting this is a sly reference to William Crawford, a Pinnacle house writer who lived in Texas; Crawford wrote the Stryker series and was also the infamous "Jim Peterson" who wrote the 16th volume of the Executioner series, Sicilian Slaughter.

The Penetrator #7: Baja Bandidos

The Penetrator #7: Baja Bandidos, by Lionel Derrick
December, 1974 Pinnacle Books

All told, this is a rum entry in the Penetrator saga. After the action-packed fifth volume and the trip to Japan in the sixth volume, this one comes off as rather uneventful. Mark Roberts, who penned this installment, also wrote several Westerns; I wouldn't be surprised if the plot of Baja Bandidos was a leftover from one of them.

All the standards of a pulp Western are in place: there are Mexican bandits, a damsel in distress, plucky peasants, and an Indian-trained hero who fashions his own arrows from flint. Other than a few bows to the modern age, it's as if the entire novel takes place in 1874 rather than 1974. El Baron, bandit leader and self-proclaimed future ruler of Mexico, is kidnapping people in the Mexican desert, all of them rich or influential. His latest captives are an Israeli woman and a professor who is an associate of William Haskins, ie Hardin's benefactor.

Even though several people have gone missing in Mexico, the Penetrator is the only one who puts it all together and assumes it's the work of one person. His brilliant plan is to go undercover as a millionaire playboy. Flashforward a few weeks and Hardin's cover identity has been firmly implanted in the public conscious. He tools around Mexican resorts in his sportscar, accompanied by two gorgeous Hispanic women, one a glamorous socilaite, the other her "minder." Hardin scopes out the place, trying to get himself captured. It's all kind of dumb.

And it gets dumber, for when Hardin is captured he doesn't even have a fallback plan; I figured he would've smuggled in some weapons hidden on his person or something. Instead, he's taken to a smelting plant in the Mexican desert in which the other captives are held. Here he meets El Baron, who takes the time to announce his grand plans before taking off, leaving his second-in-command, a black American named Clyde, in charge. Clyde comes off as the worst of the two, hateful of whites and women; another of those oddly-displaced scenes occur amid the otherwise light nature of the book, where Clyde and the bandits get drunk and gang-rape the Israeli woman. Meanwile all Hardin can do is seethe and plan his escape.

At length he does, killing a guard and escaping into the merciless desert heat. Again Hardin proves his lack of planning; I mean, who in their right mind would just allow himself to be captured and hope for an eventual opportunity to escape? Hardin here is accompanied by Jose, a young peasant boy who soon acts as his surrogate son. This is the most affecting part of Baja Bandidos and really sets the reader up to be gutted at the end.

Weaponless, Hardin makes use of the training he received from David Red Eagle and fashions arrows in the Cheyenne way. After a few raids he assembles a rag-tag band of peasantry and forms them into an army, employing the same training he did with the Montagnards back in Vietnam. This is a neat sequence in which the men train in guerrilla warfare, creating weapons from anything at their disposal, including "beercan grenades."

It all culminates with a final raid, including an out-of-left-field bit where Hardin "appropriates" a Mexican Army fighter plane and hammers the shit out of El Baron's forces. What's funny is that amid all the carnage the captors, so central to the plot, are pretty much forgotten; even when Hardin frees them Roberts gives them only a cursory mention and gets back to the fireworks. Again we get a novelty death for the main villain, as Hardin takes on El Baron in the style of the bullfighters. But I'd say this is a miss, as El Baron is absent for the majority of Baja Bandidos; the true villain is Clyde, whom Hardin dispatches with a casual shot.

So this was a muddled installment. Given that the series continued on for another 46 volumes, I'm assuming it was a momentary lapse.

The Penetrator #5: Mardi Gras Massacre

The Penetrator #5: Mardi Gras Massacre, by Lionel Derrick
June, 1974 Pinnacle Books

Given the plot I figured this entry of the The Penetrator would be a wash-out: a Bayou fisherman contacts Mark Hardin and asks for his help, as the fisherman is certain he's being paid in counterfeit bills. However this bare plot is just an excuse for author Mark Roberts to have Hardin kick all kinds of ass. This is without a doubt the most action-packed installment yet in the series.

In my review of the previous volume I claimed that even-numbered volume author Chet Cunningham presented a crueler version of the Penetrator, but I might have to retract that. Mark Roberts proves that his version of Hardin can be just as merciless, though with the caveat that at least Roberts's version only goes after the "wicked;" ie, unlike Cunningham's version he doesn't torture and maim the innocent. But if you happen to be a "bad guy," then god help you...

Hardin arrives in New Orleans in the opening pages, only to discover that the fisherman who wrote him has been murdered. Instead Hardin's contact is Angelique, the fisherman's beautiful (of course she is) daughter. Hardin notes her resemblance to his dead girlfriend Donna Morgan and so instantly has feelings for the girl. A consortium of businessmen have taken over the fisherman's union here in New Orleans, with grander plans to dominate business around the country; Angelique's father accidentally discovered that they were paying their employees with counterfeit bills, fake money with which they plan to cripple the US economy. Angelique's father apperently left evidence somewhere, but he didn't leave behind any clues. Regardless, the consortium is certain Angelique must know about it (she is the man's only living relative and was with him when he was murdered) and so send wave after wave of hitmen after her. But when Hardin enters the fray, things of course change.

It all goes down during Mardi Gras, and Roberts weaves the festival into the action, with a long sequence with Hardin wearing a mask to blend in with others on the street that ends with Angelique and Hardin escaping on a float. Finding one fisherman family empathetic to Angelique and her father's cause, Hardin leaves the girl with them and launches a one-man war on the consortium. This is where the novel really picks up; Hardin gets pissed that since he's arrived in New Orleans he's been attacked again and again. Now he will go on the offensive. And boy does he.

There follows many scenes of laugh-out-loud barbarity in which Hardin shows how merciless he can be. He sneaks into consortium-owned buildings, kidnaps upper management, tortures them, kills them. In a prefigure of Arnold's infamous line from Commando, Hardin promises one poor sap that he won't kill him if the sap gives him the info he wants. The sap gives the info, and as Hardin begins to string up a noose he squeals that Hardin promised he wouldn't kill him. "Sometimes I lie a lot," says Hardin, who then hangs the sap -- later boasting to Angelique that he strung the man up and watched him die. During the funeral for Angelique's dad, Hardin spots three gunmen hiding in the cemetery. He surprises them at gunpoint and ushers them into a windowless masoleum, handing the last guy in an unpinned frag grenade. Hardin bars the door and walks away, then laughs aloud when he hears the grenade go off.

But once again Hardin himself takes a lot of damage. This seems to be a "thing" with this series; whereas the typical men's adventure protagonist gets through each novel without a scratch, like some comic book superhero, Hardin usually finds himself at death's door. This time out it happens early on, with Hardin sliced up badly in an endless fight scene with a friggin night watchman, of all things. Limping back to his hotel Hardin shoots himself up with penicilin, but the antibiotic is expired and Hardin double-doses.

He spirals into delusion, during which he finds himself having sex again with Donna Morgan, calling out her name. When he comes to he finds Angelique there with him; it turns out that Hardin phoned her in the midst of his delirium and the girl came to nurse him, during which one thing lead to another and the two had sex -- that sexual fever dream was real. Angelique further informs Hardin that the whole time he kept calling her "Donna," but Angelique claims she was so happy to be with him that she didn't mind being called by the wrong name. I can't think of a single woman who would actually say that.

It culminates in another well-done setpiece in which Hardin and a new friend wage war on the consortium in the sea, also going up against a detachment of Cuban soldiers -- the suppliers of that counterfeit money. In a way, Mardi Gras Massacre is like an '80s action movie, with one extended action sequence after another. There is also the mystery of where Angelique's father left his evidence, and Hardin goes into detective mode to solve it. However doing so necessitates that Hardin eradicate the girl's feelings for him; during a crying jag about her father's death, Hardin yells at her to snap out of it, a desperate gambit to jolt her senses from grief to fury. It works, with the after-effect that Angelique now looks at Hardin with hatred. It's basically just a drawn-out way for Roberts to get the girl out of the picture so Hardin can go on to meet more willing gals in future installments.

Roberts again serves up some in-jokes: that night watchman who nearly kills Hardin chastises himself for "reading too many of those Executioner books," and later, as Hardin watches the news, the anchorman's name is Chet Cunningham -- aka the other author of the series. There are also some funny parts where a kid spouts lines from Sanford and Son in Red Foxx's voice; all the more funny when Hardin has no idea what the kid's doing and it has to be explained to him that he's only quoting a popular TV show. But then who has time for TV when you're launching a one-man war against crime and having delusional sex with a nubile fisherman's daughter?

The Penetrator #3: Capitol Hell

The Penetrator #3: Capitol Hell, by Lionel Derrick
March, 1974 Pinnacle Books

Mark Roberts returns as "Lionel Derrick," again delivering a taut narrative that plays out like one of Don Pendleton's Executioner novels. After the inept #2: Blood On The Strip, I was uncertain if I wanted to delve back into the world of Mark "Penetrator" Hardin, but this volume was just as good as the first -- which also happened to be written by Mark Roberts.

Capitol Hell picks up right after the previous volume, and this volume itself ends with tidbits which take us right into the next. I like this attempt at a serial narrative -- it's better than the freeflowing chaos of the The Sharpshooter, at least -- but it gives the unfortunate impression that Hardin is one busy s.o.b., going from one campaign to the next. Even James Bond took the occasional vacation.

The novel opens with a goofy coincidence; Hardin just happens to be driving behind a mobster who gets in a fatal crash. It would've made more sense if Hardin was tracking the guy, but whatever. Anyway, Hardin inspects the crash, finds the half-dead mobster; the mobster whispers something about "SIE" with his dying breath, and Hardin goes off, perplexed. Meanwhile, an assassin pulls an Oswald on the press secretary to the President of the United States -- a man who, coincidentally again, just happens to be friends with Hardin. The Penetrator heads for DC to investigate. He soon encounters the name "SIE" again, as it comes up in relation to his dead press secretary friend.

SIE it develops is the Societe Internationale d'Elite, a VIP club in the District which houses a secret cabal of James Bondish-supervillains who plot the takeover of the world. The SIE's club activities are open to all and so Hardin goes to a few events undercover, learning gradually that there is more afoot here than simple DC partying. In another goofy coincidence, one of the "inner chamber" members of SIE happens to be a former 'Nam commanding officer who was screwed over when Hardin exposed the black market ring back in the war. When Hardin leaves his first SIE party this guy follows after with some men; a shootout occurs in pitch darkness, and it's unintentionally hilarious because the goons keep crying out when Hardin shoots each of their comrades: "Jesus! He just shot Louie in the balls!!"

The clunkiness of Blood On The Strip returns when Hardin hooks up with a pretty District employee who invites him over to her place; the lady's roommate happens to be a former dancer at the Pink Pussy -- the Fraulein-run casino in volume #2 -- and she instantly guesses that Hardin is the Penetrator. It's another of those WTF? moments. But Capitol Hell has more going for it: the inner chamber of the SIE is a sort of Satanic coven in which the members wear red KKK-type robes and stand around chanting. The hidden level of their club is a torture chamber/orgy den; unfortunately we never see it in action, only when Hardin discovers it after it has been used. It's unfortunate Roberts didn't play up this angle a bit more; he could've easily given us a sleazefest here, but instead only hints at the Satanic insanity of the SIE.

Roberts however scores huge points by finally poking fun at both Hardin's own name and his codename: a few mobsters, re his "Penetrator" title, wonder if he's "some sort of sex freak," and another calls him "that Hard-on guy." I still say this series would've been the greatest ever if it had approrpiated more of a Baroness angle, if Hardin's name really was "Mark Hardon," his mission each volume being to "penetrate" the defenses of some beautiful enemy agent...

There are a wealth of shootouts throughout Capitol Hell, all of them well done. And again Hardin takes more damage than the average men's adventure protagonist; early on he suffers a terrible knifing which would lay up an ordinary guy. Here also Hardin comes off like John Eagle Expeditor; his "Indian" heritage is brought to the fore, with Hardin leaving behind arrow heads with his kills, and he wears a "thermal suit" which makes him look like a "space warrior." And again Hardin uses white phosphorous on his enemies, as he did in The Target Is H -- this is still the cruelest punishment I've yet seen a men's adventure protagonist inflict upon his enemies.

It all leads to a bizarre climax right out of Murphy and Sapir's Destroyer series, with Hardin and a cop friend chasing the head SIE villains through Colonial Williamsburg; Hardin even delivers the final blow with a vintage rifle. After which he hops back on his personal plane and heads back for his home base in California, already planning his next campaign; in another coincidence Hardin learns of something called "Black Gold" coming out of New York City, and now he's determined to find out what it is. This takes us right into #4: Hijacking Manhattan, but unlike Hardin I think I'll need to take a break before I get to it.

The Penetrator #1: The Target Is H

The Penetrator #1: The Target Is H, by Lionel Derrick

October, 1973 Pinnacle Books

Mark Hardin, the Penetrator -- change that "i" to an "o" and you'd have the perfect pornstar name. I mean, what were they thinking? Mark Hardin? The Penetrator??

Actually, Pinnacle Books must've known what they were thinking, as The Target Is H was the kick-off of a successful series which ran for 53 installments.

It appears that "Lionel Derrick" was a house name for authors Mark Roberts and Chet Cunningham, with Roberts writing the odd-numbered volumes and Cunningham the evens. This first volume then was penned by Roberts, and it's very much in the Don Pendleton "Executioner" mold: ie, Vietnam-trained hardass gets burned by the Mob, and now wages a one-man war on them. It's high on action and thrills and light on character and plot (not to mention sex...meaning it comes off more like an '80s men's adventure novel than one from the '70s).

Later volumes opened the series way up but this first installment, despite its narrow plotline, is actually very good. Hardin has a complicated backstory -- raised in foster homes, he achieved early greatness as an athletic champion. His sports career ended by a bad injury, he entered Vietnam where he again achieved greatness, nicknamed "The Penetrator" for his ability to "penetrate" enemy territory and take out large numbers of enemy soldiers. Here too Hardin's career was terminated early, this time beaten to a pulp by his fellow soldiers after his investagtion into illegal sale of US military weapons on the Vietnam black market.

The Target Is H sets all of this up within the first few pages, with Hardin a battered shell returning home from 'Nam, unsure what to do with his life. Therefore it's a bit jarring that the next chapter opens up 7 months later, with Hardin now living in a secluded desert fortress with a "mad scientist" named Willard Haskins and an American Indian named David Red Chief, plotting a three-man war on the Mafia.

Even the reasons for this war are glossed over -- Hardin fell in love with Professor Haskin's niece Donna, who spurred Hardin to research the reasons behind his old high school football injury. It turns out that the guy who hurt Hardin was a low-tier mobster; this revelation lead the two of them further on until they somehow ran afoul of Don Pietro Scarelli, local mob boss, who had Donna killed in a car crash. (Again, all of this is rendered in elliptical flashbacks strewn through the main narrative; Donna doesn't even appear in the narrative, which is unfortunate when you realize that her love for Mark and her murder are the two factors in his genesis as the series hero.)

Hardin relies on his 'Nam penetrating skills to wage an effective war on Scarelli's mobsters. There are a few Mafia factions in the city and Hardin hits each of them so that soon they think one faction is battling another. Hardin's got a host of weaponry, most of it culled by Haskins, some of it developed by the Professor himself, such as a dart which can render a man to a death-like state for a few moments.

The battles are mostly one-sided, with the goons no match for Hardin's skills. Regardless the action sequences are all well staged and expertly rendered, particularly a great scene where Hardin gets a small army of mobsters stuck in a canyon and lobs white phosphorous down upon them. This is probably the most brutal treatment I've ever seen delivered to the mob in a men's adventure novel! But other than that there are a lot of running battles, with Hardin blasting away thugs with various automatic weaponry.

Hardin isn't the superhero typical of these types of novels. He has past injuries which he's still trying to overcome, and despite the horrendous losses he inflicts upon his enemies there are still many times in which he himself is in mortal danger. There's another great sequence where, barely able to move due to his injuries, Hardin has to scale a cliff in pitch-black darkness, escaping an assembled army of mobsters and police.

Character development is minimal, which again is a shame -- a "regular" novel would've centered solely upon Hardin's recovery of his body and psyche, whereas this one cuts past all that stuff just to get to the gory action. (That's not a bad thing...I'm just saying.) But you get to like these characters, and you look forward to reading about more of their adventures in future installments.