Black Samurai #8: The Katana

Black Samurai #8: The Katana, by Marc Olden

June, 1975  Signet Books

To cue the old cliché, this time it’s personal for Robert Sand in this, the final volume of Black Samurai. The plot concerns Sand trying to get his hands on a priceless Japanese sword made of pure gold that is a few hundred years old and was given by Sand’s old master to the government of Japan – but someone just stole it, and they’re trying to sell it. 

So, not the most earth-shattering of plots in the series. Indeed, The Katana is by far the most grounded installment of them all, with Sand up against a humdrum group of foes. I suspect that poor Marc Olden was getting a little fatigued at this point; he wrote the entire Black Samurai series in one year, and at the same time he wrote the Narc series…so yeah, it’s not surprising some of the wind had gone out of his sails. 

Personally I think the series crested with #6: The Warlock and started its downhill slide with the previous volume. Sadly The Katana continues that slide, and we have here an altogether listless tale that has Sand getting his ass kicked by a group of villains who are completely underserving of the page count they’ve been given. Chief among this is Mrs. Thomms, a hulking German woman who acts as the sadistic henchwoman of the novel’s main villain, an effete stolen art dealer named Flowers; Olden spends way too many pages on these characters, so that once again his ostensible hero Robert Sand comes off like a guest star in his own book. 

 Another unusual thing about The Katana is that Sand works in a solo capacity for most of the tale. It opens with him homing in on a dealer who might have gotten his hands on the stolen katana, leading to the first of many fights with Mrs. Thomms and her underlings, chief among them her dimwitted brother Dieter. Man, there is a lot of bullshit about Thomms and Dieter, Olden not-so-subtly implying there is more than a sibling love between the two, but Thomms is already so grotesque that the whole taboo thing comes off as too much. 

The real issue is Olden’s tendency to POV-hop and spend pages and pages in the rambling thoughts of his one-off characters. Even the thugs hired by Thomms are given inordinate pages of rambling, like the ex-cop who just wants the money, etc. There’s also a lot of stuff about Flowers, the boss behind it all; he stays off-page most of the time, and given that he’s a British crook with sadistic tendencies he made me think of Harry Flowers from Performance. That said, we do get the humorous off-hand note that Flowers gets his kicks by dressing underaged girls up in dresses and then spanking them. 

As for Robert Sand, he’s almost somnambulant this time around. What I mean is he doesn’t have much to say, and as usual he goes without sex – Olden teases the possibility very late in the tale, when a pretty Chinese stewardess who dabbles in art smuggling on the side briefly hooks up with him…but she’s so terrified, and Sand is so beaten and worn from his latest tangle with Mrs. Thomms and crew, that nothing comes of it. Presumably that’s her on the cover; it has to be, as there’s no other female novel than Mrs. Thomms in the book. Whoever the uncredited artist was who did this and the other Black Samurai covers, he or she did a fairly good job of depicting characters and incidents within the actual books, so the artist either read the manuscripts or got very good direction from the editor. (“Show a hot Oriental broad! In boots!”) 

Action is infrequent and, like the plot itself, very grounded. Sand gets in a lot of fistfights with Mrs. Thomms and her thugs, but the veteran series reader wonders why Sand is having such a hard time with a crew of misfits like this. They nearly get the better of him again and again; as ever Olden really wants us to believe that Sand is not superhuman, that he cannot take on a few people at once, etc…but it sort of cheapens the escapist vibe of the entire series and only serves to undermine the cool character Olden created. It was like Marc Olden was always afraid to fully unleash Robert Sand. 

Eventually Sand’s boss, ex-president William Baron Clarke, comes into the tale…and there follows a weird non-sequitur bit where Sand shames Clarke for possibly having stolen art in his collection(!?), and Clarke has his people look into it. But this is what I mean when I say Marc Olden was running on empty at this point. You don’t pick up a book titled Black Samurai #8: The Katana and expect to read about art smuggling, but that’s exactly what you get. 

The main gist concerns Mrs. Thomms wanting Robert Sand’s head, as early on in the book Sand beats her brother Dieter nearly to death, so the hulking German woman has a mad-on for Sand. But as unfortunately is his wont, Olden page-fills so much that he robs us of the very climax he’s been building toward: during the climactic fight in the desolate French countryside, Mrs. Thomms throws a rock at Sand and it hits him in the head and he falls down – and she thinks he’s dead(!). Then the action moves to London, and Sand slips through Flowers’ estate, offing people one by one (including surprisingly savage stuff for the Black Samurai, like chopping off heads), but the confrontation with Mrs. Thomms never comes! The last we see of her, she’s “terrified,” but unfortunately very much alive. 

The veteran reader also knows this is common in Marc Olden’s work. As in The Warlock and the other series highlight, #3: Killer Warrior, Olden gives us a great villain, allows the villain to escape…and never brings the villain back. Now, Mrs. Thomms is not a great villain, not by a helluva long stretch, but it’s just an indication of Olden’s recurring schtick. She’s another one that gets away; Narc too was filled with main villains who escaped at novel’s end, never to return. 

I mean, imagine how cool The Katana would’ve been if it featured the return of the Warlock, or the crazy Indian guy from the third volume. Unfortunately such ideas did not occur to Olden, thus he gives us a slow-moving affair that constantly has Robert Sand getting his ass kicked by characters who would’ve been killed by Sand within a page or two in earlier, superior volumes. 

There’s no indication this was the last volume of the series – Signet did not market it as such and the novel itself ends with Sand still acting as William Baron’s Black Samurai. However, intentional or not, there is a fitting conclusion to the series overall, as Sand honors his old master by anonymously giving the katana to the Japanese delegation in London, thinking to himself that he has honored his master – a nice callback to the first volume.

So then, why did Black Samurai end? Likely low sales, the killer of most every men’s adventure series. Or the changing whims of an editorial board. Or, if Michael Newton was correct in his How To Write Action-Adventure Fiction, it was the oil crisis of the mid-‘70s that killed off so many men’s adventure series; per Newton, publishers had to cut back on publications, and men’s adventure was always deemed the lowest of the low, so it was the first to go. (I’m making that my new personal slogan!) 

What’s also curious is that two years later the film adaptation was released…and meanwhile the series ended in 1975. As mentioned in my review, the movie is copyright 1976, but even then that was still a year after Black Samurai concluded. Obviously the film made little to no impact at the time, but it is curious that director Al Adamson pushed forward with his adaptation of a series that was no longer in print. Maybe if it had been made by a half-decent director, the film version of Black Samurai could have brough the book series back to life. 

But it was not to be, and after this Marc Olden turned to The Harker File (also published by Signet), as well as standalone novels, before finding a little more fame in the ‘80s and ‘90s as the writer of Eric Van Lustbader-esque crime novels with “Oriental” overlays…which of course I intend to read someday. 

Overall I did very much enjoy Black Samurai; when I started this blog back in 2010 it was one of the first series I meant to cover, but I ended up only reading and reviewing The Warlock (Here is my original review, from August 2010), and then I focused on Narc. 

With this series Marc Olden created a memorable, powerful protagonist…a sort of more believable and more human Remo Williams, but as mentioned a problem with Black Samurai is that too many of the books don’t really feature the Black Samurai. Olden’s strange tendency to focus on one-off characters for pages and pages is one of my biggest frustrations with his writing…yet oddly enough, he’s one of the better writers in the genre, capably bringing characters to life and delivering gripping action scenes. 

Oh, and I forgot to mention: yes, The Katana also follows the Marc Olden template with an action scene in Paris. For whatever reason, Olden has had a “let’s go to Paris” scene in literally every book of his I’ve read…the dude must’ve been obsessed with the place! And it’s the one place the globe-trotting movie version of Robert Sand didn’t go in Al Adamson’s film!

Snowball In Hell (Dennison’s War #6)

Snowball In Hell, by Adam Lassiter

November, 1986  Bantam Books

It’s not a very auspicious end for the short-lived Dennison’s War; this final volume is more evidence that Steven “Adam Lassiter” Krauzer was attempting something other than the typical “mercs versus terrorists and/or KGB” storylines in the 1980s men’s adventure marketplace…but unfortunately the story is tepid, the writing is overdone, and there are annoying authorial quirks throughout. 

To recap, Dennison’s War is an unusual men’s adventure series in that it does not feature the same person or groups of people each volume. Krauzer introduces a concept that the titular Dennison is more like Charlie in Charlie’s Angels, and instead of Angels he has a bunch of hardbitten commando types at his disposal…the ex-mobster, the tough cop chick, etc. So each volume he sends out the operative he deems best suited for the mission at hand, meaning that there was no real consistency to the series. One volume might be about one guy, the next about another, etc. 

This volume features Conte, the ex-mobster, who featured in the earlier Conte’s Run (which I do not have). But Snowball In Hell also features…Dennison himself, as if Krauzer realized he should have the titular character doing something other than bossing people around. That something is taking care of the hit the Mafia has put on Conte for leaving the mob. 

Dennison is described as a forty-something former spook who started up his own operation ten years ago; he is slight of stature and has an easy-going smile, but we are to understand he’s a badass. However, the way the novel pans out, it’s actually Dennison’s hotstuff assistant, Miss Paradise, who does all the bad-assery. The only problem is, Krauzer manages to make her come off like a prototype AWFL, constantly mocking everyone, bullying everyone, and taunting people…the people who actually work for Dennison! I’m not sure what Krauzer was going for, but somehow he manages to make Miss Paradise thoroughly unlikable. 

And, more damningly, he makes Conte seem like a whimp. First of all, the dude has to be convinced by Dennison to take the job, then he worries about the danger, and then he goes through the book either getting captured or getting beaten up. Admittedly, he occasionally hits people with a “leather sap” he carries around, but this dude is nowhere near the upper echelon of 1980s men’s adventure heroes. 

As for the job, it takes place in Snowball Springs, somewhere in the Ozarks (Krauzer is not specific): a hayseed town that has been taken over by the duplicitous Bert Dolly. Oh, friends, be prepared to know that name well if you ever read Snowball In Hell. Krauzer writes “Bert Dolly” every single time the character appears or is mentioned. 

And not just him! Casey Weathers, Tommy Chin, and others besides – every time these minor characters are mentioned in the text, whether it be dialog or narrative, their full names are given; the annoying authorial quirk I mentioned. I mean, I know these men’s adventure novels were under the radar, but surely some editor at Bantam could’ve been bothered to tell Krauzer to knock it off? 

But then, Krauzer’s writing is so flowery and overcooked that he constantly stalls forward momentum. I had bad flashbacks to Stark; there is too much of a focus on word painting, and while that’s all well and good, it’s just the wrong genre for it. Especially given that so much focus is given to scenery description and character introspection that when the actual action happens, it’s rushed – and very bloodless. 

The story is essentially Buck Town: Casey Weathers, the towering ex-military girl from hayseed Snowball Springs who has become the local deputy, hires Dennison to help her take down Bert Dolly, a mobster who has taken over town and turned it over to the thieves. Meanwhile the real mob is moving in, so Dennison decides to send Conte, the former mobster, to pose as a mobster, and hopefully start a war between Dolly and the mob. 

A convoluted setup for sure, but really Conte just spends his time trading barbs with Dolly and his redneck thugs…or dodging their infrequent attacks on him. Meanwhile Dennison and Miss Paradise track down the New York mobster behind the hit, looking to lean on him and get the contract on Conte removed. 

I was not very entertained by the novel at all. It was slow and ponderous, and Krauzer seemed embarrassed by the stuff people want from the genre. When Conte and Casey have their expected conjugation, it happens so far off-page that I wasn’t even sure anything did happen. As for the action…Conte doesn’t even make his first kill until page 93, and after that we’re treated to an endless bit of exposition as he tells Casey about his past. 

Even the stuff with Dennison isn’t much fun; it mostly concerns them kidnapping a mobster and threatening him with torture (something Dennison hates but Miss Paradise takes to naturally). It’s all just kind of tepid and it comes off as if Krauzer has lost interest. Even the finale, with Conte and Casey getting into it with Bert Dolly’s men and some mobsters, lacks much spark, and could’ve been the climax of an average A-Team episode. 

As I mentioned in my review of the similarly-underwhelming Hell On Wheels (and the heroine of that one, by the way, isn’t even mentioned in this one), Krauzer also wrote a seventh volume of the series (title unknown), but it went unpublished. Snowball In Hell leaves little wonder why.  It is clear Bantam was cutting back on it; this volume does not feature a foldout cover, as the previous ones did.  I was heavily into men’s adventure novels in 1986 – I’d just discovered them the year before – and I was not aware of Dennison’s War at the time. So this is one instance where I can attest that the series wasn’t even well-received in the era it was published.

Unreleased (?) 1970s Destroyer Poster

From the Glorious Trash Archives: I just discovered this image on an old laptop of mine; looks like I saved it to the PC in February of 2012.  Per my note it was an unreleased Destroyer poster from the 1970s:

No idea where I got the image from, so apologies if I have stolen it from some other site.  However I just did a quick search on the image and could not find it anywhere.

I do not have any other info on the poster, so if any of you know anything about it, please share.  Clearly the art is by Destroyer cover artist Hector Garrido, and I bet it would have looked cool blown out to full poster size!

Richard Blade #39: Les Dieux De La Mort Lente (The Gods Of Slow Death)

Richard Blade #39: Les Dieux De La Mort Lente, by Jeffrey Lord

1983  Plon Books

The French adventures of Richard Blade continue with another volume that was, according to ISFDB, written by Richard D. Nolane. Once again it is hard for me to judge the quality of his prose, given the bland way the book has been translated into English; as Johny Malone speculated, this is likely because it was translated by AI and not a human. 

At any rate, this is one of the most streamlined Richard Blade novels ever: Blade goes to a patch of Dimension X called Winter, a frozen tundra with a fat red sun, and he fights ice pirates and wizards. It’s all very humdrum, A to B sort of stuff, but it is filled with a lot of memorable imagery. Also I must note that The Gods Of Slow Death breaks series protocol by only having Blade sleep with a single woman! Yes, I too was shocked. 

We have the briefest of openings in the real world, ie Home Dimension, where we learn that Blade has picked up an English girl named Ann (“…she was quite tall, with fair skin dotted with light freckles that further-accentuated her cheerful demeanor”), and though we are told she is “kissing Blade’s muscular back” in the intro, there’s no hanky-panky for our hero; he is called to the Tower of London for another trip. 

Nolane is not one for big setup or development; Blade is thrust into an icy world, but unlike the earliest volumes of the series he no longer arrives nude, but wearing armor and carrying a “saber” of an alien metal that can travel across the dimensions. Otherwise the story is identical in development to every other volume of the series: Blade meets a crew of warriors, introduces himself as a warrior from a distant land, and spends the rest of the book proving himself and then leading them in battle. 

I want to think that Nolane was inspired by Barbarella, as Blade immediately encounters ice-roving warriors who go about on sleds that sound very much inspired like the one seen in that film (and possibly the original French comic); I’m talking about the craft that was piloted by the dude who wore the shaggy outfit which when taken off revealed an even shaggier torso. 

Nothing like this happens in The Gods Of Slow Death (fortunately); Blade, near death from exposure, is rescued by these guys, then soon after they are in a battle with ice pirates. As expected Blade proves himself in battle, splitting faces and spilling brains with his saber. 

Abruptly the novel changes pace, coming off like Toga Trash or somesuch; Blade is captured, stripped down to loincloth, and sold to a slave trader named Demetrio. Here the sole female character in The Gods Of Slow Death is introduced: Neysa, a super-hot blonde daughter of nobility who happens to be bad-ass warrior to boot. She too is in the clutches of Demetrio, and Blade’s first “conjugation” occurs when he is ordered to arouse a similarly-nude Neysa…a scene that leads to her visiting his chambers that night. 

Ultimately it will pan out that Demetrio and Neysa are part of a plot to take down the titular Gods of the Slow Death, also known as the Star Gods; Nolane, taking a page from Erich von Daniken, introduces the concept that Star Gods visited Winter centuries ago and now rule from their remote, heavily-guarded mountain fortress. 

The “slow death” refers to the double-edged sword of serving the Star Gods. Certain vassals are chosen and graced by the gods with magical powers, but the cost is a slow death, with facial disfigurement being one of the chief signs of decay. Given this the vassals all wear robes and golden masks; as mentioned, Nolane does pile on some cool imagery in the book. It’s just all underserved by the blasé translation. 

Blade of course becomes part of the resistance, Neysa often fighting at his side. And as mentioned she is his sole bedmate. Nolane adds variety with the off-hand mention that Neysa is kinky, delivering a sequence that again seems like it could come out of a trashy toga ripper, complete with slaves watching Blade and Neysa get busy: 

And as with the The Aerials Of K’Tar, gender often switches during the sex scenes, making for an awkward read, and also there’s again that weird connotation of mentioning the “stomach” in relation to sexual urges. Maybe it’s a French thing. And on that note, I actually read some of The Gods Of Slow Death while in Montreal the other month, so it was all rather fitting. 

The vassals of the gods have total power over all, able to kill people with their minds and whatnot. However Blade discovers that he is immune to their power – a development that superior series author Manning Lee Stokes would have exploited for all its advantage, with Blade ascending to his own godlike status. Instead Nolane’s characters have a reaction almost as blasé as the translation itself, with one guy exclaiming over Blade’s power, but not much else really being made of it. 

Then again, this is a book that features the line, “Of course, wanting to avenge an ice cream seller might seem insignificant compared to the future of an entire world, but history was full of facts of this kind that had set in motion crucial events for its future development.” An odd statement for sure, especially given the fact that there is no “ice cream seller” in the book! 

The finale is pretty good, with Blade leading combined forces on the mountain fortress of the Star Gods, slaying their Star Disciples left and right. It gets very Von Daniken in the end, when Blade discovers a starship in the mountain, the home of the Star Gods, and fights a towering alien – but is promptly zapped back to Home Dimension, where we have a talky denouement in which Blade and J figure that the “slow death” was radiation. Also, we have the offhand mention that Blade (or maybe it’s Lord Deighton, the translation being unclear) has a pet monkey…! 

Overall The Gods Of Slow Death was entertaining, but again it’s tough to truly gauge it because I feel like I’m reading a pale reflection of the French original.

The Baroness #3: Death Is A Ruby Light (second review)

The Baroness #3: Death Is A Ruby Light, by Paul Kenyon

April, 1974  Pocket Books

I had a grand old time re-reading this third volume of The Baroness; I found that I remembered many things from the first time I read it, back in 2011. This is still my favorite cover art in the series, courtesy Hector Garrido, and overall Donald “Paul Kenyon” Moffitt does a great job keeping the story moving while indulging in his sci-fi interests…and featuring his frequent, pages-consuming sex scenes. 

I still wonder about the explicit sex in The Baroness; it’s more explicit than most any other Lyle Kenon Engel action-series production (save perhaps for The Man From Planet X), and either it was given such a focus due to Engel’s request, Pocket Books’s request, or because Moffitt himself wanted to write it. I don’t believe Moffitt’s sci-fi books indulged in such rampant sexcapades, and given that Engel’s productions all had sex in them but not this much sex, I contend that Pocket Books, publisher of the paperback editions of Harold Robbins, perhaps requested it. Like many paperback publishers of the day, Pocket really hyped the sexual content of their books – sometimes quite misleadingly so – but as the official publishers of Robbins I suspect they felt that they had a cache on “upmarket” filth. It’s tempting to think that it was they who requested that Penelope “The Baroness” St. John-Orsini get down, in super-‘70s detail, frequently and explicitly, in each volume. 

Of course, I could be wrong. However, this seems to be proven posthaste, as Death Is A Ruby Light opens with Penny (as I’ll mostly refer to her; Moffitt himself, in true “house writer style,” refers to her by multiple names in the narrative, which I always find messy writing – I mean, the characters can refer to each other by various names, but the author should only use one name in the narrative…and here ends the sermon) getting in super-busy detail with a visiting Norwegian film director. 

The action goes down in Penny’s palatial Italian villa, and she ends up screwing the guy in the pool…after a few pages of foreplay where she keeps him from getting too excited too soon. The ensuing sex goes on for a few pages and is, again, more detailed and descriptive than any other Engel production I’m aware of…and I’m aware of them all by god, even the ones I haven’t reviewed here yet! Moffitt again shows a superior talent for sleazy details, like telling us how “the jellied evidence of [the Norwegian director’s] passion float[s] away like a water lilly” post-orgasm, or how the water rushes into Penny’s, uh, body cavity after the Norwegian pulls out of her. 

There’s a subplot, which gradually disappears from the narrative, that the cover identities of spies are being compromised and they’re being killed, on both the US and USSR side. Penny wonders why her wrist bracelet hasn’t “pinged” in a while, ie giving her a mission, and we learn in a cool scene that she too has been compromised – men in hoods come into her room late at night. One of the few times the Baroness is caught completely unawares, but the sequence is more of a plot convenience than anything else, as it’s John Farnsworth, here to tell Penny that her cover is in danger of being blown. 

As ever Moffitt makes a big deal out of Penny being “Coin,” super top-secret spy whose identity is only known to her handler, Farnsworth. Which means this series is like The Butcher in that it has a misleading title – Bucher’s codename was “Iceman” and the Baroness’ is “Coin.” Oh and on page 97 Moffitt shoehorns Penny’s backstory into the narrative: widow of an intelligence world bigwig who died in a plane crash, then wife of an Italian baron who died in a car crash…then deciding she wanted to become a spy and, after a few handy courses and whatnot, emerging as “Coin,” using her cover as a famous jet-setting baroness. It’s all very belabored and particularly hard to buy because Penny does not have much personality. 

I’d forgotten that’s the one element missing in Moffitt’s otherwise superb writing: there is zero character motivation and zero in the way of personality or memorable character traits. The Baroness is essentially perfect and likes to call people “darling,” and she certainly likes sex with handsome (and usually foreign) men, but what drives her is very remote. Why exactly did she want to become a spy? Then again, in a way it’s refreshing: Penny’s job is to find out what is knocking satellites out of the sky, and she goes about her mission with steely resolve; there is none of the hand-wringing or dramatic histrionics one might encounter in a similar story today. The only problem is, Penny is a cipher. 

This is proven when, with absolutely not setup or explanation, she straight up sleeps with Alexey, hunky GRU agent, the night she meets him; the complicated setup has it that America and Russia, at much page expense, have determined that China is behind the satellite affair, courtesy a large laser installation somewhere in Mongolia, and so a joint US-USSR commando team is to be sent in, led by Coin. 

Alexey is the leader of the USSR faction, and readers of the series know that he eventually became a supporting character, appearing a few more times – most notably in the unpublished ninth and tenth volumes (where in the latter he presumably was killed in the final pages…though I suspect Moffitt was only bluffing). Anyway, he and Penny exchange a few lines of dialog as the teams are united…and then they just go to bed together. Again, it’s kind of refreshing on one hand – Moffitt just delivering the sex scene everyone knows is coming – yet again it makes our heroine seem like a cipher. 

The same is true of Penny’s unwieldy team, which we know from Moffitt’s conversations with Baroness Yahoo Group honcho ppsantos were foisted on him by the publisher. The only team member with much spark is, as ever, Tom Sumo, the electronics whiz; it’s clear Moffitt likes him, and maybe hulking American Indian Joe Skytop, the best of all the team…with Dan Wharton coming in a distant third. The others are so bland and faceless that they fade right into the background…and this time the reader can sense Moffitt chortling to himself as he finds a way to dispense with all of them, having it that Penny can only bring a few members along on this particular caper. 

The villains actually have more spark. There’s Major Sung, who very much enjoys torturing people – we get a grueling scene of him happily chopping up a slackjawed native who accidentally came across the secret laser silo – and also Professor Thing, a towering Chinese albino with a ruby for an eye who is behind the laser cannon and who has a wanton hatred for America because, as a professor in the United States, he was blinded when someone burned out his retina with a high-powered telescope…or maybe it was an accident. But anyway, there are a lot of scenes with Thing and Sung, and as ever Moffitt fills the 207, small-print pages of the book to the brim. 

The spy-fy focus is also again here, with Penny and team using a host of high-tech equipment, most notably their super-thin winter gear which, like much of the equipment in The Baroness, is a by-product of the Space Race. Moffitt clearly was a follower of the moon launches and NASA ventures of the day; the climax of Death Is A Ruby Light features Professor Thing plotting to use his laser to destroy a US-USSR linkup in space, which is quite similar to the plot of the unpublished A Black Hole To Die In. 

Moffitt seems to cater to Hector Garrido’s recurring cover depitction of the Baroness in an off-hand mention of a “black body stocking” she has in her luggage and which she wears for only the briefest of moments. This is so similar to the outfit Garrido consistently depicted the Baroness wearing on his covers that I figure Moffitt was trying to cater to it…because otherwise the Baroness does not wear any such outfit in the series. That said, the Baroness also has jet-black hair, whereas Garrido consistently depicts her as having shoulder-length brown hair. 

Action is infrequent but memorable when it happens – and pretty hardcore, too. The Baroness is not only atypical of a female protagonist but also of men’s adventure protagonists in general in that she kills in cold blood; frequently, at that. There’s a grueling scene where she and a few hand-picked team members slip through a camp of sleeping Chinese soldiers and slit their throats. 

Another great action scene mixes violence with Moffitt’s lurid inclinations when Penny is knocked out and wakes up in the hut of the hulking Omogoy and his fellow Yakuts. Penny feels a “burning” in her loins and realizes, quite placidly, that she’s been raped – further evidence provided by the “crusting” she sees on the penises of two of the native men, who are walking happily nude around the hut! Curiously Moffitt doesn’t have Penny really getting vengeance on her rapists, though she does as expected run roughshod over them in her escape. Omogoy too is shuffled out of the narrative and meets his fate in an unsatisfying way, a fate dealt out by Professor Thing instead of Penny. 

Alexey doesn’t contribute much to the narrative, other than providing a team of redshirts who can die so that the Baroness’ team will, as expected, survive. And also he engages Penny in a few more sex scenes – lots of description of his uncircumcised “pole” and Penny doing her “rotary” movement as she rides him…another recurring series schtick, like Penny’s tendency to “crush” the throats of unsuspecting guards. 

That said, late in the game the Baroness says to Tommy, speaking of Alexey: “I think I love him, a little.” This “love” is not developed at all in the narrative itself; for the most part, Penny and Alexey trade barbs about the mission, as they each have confidential info they are not willing to share with each other until necessary. So there’s a lingering tension of whether Penny and team can really trust Alexey. So Penny suddenly admitting she loves Alexey is a little hard to buy…yet at the same time, it goes hand-in-hand with her overall cipher-like nature. After all, this is the same woman who woke to discover she’d been raped by two men, a discovery which was dwelt upon and passed over in the span of a few sentences, and never mentioned again. 

The climax is pretty good, with Penny and team captured and taken to the massive base of Thing and Sung, where Penny has the series-mandatory tete-a-tete where Thing reveals his motivations. There’s also a memorable part where he pulls out his ruby eye and tosses it to her. But once again Tom Sumo proves himself the most indispensable member of the Baroness’ team – perhaps including even the Baroness herself – when he uses his gee-whiz science knowledge to undo Thing’s laser cannon. 

Unfortunately the finale sort of peters out with Penny and the others again silently killing a full base of sleeping Chinese soldiers…sort of anticlimactic after the big bad guy and his henchman have been deposed. But Moffitt goes on to write even more, with a scene in which Alexey, back home, learns who “Coin” is – thanks to Dan Wharton’s casual reference to her as “Baroness.” This leads to a surprising finale where Alexey goes to Italy to surprise her, tells her he has a week off and wants to spend it with her, and they go off together – so clearly from the get-go Moffitt had Alexey in mind as a recurring character. 

Overall Death Is A Ruby Light remains one of my favorite installments of The Baroness, even though the majority of it occurs in a frozen tundra. Sure, there’s not much in the way of personality or motivation, but otherwise Donald Moffitt’s writing is a cut above the men’s adventure norm, doling out exactly what producer Lyle Kenyon Engel wanted. One imagines that Engel must have been ecstatic to acquire Moffitt for his writing stable; compare to Manning Lee Stokes, another gifted writer, but one who “did not adhere exactly to the approved outline,” per Will Murray’s Killmaster article in The Armchair Detective volume 15, number 4 (1982). Moffitt turns in books that actually deliver on what the back cover promises.

Cherry Delight #3: Silverfinger

Cherry Delight #3: Silverfinger, by Glen Chase

No month stated, 1973  Leisure Books

Other than Where The Action Is, which was written by Len Levinson, I’ve never had any interest in Cherry Delight. Like Ted Mark’s books, it’s another of those spoofy spy-parody series with goofy acronyms and lame attempts at comedy and, even worse, it’s written in first-person -- a male author writing in the voice of a woman. But then I saw this third volume for a few dollars at an antique store and figured what the hell. 

There were actually two series: this initial Cherry Delight, which ran in the early 1970s, and then the later The All-New Cherry Delight (which is the series Len wrote one volume of), which ran in the late ‘70s. Veteran writer Gardner Fox handled all 24 volumes of the initial Cherry Delight, which is another reason I’ve never had much interest in the series; I’m not the biggest fan of his writing, as noted in my reviews of his two Commander Craig novels. 

But for a few bucks I couldn’t say no. However, Silverfinger turned out to be another reminder of how I just don’t like Gardner Fox’s work. It’s a slow-moving caper that operates on a threadbare setup with few thrills and hardly any action at all, only livened up by the occasional sex scene – sex scenes that are admittedly odd in that they’re written by a man but relayed in the first-person narrative of a woman. The conceit has always baffled me. 

In the 1960s Fox was one of the authors on the similar Lady From Lust series, another spoofy spy-fy series featuring a lusty female protagonist. But by the ‘70s The Executioner had overtaken James Bond and thus Cherry Delight is a spy who fights the mob, and she works for NYMPHO…the goofy and punny (and unfunny) ‘60s acronym titles making their unwelcome way to the ‘70s. 

Otherwise Cherry is essentially a spy who takes on the Mafia, and she’s a redheaded beauty with huge boobs (which she often reminds us of), and somehow she finds the time to narrate her adventures for us. The same thing Nick Carter began to do around this time. Personally I think any editor or publisher who demands a men’s adventure series be written in first-person is an editor or publisher who doesn’t know what the hell he or she is doing. 

 But then, one might argue that Gardner Fox doesn’t know, either. Case in point is this third volume, titled Silverfinger. Clearly it’s a take on Goldfinger, and the reader might envision a sex-and-violence-filled yarn about Cherry Delight taking on a Mafia chieftan with a penchant for painting women in silver and having his own personal army at his disposal…maybe with grand plans for taking over Fort Knox or somesuch.

Instead, the reader gets a threadbare, mundane, humdrum yarn about a Mafia boss in rural Italy who wears silver clothes, drives a silver car, and goes around to a shipyard to try to talk the employees into working for him. This, folks, is the threat Cherry Delight is up against in Silverfinger. It’s baffling how mundane and inconsequential the story actually is. 

What’s even crazier is that Fox writes like his life depends on it; the book runs 150-some pages of small, dense print; Silverfinger is similar to the “sleaze” paperbacks of a few decades before in that for the most part it’s made up of crafted narrative…but frequently will cut over to hardcore sex scenes. But as mentioned these sex scenes are odd because “Cherry” tells us all about the dudes she’s banging, and she has an odd way of referring to her anatomical parts. 

In the course of Silverfinger Cherry will have sex with a brother and a sister (not at the same time), and then later on she’ll conjugate with her NYMPHO handler, Mark Condon. Bizarrely enough, back in high school I dated a girl named Jennifer Condon…the name being so unusual that I of course remembered it. Plus she was a dead ringer for Elizabeth “Bewitched” Montgomery…but built like Barbara “I Dream Of Jeannie” Eden. No, I don’t know why I didn’t marry her, either!

I really need to stop drinking before I write these reviews. Okay, I’ll focus. Cherry is in Italy, with her red hair dyed black, trying to convince a trio of siblings that their shipyard is about to be taken over by the Mafia. The siblings, all young jetsetters, don’t believe Cherry…until mobsters start showing up to make threats or try to kill them. 

Cherry soon deduces that the mysterious “Silverfinger” is behind the group, and ultimately she’ll discover the otherwise dapper and silver-garbed older man who is indeed in charge of them…but for a main villain, he lacks bite. Then again the same can be said for the entire novel. 

Probably the highlight is a random bit where Cherry and Ines, the hotstuff sister of the trio, goes to a friggin Satanic ceremony in an old abbey, one attended by the shipyard workers. Cherry and Ines get so turned on by the nude congregants that they enjoy a brief lesbian fling, Cherry informing us that she’s done this sort of thing often. A lesbian fling that features the memorable image of Ines dipping her nipples in Cherry’s womanhood before dining at the Y. Hail Satan! 

The sex goes on for pages when it happens, but truth be told it lacks any heat and is undone by the bizarre decision on Fox’s part to suddenly become guttural; Cherry, otherwise highfalutin in her narrative, will suddenly be referring to her “pussylips” and her “girly-girl body.” There were parts, honestly, where I got the impression of an AI program attempting to write hardcore sleaze from the perspective of a human female. 

And really, the sex is the only thing Silverfinger has going for it. There certainly isn’t any action. Cherry takes on a few thugs with her bare hands early in the book, and gets in the odd shootout or two, but there’s no big action scene and for the most part the novel operates on a long-simmer approach, with Cherry more concerned with figuring out what Silverfinger’s plans are. To this end she goes undercover as a country girl working on the shipyards, gaining her way into Silverfinger’s confidence. 

More frustratingly, the finale comes on us without us even realizing it; Cherry gets in a protracted catfight with Silverfinger’s girlfriend, and some of Cherry’s hair is pulled out and she sees that her red roots are showing, so doubtless Silverfinger will realize that Cherry is the mysterious redhead who has been hitting his places. Then suddenly someone is sniping at Cherry moments after she’s had sex with Mark Condon, then there’s a harried action scene…and then the novel’s over…and Silverfinger has gotten away; Cherry figures she’ll see him again. 

Personally, I don’t give a damn whether she did or didn’t. Len’s Where The Action Is was worlds better than this, so unless I ever come across more volumes of Cherry Delight for a pittance, I figure I won’t be reading another volume of this particular series. I know Gardner Fox is well respected and all, but his writing just isn’t for me.

Big Tocsin Update: New Books, New Covers, and a SUMMER SALE!

Big Tocsin Press update – first up, a new volume of Black Angel has been published! It’s titled Green Hell, and here’s the cover: 

Angie Black has fought killers, madmen, and Satanic cults, but nothing has prepared her for Green Hell! Deep in the steaming jungles of South America, a forbidden clinic offers desperate men a second chance at passion…while far below the waves, a sunken pyramid guards secrets older than civilization itself. Between lust and lost science waits a power no mortal was meant to command…and once awakened, it could remake the world in its own terrible image! 

Now the one woman bold enough to face the unknown must plunge into a nightmare of savage mercenaries, decadent pleasures, ancient machines, and death at every turn. Beautiful, deadly, and unstoppable, THE BLACK ANGEL returns in her most shocking adventure yet! From jungle heat to ocean depths, from forbidden desire to unimaginable terror, Black Angel: Green Hell is a pulse-pounding explosion of thrills! 

More details at Amazon, where you can preview the first few chapters (desktop only). But that’s not all, folks! 

Also new from Tocsin is Carter Nicholson: The Red-Black Terror, one that was out there as an eBook for several years but now, finally, exists in paperback…and with one helluva cover to boot: 

Carter Nicholson, the Masterkiller, aka Z3 of HATCHET, must stop a nefarious Red Chinese scheme headed up by a hotstuff Asian sadist and Nicholson’s old archenemy, the dread Iscariot! From pulling heists on acid rock clubs to battling laser-wielding savages in the desert, to finally raiding a decadent domed city of perversion and wanton lust, the Masterkiller does everything necessary to succeed in his mission! 

Here is the Amazon page for The Red-Black Terror, where you can check out the first few chapters (desktop only). 

 And that’s still not all! Several of the books from Men of Violence have been updated with new cover art (the content of the books is unchanged, by the way)…none more incredible than John Falcon Infiltrator: The Hollow Earth:

Personally, I have a hard time deciding which one I like better, this or the Red-Black Terror cover! 

Next up is everyone’s favorite misogynist tough cop, Joe Blitz! His ultra-sleazy adventure The Psycho Killers has also been graced with a phenomenal new cover: 

Blitz’s other adventure (so far), The Maimer, also has a great new cover: 

And back to one of my favorite topics, Black Angel, that series too has been updated with new cover art, in the vein of Hector Garrido. Hey, he did the covers for The Baroness, so we can just imagine that he did ‘em for Black Angel, too! But again, as with the other Men of Violence books, only the covers have changed, so if you already purchased the books, you aren’t missing anything. And also, you now have a collector’s item! 

First up is the initial installment, Black Angel: 

Next up is the “Women in Cages” second installment, The Doll Cage! 

And who can forget the third volume, Dixie Death Hunt, with its hulking albino mutant freak? 

And finally Satanic Slaughter, now with additional devil-cult-biker-and-wanton-cleavage-baring cover action! 

Speaking of new covers, The Undertaker #2: Black Lives Murder has also been given a great new cover! 

And folks, that’s still not all! Starting today through Monday, ALL TOCSIN PRESS BOOKS ARE ON SALE! You can think of it as a Fourth of July Flash Sale…or, if you aren’t in the United States, you can give it any fancy name you want! The important thing is…SALE! And the other important things are…NEW BOOKS and NEW COVERS! 

Head on over to Tocsin Press, where you can see all the books and order every single damn one of them!! And I’ll get back to regular posting asap!!

The Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder

The Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder, by Mike Barry

December, 1974  Berkley Medallion

Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg is so far into the headspace of his characters by this point in the Lone Wolf saga that a high-speed chase with cops can feature lunatic “hero” Burt Wulff ruminating about the rotten core of American society, ultimately acknowledging to himself that it’s “heavy thinking for a speeding chase.” 

We pick up shortly after the events of the previous volume, and things are as surreal as ever – no more evident than when Tamara, Wulff’s girl who was introduced in #2: Bay Prowler, is abducted from the home of her parents by goons under the employ of recurring series villain Calabrese; a sequence where Tamara is more baffled than terrified, insisting that she split up with Wulff and has nothing to do with him anymore.

Calabrese meanwhile takes up his own brunt of the inner musings that make up the majority of the narrative of Miami Marauder, and speaking of which, note how once again the titular “marauder,” presumably Wulff himself, sounds more like the name of a serial killer than a mob-buster. This has been such a recurring staple of the series that I figure it’s more of Malzberg’s in-jokery. 

Which is not to say The Lone Wolf is similar to The Destroyer; there is no parody here whatsoever, and despite characters marveling over the surreality of things, events are still real enough that they don’t mock them. Tamara herself takes up a lot of the narrative; Malzberg trades off between the musings of her, Wulff, Calabrese, and Wulff’s partner Williams throughout the novel, to the extent that Miami Marauder is even more in the headspace of its characters than the previous books. 

And yet while this sort of thing bugs me in other action series novels, in the case of The Lone Wolf I think it only adds to the surreal nature of the series. Or maybe it’s just the quality of Malzberg’s writing. As ever he finds a way to insert bitter griping about a host of random topics, from the poor quality of certain cars (a recurring series element) to how women are both encouraged to and shamed for showing off their bodies. 

We even get a peek into the life of truckers; Wulff when we meet him has hitched a ride with a truck driver, Wulff carrying his “bag of shit” with him, ie the heroin shipment he acquired previously, and which Calabrese wants. The surreal texture is present even here, with Wulff and the trucker randomly coming across a guy who has crashed, and Wulff immediately deduces the guy overdosed. Then there’s an equally weird part where the trucker indulges in his casual hookup with a truckstop waitress while Wulff waits at the bar, but Malzberg adds this weird, never-explained layer that the waitress doesn’t seem happy about the arrangement. 

Meanwhile we get a lot of scenes of Williams playing poker and kidding about with his own pair of abductors; he’s being held in a house on the outskirts of Miami, and soon Tamara will be brought there, kept in a separate room with her own minders. Calabrese is there as well, nothing like the powerful figure he was when first introduced; he spends the novel bickering with his bodyguard, obsessing over Wulff, and trying to rape Tamara – but not being able to do the deed, given his impotence. I’d say at this point Malzberg has well rammed home the point that Wulff has completely obliterated Calabrese’s masculinity. 

There really isn’t much in the way of action. Indeed, Malzberg really spins his wheels until the final quarter. There’s a preposterously-trivial part where Wulff, sneaking into the Fountanbleu hotel in Miami (where Calabrese is staying), comes upon an older married couple, and the wife is drunk, and Wulff helps the husband drag the wife to their room, and there follows a long discussion about a previous Republican convention the husband went to. And it goes on and on, having nothing to do with anything, and Wulff finally realizes he shouldn’t be there and leaves. 

We get just as much stuff from Tamara, who at this point is so like Wulff that she keeps reminding herself that she’s “already dead;” she died when she was a speed junkie, and was about to OD before Wulff came upon her in the previous volume. We’re also reminded that her real name is Susan Jenkins, “Tamara” being the name she gave herself when she ran away from home and became a junkie; this furthers the conceit that Tamara is dead, as she now wants to be Susan again – though Malzberg only refers to her as “Tamara” throughout. 

Wulff for his part is learning “the pleasures of criminality;” after leaving the trucker and getting in touch with Calabrese, who boasts that he has Williams and Tamara and will trade for one of them in Miami, Wulff steals a car, thinking to himself how easy it is to be a criminal. But then we have another arbitrary musing on the railways that run through the country, and how the trains were once such big business; I found this personally relevant, despite it having nothing to do with the tale at hand, given that I’d recently gone to the Frisco Train Museum as a chaperone on my son’s school trip. 

Malzberg works an action scene into the train part, though it too is surreal; Wulff has a couple drinks in the bar, realizes the car is empty, and then further realizes he’s been cornered by a pair of hoods. Despite being unarmed, Wulff manages to (possibly) kill both and flee; Malzberg has it at this point that Wulff is so wanted that criminals come out of the woodwork to collect the bounty on his head, thus there’s no need for the author to have to explain the how and why of it. It’s just another pair of goons who saw Wulff and decided to make a play for that bounty. 

Malzberg saves the fireworks for the extended climax, which sees Wulff swimming up to a beach along the Miami coast – a few hundred yards from a resort hotel, we’re told – and evading the fifty or so men Calabrese has waiting for him. Then Calabrese shows up in a ‘copter, Tamara up there with him, and he makes the girl go down to the sand on a rope as everyone watches – and meanwhile Wulff figures this is the perfect time to take possession of the Browning Automatic Rifle that has been set up on the beach. 

Oh and also at this time Williams is on the way, having broken free – another surreal and darkly humorous bit, where his abductors-slash-friends say how disappointed they are in Williams that he broke their trust(!), and then Williams himself steals a car…leading to a long exchange with the young couple in it. Just wild and weird stuff, but darkly humorous throughout. 

But it all climaxes with this big action scene on the beach, Wulff blowing people away with the BAR and Calabrese arguing with his bodyguard as he makes his escape on the helicopter. But again we are so into Wulff’s thoughts that the action is again more so relayed via thoughts and feelings, to the extent that there’s hardly any gore. 

SPOILER ALERT: The biggest outcome of this firefight, and I’m noting here for myself when I finish The Lone Wolf and go back to my reviews to try to make sense out of it all, is that Tamara is gunned down early in the exchange. Curiously, Malzberg never tells us who kills her, and there’s no final scene between her and Wulff; indeed, the two are never even together in Miami Marauder. Tamara is dropped down a rope from the helicopter – after calling out Calabrese as an impotent loser in front of his men, and being slapped around for it – and then she’s on the beach, and then she’s waving toward Wulff, like trying to tell him something, and then she’s gunned down. END SPOILERS. 

It seems that this is an accident, though, as it’s the final nail in the coffin of Calabrese’s relationship with his bodyguard – that Calabrese “let this happen” – but even here Malzberg goes for a dark comedy…and I forgot to mention the strange and arbitrary parts where the bodyguard keeps puking in the helicopter. But after this crazy action Miami Marauder drifts to an anticlimactic close; Wulff and Williams talk in the airport bar, where Wulff somehow manages to guilt-trip Williams for giving up the fight, even though Wulff keeps telling him to go, and then Wulff flushes the heroin down the toilet – in other words, he flushes the shit. 

MORE SPOILERS: This one has the most bizarre ending ever; Calabrese takes a passenger flight back to Chicago, for once without his men (the majority of them wiped out on the beach by Wulff), and he wakes up from a dream where he’s giving it to Tamara good and proper. Then he orders a drink after arguing with the stewardess, then the plane suddenly “drops in the air,” then the pilot comes on to say drinks are on the house, and due to this Calabrese “knows it’s bad”…and after that we cut to Williams, back in New York and finding out he has a baby son…oh, and then a few days later he realizes that the “plane that went down” is probably the one that Calabrese was on(!). In other words, the huge, ever-building confrontation between Wulff and Calabrese is brushed away in the most brazen deus ex machina possible, and Calabarese (apparently) dies in an airplane crash. END SPOILERS 

That’s it for Miami Marauder, and the last we see of Wulff, he’s on his way to Chicago to mete out some payback…unaware that fate (might have) already handled it for him. Overall this was a good one – I’ve enjoyed every volume – but it must be said that Malzberg’s fast writing is slightly getting the better of him, and too much of this one comes off like stalling and arbitrary internal pondering.

Black Angel: Satanic Slaughter

Great news, everyone: a new volume of Black Angel has just been published by Tocsin Press! It’s titled Satanic Slaughter, and here’s the cover: 

The Black Angel is back – and this time she’s plunging headfirst into a nightmare of Satanic cults, kidnapped starlets, and a conspiracy so twisted it reaches from the sleaziest back alleys to the mansions of the rich and powerful. 

What starts as a simple rescue job explodes into a blood-soaked battle against black magic, brainwashing, and a secret empire built on sin. In a world where every shadow hides a knife and every smile masks corruption, the Black Angel is the only one who can fight back – and she’s bringing hell with her! 

Brace yourself for a shock-loaded descent into ritual murder, mind control, and unholy desire as the Black Angel takes on the ultimate evil! 

Savage violence! Forbidden rites! And a heroine who’s as beautiful as she is deadly! 

This isn’t just a mission – it’s a one-way trip into Satan’s playground…where survival means killing before you’re sacrificed! 

Head on over to Amazon, where you can preview the first several pages (on desktop only) and order a copy! 

And while you’re at it, check out the Black Angel page on Amazon and pick up the other volumes you might’ve missed! 

The Specialist #11: American Vengeance

The Specialist #11: American Vengeance, by John Cutter

November, 1985  Signet Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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