The Last Ranger #5: The War Weapons

The Last Ranger #5: The War Weapons, by Craig Sargent
October, 1987  Popular Library

The fifth volume of The Last Ranger is basically part two of the previous volume; it opens immediately after the apocalyptic events of The Rabid Brigadier, with Martin “The Last Ranger” Stone determined to stop insane General Patton III before Patton can carry out his threat of nuking Colorado – just so he can kill Stone. 

But to tell the truth, I wasn’t really crazy about the previous book, and General Patton’s a bit too cliched a villain for my tastes, so I found myself enjoying The War Weapons the least of all the Last Ranger novels yet. Mostly because this one follows the “Stone joins the military” premise of the previous book, with Stone this time commanding a squad of raw recruits on the mad dash to find Patton’s nuclear silo. And it’s pretty clear that Jan “Craig Sargent” Stacy was having a hard time filling up a whole book this time, as to tell the truth not much happens; much of the narrative is Stone sitting in a tank, trying to navigate it through post-nuke Colorado.

This was the last volume of the series I bought when it was fresh on the bookstore shelves; in fact a memory I’ve carried around for 30 years now is the day I happened to go into my local WaldenBooks store, where I bought all my new men’s adventure paperbacks, and there was a kid my age (13 or so) standing there. I didn’t know him; he said he was from a few towns over or somesuch, and rarely came to this mall. We got in a conversation about The Last Ranger, and it was the only time I’d ever talked to someone else about the genre I loved so much. We were geeking out about the series, and in particular I recall how we both were laughing excitedly about the part in The Madman’s Mansion where Stone threw the depraved dwarf Poet out of a window – we both hoped the damn freak was dead for real. 

Then the part I always remember is we were wondering when “the new one” might be coming out…and the kid happened to look down at the shelf and was he like, “Look – the new one is out!” And lo and behold there was The Last Ranger #5: The War Weapons sitting on the shelf. But only one copy was left! The kid excitedly grabbed it up, and then, in a display of kindness that still makes me tear up despite the grizzled bastard life has made of me, the kid handed me the book, saying he’d find his own copy at the mall that was closer to where he lived. So of course I bought it; I wonder whatever happened to that kid, but I do recall that from then on when I went to that store I always wondered if I’d run into him again, though I never did.

But anyway this was, fittingly, the last one I ever bought, and reading it again all these years later I experinced occasional bouts of déjà vu, so I defintely read it back then. (Unsurprisingly, the parts I remembered were the ones with gory violence and hardcore sex!) I guess though this was around the time my interest in the men’s adventure genre was beginning to wane. Or maybe I just didn’t like it as much as the previous four volumes back then, either. About the most positive thing I can say about this one is that it really does read like the second half of The Rabid Brigadier, but then pretty much every volume has picked up directly after the one before; it’s mentioned in the text of this one that Martin Stone’s only been roaming around post-nuke America for a month.

As we’ll recall, in the last book Stone joined General Patton’s New American Army, quickly ascended through the ranks until Patton looked upon him as his future replacement, and then abruptly realized that Patton was really a sadist, one who was looking to destroy America and rebuild it in his own image. Stone managed to destroy, at much page count, Patton’s nuclear warhead, only to find out on the last page that Patton actually had more nukes at his disposal. So The War Weapons opens with Stone standing in the ashes of the nuclear silo, fighting off a few surviving NAA troops. As ever Stacy delights in the gore, indluging in a dark comedy vibe that at times reaching David Alexander heights: “The slug tore into the sniper’s head and whipped his brain tissue into instant mouse, servable at all the best parties.”

Stone stumbles across the group of men he went through basic training with, in the previous volume. Humorously, Stacy can’t seem to figure out how many of them there are, though gradually he settles on ten. But only a few of them are named; the two most memorable are the similarly-named Bo and Bull. The former is the one person Stone feels he can trust in the group, the latter is the one he trusts the least – Bull, a big sonofabitch, tangled with Stone in the previous book, and got his ass kicked by the Last Ranger. Stone is able to talk the guys out of killing him as a “traitor” and quickly convinces them of Patton’s insanity, and that he must be stopped before he sets off one of his nukes.

Here The War Weapons settles in for the long haul; the squad appropriates a trio of Bradley III tanks, taking them from a group of bikers in another gory battle. But the book almost assumes the vibe of the C.A.D.S. series, with too much time-wasting and technical detail as Stone quickly trains the men on various aspects of the tanks, and then they set off across the blasted ruins of Colorado, encountering various setbacks, usually ones of nature. Flashing back to his work on the early volumes of Doomsday Warrior, Stacy even has the group encounter freak nuke-spawn weather, with the tanks at one point buried under several feet of sand. Again evidencing the gooy nature of the series, Stone’s loyal pitbull Excaliber digs them out.

Around here is a part that had me on that déjà vu trip; Stone leaves his men for a bit and secretly heads back to the Bunker his father built here in the mountains of Colorado, where Stone spent the past five years of his life before leaving it in the first volume. For some reason I always recall these Bunker scenes; it must’ve resonated with me as a kid that Stone had a “safe space” (in the lame modern parlance) in the post-nuke world. That Stone has never considered finding himself a woman (not to mention his ever-missing sister April, who hasn’t been seen since the third volume) and just living safely and easily in the idllyic home, leaving the blasted US to its fate, is reason I guess why he’s “the Last Ranger” (a title, by the way, which is actually used to describe Stone in this one).

But for once there’s trouble in this little paradise; just as Stone’s tacked up the “painting of Michelangelo’s Creation” which Patton gave him in the previous book (despite the fact that the Creation is a ceiling fresco and not a painting), Stone’s attacked by a group of assassins who have secretly followed him here. NAA soldiers who claim to Stone before killing him that there’s a traitor in his group, one who dropped them a dime that Stone had just left camp. Stone manages to take out two and Excaliber kills the other two in another action scene that’s even heavier on the gore. We also get another glimpse at that proto-internet Stone’s dad created; Stone accesses it to learn what nuke silos are in the area. Here we also learn that Stone was a big fan of Aquaman as a kid, having named his pet hamster after the hero – Stone’s dad having made the hamster’s name the password to access this info.

The saddest thing about all the egregious tank stuff is that it’s ultimately pointless. Stone leads his mini-convoy to Patton’s silo, only to learn it’s a trap. Several more Bradleys come out and surround them, and Stone learns which of his men is Patton’s insider (it’s neither Bull nor Bo). There follows a bit of sadism as Stone is beaten to a veritable pulp, with one of his eyes swelling to baseball size. An ironic bit here has Stone uttering this badass (but frowned-up today) line to his tormentors: “I’ve had old women with AIDS hit at me harder than that.” Ironic because Stacy himself died of AIDS in 1989. One wonders what was going on in his mind when he wrote the line – was it just a fluke of irony or was there more it? (And I haven’t even mentioned how the song “It’s Raining Men” is referenced in the book!)

But Patton can’t just kill Stone. After having him beaten unmerciful (to quote Sol Rosenberg), Patton condemns Stone to “the death of ten million bites.” Stone, stripped and covered in syrup, is tied to an X-shaped cross and planted on a Colorado plateu, to become ant bait. He’s saved by the appearance of a gorgeous Indian babe, just as the ants are really tearing into him. This is Merya, “dauther of Fighting Bear, of the Cheyene,” a “full-breasted” American Indian beauty who goes around in a slim leather deerskin vest and not much else. She takes Stone back to her teepee and goes about healing him in the old way – ie spreading some sort of gunk on his beaten flesh and having the expected hardcore sex with him.

Once again Stacy devotes an entire chapter (16, for those taking notes) to sex – for some reason, yet another part that had me experiencing déjà vu, as I guess this part too resonated with 13 year-old me(!). And with insane lines like, “Slowly the spear of turgid flesh slid deeper and deeper into the recesses of [Merya’s] body,” how could it not? What’s most humorous here is that Stone appears to forget that this exact same thing happened to him back in the first volume – there too he was beaten near to death, only to be brought back to life thanks to the exuberant banging skills of an Indian babe. Stacy does kind of play on this, though; after a whopping orgasm or three, Merya declares Stone “a yanna, a giver a love,” which Stone muses to himself is the opposite of the “bringer of death” he was declared to be by the Ute Indians in volume #1.

Stone, despite having a few broken fingers and toes and a still-swollen eye, vows to lead the ten Indian men of Merya’s tribe on a raid upon Patton’s compound. Luckily they have a bunch of three-wheelers with autopistols jury-rigged to the handles. Merya of course goes along. But even here it’s all buildup for naught; promptly upon sneaking into Patton’s compound, Stone finds his troops lined up in a firing line. Again evidencing the goofy tone of the series, friggin’ pitbull Excaliber stands in the firing line with them. Stone of course saves the group, leading into a chaotic climactic battle which has three-wheelers and tanks going at it.

But as if again displaying the fatalist vibe of the series, Patton escapes again – and this time launches a nuke, right at Stone! Our hero just manages to high-tail it twenty miles from the compound, and, in perhaps another shout-out to Doomsday Warrior, finds shelter in a tunnel that’s built beneath a highway, which of course brings to mind the origins of that earlier series’s Century City. It’s all a bit hard to swallow as Stone, Merya, Excaliber, and a few others survive a friggin’ nuclear blast only miles away. But in the aftermath Merya assumes that Patton too is dead, having fired the warhead from another silo not far away. Stone figures she’s right, but he’s uncertain – personally I won’t figure the guy is dead until we see his bullet-ridden corpse, but I hope the series moves on to a more-interesting villain in the next installment.

And here we leave Martin Stone, wondering how much radiation he’s absorbed in this blast, yet another megababe of an Indian beauty at his side, loyal Excaliber at his heels, and his sister April still missing. But whereas this is where I left the series all those years ago, this time I’ll continue on with it – but here’s hoping it gets back to the insane, lurid vibe of The Madman’s Mansion and moves away from this New American Army stuff.

Have I mentioned yet that the covers for this series are courtesy men’s adventure magazine legend Norm Eastman?

Cage #2: The Conspirators

Cage #2: The Conspirators, by Alan Riefe
No month stated, 1975  Popular Library

The “twin supersleuths” return in the second volume of Cage, which again sees Huntington “Hunt” Cage acting as the main protagonist, with his brother Hadley (aka “Lee”) serving a small supporting role. Alan Reife denies us the pulpy fun of the first volume and turns in a second installment that’s more of your typical murder mystery, with a bit of prison fiction tossed in for good measure.

We meet up again with Hunt Cage as he’s in high spirits, having just broken a big case involving the mob. He expects some commendations from Lt. Gamarr of the NYPD, but instead the man’s in a rage – there’s an article about Hunt breaking the case in the morning’s paper, and in the interview Hunt has some bad things to say about the precinct. However this is “fake news,” as Hunt never said any such thing to the reporter. But Gamarr engages Hunt in such a megawatt argument that it ends with Hunt’s P.I. license being suspended.

Some cops come around to take Hunt’s .38 later, which really ratchets up his anger – only to learn that the lieutenant has been killed, the murder weapon a .38, just like Hunt Cage’s. And sure enough, the cops display how Hunt’s gun has recently been fired, even though he swears up and down it’s been over a week since he’s fired it. In other words, someone broke into his apartment, stole his .38, killed Lt. Gamarr, and put the gun back in Hunt’s drawer, all within the past few hours. Hunt even shows the clear signs of a break-in on the windowsill, but the cops will have none of it.

Hunt’s booked and put in prison and stews over how he’s been set up. There’s a lot of dialog throughout as various one-off characters come to meet him. Riefe pulls a nice fast one on us when one of the visitors turns out to be Lee Cage in disguise, and the two brothers swap clothing and disguises when they’re alone. Lee, going above and beyond any sibling responsibilities, will pose as Hunt in prison, so Hunt will be free to exonerate himself – he spent the few hours in which Lt. Gamarr was murdered with a British gal named Jenny, and he’s desperate to find her so she can serve as his witness and clear his name.

Jenny is a singer, an old acquaintance of Hunt’s, and the two spent those hours drinking and singing – there’s no sex in the book, despite Riefe constantly reminding us how “the twin supersleuths” are a pair of ladykillers. But clearly Jenny was threatened and has left town. Hunt chases after her to London, leading into lots of page-filling stuff as he chases various leads; Jenny has gone to ground. Eventually Hunt finds her, hiding out with her fiance. We get more page-filling antics as, after she’s written a letter exonerating Hunt, Jenny sings for the delight of the two men, Riefe doling out the lyrics of her song.

Meanwhile Lee deals with the harsh life of prison, in particular a sado-cop named Mizanski, who delights in torturing prisoners. Indeed Riefe seems to be at pains to have her twin protagonists endure hell this time around. For his part Hunt is bashed in the kidneys and gets his hand stomped on, the fingers empurpling and swelling. But there’s a lot of mundane stuff, like padding sequences of the brothers sitting around and wondering what’s happening to the other. “Padding” in fact is the operative word when it comes to The Conspirators; my guess is Riefe hammered the book out quickly.

The only real bit of action comes late in the game, while Hunt’s in London. He’s jumped by two thugs and ends up killing them both, using the .44 supplied by his brother – as we’ll recall, Lee is Hunt’s arms supplier, despite the fact that Lee is an artist (and this time is working on the cover for an action series novel). Hunt hassles back to New York just in time to find out there was a riot in the prison, all of it happening off-page. First Hunt tracks down the man who actually killed Lt. Gamarr – turns out Hunt’s been right all along, and the entire frame was a plot courtesy the mobsters he brought to justice in a previous case – and then he sneaks back into the prison to switch places with Lee. 

There’s no big action finale; the spine is labelled “Mystery,” which really is all the Cage series is, despite being packaged like a men’s adventure series. Rather, Hunt uses Jenny’s letter and the confession of a sort of mob broker to both clear his name and to bring the plotting mobster to justice, but all of that happens off page. Riefe spends more time showing how there’s no hard feelings between Hunt and the cop who arrested him in his apartment.

Not overly exciting, and with zero exploitative content, The Conspirators is a passable time-killer, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as the previous volume.

Chopper Cop #2: The Hitchhike Killer

Chopper Cop #2: The Hitchhike Killer, by Paul Ross
No month stated, 1972  Popular Library

Fortunately, the second volume of Chopper Cop is the last one to be written by Dan Streib; one can almost imagine series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel putting down Streib’s manuscript and immediately drafting a letter of termination (not that he wouldn’t still send it to Popular Library – there being a deadline to meet and all). For once again Streib fails to grasp the gist of the series plot, turning in a slow-moving murder mystery that could just as easily feature a 90 year-old widow as the protagonist.

As we’ll recall, the titular “Chopper Cop” is 27 year-old Terry Bunker, who despite the cover image has “slightly long brown hair and muttonchop sideburns.” He’s based out of California and basically answers to the Governor only, though he reports to “stupid chief” Raymond Haggard, with whom Bunker has a venemous relationship (Haggard refers to Terry as a “long-haired ape”). We’re often informed that Terry’s “craggy looks” are appealing to the ladies, and he’s racked up quite a healthy score-count in his day, with the tidbit that at one point he even had to hire a secretary to keep track of all the women calling for him.

Not that we get much of that, this time. No, Streib once again must remind us that Terry is “lonely;” as I mentioned in my review of the first volume, Terry Bunker is altogether womanly, at least when compared to the average men’s adventure protagonist. He’s constantly moping or brooding, and he’s more often afraid than not. So far as the babe magnet quotient goes, there’s a part early on where he runs into Haggard’s sexy secretary, with whom Terry was once involved, and Terry thinks to himself that, while the lady is suitably hot and being with her was fun, she wasn’t able to quelch “the loneliness inside” Terry. Oh, brother!!

Streib makes vague references to some woman in Terry’s past, one who was apparently killed sor something, and Terry’s never been able to get over her. Streib doesn’t elaborate, and I can’t recall if this woman was mentioned in the previous book, but as someone once said, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” This was it for Streib on Chopper Cop and I highly suspect the co-authors of the next one (which was to be the last) won’t dwell on all the maudlin bullshit and just deliver a fun book about a chopper-riding cop. At least, here’s hoping they will.

Streib does make Terry suitably rule-breaking – but to the point where he’s mostly an asshole. When heading into Sacramento to meet with Haggard on the latest assignment, Terry, for no reason at all, begins taunting his fellow cops – none of whom realize biker Terry himself is a cop – and leads them on a chase through the city streets, with the outcome of Terry being arrested on the steps outside the capitol building. Chief Haggard has to come out and admit Terry is actually a cop. One begins to understand why Terry is so hated by his brothers in blue.

Terry refuses to read the paper so the recent murders of three girls around California is literally news to him. We readers have already witnessed one murder in the book’s opening: a biker in a leather jacket and a “full face mask” of white plastic picks up a hitchhiking young girl named Diana Cole, gives her a lift, and takes her to an abandoned area, where the biker then runs over her. Terry learns there have been two similar murders across the state and the governor, aka Terry’s boss, wants Terry on the case, as he’s certain only the “Chopper Cop” (a title never used in the books, by the way) can prevent more murders.

Here’s the funny thing about The Hitchhike Killer. Throughout the book Haggard keeps nagging Terry to look into “the biker gangs” that are plaguing California, as Haggard and his fellow cops are certain it’s a bunch of bikers doing the killings, and not just a sole murderer, as Terry suspects. So in other words a bona fide pulp biker novel is promised in the text but denied us; Streib is determined to turn in another slow-moving murder mystery when he could’ve easily done something like The Blood Circus (which likely is what editor Lyle Kenyon Engel had in mind when he came up with the series concept!).

Because honestly, Terry’s biker aspect doesn’t factor much into the tale; he spends the majority of the narrative flying a commuter airline around California and then staying in a house with a pair of stews. Immediately upon looking at the items found at the murder sites Terry notices something the other cops missed – cigarettes from sample packages once given out by certain airlines. While Haggard keeps pressuring Terry to look into those biker gangs, Terry instead flies around with a regional plane that goes to the three areas the murders occurred – and sure enough, the crew reveals that those cigarettes are no longer given out due to “health concerns,” but there’s so many of them left over that the crew has open access to them.

So basically Terry’s already solved the case…someone in the crew of this very plane killed the three girls. We even learn that all of them, pilots and stewardesses alike, are biking enthusiasts! But Terry shoots the breeze with them, smoking cigarettes in the cockpit(!), and here we meet the incredibly small cast of characters Streib gives us for the duration: co-pilot Paul Dunn, Terry’s instant prime suspect; super-sexy blonde stew Lisa; and Lisa’s roommate, equally-sexy brunette stew Chris.

Terry has an instant thing for Lisa, but we’ll recall that Terry is more than just virile lust; he thinks Lisa might be “the one.” (Oh, brother again!) He thinks there’s equal sparks, thus he’s crestfallen when it turns out Lisa is having an affair with Paul, who is married. Instead, Terry goes back home with the stews and ends up boffing Chris, who doffs her top and says “Announcing Twin Mound National Park.” Streib doesn’t get too explicit in this or the few other sex scenes, though he does add the memorable bit that a climaxing Chris starts screaming for someone named “Joey.”

But mostly Terry just tries to put the moves on Lisa, who is alternately interested and stand-offish. Occasionally he tracks clues, visiting the various murder sites and putting himself in the minds of the victims, complete even with a moronic scene where Terry runs along the desert, tracing the footsteps of one of the murdered girls, and only stops when he notices his fellow cops laughing at him(!). Chopper Cop, baby!! I mean the whole book is damn hilarious in how lame it is. We do finally get a bit of biker stuff when, in San Bernadino, Terry runs afoul of some teen bikers who discover the two-way radio on his chopper, call him “pig,” and beat him unconscious.

Streib from what I’ve read of him was fond of female villains, and he pretty much lays all his cards on the table with an arbitrary chapter from the point of view of “the killer,” in which the gender is cagily never mentioned. But anyway “the killer” dreams as the various girls die over and over again, unsure if they are dead in reality or if it’s all a dream. So by this point the reader is pretty certain the mystery has been figured out – the killer is a woman. Couple this with stew Chris, given to her flighty emotions, her disappearing at night, and her being near the murder locations in each instance.

We get a chase scene in the final quarter – but notably, Terry is not on his bike during it, which should be all the more indication that Dan Streib was the wrong writer for a series called Chopper Cop. Instead, Terry’s not only in a car for the chase, but he’s riding shotgun as a fellow cop drives! They’re chasing after Paul Dunn, who turns out to be innocent – Chris, meanwhile, has been uncovered as the villain, killing the girls in vengeance for a boyfriend named Joey who was sent to prison on a rape charge.

Terry finally gets on his bike for the finale, high-tailing it into the desert, where an oblivious Lisa is going to pose as a hitchhiking decoy for Chris, in one of Streib’s more belabored and unbelievable setups. Terry’s desperate to get to her in time, as Terry has finally gotten to act upon his “thing” for Lisa, engaging the somewhat-reluctant girl in one of Streib’s somewhat-explicit sex scenes (“He did things with his hands and his tongue until she was ready” and the like). And since Terry earlier cried wolf by having Chief Haggard summon the forces on a bust of a stakeout, the chief refuses to answer Terry’s pleas this time, so it’s only Terry himself who can ensure Lisa doesn’t become the latest victim.

But our hero is such a friggin’ chump, he fails!! He gets there just in time to see Lisa’s bloodied form, having been run over by Chris, and Terry goes off in pursuit. Here Chris becomes a raving lunatic before driving herself off a cliff, all while “the Chopper Cop” just sits there like a lummox on his bike. And meanwhile we never learn if Lisa even dies…Chief Haggard, who did in fact send a squad car after all, has her sent off to the hospital, and tells Terry “if she lives” it will only be because Terry got to her in time…

And here Streib ends the tale, on a downbeat note that was typical of the grindhouse biker fare of the era, so at least he got that part right. But boy The Hitchhike Killer was a lame, tedious affair. The next one has to be better, if only for its awesome title: Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert.

The Liberty Corps #1

The Liberty Corps, by Mark K. Roberts
September, 1987  Popular Library

Mark Roberts really appears to have invested himself in this book, which initiated a six-volume series. Judging from this mammoth-sized first volume (313 pages of small print), The Liberty Corps might have been Roberts’s attempt at fashioning more of a “regular” or at least military style thriller than the men’s adventure pulp he’d been writing for the past several years.

The book opens with much fanfare, Roberts thanking a host of people for their help in the research and even the actual writing of the novel. It looks like big things were hoped for The Liberty Corps, but only five more volumes were to follow (unbelievably, the covert art only proceeded to get even more homoerotic), so I’d wager the series failed to catch a readership. If this first volume is any indication, that might be because The Liberty Corps is a bit too concerned with how to start up an army, at the expense of the action itself – which is what readers of this genre want in the first place.

The novel really is military fiction, having little in common with Roberts’s earlier work on The Penetrator. This I guess is a natural progression on Roberts’s part, given that his work on Soldier For Hire also veered into the military fiction arena when it came to the action scenes. Eschewing the “lone wolf” aspect of The Penetrator, Soldier For Hire would have “fire teams” engaging in smallscale warfare, even employing artillery and etc, yet it at least still felt like a men’s adventure series. With Liberty Corps, Roberts has moved even beyond the basic men’s adventure feel, so my assumption is he was trying to branch out into a new thing, something perhaps with more of a mainstream appeal.

The titular Liberty Corps is the pet dream of President Dalton Hunter, a ‘Nam Special Forces vet who envisions an “American Foreign Legion” patterned after the famous French Legion. Hunter, who enjoys majority rule of Congress, has pushed through his idea after much opposition-party pushback. Folks, believe it or not…President Hunter is a Democrat!! Indeed it’s the minority party Republicans who fight his army pet project tooth and nail. For one, given the usual “Republicans are warmongers” cliché, I figured Hunter would be a Republican president looking to start up his private army, with the Democrats being the party in opposition. But more importantly, we know from other Roberts books, like his Soldier For Hire novels, that Roberts was an unabashed hater of the Left.

This means that the goofy Right-wing jingoism of those Soldier For Hire books is gone, with the Democrats now the “good guys,” at least so far as being the ones pushing for the Liberty Corps. But whereas Roberts lays off on the Democrat-bashing of that earlier series, he does still set his sights on the friggin’ liberal media, in particular noting how the press is infiltrated by Commie agents, even inferring that Dan Rather is chief among them. The media’s oft-stated goal is to undermine the president and to provoke distrust of him, and Roberts will subtly have Russian intelligence agents coming up with a new angle of attack…and then Dan Rather or some other reporter will repeat their exact words in news broadcasts. But again this kinda seemed off to me. I mean, who ever heard of a press that was hostile to a Democrat president??

Plotting against Hunter is a KGB force led by a chief saboteur named Arkady, who is legendary in the biz and has movie-star good looks. Roberts appears to set Arkady up as the recurring series villain, as he lives through this first volume to plot another day. Throughout the book he dissiminates “news” to his vassals in the media, tries to sabotage practically every move Hunter makes in the creation of the Legion, and most importantly sends out the occasional hit team to rub out newly-appointed Legion officers.

This first hit leads to one of the first “action scenes” in the novel, a brief sequence which has a bearish ‘Nam vet general named Gator, just appointed by Hunter to command the Legion, taken out by a squad of KGB assassins in a subway. That Gator was given elaborate background and setup and etc is just the first indication the reader gets that The Liberty Corps will be much heavier on character and plot-building than other men’s adventure novels. Indeed the entire novel is overstuffed with characters, all of whom compete for top dog status. Here are just a few of them:

Colonel Lew Cutler: young Army officer who is booted into the “dead-end” assignment of the Legion because he’s been sleeping with the wrong general’s wife; he’s assigned to be the regular Army liason, and he’s the closest thing we get to a “main protagonist.”

Norman Wade Standie: an alchie, Cherokhee ‘Nam vet who is suffering depression after the death of his wife; he joins the Legion after the murder of General Gator, with whom he was pals in ‘Nam, and given the fact that he was a commander in the war Stadie eventually becomes the commander of the Legion.

Chuck Taylor: firearms expert; I got the impression he was based on Jerry Ahern.

“Arizona Jim” Levine: a city slicker would-be cowboy who proclaims at the recruting office “I’ve read the Executioner books, The Penetrator, Soldier For Hire.”

Patrick Andrews: Special Forces vet whose name is another in-joke, as Patrick Andrews was the main author of The Black Eagles, a series which Roberts wrote the first volume of.

Jacob Martin: snowflake reporter given the assignment to join the Legion under a fake name to get more anti-Legion dirt for the press; “vehemently opposed” to the army and violence, but is eventually won over by the gung-ho camaraderie of fightin’ men.

In addition we have a battery of other characters, from one guy who joins the Legion to escape the Mafia, to a former IRA terrorist named Liam who gets in drunken fight with Cutler in bar and becomes his BFF. All of these characters (and more!) have their own running subplots and sequences in which Roberts hops into their perspectives, so in this way the book really does have the feel of a war novel. Oh, and the novel features an unexpected usage of the dreaded “N-word,” something I thought would be verbotten by 1987 – and it’s spoken by a black Legion soldier, one who humorously enough has not previously been mentioned, and in fact only shows up in a single paragraph so he can say this particular word and then is never mentioned again!

The first 200+ pages of small, dense print are mostly dedicated to how one would go about setting up an army, along with how to train its soldiers. If this is something that would interest you, you’re in luck. Otherwise we must read about orders for weapons and uniforms and the struggles suppliers must endure when working with a limited budget. Ordering (and designing!) uniforms, getting aircraft, tanks, etc. There’s this interminable subplot about the endless struggles they encounter in getting “CETME submachine guns;” it goes on and on, how they’re such great guns but so expensive and near impossible to get what with all the budgetary limits placed on the Legion, to the point where I was about ready to start up a fundraising drive in my office.

As for the uniforms – despite the “loud and proud” cover art, the Legion soldiers do not go into battle shirtless and wearing berets. Their parade uniforms, designed by General Standie, do include gold berets, but the parade uniform itself is a toga-meets-kilt affair…in other words, “skirts,” as the men call them. Battle dress is leftover “Aggressors” stock from the 1950s, ie the “woolen green” uniforms the aggressor army would wear during war games. The Legion you see is forever being supplied with leftover stock and assorted hand-me-downs; this is another interminable subplot. For example, the Legion’s chief infantry weapon is the M-1 Garand, long outdated but beloved by Standie and others of his generation.

Action is infrequent in these first 200+ pages. One moment that harkens a bit back to the old men’s adventure vibe is when Cutler is attacked by a KGB hit team on the streets of Washington. A later, better sequence has Cutler and a small group of men pull a vengeance ambush on the island fortress of Arkady. But for the most part Roberts saves all the fireworks for the last quarter of the book; the action doesn’t truly begin until page 256, which is when the Legion goes into its first mission. A South African country called Zalambia is in the midst of a revolution, with Communist forces threatening to take over. President Hunter monitors the situation, and decides to send in the Legion when Cuban troops set up shop in Zalambia and begin running the show.

But as mentioned, this action sequence is really military fiction. We hopscotch among the huge cast of characters as infantry teams fight it out, fighter planes dogfight, and tanks blow shit up real good. There’s none of the immediacy of men’s adventure action – or at least that’s how I see it. Rather, the personal touch is lost and it’s more about hordes of men fighting and killing each other. Again, the focus of The Liberty Corps is full-on army battles, not the smallscale action of average men’s adventure novels. And also, most of the action is relayed via dialog, with various units radioing back to HQ about their progress and whatnot.

Another thing missing is the sex. Lacking the outrageous sleaze of Soldier For Hire, this one goes more so for dirty talk and the occasional mention of past sexploits. There’s even a part where the Legion hires a veritable army of hookers to “alleviate” the frustrations of the 6,000 soldiers on Corsair Cay (Arkady hires a hooker for the event, one who just happens to be a Commie secret agent!), and it too only barely dabbles in the sleaze. Only in a part where Cutler gets friendly with his latest babe does Roberts return a bit to that Soldier For Hire fun stuff:

Kristen mewed like a contented, belly-rubbed kitten when Lew penetrated her sensitive portals and slid commandingly into her eager passage. Past, present, and future merged in a jumble of sensations, each more delicious than the ones before, until little hiccups of exploding passion sent them into oblivion.

But the helluva it is, at 313 pages you’d think The Liberty Corps would at least be memorable. Rather, at least for me, it was almost a blur of a read – a blur of easily-confused characters and way too much technical detailing on how one supplies an army. Roberts clearly tried for something big, but in the end overlooked that which made his earlier pulp efforts so much more enjoyable – a central character with a central objective. I’d rather read ten volumes of The Penetrator than just one more Liberty Corps, and that might be a good indication of why that earlier series ran for over 50 volumes and this one ran for only 5 more.

Finally, this novel has one of the most hilariously stupid lines ever:

Silence held while the clock ticked noisily.

The Last Ranger #4: The Rabid Brigadier

The Last Ranger #4: The Rabid Brigadier, by Craig Sargent
August, 1987  Popular Library

The Last Ranger picks up immediately after the previous volume, with hero Martin Stone sprawled out unconscious in the snow, the ruins of the Dwarf’s depraved villa still burning in the distance. Unfortunately the “slave-whores” Stone freed in the final pages of the previous book are gone, having knocked him out, taken all of his weapons, and raced off into the post-nuke night. Meanwhile Stone’s sister April and his new buddy Dr. Kennedy have escaped – and by the way go unseen this entire volume.

But at least we get Stone’s faithful canine companion Excaliber, who still waits where Stone left him midway through Madman’s Mansion. When the two hop on Stone’s weaponized Harley and blast off into the night, the reader expects that they will reunite with April and Kennedy and the series will proceed on from there. However, Jan “Craig Sargent” Stacy has other plans; this volume, instead of continuing on with the building plot of the previous three books, will instead get mired in an elaborate “New American Army” setup that Stone is drafted into.

Easily my least favorite volume yet, The Rabid Brigadier features hardly any of the stuff that makes The Last Ranger so fun, and is for the most part an endless training and initiation sequence Stone goes through. Yet I recall really enjoying this one when it was brand new and I was 12 years old. Reading it this time, I found myself bored for long portions, something I could never say about those earlier three installments. All the crazed, gore-filled sadism of those books is gone, and this one’s basically “The Last Ranger joins the army.” 

Calling to mind the similar survivalist fiction Stacy co-wrote in the first few Doomsday Warrior books, The Rabid Brigadier features a practically endless sequence early on in which Stone and Excaliber are nearly swept up by a massive tidal wive that’s rampaging through Colorado – courtesy that post-nuke freak weather, of course. It’s page-filling at its best as our two heroes struggle desperately to outrace the huge waves; the goofiness expected of this series presents itself when Stone finally remembers a friggin’ raft his dad (who was gifted with an almost superhuman sense of foresight, it would appear) had built into the bottom of the bike.

With the push of a button Stone inflates the raft and he and the dog are nearly in the clear, but the waves are pushing them toward a cliff. They’re saved by the last-second appearance of an army helicopter, which pulls man, dog, and bike clear of the waves. These young soldiers are members of the New American Army, which has been founded within the past few years under the leadership of “Supreme Commander Patton.” Stone meanwhile falls into a stupor; in the opening pages, during a savage battle with a group of ear-collecting cannibals, he was bitten on the hand. Now it’s infected, and Stone is sent off to the NAA infirmary.

When Stone wakes up and finds a hot-bodied blonde nurse at his bedside, the veteran reader knows exactly where it will be heading. This is Elizabeth Williamson, whose sad story has it that she was a refugee saved by the NAA as it moved through the area, “cleansing” the country of cannibals, pirates, and criminals. The expected shagging takes a while, but expectedly it occurs, and humorously Stacy basically just plagiarizes from the sex scene he wrote in the previous book, complete with the description of Stone “mining” the girl with his massive prong. And just as always, once Stone’s banged the girl she’s dropped from the narrative, not mentioned again until the end.

As mentioned, the majority of the book details Stone’s hellish trials during the two-day basic training course all NAA recruits must endure. Stone you see has decided to join, despite his long-borne hatred of authority in general and the military in particular. We are reminded again that Stone’s dad was a total ass, an army man right down to the bones, and his stern nature resulted in a son who was a born rebel. But Stone figures the NAA has the right idea, as he’s been doing alone what they’re looking to do as an army: clear away the criminal, rapist riff-raff and rebuild America.

Curiously, one of the initial tests Stone and the recruits must undergo is ritually cutting themselves, and they use the same blade. I couldn’t help but recall here how Jan Stacy died of AIDs. But Stone has more worries than contagious diseases; the practically-endless training has them going through one hellish thing after another, from shooting at fresh corpses to running a death-trap course through thorns and quicksand. There’s even lots of brutal fighting courtesy ninja-type ambushers who spring out of the thorns and attack them all with fighting staffs.

As expected, Stone is a total badass and gets through unscathed, saving his fellows and uniting them as a team – subtle commentary from Stacy that our hero, despite his rebellious nature, is a true leader. In fact Stone has done so well that General Patton himself wants to meet him. An older vet who carries twin .45s at his waist, Patton bears a similarity to Stone’s father, and indeed actually knew Major Clayton Stone, claiming that he temporarily served as Stone’s commander back in ‘Nam. Unfortunately, Stacy doesn’t do much with any of this. The potential is there for a father/son dynamic between Patton and Stone, but it’s all cast aside within just a few pages.

Instead, Stone’s sent out on a mission, commanding a squad of tanks. Their assingment is to wipe out a village of cannibals. But even here we are denied the crazed nature of action scenes from previous volumes, with Stone more so trying to figure out how to operate the massive tanks. And here we get the first glimpse of the evil nature of the NAA, as the men in Stone’s crew blow away the surrendering members of the village, even the women and children. Stone, “crying like a baby,” is informed that Patton has ordered “no enemies, no survivors.” Stone cannot accept the wanton disregard for life.

Stone is even more shocked when Patton reveals that he has a nuclear warhead, one which he plans to launch on a meeting of Mafia bigwigs only a hundred miles away. In a completely goofy sequence, Patton takes Stone to his handy nuclear silo several miles from the NAA base in New Junction, Colorado, and shows off his ballistic warhead. Despite claiming to have run a similar silo before WWIII, Patton doesn’t realize that a nuke strike so close to the base will wipe all of them out. Here Stone gets further proof of Patton’s insanity, and vows to stop him.

In a development a little hard to buy, Stone decides to unite with the Mafia guys and their biker comrades, ie his former enemies, as Patton is the greater threat. Stone claims to hate these guys, but feels that they’re small fish, only doing their own thing within their own spheres of influence, whereas Patton wants to wipe out the world. So then it would appear so far as Stone’s reasoning goes that raping and killing is okay, just so long as you keep your activities to like a few square miles or something. Strange!

The Mafia-biker meeting is the highlight, as Stacy writes it more like some Satanic gathering; the leader is even described as a craven-faced ghoul who looks like Boris Karloff. Stone sells out his own troops, letting the mobsters and bikers slit their throats (it’s okay, though, as all the NAA soldiers are bad guys, or something), and he leads them all in the commandeered tanks on an assault upon the NAA base. Even here the action is mostly perfunctory, with Stone tearing through the base and finding Excaliber, who has been locked up in the pens – once again the dog spends the majority of the narrative off-page.

The finale sees a desperate Stone tearing ass on his Harley for that nuclear silo, with the warhead launched despite his best efforts. One is reminded again that this series has no grounding in reality when Stone blasts the warhead out of the air with an anti-aircraft gun. Oh, and then Excaliber pisses on the missile’s wreckage! But Patton is gone, and I seem to recall that he appears again (as does the Dwarf), but meanwhile Nurse Elizabeth is dead (remember her?), somehow murdered by Patton during his escape, even though she was all the way back at the base, waiting for Stone to come back and get her, and the last we saw him Patton was still at the nuclear silo.

But that’s that – Stone’s crestfallen, and as a kicker he’s learned that Patton has even more nukes, so all this has been moot. Well, here’s hoping the next volume gets things back on track. And I seem to recall the next volume was the last one I bought when this series was being published, so this was around the point when my enthusiasm for The Last Ranger was beginning to fade.

The Last Ranger #3: The Madman's Mansion

The Last Ranger #3: The Madman’s Mansion, by Craig Sargent
December, 1986  Popular Library

Strangely, I didn’t recall much of this third volume of The Last Ranger, though I’m sure I eagerly snatched it off the WaldenBooks shelves in ’86 and quickly read it, just as I had the previous two volumes. Yet as I re-read The Madman’s Mansion all these years later, damned if any of it seemed familiar; only Norm Eastman’s typically-great cover sparked anything in the dusty ol’ memory banks.

At any rate this one opens just two days after the previous volume. Hero Martin Stone speeds from Boulder, Colorado, where as we’ll recall he took on both a death-cult and a biker gang called The Guardians of Hell. Stone is determined to save his cipher of a sister, April, who was abducted by the Guardians and taken off to Vernal, Utah, where she will be put into the depraved hands of Poet, aka The Dwarf, a quadrapalegic sadist who goes around in a wheelcair with guns in the armrests and who turns out to be a lot more important than he seemed in his previous appearances – from his fortress in Vernal he hosts a deluxe watering hole for the new rulers of this post-nuke ‘90s America, from Mafioso to drug dealers to bikers.

While it takes its time getting to the good stuff, The Madman’s Mansion at least opens with the outrageous gore Jan Stacy (aka “Craig Sargent”) excelled in. Stone is waylaid by a group of bikers as he continues his escape through Colorado, riding as ever his armored and armed Harley Electroglide with ever-faithful pit bull Excaliber clutching the seat behind him. Our hero makes short work of the hapless scum: “But Stone was already firing forward again, taking out one more, with a stream of five slugs that scissored down his face, cutting a line from forehead to chin that seemed to just open up and spew out everything within it – eyeballs, brain tissue, tongue, and teeth – into a bubbling stew of parts in the road, a steaming smorgasbord just inches from the gushing corpse that dove forward into the white snow.”

But soon after this opening chaos the book settles into a measured pace for the next hundred or so pages. We do however get a return trip to “the Bunker,” ie the nuclear shelter Stone spent the previous five years in, buried in the Colorado mountains. I always enjoyed these scenes when I read this series as a kid, but even here I had no recollection of the Bunker sequence in this volume, which sees Stone opening up tons of canned food for Excaliber as repayment for saving Stone’s life so many times. Afterwards the pit bull is a bloated lump that can only lay in misery on the floor – once again Stacy develops a humorous rapport between man and dog, with many funny scenes between the two. 

Stone again consults the sort of proto-internet his father, Major Stone, left behind for him in the Bunker, a computer interface which answers any military-strategy question Stone might have. In this case he asks how a lone person can attack a heavily-guarded fortress, for Stone has learned that the Dwarf’s Vernal retreat – which was once a posh ski lodge – is guarded by hundreds of men, many of them former insane asylum patients. But Stacy holds off on the carnage, with the book sort of detouring into some of the goofier stuff one might encounter in Stacy’s other post-nuke series, Doomsday Warrior, as Stone stops off in “Mom’s Diner,” a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of Colorado, where he gets in a poker game that becomes a gunfight.

Here Stacy introduces a character I had no recollection of: Dr. Abraham Reagan Kennedy, an old hippie-type who drives around the blasted country in a “house-truck” (complete with chimney), selling “Certified Snake Oil.” Stacy is much too enamored with Kennedy, giving over pages and pages to his blatherings, particularly when it comes to selling snake oil. But Kennedy proves to be Stone’s in to the Dwarf’s resort, as Kennedy is hired each year to put on a magic show there. And guess what, that’s just where he’s headed right now. So Stone hauls his massive bike onto Kennedy’s big truck (formerly a moving truck), which is both a home and a store on wheels, stuffed with the various bric-a-brac Kennedy sells to eager clientele.

More flashbacks to Doomsday Warrior ensue as Stone and Kennedy drive into the freak weather that was customary in that earlier series: a tornado-blizzard that goes on for too many pages and, despite the danger Stacy strives to convey, doesn’t have a chance in hell of actually killing our hero, his new best friend, or his faithful dog. If anything this scene just provides the setup for another goofy Stone-Excaliber moment, as a mud-drenched Stone, who rode out the storm from beneath the truck, demands that Excaliber – who stayed nice and clean inside the truck – jump out and also get muddy. This the dog does with joyful aplomb, once again coming out on top in this latest goofy exchange with his master.

But a bit after page 100 The Madman’s Mansion takes a change for the better, abruptly becoming the most lurid offering yet. The Dwarf’s plush resort is of course the titular “mansion,” and here insanity reigns; the nation’s new “elite” come here to cavort in the most outrageous, most sleazy manners possible, and Jan Stacy plumbs the darkest recesses of his capable imagination for some truly over-the-top shit, like a roulette wheel where the “ball” is a severed head to crazed “bloodcleaner” maids who worry about “flying penises” that might eat them. The Dwarf has staffed the place with former asylum patients, and as we know Stacy had a penchant for nutcases-turned-enforcers, as memorably shown in C.A.D.S. #1.

The former high-class ski lodge is now the stomping grounds of bikers, Mafia bigwigs, and scantily-clad female chattel; women are so disposable here that a shocked Stone even finds himself stumbling over casually-discarded female corpses as he’s shown to his grand suite by a jaded preteen bellhop. Later Stone will find sections of the lodge catering to the most perverted whims imaginable, including a room where girls are strung up and slowly sliced to ribbons. The Dwarf also runs a lucrative “white slavery” business, and Stone will gradually discover that this is the fate the sadist has in mind for April. Meanwhile Stone, after killing a Mafia thug in a knife fight, enjoys the explicit sex scene which is mandatory for the series.

I forgot to mention – Stone, due to the events in the previous volume, is wearing a disguise: he’s now “Vito ‘Pimp’ Staloni,” Mafia bigshot from New York, clad in a pink pimpsuit with violet sunglasses (the clothing provided by Kennedy). At any rate a blonde bimbo with an awesome bod named Triste is so turned on by Stone’s killing of the Mafia thug that she throws herself at him. After dancing in a room with an all-female, all-naked band and mutilated corpses arrayed along a clear floor beneath the dancers’s feet, Triste and Stone head back to his room for a “long night of super sex.”

Stacy devotes the entirety of Chapter Fourteen to the sexual shenanigans, and unlike in the Doomsday Warrior books it doesn’t get very purple-prosed, instead sticking to hardcore description throughout. It goes on for pages and pages as these two get along in the most XXX-detailed manner imaginable: “It was as if he were mining her. The harder he pumped, the more she seemed to open. As if her body had lived just for this night, her breasts just for his hands to squeeze, her entrance just for him to find the full depth of. Then he suddenly seemed to go half mad himself and started banging into her like a jackhammer.” And so on!!

Finally, in the last third of the book, things started to get somewhat familiar – and indeed made me wonder if the book had been so OTT that 12-year-old me just couldn’t handle it and promptly forgot everything! Anyway Stone, after checking out more of the Resort’s horrors, finds a slavery auction going on, beautiful, nude young women trotted out and pawed by an obese auctioneer. Who will be surprised when one of them turns out to be none other than April? Stone bids desperately for his sister and wins at exorbitant cost, even though he has no money. But it turns out to be a trap – when he goes to collect his winnings, Stone is instead bonked on the head and captured by Dwarf, who has been expecting him.

Here The Madman’s Mansion becomes even more like an ‘80s horror paperback. First we get a spine-chiller of a chapter where Stone is cuffed amd thrown in a brackish pool while rats, big centipedes, and various other creepy critters come after him. He passes out and comes to at a dinner table with Dwarf himself, presented with a banquet of delicacies. But man Stacy was in a gross-out mood when he penned this one, as it turns out the food is human flesh – “deveined” eyeballs for potatoes and even a poor young woman (nude, of course) with a spigot in her throat, so the Dwarf can tap it and hurridly share the “wine” before she dies! There’s even a bizarre bit reminiscent of The Butcher #2 where a massive snake eats another girl.

Stone, still in cuffs, must now fight a seven-foot mutant with “muscles that would have made Arnold Schwarzenegger turn in his bodybuilding badge,” with a face that’s “a mass of tissue like bloody pudding.” This knock-down, drag-out fight is particularly brutal, as is everything else in this volume, with Stone literally knocking the mutant’s brain out! When an outraged Dwarf orders Stone’s death, hell suddenly breaks out with the appearance of Kennedy, tossing grenades. Deus ex machina be damned, Kennedy also has the “blueprints” for the Resort, and in the commotion they escape to the elevator shafts and rappel up to Dwarf’s floor-spanning suite on the 18th floor.

Even though he was just down there in the chaos of the ground floor, Dwarf’s already somehow up here on the top floor – who cares about realism, anyway? – and he’s leading a bunch of dudes in robes as they prepare to sacrifice poor April, nude and nailed to a cross! Did I mention it’s Christmas? With “tommy guns” roaring Stone and Kennedy save the day, and here occurs about the only thing I remembered from The Madman’s Mansion, as a victorious Stone kicks Dwarf off his wheelchair, picks him up by the throat, and hurls the misshapen bastard out the window! Indeed I got such a vicarious thrill out of this all those years ago that I remember eagerly discussing this scene with a fellow Last Ranger fan I ran into at the Country Club Mall in LaVale, Maryland sometime in early 1987, when the fourth volume came out – and I remember the kid and I both reacted with the same excitement when we saw that the fourth volume was sitting there on the shelf; back in those pre-internet days you had no idea when new books were coming out.

Unfortunately though, we readers see that Dwarf does not die – he plummets through the frozen-over pool and bobs to the surface, “to mean to sink,” and as I recall he returns in the next volume to wreak his vengeance. Meanwhile Stone’s acting a little too concerned over April; intentionally or not, Stacy sort of hints at a more-than-siblings relationship between the two, with Stone fretting over the girl’s nude body. At any rate he lets her and Kennedy escape separately – and believe it or not April finally gets a few lines of dialog, revealing a fiery temper – while Stone meanwhile kills a bunch of guards, blows up the resort, and saves a mack truck full of “slavewhores.”

 Anyway, this one was pretty crazy when it got going, but the middle section was a bit too padded and goofy – I could’ve done with less of Kennedy’s “snake oil” blatherings. But man when it got out there it really got out there, and many sections of The Madman’s Mansion could’ve come out of the “splatterpunk” subgenre of horror fiction that was popular at the time.

Cage #1: The Lady Killers

Cage #1: The Lady Killers, by Alan Riefe
No month stated, 1975  Popular Library

Brought to you by the same imprint that published Hardy, Cage ran for six volumes and was more of a men’s adventure deal than the aforementioned bore of a private eye series. Alan Riefe, a real person and not a house name, turned out the action-packed tale of “twin supersleuths” Huntington and Hadley Cage, as represented by the studly ‘70s dudes on the photo cover with their groovy ‘70s chicks.

The Lady Killers is a good opening to the series, as it features my favorite pulpy concept: good-looking female villains. As part of his P.I. work, Manhattan-based Huntington Cage comes across the Chain of Silk, an five-woman hit squad that works for the mob. However there’s no part where Cage or his brother get busy with any of the sexy ladies, and indeed Riefe seldom even describes the women. He instead plays more with the Chain of Silk being like a “women’s lib” movement in the mob. As a minor character complains, “Women are getting into everything these days.”

“Hunt” Cage, who I suppose is the main protagonist of the series, doesn’t fare very well in this first volume. Within a few pages he’s gunned down on the street, shot by a hitman posing as a motorcycle cop. The hit was ordered by Angie Visconti, obese Mafia cretin. But Hunt survives and is in the hospital; Visconti sends the same hitman to kill him there. But Hunt has a mysterious savior, an unseen figure summoned by a special transistor switch on Hunt’s wristwatch; the savior blows away the hitman and fades into the shadows. Six weeks pass and Hunt has sufficiently recovered…and meanwhile, Angie Visconti himself has been blown away, by that same mysterious figure. 

Meanwhile, we already know who the mystery figure is – of course, it’s Hunt’s twin brother, Hadley “Lee” Cage. An artist based out of New Jersey, Lee helps Hunt in his investigations for reasons that are never disclosed. Honestly, there’s no reason why Lee, a successful artist and ladies man, would keep meeting Hunt on the waters beneath the George Washington Bridge (the two brothers never venture to each other’s stomping grounds, so that no one will ever figure out that either of them has a twin brother) and agreeing to fill in for him on certain jobs. But Lee’s even Hunt’s gun supplier, hooking him up this time with a .357 magnum he insists Hunt try out.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, as that’s the novelty factor of this series: the world doesn’t know that there are actually two Cages, identical twins. Actually this gives the series a bit of a ’30s pulp vibe; the idea of Hunt Cage having a special gizmo watch which will alert his twin brother is so weird that you could see it being a big hit with Depression-era readers. But Riefe wisely sleazes it up a bit, mandatory for ‘70s pulp, in particular with digressions on “the art of making love on a waterbed,” as Hunt reconnects with his redheaded girlfriend, Rosemary O’Boyle, a beat cop. Riefe doesn’t go for full-bore sleaze but we do get a lot of info on how to properly screw on a waterbed.

Meanwhile the brothers try to figure out who is apparently continuing Angie Visconti’s assassination work. Lee cases the man’s family in Jersey while Hunt tracks down Visconti’s sole Manhattan-based family member: a twenty-something daughter named Marie, a gorgeous blonde with big breastesses who is so perky and upbeat when she meets Hunt Cage that he figures there’s no way possible this chick could be a hitwoman. Plus she’s a schoolteacher and has no knowledge of her dad’s wrongdoings. So who’ll be surprised when Hunt and Rosemary come back to Hunt’s apartment one night and there’s Marie Visconti, in a skintight black jumpsuit, leaping out of his apartment window and running acrobatically across the rooftops?

She’s left behind a vial of nitro glycerine, intended to blow up an unsuspecting Hunt when he opened his medicine cabinet. After checking the rest of the place, instead of calling the bomb squad for a thorough search, Hunt and Rosemary head on over to the waterbed for more of that good stuff. Who’ll be surprised when the next morning the living room explodes – turns out there was another bomb, hidden in the television set – and Rosemary is killed in the blast? Hunt’s so consumed with vengeance that he’s not thinking properly, so Lee bashes him on the head and takes him back to his place in Jersey so Lee can pose as Hunt in Manhattan and draw out Marie Visconti.

Lee Cage turns out to be the better protagonist; within moments of posing as his brother he already draws out one of the members of the Chain of Silk and blows her away as she’s planting explosives on Hunt’s boat. Despite the women’s lib angle of the Chain of Silk, these girls are all bunglers, constantly goofing up. I’d like to think this is “subtle” commentary on Riefe’s part, but again, he really doesn’t exploit the fact that these particular assassins are all women. It’s such a head-scratcher of a miss that you really don’t know what to think. But anyway, they’re now down one more thanks again to Lee, and soon thereafter he takes out yet another in a firefight.

Meanwhile, Hunt, the “star” of the book, spends his time running away from Lee’s hot-to-trot girlfriend, Mina(!). Seriously, Hunt’s in the dumps due to his girlfriend’s death, but long portions are given over to Hunt trying to throw off the busty gal, who’s burnin’ for some good lovin’. And Lee continues to act more like the protagonist of an action series, tracking Marie and another of her assassins up to Vermont, where he eventually deduces that they are planning to assassinate a crusading old journalist named Atherton.

Hunt finally gets in on the action in a long sequence in the Hotel Gatewood, in Harlem, a posh all-black luxury palace in which a bigwig loan shark named Breadman resides. Hunt has learned Breadman too is on the hit list, though the man disbelieves Hunt’s story. But when one of Breadman’s goons tries to kill Breadman, everyone realizes that Hunt was on the level; Marie Visconti, back from Vermont, is in a hotel across the way, holding the goon’s family hostage. The goon is to kill Breadman, or the family gets it.

Devising an elaborate scheme, Hunt swindles the lady with a fake corpse, so that when she pops out of her hotel window with a rifle he shoots her, hanging from an old stone gargoyle on the Hotel Gatewood’s edifice. Yes, Marie is summarily killed off, with little buildup or payoff – Hunt just shoots her, and that’s that. More focus is given to the stuff up in Vermont, where Lee poses as Atherton in a parade, dodging yet another unsuccessful Chain of Silk assassination attempt. Shortly thereafter the brothers switch places, Lee back to Jersey to boff Mina, and Hunt engaging the final two Chain of Silk gals and two Mafia hitmen in a protracted action scene in the forest.

Hunt doesn’t even kill the Chain of Silk girls, just capturing them after blowing away the rifle-toting men in their party. He calls the law and that’s that; there’s no resolution to the Chain of Silk or explanation of how or when Marie Visconti put them together, even why they were still operating after Marie’s death. It’s all very anticlimactic, but that’s unfortunately par for the course for many of these cheapjack ‘70s action series. Otherwise Riefe’s writing isn’t bad, with a bit more word-spinning than typical of the genre and a good touch with the dialog exchanges. Actually the writing is for the most part so good that it actually makes you expect more from the plot, which is why I’m coming off a little too hard on it.

At 172 pages of fairly big print, The Lady Killers moves pretty fast. Riefe has a firm handle on the requirements for ‘70s men’s adventure fiction, from the action to the sleaze to the generally lurid feeling, and I wonder if the series would’ve lasted longer if it had found a home at a more appropriate imprint, particularly Pinnacle Books.

Chopper Cop #1: Valley Of Death

Chopper Cop #1: Valley Of Death, by Paul Ross
No month stated, 1972  Popular Library

Yet another men’s adventure series produced by Lyle Kenyon Engel and his BCI outfit, Chopper Cop attempted to meld the vibe of Easy Rider with the tough cop genre. It ran for three volumes and, at least judging from this first volume, wasn’t very successful in its attempt.

According to Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms, Chopper Cop was the work of three writers: Dan Streib, who wrote the first two volumes, Valley Of Death and The Hitchhike Killer, and the writing team of Bill Amidon and Nat Freedland, who collaborated on the third volume, the awesomely-titled Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert.*

The series protagonist is Terry Bunker, 26 years old and described as “craggy, but handsome.” Formerly a lieutenant (the youngest police lieutenant in the country, we’re informed), he was spotted by California’s “colorful” governor, who retained Terry to be his own personal go-to guy. Now Terry is an agent for the State Department of Criminal Investigation, and gets his missions directly from the governor, though he reports to Chief Haggard of the Sacramento police. Terry has “longish” hair and drives a chopper – a “Rickman frame with a 659 Triumph engine” – and gets a lot of grief for his appearance.

But anyone expecting “Hell’s Angel turned cop” will be disappointed. Terry Bunker is just a regular action series-type cop and there’s nothing to differentiate him from the genre norm. Other that is than his chopper, which really doesn’t factor into this particular story much, anyway. Rather, we’re informed that most cops just don’t get along with Terry because of his long hair and his casual threads, like jeans and a “turtlenecked sweater.” What a rebel! If anything I’d say this is another indication where the book’s producer wanted something much different than what the author delivered.

Because here’s the thing about Terry Bunker – he’s kind of a wimp. Throughout the novel he’s constantly afraid; there are innumerable scenes of him taking deep breaths to steady himself and to remember his “training.” He’s also kind of womanly, as just as often as he’s afraid he’s lonely…! There are many parts where he’ll wish someone else was with him, as he feels so alone. I mean what the hell kind of a shit-kicking men’s adventure protagonist is this? And when he does get in fights he’s usually just ducking and shooting and hoping he doesn’t kill anyone. For that matter even his weapon of choice is blasé; it’s just a standard police-issue revolver.

In a 1981 interview with Will Murray, which was published in Paperback Parade #2 (1986), Lyle Kenyon Engel had this to say about Streib:

Dan Streib, oh God, Dan Streib I see is with Chet Cunningham. I knew Dan, I used him on another series, and then I stopped using him because he wasn’t any good.

Engel mentions Streib being “with” Cunningham because the two authors collaborated on a volume of Nick Carter: Killmaster titled Night Of The Avenger. Engel’s reference to “another series” he used Streib for must be Chopper Cop, because after this Streib was on his own, publishing under various house names for different publishers, like the Death Squad and Kill Squad books. And while Engel’s off-hand criticism might sound harsh, I can’t say I disagree with him.

What’s interesting though is that Valley Of Death presents Streib as filtered through the editing/producing of Engel. The writing here is a little more polished than that in the Kill Squad or Death Squad books, ie the ones Streib did without Engel. But it seems pretty clear that Engel envisioned Chopper Cop as being more about the concept he’d come up with, whereas Streib turned in a rather standard mystery novel, one graced with a lackluster protagonist at that.

In fact, parts of Valley Of Death are like a Gothic novel, except instead of a virginal heroine we have a “craggy, but handsome” long-haired cop for a protagonist. And at 207 pages of big print, the book at least moves at a snappy pace. This caper has Terry investigating a “hippie sex cult” that operates out of Death Valley; three beautiful young Californian women, each of them members of wealthy families who became members of the cult, have committed suicide in unusual ways. But now, a few weeks later, their parents are receiving ghostly phone calls from their deceased daughters, asking for half a million dollars so they can be “resurrected.”

The Gothic stuff mostly plays out in the palatial home of Annette Caldwell’s parents; one of the three suicides, Annette apparently jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, her suicidal act witnessed by a random motorist. But the beautiful young girl’s ghost seems to haunt the home; during his brief stay there Terry sees a ghostly female form rushing from various scenes, hears her playing an organ in the house, and he even kisses her in a strange sequence. Meanwhile Terry’s being constantly propositioned by Penny, Annette’s equally-pretty but virginal 19 year-old sister, who is a fellow biking enthusiast.

There isn’t much action to be found. After a few ghostly visits Terry heads over to San Clemente, where another of the “dead” girls has returned. This leads to a scene where Terry goes out into a desert cemetery in the middle of the night for the money drop off, but it leads to an assassination attempt, culminating in a quick motorcycle chase. But really Terry’s chopper knack isn’t much highlighted by Streib. You get the impression that Engel came up with this cool idea and handed it off to a dude who didn’t know what to do with it.

The cover proclaims a “hippie cult of sex and death” but it must’ve sat out on the actual book, as the cult here is lead by a dude named Arnold Van Doren who appears maybe a page or two and doesn’t offer much. The “sex and death” angle is woefully underplayed, the farthest it gets being a sort of orgy ceremony Terry and Penny walk in on in the middle of the desert, but Terry flashes his badge and the hippies disperse. But the whole cult deal is really just a snow-job, as Valley Of Death is more about a typical blackmailing scheme.

The climax returns to the Gothic tones, playing out in an old mansion somewhere in Death Valley. Here Terry, once again alone (and afraid), sneaks up on the big house in the middle of the night, only to be frightened by an organ that plays in the otherwise-deserted place. (Turns out to be a player piano.) Streib has used female villains in his other books I’ve read, and he does so here too, though you’ll see her “surprise reveal” coming a mile away. But she’s not a bloodthirsty villainess, and the finale, tying in to the womanly feel mentioned above, features the poor girl crying on her father’s shoulder!

Valley Of Death is not an auspicious beginning for the Chopper Cop series; action is minimal and sex and violence are nonexistent.  Let’s hope that Streib’s next one is better. Failing that there’s always the third volume, which should be better if for no other reason than it’s not by Streib.

*Lyle Kenyon Engel also produced another book credited to “Paul Ross” which was not associated with the Chopper Cop series. It was titled The Assassin (1974, Manor Books) and was one of those standalone BCI crime paperbacks; it was written by William Crawford.

The Last Ranger #2: The Savage Stronghold

The Last Ranger #2: The Savage Stronghold, by Craig Sargent
October, 1986  Popular Library

I had another fun time revisiting my nerdlinger youth, reading the second volume of the Last Ranger series. This one was just as entertaining as the first, and I can see again why this series so resonated with my 11-year-old self: it’s awesome! Jan Stacy once again turns in a goofy but violent tale about a dude, his dog, his Harley, and the post-nuke world in which they live.

Picking up two weeks after that first volume, Stone and his pit bull, who we learn here he’s named Excalibur, are heading deeper into Colorado; Stone’s witless sister April was captured by the biker maniacs the Guardians of Hell in Denver at the climax of that first installment, and Stone’s hellbent to save her. The biggest boon to the series is the introduction of Excalibur; Stacy turns it into a buddy novel, with lots of banter between Stone and the dog. Not that the “bullterrier” can talk, of course, but his nonverbal responses and reactions to Stone throughout the novel actually made me laugh.

Stone by the way was consistently depicted on the covers as wearing sleeveless fatigues and goggles (I disagree with Zwolf – I think the goggles look cool!), but in the text we learn that he goes for more “realistic” post-nuke garb: jeans, a few sweaters, and a leather jacket. He also wears a motorcycle helmet with visor, so there go the goggles. Also I don’t believe the cover artist ever properly captured Stone’s Harley, which not only is an Electroglide 1200 but more importantly has a .50-caliber machine gun built onto its frame, the barrel jutting out from above the headlight.

The first novel spent most of its time world-building; The Savage Stronghold gets right to the good stuff with Stone blowing away a group of mutants who have erected a barrier outside some road near Pueblo, Colorado. They turn out to be cannibals too, with Stone coming across the grisly remains of one of their feasts. He blows away the half-eaten corpses, thinking them an affront to god – that is, whatever god allowed Earth to become such a hellhole. Running throughout the novel is a nicely-done subtext of Stone’s growing bitterness toward this world, and the life that was denied him by the nuclear holocaust.

Another interesting element Stacy builds in The Savage Stronghold is how 23-year-old Martin Stone slowly begins to think of himself in the role of a savior or at least a hero of the post-nuke world. The series shares the blackly humorous cynicism of David Alexander’s Phoenix series, but The Last Ranger is even more acidic, with even the narrative tone dripping with despair (I lost count of the number of times “fucking” was used as an adjective – ie, “Stone wondered how long until the whole fucking world collapsed,” and etc). Stone begins to feel that he is the only person on the planet who still cares, and as the narrative proceeds he begins to help those unfortunates he meets.

The first such person is an emaciated man crucified on a wooden cross outside of Pueblo. (Stone’s shocked reaction to the sight is another example of Stacy’s subtle dark humor: “Jesus Christ!”) After Stone cuts him down the man proceeds to explain that he was put up there by the Brothers of the Same, who rule Pueblo. Then a few of the Brothers show up: hulking, gray-robed sadists whose faces are hidden by cowls. They employ these cattle prod sort of things that shoot out electric lashes; one of them fries the poor guy Stone just saved, and Stone makes quick but gory work of them. Stacy retains the ultra-gore of the Doomsday Warrior series; anytime someone dies, we get thorough detail of brains gushing, eyeballs exploding, etc.

Stone eventually learns that The Brothers of the Same preach the equality of sameness. If you are in any way different from their definition of “sameness” (as defined in their massive handbook) then you are punished. Stacy has a lot of fun spoofing organized religion, though it is a little hard to understand how or why the Brothers work with the Guaridans of Hell, whom they co-rule Pueblo with; you’d think each would naturally hate the other. Stone’s plan is to pose as a trapper, here in Pueblo to trade animal hides, and he quickly makes a sale with Straight Razor, aka Straight, the pot-bellied Guardian boss with a penchant for knife fighting – and also the man who stole away with Stone’s sister.

For vague reasons Straight has decided to marry April, and he’ll do so in a Brothers-hosted ceremony on Sunday, two days away. Also Straight’s into dog fights, and insists that Stone bring his mutt to that night’s fight. Much deliberation on Stone’s part, as he feels terrible that he’s about to toss the trusting pit bull to the dogs, literally, but it all turns out moot – Excalibur, unsurprisingly, is a born fighter, and makes quick and gory work of Straight’s previously-undefeated champion. But when Stone demands April as his reward, he’s outed by the surprise appearance of Poet, that armless and legless dwarf who made Stone’s life hell back in Denver.

Shot up and bleeding to death, Stone manages to escape, but he’s forced to leave Excalibur behind. In true Doomsday Warrior fashion Stone manages to get saved by a group of rebels who live in an abandoned gold mine outside of town. And sure enough there’s also a smokin’-hot chick there (Melissa) who takes an immediate interest in Stone, and vice versa; cue a super-explicit sex scene that goes on for a few pages as Melissa crawls in bed with the convalescing Stone. Unlike Doomsday Warrior it doesn’t get purple-prosed at all, and in fact is probably more explicit than what you’d read in most any other men’s adventure novel of the ‘80s (excluding only the Depth Force series).

“If I can fuck I can fight,” claims a still-injured Stone, and thus armed with an Uzi and some old dynamite he limps back into Pueblo on Sunday morning to save his sister. Instead he’s promptly caught by the Brothers and taken to their Temple of Pain, where he manages to free himself after some sadistic stuff. Stacy gets even more sadistic with a bizarro part where Stone discovers a section where the Brothers keep their human experiments, a scene capped off where Stone finds one of them still living, even though his brain has been removed and is sitting in a tank of water (Stone blows it apart in another of the novel’s hilariously gruesome moments).

The finale is mostly made up of Stone blasting the church of the Brothers, right in the middle of April’s wedding ceremony. Speaking of April she continues to be such a cipher – Stacy doesn’t even bother describing her this time – that the reader has a hard time understanding why Stone’s in such a tither over saving her. Also I believe she speaks for the first time in the series here – “Martin, I thought you were dead!” – before she’s pulled away and Stone gets in a savage knife fight with Straight. After this it’s a lot of dynamite tossing and then Stone and Excalibur standing in the rubble and taking out hordes of Brothers – that is, with a little last-second help from the Pueblo freedom force.

By novel’s end April is still missing; Stone is informed by one of the surviving Guardians that Poet took her off to his “central headquarters” in Utah. Even Stone is uncertain over this, as he’d thought Poet was nothing more than a court jester. But apparently he’s some post-nuke bigwig, and more importantly now he’s got April. So now Stone must continue on toward Utah, but Melissa insists that he stay for the night, so she can bathe him and feed him – “And then we can just fuck and fuck all night.” Now that’s a post-nuke babe you stick around for, but Stone’s damn determined to save his sister.

In my reviews of the early Doomsday Warrior books I wondered endlessly who was the “better” author: Jan Stacy or Ryder Syvertsen. Reading The Savage Stronghold, I see now that all of that was moot: the two authors have such similar writing styles that I wondered if Syvertsen had written this book, too. Seriously, the novel is filled with run-on sentences and the same sort of bombastic yet goofy tone which is prevalent in the sole-authored Syvertsen books.

That being said, The Savage Stronghold was still a lot of fun, even if it wasn’t filled with action – though as stated, when the action did go down it was incredibly graphic (both in the violence and the sex departments). What more could you ask for?

Spy And Die (Hardy #2)

Spy And Die, by Martin Meyers
January, 1976  Popular Library

The most slovenly, lazy, non-compelling protagonist in private eye fiction returns in Spy And Die, the second volume of the forgotten Hardy series. Once again author Martin Meyers spins out a listless tale in which hardly anything happens, other than our “hero” Patrick Hardy stuffing his face and watching old movies on tv.

It occurred to me that perhaps Hardy was Meyers’s attempt at capturing the vibe of James Garner’s The Rockford Files, with a down-on-his luck gumshoe who is constantly thrown into events that are over his head. But man, at least in that show stuff happened! Spy And Die is an endurance test of the first order; without any exaggeration at all, the novel is mostly made up of lists of what Hardy eats and which movies he watches.

My friends, there were too many times in which I wanted to put this damn book down and move on to something more interesting…like maybe watching dust form on the furniture. But I perservered so that I could bring you a full report. In the end though I probably should’ve just watched the furniture. Nothing at all memorable occurs in Spy And Die and it’s such a nonentity of a book that I wonder again if the whole thing was some dire joke – on the reader.

Despite the fact that the novel is filled with beautiful and nude women, tons of sex, a monocle-sporting villainess, and various groups of spies, Spy And Die barely registers on the reader’s consciousness. It would also be a great alternative to sleeping pills. Meyers rarely if ever describes actions, events, characters, or scenery, with those mentioned sex scenes always relegated to, “They made it again.” Action scenes are slightly more fleshed out, with details of Hardy throwing punches, but they are so few and far between that even they can’t rescue the novel from its torpor.

But what’s it about? Well as we’ll recall, Patrick Hardy, our “hero,” is an Army-trained private eye who’d rather eat, read, and watch tv all day. Who wouldn’t?? But you see, this doesn’t make for a very compelling private eye protagonist, and Meyers isn’t very interested in expanding beyond this limited scope; even when Hardy is thrust into situations which take him out of his comfort zone, he just runs away and goes back to gorging himself and watching tv. The novel is almost a litany of the various things Hardy stuffs his face with.

Anyway, some unspecified time after the first volume, Hardy is hired for another job – once again, by some hotstuff gal who waltzes into his big place on Riverside Drive and proposes the task for him. Her name is Alice King, she’s from Houston, and an uncle named Walter whom she’s never before heard of recently died and left her some money, or something. But Alice suspects that Walter was involved with the Army (apparently he died on a “post” somewhere) and thinks the story’s real weird, and wants Hardy’s help.

Well, they screw a bunch (zero details per the norm), and Alice goes back to Houston. Hardy proceeds to sit on a barber chair in his lounge and watch tv, with frequent breaks to the kitchen. We are of course well-informed of what he eats – the one element Meyers doesn’t fail to elaborate on is what Hardy eats. Soon he discovers himself being followed around by groups of strange men – spies, he’s certain.

After a half-assed chase, Hardy ditches his car and heads over to Philadelphia to hook up with his stripper/dancer friend, Ruby Rose, returning from the previous volume. More undescribed sex occurs. Hardy returns to New York, where he is contacted by members of the Central Security Force, headed by obese Julius Foxx, who inform him that Walter Henry was a spy. They want Hardy to keep working his case for Alice, basically using him as a lure for the other group of spies who are tailing him.

These other spies work for Duchess Annette de Montespan, a smokin’-hot, super-stacked blonde who goes around wearing a monocle, and usually nothing else. A bisexual fashion photographer, she calls Hardy over to her place so he can watch her photograph some equally-hot and equally-nude models. Hardy falls hard for one of them, a Chinese gal named Mae-ling, aka Linda. After this the Duchess invites Hardy up to her room, where apparently a whole bunch of sex occurs off-page.

But Hardy "can’t make it.” Due to the valium he’s taking for his high blood pressure, he can’t reach climax, and thus the whole Duchess-banging is a bummer. I forgot to mention – the Duchess keeps on her monocle during all the banging. Anyway the lady is such a missed opportunity, apparently a supervillain in the Bond mold, even with a hulking henchwoman named Claude and an assassin named Korloff. But Meyers would rather tell you about what books Hardy buys on the way home.

Not having gotten enough tail, Hardy also tracks down Mae-ling, and more bland fireworks ensue. Hardy, who is often described as rugged but slightly going to seed around the middle, must be a killer with the ladies. But then, it was the ‘70s. Oh, and like last volume, friggin’ Hardy leaves all the real work to his tv-movie actor friend, Steve Macker – in fact it’s Macker who inadvertently stumbles upon the clue which allows Hardy to break the case!

But yeah, Macker flies down to Houston and Dallas to research leads while Hardy sits in his barber chair and watches old movies. Occassionally he’ll get up to write down an idea on his cork board. People, I’m not making this up. The novel is so eventless (not a real word, I think) as to be hilarious; you can forget about the sensationalistic cover, which has no bearing on the actual contents of the novel.

I’ll just cut to the chase – apparently Walter Henry was an undercover spy, and the name “Walter Henry” was just some random name these dudes would use. Something like that. And, uh, apparently the Duchess and her people were trying to find some MacGuffin he was working on, and Julius Foxx wanted to use Hardy as bait to lure them out. But good friggin’ gravy it’s all so half-assedly played out and revealed that you actually do forget everything except what Hardy eats!

Even the finale sucks – Hardy, with Mae-ling, crashes an upper-crust party and the Duchess captures them. In the span of two sentences, my friends, the Duchess kills Linda, and then Ludwig Lurche, a “black Teuton” who is behind it all, kills the Duchess! Seriously, there’s no drama behind either death…just like, “The Duchess stabbed Linda in the heart. Ludwig shot the Duchess.” It’s like that throughout, like an outline.

In fact, once again it occurred to me (you see, I was desperate to at least find some value in this book) that Meyer’s intent was that he himself was just as lazy and indolent as Hardy; that, just as Hardy is too lazy to actually do anything, the joke would extend into the metafictional realm with the author himself to lazy to write anything, churning out an outline instead of a fleshed-out work of fiction.

Does Hardy learn anything from the tale? Of course not. After Lurche is caught and Foxx and his minions arrive, Hardy mourns Mae-ling for a hot second before announcing, “I’m starving.” At this point Spy And Die mercifully ends, the tedium of it all is finally over, and the reader can recuperate and move on…until the next volume. And like a fool I bought it, years ago – and like an even bigger fool, I’ll read it some day.