Frogman!

Frogman!, by J.E. Macdonnell
January, 1960  Pyramid Books
(original Australian edition, 1958)

A few years before he wrote the Mark Hood series, Australian author J.E. Macdonnell turned out this World War II paperback, no doubt sourced from his own memories of serving in the Navy. Frogman! is written a bit differently than the later Mark Hood books, with Macdonnell delivering a mostly standard story that focuses on the so-called “frogmen” of the war.

First though let’s take a moment to appreciate the awesome cover art, courtesy veteran men’s adventure magazine artist Mel Crair. It’s super cool and all, but you have to love how the frogman’s holding a stick of dynamite with a fuse…under the water. I think I once saw Wile E. Coyote try the same thing. It’s likely Crair did this as a joke, but at any rate it’s pretty funny. The cover’s still pretty great, though.

I remember being fascinated as a kid by the frogmen, probably due to their wetsuits and gear – as a kid I was obsessed with costumed superheroes and masks and whatnot. Surprisingly though, it doesn’t look like very many novels were written about the frogmen, or at least I personally have been able to only find a few of them. In fact it seems that so few were written that Pyramid Books, which published a ton of WWII paperbacks, had to import this one from Australia. It’s a slim book, too, coming in at 143 pages of smallish print.

Those hoping for a pulpy, action-packed read will be a little disappointed. Like Women’s Battalion, Frogman! is another WWII paperback that doesn’t retain the puly, sensationalistic feel of the men’s adventure mags of the day. Macdonnell plays it straight throughout, giving us a realistic story that’s made up of about 80% training and only 20% action. The novel takes place in the Pacific front of the war and its protagonists are all members of the Australian Navy, which is locked in combat with “the Japs.” The year is not stated, but it would appear to be at the height of the war.

Our hero is Petty Officer Clive Gellatly, a former boxer who has been in the Navy for about ten years. Gellatly is a “pom-pom” operator on a destroyer ship, and chomps at the bit for more athletic duty, despite his skill at the heavy gun. As for that “pom-pom” bit, part of the problem the reader of Frogman! must surmount is that Macdonnell has peppered the novel with 1940s Australian Navy slang that will be meaningless to Americans. I mean I felt like I was reading A Clockwork Orange at times, encountering nonsensical phrases like “jack-me-hearty’s” (apparently a derogatory term for pompous officials) and, my favorite of them all, “You’re acting like a sheila with her first matelot.”

Gellatly responds to a request for able seamen interested in frogman duties. “Suicide squad,” Gellatly figures, and quickly signs up. He’s taken to a remote oceanside area where he will train with another four men for the next few months. His teammates are Corby, a musclebound dude nicknamed “Blubberguts;” the monosyllabic Bill Smith, who is such a forgettable character that he doesn’t even get a nickname; “Bluey” Taplin, a redhead with lots of freckles; and finally “Whitey,” an Aborigine pearl diver. Macdonnell has a subplot where Gellatly wonders if Corby resents Whitey due to his race, but this comes and goes, and besides Corby launches to Whitey’s defense during the infrequent barroom brawls the team gets in.

In fact it takes a good 50 pages until we even get to the frogman stuff. Macdonnell introduces the readers and Gellatly himself to the team during an overlong sequence in which they hit a bunch of bars. Along the way Gellatly hooks up with a brunette bombshell named Rita, even having sex with her in a park – a fade to black scene, but humorously enough the part of the book Pyramid chose to spotlight in the first-page preview of this edition. Gellatly’s casual affair with Rita ultimately leads to the novel’s first big action sequence, a brawl in which the team takes on her former paramour and his colleagues.

But the frogman stuff is what we’re here for. The team’s trainer, Henley, teaches them all the rudiments of diving and working their air beneath the waves, along with how to keep their ears from rupturing and etc. Macdonnell doesn’t bore the reader with tedious, endless details. He capably brings to life Gellatly’s own joy with deep diving, something he’s never done before, with our hero broken in to his new life with on-the-job learning like recovering lost watches and other items from the sea floor. Eventually the team is also taught how to plant mines on enemy ships, growing into a strong, capable unit along the way.

Around page 100 the team’s given its first mission; Gellatly, as senior officer, is in charge. Taken to New Guinea, Gellatly’s frogman team boards the Wind Rode, Gellatly’s former destroyer. Their mission is to venture to Mortie Island in the Halmaheras, the location of a “big Jap base,” one that features a powerful radar station. Gellatly’s team is to blow up the radar base so that bombers can’t be called in to stave off the impending Allied invasion. We get our first aquatic action scene when Whitey suits up in his frogman gear and goes beneath the Wind Rode, encountering two “Jap frogmen,” killing both of them with his knife.

This proves to be the action highlight. While Gellatly puts a submachine gun in a plastic bag for the nighttime swim to the island, he never uses it; he uses a knife to take out a sleeping sentry and the team slips into the radar station, setting it to blow. There is no big action setpiece in Frogman!; instead the team escapes, safely in the water when the station blows up, but Corby is injured by the shock waves from depth charges dropped by a pursuing boat – repercussions for his refusal to wear a jersey beneath his wetsuit, something Henley always advised for this very reason.

Corby lives, though, and indeed the finale is a payoff on the simmering Corby/Whitey rivalry. Given that Whitey risked his neck to save Corby, the Aborigine is rightly pissed that Corby caused the whole issue by disobeying orders and not wearing a jersey. Corby swallows his pride and apologizes, and that’s that; the novel ends with the success of this first mission of Gellatly’s team. It makes one wish that there was a bit more action in the book, as it is more gripping than the training and barroom brawling.

There is nothing exploitative about Frogman!; the two sex scenes with Rita are instant fades to black, and the action scenes are not gory. As for language, anything stronger than “hell” is bowdlerized, with dialog like “- -!” appearing the text. (I enjoyed coming up with my own outrageous profanity to fill in the blanks.) About the only thing readers would find off-putting today is the constant usage of “Japs,” even on the back cover, but then that’s part and parcel of these old WWII paperbacks, and any veteran reader of vintage pulp will be immune to it.

It’s short, breezily written, perhaps a bit too confusing in its Australian dialog, and maybe too focused on training at the expense of action, but Frogman! is in the end pretty enjoyable…though I have a feeling there has to be a better frogman-focused war paperback out there.

Now stop acting like a sheila with her first matelot!!

Jefferson Boone, Handyman #1: The Moneta Papers

Jefferson Boone, Handyman #1: The Moneta Papers, by Jon Messmann
April, 1973  Pyramid Books

Jefferson Boone is a different kind of agent. If you like a little culture with your killing, a hero who’s literate as well as phallic, the Handyman’s your man. -- From the back cover

The same time he was writing The Revenger, Jon Messmann also turned out another action series that ran for six volumes: Jefferson Boone, Handyman, which on the surface is more along the lines of the spy-fi Messmann wrote for the Nick Carter: Killmaster series. Style-wise the series is more similar to The Revenger, with an intellectual hero given to lots of introspection and rumination. He also likes to occasionally quote from say Boethius or Dante, which results in a strange protagonist; Jefferson Boone is pretty much James Bond meets Frasier Crane. 

Boone (or “Jeff” or “Jefferson,” as Messmann arbitrarily refers to him in the narrative) is a sandy-haired stud who works out of DC and performs odd jobs for the government. His dad was a diplomat, and we learn in quickly-relayed backstory that Pop Boone once complained to his son about all the red tape that prevents diplomats from effecting change in the international arena. What was needed, said old Boone, was a sort of “handyman” who could fix all the leaks and whatnot. Apparently from this off-hand comment young Jeff decided that he himself would become the Handyman.

He’s apparently been quite successful, for as we meet him he’s in a posh apartment in DC, with another in New York, and drives a new cherry red Mustang (which he has flown around with him so he can drive it wherever he goes). His custom weapon is a .357 Magnum but he carries a Colt automatic target pistol as a backup piece. The “phallic” stuff mentioned on the back cover comes into play posthaste, as Jeff scores with some gal who takes him to a fancy DC party. But Messmann as ever is in a Burt Hirschfeld style this time, relaying all of the frequent sex scenes via analogy, metaphor, and purple-prose. There’s hardly any descriptive material at all, even though Jeff gets laid a bunch. Messmann actually wrote harder stuff in his Nick Carter books.

In fact, Messmann’s work could very well provide the answer to the unasked question: What if Burt Hirschfeld had written men’s adventure novels? The style is at times so similar as to be mysterious, even when it comes down to the plotting. For like Hirschfeld Messmann is all about the slow burn. Jeff’s assignment this time has him looking up an old platonic friend named Dorrie whose mega-billionaire dad, dead now, was about to turn over some important land to the US. Dorrie is game to sign over the deeds, but two couriers who have been sent to her in Italy have turned up dead. The State Department tasks Jeff with being the latest courier, and getting “The Moneta Papers” signed. 

This simple plot drags on over the course of 190 pages of small, dense print. My guess is the book is around 80,000 words or so, but then I’ve never been good at estimating word count. Let it just be said that The Moneta Papers is way too long and lots of it could’ve been whittled down; The Revenger books are also pretty densely-written, with lots of incidental rumination and whatnot, but at least those books are shorter. Maybe Pyramid Books demanded higher word counts, who knows. But instead of ramping up the action and etc to fill the space, Messmann instead just goes for lots of slow-burn and long-simmer sort of stuff. 

Anyway, Jeff heads on over to Venice, his portable bar in tow. An attempt is promptly made on his life, a car trying to ram him as he drives along the Italian countryside. Things get more interesting when Jeff meets Dorrie – only he discovers, gradually, that it isn’t really Dorrie. Rather it’s a “ringer” who looks very much like Dorrie, laughs at the same jokes, shares the same memories, and otherwise walks and talks just like the real thing – save for one peculiar difference. This particular Dorrie doesn’t appear to realize that she and Jeff have never had sex. Playing the girl along, Jeff takes her back to his apartment – and proceeds with boffing her.

The nympho ringer just loves it, and while she begs for more Jeff grabs her by the hair and demands answers. This leads to a knock-down, drag-out fight, during which the fake Dorrie manages to escape – and is never seen again. Messmann just forgets all about tying up that loose end. Understandably puzzled, Jeff the next day meets the real Dorrie, who is living in a posh villa with her new beau Umberto Fiando, heir to the Fiando automobile fortune. But what has concerned the State Dept is that Umberto is a loyal follower of Cesare Gallermo, a regular modern-day Mussolini, and they’re worried that once Dorrie and Umberto are married, by Italian law all of her possessions are also owned by Umberto, and he’ll give those highly-important lands over to his pal Cesare.

The Hirschfeld/trash fiction vibe continues as Jeff hangs out with Umberto’s jet-setting crowd, among them the dark-eyed Marie-Claude, a French-Italian beauty who is bored due to her billions but clearly wants to get freaky with Jeff. After lots of boring Formula 1 race car stuff – during which another attempt is made on Jeff’s life, this time via an “accidental” crash – Jeff heads with Marie-Claude over to her summer house for some more “phallic” shenanigans. But again it’s more on that poetical tip:

She trembled under him and he felt her surgings and he drew away from her and she cried out in protest, but only for a moment as he caressed her openness until she sighed and surged again, each movement of her abdomen like successive waves on a shore, coming nearer and nearer to the high-water mark.

If that doesn’t sound like Burt Hirschfeld, I don’t know what does.

The climax plays out in a ski lodge in the Italian Alps. Jeff has gotten Umberto’s father to reveal that Umberto has been denied the family fortunes, thus he’s “more air than heir,” per Jeff. And thus, he really is part of Cesare’s plotting and is only marrying Dorrie for her wealth and those important lands. But the game is now out in the open, and Umberto has taken an unwitting Dorrie to this lodge, which is under guard, with the veiled threat to Jeff that if he comes after her, Dorrie will die. For his part, Jeff still wonders how complicit Dorrie is in all this. Later he will discover that Umberto, a former doctor, has been drugging her with truth serum and extracting info from her. But the reader will have long ago come to this conclusion.

Among his skills Jeff is also talented at disguise. He makes himself look like an Italian, goes by the name Guido, and even in this manner manages to pick up a hot-to-trot babe, this one an American gal on vacation named Edie. Jeff poses as a man of the world, using the naïve but sexy Edie as a way to throw off the blue-blazer-wearing thugs who have surrounded the lodge, on the lookout for Jeff. And guess what, Jeff ends up hopping into bed with Edie as well, especially given how she keeps throwing herself at the Italian lothario. Another vague, Hirschfeld-esque sex scene ensues.

But this one has a fun finale, as Jeff decides to hell with it and comes clean with Edie, suddenly speaking without his fake Italian accent. He tells the girl who he is and why he’s here, and after getting over her shock Edie agrees to help – and wants a bit more lovin’. In fact she wants to come visit him in his pad in New York after all this! A very Bond-esque scene follows the next morning, as Jeff takes out several thugs while skiing down a dangerous pass. He sets up one of them as his own corpse, thus fooling all and sundry into believing that “Guido” is dead, his disguise having been ruined.

The actual climax though is mostly dialog. Messmann again writes the novel like it’s a “real” book, and perhaps he hoped for the success and popularity of a mystery series along the lines of Travis McGee or something. Jeff outs Umberto as a murderer, which ends up breaking poor Dorrie’s heart. He then confronts Cesare and tells the man the US lands – and Dorrie’s fortunes – are no longer his, and also makes him promise to drop out of Italian politics.

And that’s that – Jeff makes amends with Dorrie (Jeff is more heartfelt than many of his men’s adventure contemporaries, and indeed turns back before leaving to make sure Dorrie has forgiven him for exposing her lover as a fraud) and heads back to New York – just in time for more of that good lovin’ courtesy his new guest Edie.

Overall The Moneta Papers was mostly enjoyable, though the introspection and rumination did serve to slow down the proceedings. And yet, as with The Revenger, despite the measured pace Messmann is still capable enough of a writer to make the reader invested in the story. He’s also very good at description, and brings the Italian countryside to life. This only serves to further lend the book more of a trash novel vibe and less of a men’s adventure one.

Stark #5: Rainbow Colored Shroud (aka The Revenger #5)

Stark #5: Rainbow Colored Shroud, by Joseph Hedges
May, 1975  Pyramid Books
(Original UK publication 1974)

John Stark, the Revenger (not to be confused with the other Revenger), continues his European war against “the company” in this fifth volume that’s as tediously overwritten as the third one was. Terry “Joseph Hedges” Harknett again undermines his own writing skills with blocks and blocks and blocks of overdescription that stops all forward momentum and turns Rainbow Colored Shroud into a turgid trawl of a read.

Harknett does inject a lot of continuity into the series, with this fifth book presumably opening up after the events of the fourth one, which I don’t have. (And again the occasional asterisk will refer us back to a previous volume, but again the series is referred to in these notes under its original title, The Revenger, which must’ve confused readers in the US!) Stark apparently wreaked havoc in Germany in that book, and now he’s heading up into Denmark to kill more company scum. The very first pages give us a reminder of how John Stark is a complete asshole and not at all heroic.

Stark’s hired a father and son team to pilot a boat up into Denmark, and coming in on a night landing during a heavy thunderstorm, Stark realizes at the last moment that the company is awaiting him on the beach. Stark jumps off the boat right before the goons open fire – and lets the son take the bullets that were intended for him. Then Stark hides in the water and silently pulls himself to safety while the father, an old man, is tortured by the company thugs who are seeking Stark. Stark finally pulls out his Luger, which is his customary gun this volume, and you think he’s about to do something heroic. Instead he shoots the old man in the head and runs away!

So safe to say, Harknett does not see Stark as a hero, and it’s a stretch to even consider the guy an antihero. But I found as I read this book that I actually want a hero in these men’s adventure novels; even Philip Magellan and Johnny Rock, despite being psychopaths, occasionally do something to engender reader empathy or sympathy. Not so John Stark, who cares for no one but himself and is actually more danger to those who help him than the company itself. Once again, if you are a character in this series and your name isn’t “John Stark,” you’re going to be killed in some horrific fashion.

But this opening left a bad taste in my mouth, which is never a good sign when the damn book’s 188 pages of incredibly small and dense print. Stark’s ass-holery is only just a small part of the problem. Not only could’ve a lot of these Imitation Executioner authors learned something from Don Pendleton in making their protagonists heroic (or at the very least likable), but many of them could’ve learned a helluva lot from the master on how to friggin’ write these kinds of books. I mean, just check out a section from this opening “action scene,” as Stark attempts to evade the company thugs waiting for him on the beach:

One of the riflemen sent a burst of shots across the beach and Stark speeded his progress. Perhaps spurred by fear, perhaps by a reasonable decision that the explosion of noise provided good cover. Shouts, in the tone of contrition and derision, ended the brief silence after the barrage. He didn’t step on to the steeply pitched roof of the barn when he reached the gutter. Instead, his probing foot tested the strength of a beam running along the rear wall on a level with the ledge of a hatchway into the barn’s hayloft. The beam was solid and he edged out along it. It protruded a lip of less than twenty centimetres from the wall and Stark had to keep his body pressed tight against the shiplap timber to stop from pitching backwards to the ground four metres below.

At one time the hatch had been shuttered by two swing doors, but one had long since been wrenched or had rotted off its hinges. There was ample space to crawl through the opening and stretch out full length across planks which smelled of decomposed hay and bird droppings. He froze into stillness, holding his breath and pumping sweat as he heard movement below him. He pin-pointed the position of two enforcers as he used the unaviodable idleness to accustom his eyes to the deeper degree of darkness within the barn.

Even the so-called “action” just drags on and on:

The recoil of the Luger jolted against his palm as he shot the man who had not yet fired at him. The bullet hit the side of the man’s head and burrowed through flesh on a downwards trajectory, passing across the mouth to burst out at the cheek and then find a new mark in the shoulder. The lightning supplied its follow-up of thunder, swallowing the sound of the Luger. The enforcer had flung himself backwards, fearful of being hit by the bullet blazing through the other man. Blood from the punctured cheek splashed into his eyes and the thunder masked his scream of revulsion. The Luger cracked a second time and the bullet rifled into his throat. The impact flung him harder against the door, then he bounced away and slumped across the forward curled body of the first man to die. They twitched through their death throes together. The thunder rolled away into the far distance and there was just the beating of the rain and howling of the wind against and around the crumbling walls. It covered the regular dripping of blood from torn flesh to floorboard carpet.

Seriously, enough of this could put you to sleep. And it’s like that on every single page. Every single thing Stark sees, hears, or does is over-described to the nth degree. Pendleton would’ve whittled the above down to a few sentences at the most and kept the action moving. In many ways Stark could be viewed as a primer on how not to write men’s adventure fiction. I haven’t even mentioned yet how pointlessly dour and nihilistic it is. Yet even this shouldn’t be a detriment to it being entertaining; Gannon and Bronson: Blind Rage were both dour and nihilistic, but good lord were they fun to read. Rainbow Colored Shroud almost makes you want to slit your wrists.

What makes it all the more sad is that the novel has a lurid core that could’ve made for a classic, and indeed perhaps there is a classic buried within the overlong text. For Stark in his Scandanavian war becomes involved with the porn business of the company; Denmark and Sweden are where 90% of the world’s porn comes from, we’re told, and Stark’s contact in Copenhagen is a busty beauty named Ingrid who has starred in many of these movies. Stark gets in touch with her via Poul, the son who took Stark’s bullets in the opening pages; Ingrid, a lesbian, is in love with Poul’s sister, Britt, who is also a porn actress but who is missing now. Ingrid fears that Britt fell in bad favor with the company sadists who run the porn biz.

As another example of the tedious overdescription in the book, here’s how Ingrid, the “statuesque Lesbian,” is described in her intro:

She was about twenty-five and at least six feet two inches tall, he guessed. Basically slim, she nonetheless had full, thrusting breasts and flaring hips that were challenging in their sexuality. The tight fit of her clothes revealed that she kept everything in place by her own muscle-power. Her face was long with a lot of sharp angles that could easily have resulted in plainness. But, in fact, the effect was opposite. Her eyes were dark, heavily shadowed with mascara. Her mouth was adorned by just the right colour and amount of lipstick. Her hair was long and golden, worn as Veronica Lake used to wear hers in the wartime mystery movies she made with Alan Ladd. Her hanging earrings were of real gold, as was the brooch above the cone of her right breast. The stones in the rings on the third finger of each hand had the blue sparkle of genuine diamonds.

Honestly, this is a men’s adventure novel; just tell us she’s young and pretty and has nice breasts and call it a day. I mean, is Stark’s vision so good that he can tell in a glance that earrings and brooches are “of real gold?” And for that matter, what the hell kind of a mob-busting vigilante even notices a woman’s brooch??

As in the previous volume, Ingrid’s homosexuality really sets Stark off, and he baits and taunts her throughout. They have an instant hate for each other, but Ingrid needs Stark to find out what happened to Britt. As for Stark, he could care less what happened to Britt and couldn’t care less what might happen to Ingrid – this is not just implied but flatly stated in the novel. Ingrid says Britt got involved in the bondage area of the biz, and we readers know that four women play a central part in this, led by the beautiful and psychotic Sigrid. Company bigwig Rappe, the main villain of the piece, has tasked Ingrid and her three co-dominatrices as “secret weapons” in the war against Stark. 

Unfortunately, this twisted stuff doesn’t factor into the novel until the damage of tedium has been done. Stark and Ingrid head to the posh island resort in which the company shoots its porno movies under the guise of a “health spa;” this sequence also takes place at night and clearly demonstrates Stark’s unheroic nature. While “The Revenger” is stalking the grounds, Ingrid sees that it’s a trap and cars filled with enforcers are on the way. She puts herself at risk by pushing a car down a hill and causing a massive pile-up that kills a dozen or so company flunkies. Later she’s caught…and Stark gives her up for dead and concerns himself with his own escape!

It’s hard to not hate Stark as poor Ingrid, who just saved his life, is strapped to a bed and tortured by Sigrid and her bondage sisters while Rappe and other company freaks happily watch. This is straight-up torture porn, as we learn that Sigrid gets off royally on mutilating other women. Harknett keeps toying with us on what happens to Ingrid, but by novel’s end we’ll learn that the flesh has been razored off of her breasts and ultimately scissors have been jammed into her eyeballs and mouth. But meanwhile Sigrid, posing as a wanna-be defector, has met Stark on the health spa grounds, and eventually succeeds in winning his trust and “escaping” with him. You want more tedious overdescription? Here’s how she’s described:

She was tall and slim with short black hair that hugged her head like a custom-made hat of some thick, silky material. Her face was as lean as the rest of her with clean-cut features and a smooth, tanned skin. Her eyes were china blue and saucer big. Her nose was just a trifle crooked and the imperfection added to her beauty rather than detracted from it. She had a wide, fractionally pouting mouth above a resolute jawline. Her clothes were elegantly casual and incongruously erotic – a polka-dot scarf tied at her throat above the high-necked, long-sleeved sweater, a plaid-patterned skirt with a large safety pin halfway up the split at her right thigh, and knee-length boots of shiny white. Thus, only the flesh at her knees, hands and face was exposed. But there was something, even in the tense fragment of time as Krag and his men piled into cars and sped towards the wood, about the way she wore the clothes and held her body which was sexually stimulating.

Krag by the way is the henchman in charge of finding and killing Stark, and Sigrid hides ulterior motives in that she wants Stark’s help to kill the bastard. Krag has a penchant for taking the various company porn actresses and using and abusing them as his mistresses; we see this in effect early on as Krag has his current mistress, an Israeli girl named Yeda, lick butter and jam off his body(!?) before blowing him in fairly graphic detail. One thing that must be said of Harknett is that, unlike many of his British peers, he doesn’t shirk on the explicit material. This is well displayed later in the novel, when, after killing Krag, a super-horny Sigrid succeeds in getting Stark to screw her:

With a sigh, Stark covered her body with his own, inserting himself between her thighs. Her sigh was louder as her arms dropped and her hands delved under his lowering form. The electric touch of her fingers sent delicious sensations to every nerve-ending again. And then she guided him into her and the sucking wetness of her drove him to the edge of ecstasy. As her womb drew at him, she fixed her clawed hands on his shoulders, crushing his chest to her breasts. Her legs rose and she locked her booted feet around him.

“Come on, Mr. Stark, do it to me,” she whispered, forcing his head down so that her wet lips brushed his ear. “Do it to me like you’ve never done it to any woman ever before.”

The strength with which she had sunk the knife blade deep into Krag’s stomach was now brought into use again. But this time to sink a weapon into herself. For pleasure, not pain. Despite Stark’s weight and the powerful thrusts that drove him lustfully into the hirsute centre of the woman, she was still able to arch her back from the bed: pushing towards him with her straining body and pulling him towards her with legs and arms.

Sweat pasted their flesh together and sometimes it tore apart with a moist sound: then became fastened again. But the engulfing grip of wet flesh that trapped the man willingly inside her body never released its grip. It flexed and sucked around his pumping hardness, yearning to hold him forever yet drawing him inexorably towards the spurting finale that would drain him of the essential driving force to maintain the ecstasy.

Ten points for managing to use the word “hirsute.” Mind you, all this occurs shortly after Sigrid has tortured Ingrid to death, unbeknownst to Stark. Plus Sigrid has yet another ulterior motive; Stark killed Sigrid’s boyfriend in the third volume, and now she aims to kill him in revenge; that is, after she’s “flexed” and “sucked” his “pumping hardness” to a “spurting finale.” Immediately after the sex a still-naked Sigrid tries to kill Stark, but he’s taken the clip out of his Luger. She starts clawing at him, and ol’ Stark trips her into a doorframe and slams the door on her, breaking her neck!

We go to Sweden in the homestretch, with Stark now accompanied by Yeda, Krag’s abused mistress. Yeda, who saw everything go down in Krag’s place, tells Stark how sick and evil Sigrid was. You feel bad for Yeda, who is nice and has had a rough time, which of course means Harknett plans to kill her off. And she’s dead in like two pages, her head bashed open and her neck broken as Stark crashes his stolen Datsun into the river while escaping the cops. And meanwhile we learn that Ingrid’s decomposing body was locked in the trunk, apparently planted there on the off chance that Stark would steal the car and get pulled over and thus pegged for her grisly murder…

Harknett piles on more lurid stuff in the finale, in which Rappe and his fellow “pornbrokers” watch Sigrid’s last film, which is an all-out bondage piece in which poor Britt is burned and mutilated on camera (“color by Rainbowcolour,” we’re informed, thus giving us the book’s cryptic title). As the cherry on the top, a happy Rappe even pulls poor Britt out for the others to see, proudly showing off how mutilated and mauled she is! She looks so bad – and Harknett leaves the details vague – that some of the company men even puke their guts out. But Stark, who meanwhile has of course lived through the car wreck, shows up just in time to steal a pair of AK-47s and goes in, guns blasting, mowing down every single one of them. The end!

A dire trawl of a read, Rainbow Colored Shroud leaves an unpleasant taste in the reader’s mouth. And worst of all, it isn’t even very entertaining. The book is too pessimistic and nihilistic and lacks the spark you want from this genre; it’s so dispirited as to be depressing. While Harknett’s a good writer, he honestly needed a better editor to whittle down his material to a more acceptable and fluid length.

Also, this book features one of the funniest goofs I’ve yet encountered – on page 170 Harknett actually writes “me” instead of “him” when referring to Stark, and both the UK and the US editors missed it. (My guess is they both probably fell asleep while reading the book.) Did Harknett identify with Stark that much?

Clearly I’ve been railing on this book, but the fact remains that Harknett has been a successful author for many years, so there are many readers who enjoy his style of writing. Like everything else on the blog, this review is just my opinion. And who knows, maybe after I’ve read a few more of his books I will become a bit more acclimated to Harknett’s info-rich narrative style. But as for right now, I prefer my pulp to be lean and mean and with as little excess fat as possible.

Balzan Of The Cat People #1: The Blood Stones

Balzan Of The Cat People #1: The Blood Stones, by Wallace Moore
May, 1975  Pyramid Books

Yet another series produced by book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel, Balzan Of The Cat People is along the same lines of an earlier Engel production, Richard Blade. But whereas that series took inspiration from the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard, Balzan takes its inspiration from Edgar Rice Burroughs, particularly John Carter of Mars and Tarzan (who is even referenced on the cover). 

Another difference is that Richard Blade lasted a whole lot longer; Balzan only amounted to three volumes, and whether that was due to the series being a bomb with readers or the fact that Pyramid Books folded in 1976 is unknown. I’m betting it was a combination of the two, because The Blood Stones, the first novel in the series, really doesn’t have much to recommend it. It’s fair for what it is, just an average piece of mid-‘70s sci-fantasy, but it’s nothing remarkable.

According to the internet, “Wallace Moore” was really comics writer Gerry Conway. It was interesting knowing this, as Conway’s tale would be perfectly at home in a Marvel comic of the time. The story is heavily plotted with a lot of melodrama and action but zero sex. Conway wrote mainstream comics and he brings that same sensibility to The Blood Stones, as the novel has none of the softcore nature of the Richard Blade novels. And yet Conway’s writing, due to that too-heavy plotting, is in a way similar to that of Manning Lee Stokes.

Balzan is around 22 years old and is the lone human on an alien planet; in capably-dispensed backstory, we learn he had a Superman-esque origin story. His parents, Doctors Weldon and Katherine Rice, grew frustrated with the short attention spans of the American people of the year 2500; we’re informed this short attention problem began in the 1970s, but by the 26th Century nothing lasts, all is ephemeral, everything is just a flash in the pan. It’s interesting that Conway the optimist gave us a few centuries; rather, a mere 40 years after Balzan was published and we already live in a Twitter/Facebook world of impermanence.

But as their spacecraft neared Mars the couple ran into a black hole or something, zipping through space to a weird new galaxy. The couple died immediately, but their baby, Paul Brian Rice, was still alive in stasis. The ship crashed and the baby was discovered by biped cat people who lived on this part of the strange new world; the cat people were called Endorians, and one of them, Lomar, raised the baby as his own child, naming him Balzan. Lomar raised Balzan alongside his other child, a girl named Kitta; Lomar’s wife died while giving birth to her.

A big failing with The Blood Stones is we don’t really get to understand how Balzan works in this world, which is populated by biped cat people, biped lizard people, and another group of people who apparently are a combination of the two. There’s also mention of winged people, unseen this volume. But Balzan is the only human and his knowledge of earth comes from “The Teacher,” ie the computer in his crashed spacecraft, which has told Balzan all about history and who he is and whatnot. That Balzan, raised on an alien planet, is able to understand the computer’s English is a mystery we shouldn’t try to solve.

What is puzzling though is the question of who Balzan identifies with. He’s been raised by the Endorians but he doesn’t have their subservient nature. He thinks of Lomar as his father and Kitta as his sister, but I ask in all seriousness, has Balzan ever gotten laid? And if so, by what?? This doesn’t really matter in Conway’s PG world; Balzan for what it’s worth is, in the end, exactly like any other generic hero of a sci-fi fantasy, a studly monstrosity of manly muscle, described exactly as he is depicted on the cover painting, with the headband and everything.

At any rate, Balzan is so generic that you have a hard time identifying with him. It makes it worse then that the novel opens with the Endorian community he’s grown up in being destroyed by lizard-like bipeds called Albs; thus, there’s no part where we see how Balzan interracts with his “people.”   Anyway, Balzan’s out hunting with his therb (a whip with a poison barb that causes death in seconds) and comes back in time to find his home destroyed, Lomar dying, and Kitta and several other Endorians captured, taken away by the Albs. Lomar buys the farm and Balzan swears vengeance.

Balzan does what any other revenge-seeker would do: he tracks the captured Endorians to the sprawling city of Kharn, where he first hooks up with a group of thieves and then becomes a gladiator in the Kharnite arena! Seriously, Conway is very similar to Manning Lee Stokes in how he seems to be writing one book before veering course midway through and writing another. (He’s also like Stokes in his blocks and blocks of description; the book runs 190 pages of super-small and dense print.) But what starts out one way gradually turns into another tale entirely.

Armed with his therb and a Kharnite “neutron sword,”Balzan wastes a bunch of Albs on his way to the city of Kharn. While there’s no sex, Conway doesn’t shy from the gore, though again there’s nothing in the book that would’ve been unpublishable in the ‘30s. Balzan eviscerates and decapitates slews of the lizard men, the green gore gushing. He finds himself though overwhelmed by Kharn itself, which is a sprawling kingdom of wretched poverty living beneath untold wealth. He soon meets a young Kharnite (apparently lizard-like people, but not full on lizard men, or something) named Lio.

The middle half of the novel is where all the heavy plotting comes in. We’ve got Balzan trying to push Lio and the theives into full-blown rebellion, we’ve got the plotting and counterplotting of Kharnite notables. Among the latter is the master of the gladiator games, who lusts for wealth; then there’s Lord Sha, who has placed Kitta in his own personal harem (though he doesn’t have sex with her, nor any of the other female creatures in his harem); and finally there are King Dragus and Queen Myrane, rulers of Kharn and the reason for which Balzan’s people have been enslaved – the royal couple put on monthly arena games, and the rabble want to see fresh blood spilled.

Myrane seems to have stepped out of a Richard Blade novel; she’s a raven-haired beauty with an insatiable drive for sex and bloodshed, usually at the same time. She’s also an immortal beauty, ageless, which is another hallmark of that earlier (and superior) series. But when Balzan, captured at this point and training to become a yarrotite (ie gladiator), is taken as expected into the ravenous queen’s presence, he does something Richard Blade would never do: he spurns her advances. (Indeed the closest we get to adult stuff in the novel is a fade-to-black sex scene between Lord Sha and Myrane.)

Through the dense plotting and scene-setting Conway does deliver several fights, usually featuring Balzan taking down hordes of opponents, including one memorable scene where he fights a three-headed creature called a huulat. He’s busting his ass to save Kitta, and unfortunately, when we finally meet the girl, we wonder why the dude even bothers. Kitta as presented is such a cipher, so clueless and, well, stupid, that you have a hard time understanding why Balzan puts himself through the wringer for her. At first I wondered if Conway was developing a romance between the “brother and sister,” but nope – as mentioned, Balzan is as generic as can be. He’s saving Kitta because she must be saved, and that’s that.

Unfortunately we also get many sequences from Kitta’s point of view (Conway is damn excellent in how he never POV-hops…and when he does change perspectives, he actually gives us some white space!), and she does nothing to gain our interest or empathy. She’s eternally confused, frightened, or docile, and the only bright spot comes when she falls into the clutches of two sadistic members of Sha’s harem, each of whom bear her ill will due to jealousy. Kitta’s strapped to a table and tortured, but Conway leaves it all vague; despite which, you still could give a shit about her.

After a fight to the death with yarrotite trainer Kalak, hired by Sha to dispose of Balzan (due to Sha’s jealousy that Queen Myrane has the hots for Balzan), our hero is again summoned to Queen Myrane…and again turns down her sexual advances. (I honestly wanted the book to end with Balzan going back to his crashed spaceship and asking it, “Teacher, am I gay?”) Instead Balzan wants to know about “the blood stones,” which he’s heard vague mention of since this whole business started; they turn out to be ancient stones which, Myrane declares, needs the blood of the pure to keep giving out their power. Through the stones Myrane has gained control of Kharn, as well as another kingdom centuries before.

The finale is appropriately apocalyptic if overlong, with Balzan taking on a hairy demon that lives in the pool of blood in which the blood stones reside and then smashing the stones, which causes the immediate “implosion” of Kharn itself. But despite the chaos and confusion Balzan still finds the time to kill more Kharnite soldiers, another huulat, and even Lord Sha himself. By the time it’s all over you’re ready for a nap. Balzan meanwhile sees Kitta to safety, shakes Lio’s hand, and says “so long;” he’s going on a journey to find out what it means to be a “man.”

Two more volumes were to follow, both apparently also by Conway. I’ve got them both and will read the second one eventually, but long story short, The Blood Stones, while not terrible, is really just standard science-fantasy fare of the era, and the entire thing would’ve been more at home in the pages of Marvel Premiere.

Fun City

Fun City, by Hugh Barron
August, 1968  Pyramid Books

Burt Hirschfeld poses as “Hugh Barron” in another of his paperback originals for Pyramid Books; this one, while not perfect, might be my favorite Barron yet. I was in the mood for a piece of trash fiction set in the swinging psychedelic ‘60s, and for the most part Fun City fit the bill perfectly. Unfortunately though just as much of it is inconsequential “city politics” boredom that seems lifted from the earlier Tilt!.

In fact, parts of Fun City are almost identical to Tilt!, though I enjoyed this book a lot more. While Tilt! started off promisingly in the acid rock clubs of California before becoming mired in a belabored “evils of politics” storyline, Fun City at least still remembers to give us the good stuff, with many scenes featuring the ‘60s jetset in all its vapid glory. Hirschfeld well captures the over-the-top pretensions of the era, from arrogantly serious “artists” to would-be fashion kingpins. And I love how the back cover informs us that this “caustic novel” is “as vivid as an LSD trip”!

Our hero is Eddie Watson, a very traditional Hirschfeld protagonist. He’s a bitter, 38-year-old alchoholic who was once a trailblazing journalist. But then his paper folded and Eddie spiralled into a period of drunkeness. He’s got an on-again, off-again girlfriend named Molly Purdy who is of course pretty and well-endowed (practically every single woman in Fun City is stated as having big boobs, by the way). But Molly, who works as a reporter herself, has finally gotten sick of Eddie’s uselessness. She loves him and pines for him, but he refuses to see his potential and wallows instead in self-pity. That being said, she doesn’t mind throwing him a free lay every once in a while. 

Speaking of sex, there’s a bit of it in Fun City, from orgies to romantic couplings to even gay sex, but Hirschfeld is in his lyrical mode this time. The sex scenes are written almost identically to the Hirschfeld-esque sex material Dean Koontz capably spoofed in Writing Popular Fiction. For example, here’s what passes for a sex scene later in the book, as Eddie engages with another lovely young lady who pines for him:

All the swelling desire. The pendulous need from out of some foreign and mysterious place, a call that drew them together in a tidal wave natural and harmonious, all rhythms easy, swinging. Time ceased and there was only the twilight of loving, the stroke of flesh against flesh, of membranes softer than soft, the wetness deep and sensuous, drawing endlessly on reservoirs so long untapped…

All right! I’m not sure what exactly is going on, but it sure sounds hot!!

Through Molly Eddie is brought into the world of New York politics. Eddie is fascinated by Charles Harrison, an altruistic millionaire known for his charities and acts of good will around the world. Harrison’s having a party in his deluxe Manhattan penthouse and Molly’s invited. There Eddie meets the man himself, a graying-haired paragon of manly virtue who likes Eddie’s cynicism and indeed is familiar with Eddie’s work for the paper. Harrison tells Eddie that he loves New York and plans to run for Mayor. He offers Eddie the job of becoming his campaign manager.

Meanwhile Hirschfeld takes us into the swinging jetset via Lilly Harrison, hot-to-trot young wife of Charles. She has a body to kill for and enjoys showing it off with the latest mod fashions. She’s vivacious and obsessed with being famous and comes off way too much like a vapid, modern-day Reality TV star. Eddie wonders why Charles is even with her, but gradually we’ll see there’s a strange bond which unites the couple. For Charles Harrison, you won’t be surprised at all to learn, has several skeletons in his own closet, from switch-hitting to group sex, not to mention ties to various underworld figures. This is revealed rather early on, but our hero Eddie doesn’t discover it until near novel’s end.

Lilly, apparently Hirschfeld’s attempt at writing a Jacqueline Susann-type antiheroine, is ultimately too listlessly self-involved to be very memorable; not to use the word yet again, but “vapid” is the perfect description for her. She yearns to be world-famous, but she’s such a cipher that you neither care for her nor despise her. She lacks the catty cruelty you’d expect from a character like this. Rather, the character who more closely captures this antiheroine nature would be Hester Quinn, basically the Eddie to Lilly’s Charles, a “birdlike” celebrity hanger-on who knows all the hip people in Manhattan and serves as Lilly’s adviser on how to become a mover and shaker in the jetset world. This includes wearing revealing clothes and having sex with random famous men.

Center stage in these jetset portions is Marcello, Hester’s Italian “discovery” who plans to take the fashion world by storm. Flamingly gay, Marcello storms and struts through the novel, stealing every scene despite being a walking cliché. (He’s also, we eventually learn, really just a dude named Victor Mellulo, from Wheeling, West Virginia!) Hirschfeld provides several scenes in which the jetset cavort at the latest Marcello happening, from an art exhibit to a fashion show to a Warhol-esque porn film he’s directed – one which leads to an orgy among the audience. Molly, bringing to mind the heroine of a later Hirschfeld novel, literally runs away from this orgy.

And that again is the problem with Fun City. Hirschfeld seeks to capture the “psychedelic salons and beauty-bugged bedrooms” of the “swinging, go-go world of New York City” (per the back cover copy), but he sabotages it with his cynical characters. Eddie hates this world of artifice, Molly distrusts it. And those who do live in it, like Lilly, Marcello, and Hester, are so cipher-like in their narcissim that the reader is unable to vicariously enjoy it through them. The “acid-rock” nightclubs and mod fashion happenings are capably brought to life, as are the mostly-nude, sexually-voracious gals who flock to this underworld in their “psychedelic blue” lipstick, but it’s all undermined by protagonists who yearn for the straight-laced world of yesteryear.

This was the same thing that bogged down Tilt!, by the way, as well as the “politics” material. In Fun City as well we read seemingly-endless sequences in which Charles Harrison will filibuster this or that New York bigwig. Not only is it rendered moot given that these are one-off characters he meets with, but his speechifying about how to make New York great again comes off as so much padding. Clearly this is Hirschfeld’s attempt at eventually pulling the rug out from under us, as Charles is later revealed to be just as “sick” as his wife Lilly; in the course of the novel he cruises a gay area and picks up some dude (later beating him in his shame), then later on he picks up a pair of young girls and takes them back to their place for some nondescript lovin’.

But Hirschfeld does bring to life psychedelic New York City. There’s an enjoyable part where Eddie sees Lilly go off with some new stud and rushes after her, drafting Hester to lead him to her, Marcello tagging along. They go to the Lower East Side, first stopping in the headshop of The Czar, then head on over to a hippie “crash pad” where legions of teenagers have sex on the scuzzy, garbage-strewn floors. Hirschfeld really goes for it in this scene, which culminates with Eddie finding Lilly in an LSD daze, meditating in the lotus position while her latest stud, a playboy named Tolan, whips some other girl who has displeased him.

We also get a lot of Hirschfeld’s typical soap opera-style melodrama: Molly as mentioned constantly spurns Eddie, only to later welcome him back to her apartment with open legs. And Eddie promises to quit the booze and devote himself to both her and Harrison’s campaign. Instead he blows off dates with Molly and gets drunk a bunch of times. After the latest Molly breakup Eddie happens to meet a young social worker named Sarah Jane Parker (yep, she’s busty too!). In a complete disregard for character depth, Hirschfeld has this gal openly throwing herself at Eddie soon after meeting him, offering to make him a meal in her apartment.

Eddie I forgot to mention is an annoying asshole. He eats the meal, has a drink, and tells the girl she’s practically a slut! She’s only in her twenties and he feels she should straighten up and stop bringing strange men back to her place. He leaves without even taking her up on her open offer for sex…then “coincidentally” meets her again during a too-long scene where Harrison filibusts at a school in Harlem. In the ensuing riot (started by Black Panthers), Eddie runs into Sarah again. The two eventually become an item (the “sex scene” above is between Eddie and Sarah), but Molly is still on the sidelines. She’s found out how corrupt Harrison is – he’s almost penniless and indebted to the mob, who funds his campaign – and Molly intends to tap into wealth via Eddie.

The finale of Fun City plays out on an unexpected sequence of turnarounds; Eddie, hearing the truth of Harrison’s underworld activities, hunts the man down in a gay bar. For his troubles Eddie is almost beaten to death by a gang of gay stooges at Harrison’s command(!). Eddie manages to escape them, stealing the gun of one and shooting him before escaping. But he finds no salvation in Molly; when Eddie refuses to play ball and go back to Harrison – Molly wants Eddie to keep working for the man so they can strike it rich when he wins the election – she grabs Eddie’s gun, puts it on him, and calls Harrison to come get him!

After yet another escape Eddie finds true salvation with Sarah, still treating her like shit as he eats breakfast with her, his pistol at hand. The final face-to-face with Harrison isn’t exciting at all, playing more on a suspense angle than the Sharpshooter capoff I wanted. Eddie has gotten hold of some photos of Lilly in compromising positions, and uses these as blackmail to get Harrison to call of his dogs and to drop out of the race. After which it’s back to Sarah, who tells Eddie they should leave the city together. And Eddie has finally gotten an idea for a novel; he’s going to write about these very events, which will make for a surefire bestseller(!?).

Hirschfeld’s writing has the same positives and negatives as ever. He keeps the story moving, brings us into this world, and makes us care for the characters. But at the same time the plot is a bit plodding and the politicking becomes grating. Also Hirschfeld’s affected style is firmly in place – you know, how he takes a sentence, expands upon it greatly, going on and on with it, getting to the heart of it, the core, working it up into a theme, a construction of depth and meaning. Polishing it. Elaborating it. Hammering it out, over and over again, endlessly, infinitely. Until the reader. Cannot take it. Anymore. (You get the drift….)

The core of later Hirschfeld novels can be found here; the entire “psychedelic hippie hell” section in the Lower East Side for example would return in Father Pig, where Hirschfeld made it seem even more hellish. And as mentioned there are many paralells with Cindy On Fire. One thing missing this time is the Hollywood starlet character ususally typical of the “Hugh Barron” books.

Anyway, despite the affected style and the sometimes-plodding pace, Fun City is really vintage Burt Hirschfeld, and did the job of providing the piece of go-go ‘60s pulp fiction I was hoping for.

Here’s the cover of the NEL edition:

And here’s the cover of the Dell edition from 1984, published under Hirschfeld’s name (interestingly, the back cover copy of this one spins it as a hardboiled yarn):

John Eagle Expeditor #12: The Green Goddess

John Eagle Expeditor #12: The Green Goddess, by Paul Edwards
August, 1975  Pyramid Books

After a two-year absence, Manning Lee Stokes returns to the John Eagle Expeditor series with his first contribution since the awesomely lurid #5: Valley Of Vultures. Stokes continues the sort of series reset of the previous volume (which attempted to fashion the books more as straight spy stories), only occasionally featuring the exotic adventure fiction of the earlier volumes. And while it does achieve some pulpy, lurid heights, be warned that, like much of Stokes’s work, The Green Goddess takes its time to get going.

Stokes was 64 when The Green Goddess was published (and would die just five months later, unfortunately), and it’s impressive how this guy was in accord with the changing, more permissive times. What I mean to say is, the dude enjoyed his sleaze. Stokes injects a healthy portion of sleaze into the novel, from Eagle making a fake obscene phone call (where he delivers the immortal line, “We’re gonna crack our nuts over the phone”) to Eagle watching as a dead girl is raped…twice. And while previous volumes, including the non-Stokes volumes, have all had very lurid vibes, rarely if ever did anyone curse; Stokes takes care of that within the first few pages, doling out a barrage of F-bombs and other such filthy language that almost made me put down the book and pray.

First though the back cover copy, which is so bonkers I just had to share it with you. Whoever wrote this (perhaps series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel himself?) clearly had no idea what the overriding plot of The Green Goddess was, so just went for it with vague, lurid hypberbole:

And I have to say, The Green Goddess really is all over the place for the first 50-some pages (of typically small, small print – our man Stokes does not shirk on his word count). Starting off with a plane crash in Boston (and boy was I sure happy to read that right before taking a flight myself), the novel throws the reader in with no idea of what’s going on and who is doing what. We learn that a State Department courier named Christian Pangborn was on that flight, and that he had some sort of attache case that was spirited away from the scene. But by whom? And what exactly was in the case? 

A dude named Fred Talbert, Mr. Merlin’s man in Washington, DC, is on the case. We get a lot of padding material about this, with Stokes getting more experimental in his latter days with various fonts and even letters written in triplicate as various characters read letters and briefs. Pangborn was being watched by various people, among them two KGB agents working as free-lancers in the US: Boris Chebotarev and Zoya Tchekov. Stokes speends a goodly portion of the novel cutting over to these two guys as they get in long, long discussions, and it’s all very similar to the page-filling, inconsequential discussions of Admiral Coffin and the head of the Navy in Stokes’s earlier Aquanauts series.

Pangborn was having an affair with a young schoolteacher named Doris Morrisan who lives in Vermont. Here is where our hero John Eagle finally enters the scene; per the tradition of the earliest installments, Eagle doesn’t appear until well into the book. He’s called in by Mr. Merlin (who himself is given a rather cursory introduction, rather than the usual belabored affair of him looking down for many pages into the gaping maw of the Hawaiian volcano which his mountaintop aerie overlooks), who instructs Eagle’s contact Samson (a recurring character) to order Eagle up to Vermont to watch Doris Morrisan and determine if anyone else is watching her – the vague concern is that Pangborn might’ve spilled some intel to her, or something.

Eagle is as taciturn and all-business as ever in Stokes’s hands. We learn here that he’s been serving Mr. Merlin for three years, with two years left to go until his contract is fulfilled and he’s awarded a million dollars (up from the original payment as stated in the first volume, which was also written by Stokes). (Another intesterting tidbit is the revelation this time that there are other Expeditors, though Eagle is the first and best, of course.)  One return to the previous volume (and also Valley Of Vultures, now that I think of it) is that Eagle goes off without his customary gadgets and weapons. He calls Doris Morrisan upon his arrival in the “village” of Montrose, Vermont, and quickly deduces someone is there in the house with her – someone the young lady is terrified of.

As mentioned, Eagle for no reason other than Stokes’s penchant for sleaze subjects the girl to an obscene phone call; in the few seconds before he heard another extension on her line picked up, he told the girl he was “a friend.” His goal is to see how long he can draw out the other person, or something. All that really matters is that Stokes treats us to a few pages of a dirty-talking John Eagle, which in itself is pretty fun. But it’s all got a downer ending, for when Eagle sneaks to the lady’s place he finds her, as mentioned, lying nude on her bed, her neck broken, while a big stooge rapes her corpse.

Eagle is however as savage as ever; he ambushes the dude, who turns out to be a Commie sleeper agent born in Boston, beats him to a pulp, and gooses him with the dude’s own .357 Magnum. Then he takes him to the woods, ties him to a tree – the dude now a blubbering baby, devastated over the fact that someone caught him in the act of necrophilia(?!) – and proceeds to slice off his toes!! Once the dude has given up all he knows, namely that someone in Russia (we later learn it was Boris) ordered Doris’s death, Eagle slices his throat and then chastizes himself for “failing” this particular mission. He was supposed to meet Doris and hopefully have sex with her (seriously, this is the mission Samson tasked him with), but instead he found her dead.

Meanwhile we get a bit more information on what the hell is going on. It turns out Boris and Tchekov are plotting against the Soviet government, hoping to take over the entire regime. Their angle is a precious mineral recently discovered by a Soviet geologist in Afghanistan, which at this time was still on peaceable terms with the USSR. The mineral, named Kolymanite after its discoverer, is described in scientific briefs (printed in triplicate) as a “catalytic converter,” and when exposed to other metals and water it produces continuous electricity. As just one example of this incredible potential, were it to be mixed in with the hull of a nuclear sub, the sub would be powered for at least a year by just the Kolymanite and the seawater.

All of which provides the long leadup to John Eagle finally venturing over to the desert wilds of Afghanistan, a place which here in 1975 still has the mystical splendor of Arabian Nights and hasn’t descended into the ISIS hell of today. Eagle, who can apparently speak a few Arabic dialects, poses as a desert warrior in robes and veil, his plastic suit worn beneath, and rides a trusty camel over the desert wasteland in pursuit of some mysterious Russians (ie Boris and Tchekov) that Mr. Merlin has told him to contact. He ends up in the rugged expanse of the Hindu Kush, and the adventure fiction is very heavy and very reminiscent of #4: The Fist Of Fatima, which was written by Robert Lory.

Most of the middle portion of the text is just Eagle roughing it in the desert, his faithful and annoying servant in tow. This is Jinn, a prepubescent and cross-eyed waif who grew up in a whorehouse and rides around on a diseased camel. Stokes builds up such a “cute” rapport between the two, with Eagle as usual stoic and bossy and Jinn almost slavish in his cross-eyed devotion, that you can practically see Jinn’s fate coming from five miles away. And you won’t be disappointed. But anyway it just keeps going on and on, and you wonder if it will ever end, much like this review.

It seems to me that by this point in his life Stokes was more interested in the plotting and scheming of older characters than in any sort of heroic action fiction; he seems to get more enjoyment out of the ultimately-pointless digressions with Boris and Tchekov, not to mention lots of scenes of Merlin sitting overtop his volcano and talking to loyal secretary Polly Perkins. Eagle doesn’t do much of anything throughout, fires his trusty “gas pistol” but once, and doesn’t even wear his full plastic suit; this is a first in the series. Eagle merely wears it beneath his robes, but this is the first time in the series where Eagle doesn’t at some point pull on the mask as well.

Jinn tells Eagle of the mysterious Lala Khatun, “the green goddess,” who rules an army of multinational brigands in the remote Valley of Arjuna. The Lala Khatun line extends back a thousand years, from mother to daughter; “Shades of Rider Haggard,” Eagle thinks to himself. But we learn that Merlin hooked up with the 1916 edition of Lala Khatun, and indeed even has a photo of the lady locked up in his desk. Realizing Eagle is in the general location of Arjuna, Merlin sends out a radio message to her…and friends, given the usual all-padding writing method of Manning Lee Stokes, the titular “green goddess” (as Merlin refers to Lala Khatun) doesn’t even appear until page 156. 

Unfortunately, she isn’t really green; I had hopes for one of those Orion Slave Girls out of Star Trek. The “green” refers to the Earth and to fertility, as the Lala Khatun has sex with tons of men, getting pregnant again and again, the male babies exposed and left to die and only one female baby chosen to become the next green woman. The line suffers from Mayfly Syndrome, and the green women all die before 30. You won’t be surprised to learn that both Merlin and Eagle meet their respective green women before they’ve had any children, of course. I can’t imagine a woman that’s had child after child after child would be up to the high “hot chick in a pulp action novel” standards.

The novel’s sole action scene has Eagle, Boris, Tchekov, and Jinn defending themselves from bandits in a desert fortress. Eagle uses a .45 and a submachine gun for once. The pulpy gadget trappings of previous books is long gone; even later in the book, when Eagle pulls on his plastic suit (sans mask) and runs around a dark cemetery, Stokes goes on and on about Eagle worrying if he will be seen, as if Stokes has completely forgotten that Eagle’s suit has a chameleon unit which allows him to blend into his surroundings. But after this action scene we’re finally taken to the homestretch, as well as the appearance of the green goddess.

Who will be surprised when, upon her first meeting with Eagle, who has been bathed and separated from the others in posh accomodations, Lala Khatun announces her intention to screw Eagle silly? This current green woman is only nineteen but looks younger, with the body of a young girl – Stokes caters to the creepier ‘70s trend of having his hero screw a veritable teenager, something Eagle already did in a previous installment. After performing literal phallic worship upon Eagle, Lala Khatun gives herself to our hero, and Stokes as usual treads the line between metaphorical stuff and outright sleaze.

But man…forget about any thrilling conclusion. All plot threads clumsily come together and the denoument sees Boris and Tchekov escaping and Eagle trying to find them; poor Jinn is machine gunned down by accident. Eagle takes out the henchman of Lala Khatun’s sadistic top soldier – this top soldier, Major Akbar (not to be confused with Admiral Akbar), hates Eagle due to jealousy – and that’s that. There’s no resolution with the green woman and there isn’t even any resolution to Major Akbar’s animosity; I thought Eagle would at least break the guy’s neck, but Stokes flash-forwards a few weeks to Merlin’s HQ in Hawaii, where Tchekov is now staying.

The novel continues on its suspense/espionage vibe to the bitter end, with long backstory on the fact that Boris was really Merlin’s anonymous mole within the KGB, but he was secretly found out and Tchekov was put on his trail, in the hopes of discovering whoever was behind these would-be moles. Tchekov’s mission, you see, was to penetrate the headquarters of the mysterious “Merlin” and report back to the USSR. Stokes almost had me thinking that he was building a recurring plot here, with future volumes featuring Tchekov sneaking around Merlin’s place and snapping photos, but instead Samson shows up at Tchekov’s bed one night and blows him away with a .45. Finally, the end. 

Stokes tells the tale with his usual measured pacing; be prepared for a lot of padding via go-nowhere conversations among minor characters and lots and lots of narrative water-treading. But as I’ve said in like every review of a Stokes novel I’ve ever written, I enjoy the guy’s style nonetheless. An interesting note, back on the topic of Stokes’s age at the time, not to mention his impending fate, is the melancholy vibe of The Green Goddess, of time nearing its end. Merlin often relfects how “very old” he is, how he doesn’t have much time left. Even John Eagle, an assassin for hire, is prone to concern over the death of a loved one; Stokes makes a passing, vague mention of a “tumor in the left breast” of Eagle’s foster mother, White Deer.

And this is just the two main characters; a sort of foreboding and preoccupation with death runs throughout The Green Goddess. Given that Stokes’s next installment, Silverskull, was likely the last novel he ever wrote (and was also the last volume of the series itself), we’ll see if the theme continues.

Scorpio

Scorpio, by Steve Lawson
July, 1975  Pyramid Books

Scorpio is society’s speedballing revenge on an age of outrages, a lethal era when our world, rigid with fear, is engorged with blood. He is the first shot in an assassination of the unspeakable…

              -- from the hyperbolic back cover

Yet another obscure crime fiction paperback copyright book producer Lyle Kenyon Engel, Scorpio was the first and only appearance of its titiluar protagonist, Lt. Edd Scorpio, a Los Angeles-based homicide/narcotics cop very much in the Bullitt mode. According to Hawk’s Authors’ Psuedonyms, “Steve Lawson” was in reality Robert H. Turner.

This is one of those instances in which Engel clearly had a different story in mind than what his author delivered. The cover art and back cover copy make Scorpio sound like a blitzkrieg of violence and cop thrills, but Turner instead turns in a sloooow-moving tale that becomes almost an endurance test to read. The book’s only 190 pages, with the typical small print of almost all Engel productions, but it reads like it’s around 300 pages due to the glacier pace. Not to mention Turner’s fussy, convoluted writing style.

Turner was the last editor on the Spider magazine and reportedly rewrote the vast majority of longtime writer Norvell Page’s final manuscripts; in his 1970 autobiography Some Of My Best Friends Are Writers But I Wouldn’t Want My Daughter To Marry One, Turner supposedly dismisses Page’s writing as “typical pulp stuff” without merit. (I’m sure I read this in Robert Sampson’s Spider, but having recently gotten Turner’s autobio via InterLibrary Loan, I couldn’t find the quote anywhere in the book...the dude didn’t even include an index!)  The irony here is that Page’s writing, judging from the Spider novels I’ve read, is leaps and bounds above Turner’s. Honestly, if it wasn’t for Hawk’s Pseudonyms I would’ve sworn Scorpio was written by William Crawford. It reads almost exactly like his work, with the forward momentum constantly stalled by pointless digressions and diversions.

Anyway, Scorpio is in his early 40s and now works almost in a freelance fashion, a specialist who helps out the LAPD on tough cases. He drives a ’68 Jag that has a phone in it and even has his own secretary, a black lady who talks in ‘50s slang. He carries a Cobra .38 revolver and has curly black hair, and you might as well just go ahead and envision ‘70s-era Elliott Gould in the movie that plays in your mind. In backstory that isn’t delivered until midway through, we learn that Scorpio was an orphan, left as a baby outside of a oprhanage with the name “Edd” (sp) on a note on his blankets. A government employee, heavy into astrology, calcuated that the baby must’ve been born under the sign of Scorpio, so that became Edd’s last name.

Scorpio has an ex-wife and two teenaged kids. He has a casual sex thing going with a half-Japanese gal his age named Mugsie; in one of the novel’s many, many backstories we learn that Mugsie is a widow, her husband killed in a freak train wreck. Scorpio’s got friends all over the place, in particular a retired pro football player turned private eye named Al Poularis. This guy is working on a case for wealthy socialite Madeline Stewart-Brooke, whose suicide opens the novel; ravaged by her heroin addiction, the lady has blown her brains out, leaving a note that she hopes her seventeen year-old daughter won’t fall pray to the same troubles.

Only, we quickly learn that the daughter is also dead, of a heroin OD. This turns out to be the real cause of Madeline Stewart-Brooke’s death; the gunshot to the head was delivered by her heroin contact, who showed up to discover the famous woman dead and panicked, hoping to distract the cops into thinking she’d shot herself. Later the heroin contact too will be rubbed out, with more and more underworld lowlifes meeting violent ends. And all of them knew Stewart-Brooke or her daughter, and all of them are dying before they can talk to Edd Scorpio, who is now actively working the case.

Here’s the thing about Scorpio: it reads a lot like a private eye novel. You almost wonder why Al Poularis wasn’t the main protagonist. As for Scorpio himself, what with his car phone and his black secretary and the way he works solo, it’s almost like you’re reading a Mannix novelization. There’s no cop stuff like you’d expect, with random shootouts or car chases; rather, Scorpio just gets on the Stewart-Brooke case and chases leads, leads which ultimately lead him to a blackmailing scheme – again, all of it just like something you’d read in a private eye novel.

Something you do have to admire about these ‘70s crime novels is how lurid they can be, with incidental details that just drip with sleaze. Like the heroin supplier who likes to have sex with heavyset women who have mannish features, or the motel owner who jerks off over the nude corpse of a young woman…! Turner co-wrote three of the Mafia: Operation books for Lyle Kenyon Engel, each of them brimming with sleaze; he brings a bit of that here, but having read Scorpio I’d have to guess Turner’s cowriter on those books, Allan Nixon, was the one who must’ve been responsible for the good stuff.

Because honestly, Scorpio just sort of drags on and on. And like the Narc or Headhunters books, Scorpio is yet another cop protagonist who comes off like a minor character in his own novel; most of the text is given over to the sundry lowlifes who peddle heroin in LA, in particular the leader of the pack, a black-Hispanic named Jesus Martinez. A muscle-bound lothario with yellow eyes, Martinez is as cold-blooded as you can get. It gradually develops that he boffed both Madeline Stewart-Brooke and her teenaged daughter, having it all secretly photographed so he could later blackmail them.

Martinez did this for a big cash payoff, which he intends to use to buy in on the Mafia’s heroin business, promoting himself as like a district supervisor or somesuch. Meanwhile Scorpio just goes round and round, asking questions, reflecting on past cases. He doesn’t even pull his gun until the climax of the book, and even then he doesn’t kill anyone. Turner delivers a few sex scenes here and there, to make up I guess for the paucity of action, but even these lack the outrageous lurid quotient of his Mafia: Operation work. In truth, the whole thing’s just sort of listless.

As mentioned, the actual “A plot” only comes and goes, with Turner constantly stalling the momentum with digressions and detours. Anytime a character is introduced, no matter how minor he or she might be, we’ll get a few pages of background history about them. Again, exactly like you’d read in one of William Crawford’s books. But periodically Turner will return to the main plot, like when Scorpio’s footballer-turned-P.I. buddy Poularis is almost beaten to death, and later when Scorpio, right after having a face-to-face meeting with Martinez, loses his Jag to a carbomb, which instead blows up the mechanic who was trying to fix the car for him. 

Like a later listless cop novel, Hellfire, Scorpio emerges from its doldrums in the final stretch with a Hollywood-escque climax. Martinez, on the run, tracks down Inez, a gorgeous young woman who sings at his nightclub, and abducts her, the lovely lady having offered to blab about her boss’s nefarious doings. But Inez is staying with Mugsie, Scorpio’s gal. This makes the reader expect something bad is going to happen to Mugsie, but Martinez just knocks her out and runs away – strange, given how ruthless the guy’s been presented to us, killing off scads of people and even, in another backstory, a female narc, raping her and then murdering her before she climaxes.

Martinez absconds to the Lower East Side home in which he was born and there rapes Inez, discovering after the fact that the lady was a virgin. But then Martinez goes nuts; due to a childhood injury he got while skateboarding(?!), he periodically suffers migraines and blackouts, usually coming out of them in an altered mental state. So in the final pages he goes into this childlike mentality and is about to paint up Inez’s face, when Scorpio shows up; cue a bareknuckle brawl between the two, with Scorpio quickly losing his gun and having to resort to his fists and feet to bring the bigger man down.

And Scorpio’s a by-the-rules cop; instead of blowing the scumbag away, like the reader would want, he instead cuffs him and calls in the precinct. (Luckily Martinez does us the favor of doing away with himself.) The case successfully closed, Scorpio is presented with a replacement ’68 Jag, bought for him by Mugsie, Inez, Poularis, and even his eternally pissed-off chief, who just got back from vacation.

This gives the impression that our hero is being set up for more adventures in another installment, but this was not to be, and whether by accident or design this was the one and only apparance of Lt. Edd Scorpio. So I guess he must’ve successfully assassinated the unspeakable.

Dark Angel #1: The Dream Girl Caper

Dark Angel #1: The Dream Girl Caper, by James D. Lawrence
January, 1975  Pyramid Books

The Dark Angel series starts off on strong footing with a fun trip back to the sleazy ‘70s, James D. Lawrence capturing the fun and goofy vibe of a Blaxploitation movie. This series could be loglined as “Pam Grier in Banacek,” and our capable heroine, Angela “Angie” Harpe, comes off as more memorable and likable than The Baroness and Cherry Delight combined.

And friends you know you’re in for a sleazy good time when, within a few pages of her introduction, Angie’s already doing a strip-tease to a Tina Turner song (on her state-of-the-art quadraphonic sound system, naturally), all for the benefit of some dude she just met. The dude claims to be a reporter for Manhattan Magazine, and after relaying her convoluted backstory (from ghetto poverty to highly-paid insurance investigator, with tenures as a cop, fashion model, hooker, and Radcliffe student along the way), Angie’s already shucking her clothes and allowing the dude to give her a little oral pleasure.

But this is just our heroine’s gambit to distract the man, whom she knows to be an imposter. Angie you see is “the Dark Angel,” as she’s known to the criminal underworld, a tireless pursuer of justice; her trademark sign is very reminiscent of the seal of the Spider: an image of a harp-playing angel which she stamps on the foreheads of her victims (whom she does not kill, as opposed to the Spider). Apparently Angie’s Dark Angel activities have only recently gotten off the ground; as The Dream Girl Caper opens, her legend in the underworld has only just begun to grow to the point where it’s reached the awareness of the mainstream press.

And like an old pulp hero, Angie’s double life is kept secret, so that though the crooks (and the cops) know the Dark Angel is supposedly a beautiful black chick, they don’t know who she is. All of this really does give the series a bit of a “pulp hero for the ‘70s” feel, only with more of a lurid and sleazy overlay. That being said, Angie is not as bloodthirsty as other female protagonists in the world of men’s adventure books; whereas the Baroness kills with nonchalance, Angie is more prone to use her karate and judo skills to just knock someone out and then tie them up.

Anyway, the faux-reporter turns out to be a private eye himself, one from Chicago who was hired to get the scoop on Angie for some unspecified reasons. Angie sends him away (after pissing on his hand…?!) and later finds out that this dude, Tony Troy, recently pulled the same “reporter” stunt on Quentin Wise, millionaire owner of Colt’s Cigarettes. Wise’s company is running an incredibly convoluted treasure hunt/sweepstakes in which one lucky winner will win three million dollars. We get more detail on this from the many scenes featuring Garth Trent, the head adman working on Wise’s contest, and the only other person besides Wise who knows where the three million bucks will be hidden.

Garth’s wife Vale turns out to be the titular “dream girl.” A hotstuff blonde who keeps having nightmares which seem to predict things that happen in reality, Vale’s most recent dream concerns a car crashing on some desolate road. After a bit of nodescript banging (Lawrence’s sex scenes only go on for a few sentences, by the way, as compared to the paragraphs of purple prose in The Baroness), Garth ventures out into the night – only to see a car speed by and crash along the desolate road near their New Jersey home. But what comes off as even more puzzling is when Garth finds a newspaper clipping in Vale’s purse, a clipping which announces the sale of Mingo Island, off the Jersey coast.

This is puzzling because Mingo Island is where the three million dollar prize money is going to be stashed, but only Garth and Quentin Wise know this. So why does Vale have a newspaper clipping about it in her purse, and why has she never mentioned it to Garth? Suspecting something’s up, Garth hires Angie Darke, whom he’s read about in the paper. There’s instant chemistry between the two, but then Angie has instant chemistry with every guy in the novel – it’s hilarious in a way that The Dream Girl Caper is almost designed to infuriate Women’s Libbers, as Angie’s endowments are constantly being checked out and commented on by every single man she meets – and we’re informed how she gets off on it.

Vale has weekly sessions with a psychiatrist named Dr. Bruno Baxt, and Angie makes his office the first place to check out in her investigation. Here Lawrence excels in another sleazy setpiece as the gnomish Baxt hypnotizes an undercover Angie, has her strip – and then begins jerking himself off as he fingers her! And to continue with the whole exploitation vibe that our author captures so nicely, we learn that Angie in’t hypnotized at all, and has just been going along with the good doctor’s finger-based assault because she’s been enjoying it! Eventually Angie discovers that Baxt has a cathouse hidden within his office suite, with his good-looking female patients whoring themselves out to various bigwigs.

Vale Trent turns out to be one of the doctor’s top gals, though she only has two customers – Quentin Wise himself, and someone only listed as “X” in Baxt’s otherwise-comprehensive black book. At first I thought Lawrence was going to go for a mind control sort of thing, with these “whores” really being patients suffering from Baxt’s hypnosis, turned into virtual MK-Ultra style hookers. But unfortunately that doesn’t turn out to be the case; we eventually learn that Vale is a willing participant in the cathouse scheme, which renders the whole “let’s hypnotize Angie” scenario kind of puzzling. But that’s missing the point, I guess.

More digging will uncover the fact that “X” is a notorious Mafia hitman. Angie also has to break it to Garth that his wife is not only a prostitute but that he’s a double cuckhold. This of course gives Angie and Garth the opportunity to go at it themselves; Angie as usual comes on strong to the guy, calling his office and identifying herself to his secretary as “his black panthress.” Interesting to note, as in the second volume, that Angie only has sex with white men. No doubt this is to cater to what I assume was the overwhelming white readership of men’s adventure fiction, but it’s still interesting in a way – we’re told she’s had a colorful history, so to speak, but so far as the Dark Angel series itself is concerned, Angie Harpe only digs white meat.

Lawrence doesn’t dole out much action in The Dream Girl Caper, unlike the second volume, which was peppered with the occasional fight and torture sequence. There are also many moments where Angie and Garth will hide and watch as other characters do things. This plays out especially in a bit where we learn how cold Vale Trent really is: telling Garth she’s going to spend the weekend in the woods of Pennsylvannia with an old college girlfriend, who has a cabin out there, Vale later calls him in a panic saying she’s had another nightmare, that someone’s going to kill her here in the cabin. Would Garth please come over and scope out the place in the middle of the night?

Angie’s already on the scene, having bugged the cabin. When Garth shows, the two crouch in the woods and listen as Vale vigorously screws Quentin Wise in the cabin – the story about the old college friend being a bunch of crap, of course. Then someone shows up outside the cabin, and Vale demands that Quentin take this “starter pistol” out there and scare him away, insisting that he aim the gun at the dude and pull the trigger. Quentin does as ordered, only to discover too late that it’s a real gun and he just killed someone – and also that the whole thing was just photographed by “X” himself, Mafia hitman Vinny Reggio, who was hiding in the bushes. But here’s the thing: the guy Quentin just murdered, who turns out to be Tony Troy, was supposed to be Garth!

In other words, Garth’s own wife just set him up for his death. So Garth does what any other shocked husband would do…he goes back with Angie to her motel room and screws the hell out of her. Our heroine meanwhile has figured out what’s going on – Vale and Vinny are plotting to heist the three million, which they plan to do by making a blackmailed Quentin Wise replace the real loot with a bunch of counterfeit. Angie’s plan is to heist the heisters, and Garth gamely agrees. The final quarter of the novel is more of a sequence of turnarounds and reveals rather than a slam-bang action sort of thing.

Outfitted in black jump suits and masks with “plastic eyelets” (which of course reminded my geek senses of the similar “plastic suit” of another Lyle Kenyon Engel production, the John Eagle Expeditor series) and armed with Uzis, Angie and Garth get the jump on Vale and Vinny, just as they themselves have gotten the jump on Quentin Wise, who is in the middle of delivering the three million to a helicopter transport. But more people arrive on the scene, bullets start flying, and soon Angie and Garth are on the ‘copter, which is shortly thereafter shot out of the sky by a ship on a river below. This turns out to be helmed by yet more Mafioso, one of whom is a boss who wants the three million for himself.

The novel’s only real action sequence occurs on Mingo Island, with Angie and Garth caught in the middle of a sort of gang war, with more bullets flying. But only some random Mafia gunman gets killed in it; as with the second installment, the novel is for the most part bloodless. Reversals and reveals continue to assail our heroes (and us readers) with a finale seeing Angie back at Bruno Baxt’s office – turns out the psychiatrist had his own heist in mind. Here Angie gets in a knockdown, dragout fight with Baxt’s hulking “dyke” secretary. Both she and Baxt are recipients of Angie’s “dark angel” stamp on the forehead, but again they aren’t left for dead, just knocked out and tied up.

Angie and Garth end up making off with the three million, but given that they’re the heroes they decide to “anonymously” tip the authorities where it can be found, something for which Angie will receive $200,000 for from the insurance company that’s hired her to find the missing money. They split this evenly, and I think The Emerald Oil Caper made passing mention of this extra cash in Angie’s account, courtesy this particular caper. Otherwise the Dark Angel series appears to have been free of much continuity, similar to most every other Lyle Kenyon Engel/BCI publication.

The kinky bent of the series is already in effect in this first volume. Lawrence must’ve wanted to set a record for finger-rapes in a novel, with not only the aforementioned bit with Dr. Baxt but a later sequence where Angie is briefly captured by a mob boss who strips her down, ties her to a table, and proceeds to jam his fingers up her ass! This kinky bent is evident throughout the novel, like when Angie thumbs through Dr. Baxt’s catalog of whores and dwells on the shots of Vale Trent, noting her “perfectly neat and classically ringleted triangle of pubic hair”!  You can’t get more sleazy ‘70s than that, my friends. Just as ‘70s is Angie’s wardrobe, each item of which is amply described and of course so revealing that she leaves men panting as she waltzes by them.

Lawrence’s writing is good, with that same sort of professional polish as other BCI authors; I’m always impressed Engel was able to find writers with such similar styles. Lawrence could’ve easily served as Paul Edwards or Paul Kenyon or have turned in one of the Engel-produced volumes of the Killmaster, his style meshes so well with what I guess we could term the “BCI house style.” Compare this to say the Sharpshooter or Marksman books, which had drastically disparate styles each volume. But also Lawrence is good with dialog, setup, description, etc; there might be a little too much POV-hopping for my taste, but that’s par for the course in this genre.

Anyway, The Dream Girl Caper is another enjoyably sleazy Dark Angel adventure, with a fun-loving, likable protagonist and several memorable minor characters. It might not be as over-the-top crazy as The Emerald Oil Caper, but it’s still pretty great and it’s a damn shame this series is so scarce and overpriced on the used books market.