China Strike

China Strike, by William Chamberlain
No month stated, 1967  Fawcett Gold Medal

William Chamberlain, who I believe passed away shortly after this was published, delivers basically a paperback original variation of the bestselling “near future” thrillers of the day, like Fail-Safe and Seven Days In May. China Strike is also very similar in plot to Richard Tresgaskis’s China Bomb, published in hardcover that same year, so it would appear that around 1966 a big concern was China destroying America with an atomic bomb sometime in the near future. Little did anyone realize that China would just be destroying American jobs.

The book takes place in some unspecified future that is still unmistakably “1960s” in its makeup; the US has apparently been at war with “the Zulu Nations” of Africa, which are secretly funded by the “Chincoms,” aka Red China (I thought it was just “Chicoms,” no n?). As for the USSR, we’re briefly informed that the US and Russia are “on the best terms in over a decade,” which might be indication that this takes place in the ‘70s. The action opens with one of those Zulu Nations officials ranting on the UN floor that his country has the atom bomb – and will damned well use it. 

From here we cut to the Takla Makan desert of China, where the Chincoms do all of their atomic bomb testing and research; familiar haunts around here from Operation Starvation and Flight To Takla-Ma. Dr. Martin Shu, a Chinese-American physicist, has been here for the past several years, helping the Chinese perfect “cobalt alloy” bombs, which are basically thermonukes, I guess. Shu isn’t a turncoat, though; he’s secretly CIA, and his somewhat-confusing mission has him monitoring the Chincom A-Bomb progress…while helping them acquire it, or something. But now his assignment is complete, and it’s time to take off.

Chamberlain proves here from the outset that he’ll get us invested in characters and then drop them from the narrative fold. Shu for example is more than your average scientist; he kills the sadist in charge of the massive nuke-research complex with a karate blow to the face, sending a shard of bone into the bastard’s brain. From there it’s to a tense escape from the compound while Shu frets that his desert nomad contact won’t be there to smuggle him to safety. But after this Shu is demoted to supporting character status; when next we see him, he’s telling a secret Pentagon council, led by hardbitten vet General Alonzo Kennedy, about the cobalt bombs.

China, we’re told, will doubtless use these weapons of mass destruction, caring little for human life – the only question is whether they really have it. Chamberlain introduces another (somewhat time-wasting) subplot where an Atomic Energy Commission dude named Schuler claims Shu’s story is bullshit. Then a Red Chinese hit squad almost takes out Shu – he’s in a coma for almost the rest of the novel – and everyone realizes his story was legit. The damn Chincoms really have a cobalt alloy bomb – in fact a whole arsenal of them – and they’re going to destroy the West.

Well, there’s only one thing to do: take an “experimental airborne unit” with no field experience and drop it into Takla Makan! Seriously, this is the course of action General Kennedy decides upon, after discussing the matter with his top aide, Colonel Frank Starr – the man who created this experimental unit, dubbed Zorro Battle Group. Starr says so long to the wife and kids – the book is completely free of the maudlin sap of today’s thrillers, in which Starr’s wife and kid would be given their own tear-jerker of a subplot – and heads down to Puerto Rico, where Zorro is currently located. There follows lots of “military red tape” stuff where Starr busts the head of Colonel Holm, the twit who has been put in charge of Zorro.

The novel really is a streamlined thriller; there’s also a “Washington politics” subplot in which an eager young congressman named Heath hooks up with a muckracking journalist. The two have gotten wind that something big is going on in China, something being held from the public, and strike up a partnership to uncover it. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s even a bit of Bond-esque action, as Starr learns that a freelance spy named Pairvent has been monitoring Zorro Battle Group’s activities from his yacht – like a regular Goldfinger, Pairvent briefly captures Starr, giving him a Flemingesque speech, before Zorro Group shows up to save the day.

Chamberlain equips his fictional battle group with some crazy stuff. Most importantly there are “flying jeeps,” which look like “oversize manhole covers” and are like these flying wedges (with only a metal railing to protect the drivers!). These things fire compressed needles – thousands of needles that wipe out anything in their path. Chamberlain shows these in effect in a few instances and the horrific carnage is well captured. Zorro Group infantry wears body armor and big helmets that feature night vision binoculars and face plates; they carry a “combination ray rifle and grenade launcher.” The soldiers also wear “grasshopper harnesses,” which feature twin jets at the waist that allow the men to fly. The sci-fi weaponry extends to the Air Force; C304 transport planes unleash “ray guns” on attackers late in the novel, incinerating them out of the sky.

Other than the “needle gun run” which saves Starr from Pairvent, there isn’t much action until around page 165, which is when the assault on the Takla Makan complex begins. There isn’t even much in the way of adult shenanigans; this is very much a Boy’s Own adventure, with the only female character being a hooker/freelance spy named Monica who is hired to screw Starr and set him up for the kill via Pairvent, but she gets second thoughts, realizing how in deep she truly is, and she instead tries to save Starr. She ends up striking a deal to turn over all the info she’s gleaned from her traitorous actions, even scoring an off-page meeting with the President.

The climactic assault upon the nuclear complex is effectively done, if a bit threadbare at times. Indeed Chamberlain ends one chapter with Zorro Battle Group about to parachute out of the C304 transport planes to begin the attack, Starr in the lead in his own flying jeep, but next chapter the assault is already well under way. Given the amount of tension leading up to the attack, I thought it would’ve made sense for us readers to actually witness the opening moments of it. Chamberlain cuts around his large cast of military characters, showing the experimental weaponry in play. The needle guns do the usual gory damage, and there’s also something called “flashpalm” which sets off holocaustal flames.

Chamberlain is gifted enough that, despite the overwhelming amount of characters who compete for attention in a 190-page book, you still care enough when some of them bite the bullet. Zorro Battle Group suffers losses in the fight, and Chamberlain succinctly captures Starr’s remorse, brief as it may be – again, the novel is shorn of the sap that would be mandatory today, with Starr sticking to a military resolve, which is necessary in combat. No time for hysterics. Hell, there’s a part where he meets with General Kennedy shortly before shipping out to begin the assault; Kennedy offers Starr the night off to go be with his wife and kids, and Starr says no thanks – they’d just affect his mental resolve!

All told, China Strike is pretty entertaining, and certainly has the feel of a men’s adventure magazine story of the day. In fact I’d bet it was excerpted in one of them, just like China Bomb was. This one’s a good example of how to write a military-style thriller but still retain the immediacy of men’s adventure action-pulp. If anything I wish there had been a bit more action in it, and less about the preparation side of things, but that’s just a minor complaint.

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 Mind Poisoners (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #18)

The Mind Poisoners, by Lionel White
No month stated, 1966  Award Books

Hardboiled author Lionel White, who specialized in heist thrillers like Steal Big, turned in this installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster, which, per Will Murray’s essential article in The Armchair Decetive (volume 15, number 4, 1982), veered so far from the series formula that editor Lyle Kenyon Engel had to get Valerie Moolman to rewrite vast portions of it, a task which she had apparently also performed for the first volume.

I don’t think Moolman’s presence is as strong here as it was in Run, Spy, Run, as The Mind Poisoners retains the feel of Steal Big and, more pointedly, Spykill, which White also published in 1966 under a pseudonym. Like that novel, The Mind Poisoners starts off like a spy story but soon feels more like your standard hardboiled private eye yarn, with hero Nick Carter trying to bust up a heroin operation operating out of Las Vegas and Los Angeles, even getting roughed up by a dirty cop at one point.

The central conceit of this one is “Professor Nick Carter,” a goofy idea with admitedly limited humor value; globe-trotting, villain-killing, babe-laying Nick Carter as a philosophy teacher at Berkley. But White really doesn’t exploit the idea, with only two sequences of “Professor Nick” in action, one of them comprised solely of his apologizing to his class, the other a summarized account of a day’s instruction and how engaged the students are. But this is the main plot synopsized on the back cover – that college kids around the US are going nuts due to a “violence drug” and AXE suspects it’s yet another Chicom plot.

Nick as usual is called out of bed with his latest mate: Chelsea Chase, a stacked mega-babe with a singing career or somesuch. White has it that these two are an on-again, off-again item, but doubtless this is the first and only time Ms. Chase will ever be mentioned in the series. Hawk, who has come here to Los Angeles where Nick’s vacationing, tells his chief agent that “this might be the most important assignment any AXEman ever had.” (To which Nick retorts, “Aren’t they all?”) Hawk relays to Nick what we readers already witnessed in the opening chapter, a hopscotching-situations affair, written in an annoying sort of omniscient tone, with rioting students, protests turned violent, and even a beloved Berkley professor with former pinko proclivities gunned down while on his way to the FBI to blab about something.

Nick is to pose as the replacement for the murdered professor, his cover name being Professor Jason Haig. Off he goes to Berkley, his backstory carefully arranged by AXE, but first he breaks into the warehouse of “Orient Export-Import,” a SanFran company whose business card the murdered professor had in his pocket when he was gunned down. Already the book feels more Gold Medal hardboiled than ‘60s spy-fy as Nick breaks into the place, snoops around, and gets in a brief firefight with the guard – Nick’s even armed with a .38 here, a gun we’re informed he seldom uses, but which is of course mandatory for most hardboiled private dicks.

“Professor Haig” makes his debut to a classroom of surly, disinterested kids; Nick appeals to them to accept him and other humdrum maudlin stuff. Then he goes home and gets laid by one of them – Nick by the way figuring he might get some college-gal nookie the very moment Hawk handed him the assignment. This is Blossom Twin, an “utterly striking girl” who is “part Chinese,” with glorious breasts and a “chiseled coral mouth.” She comes on strong to a suspicious Nick, who does her anyway in a sequence that is only marginally explicit: “They lurched together, gasping, exulting in the tumult that they shared.” 

Unsurprisingly, it’s a setup, and some dudes come in and get the jump (so to speak) on Nick while he’s in the act. This is just the first time our hero is knocked out in the course of the novel. Nick’s caught by a couple “Orientals,” who plan to strap him into “the Persuader,” a literal ball-crusher. But he attempts to fight his way out, only to be knocked unconscious again, drugged this time. This occurs on page 72.

The next page is a curious thing. Suddenly Nick’s talking to an Israeli woman who says her name is “Sabra.” Initially I thought White was going for a weird psychedelic thing, with a drugged Nick hallucinating the girl. But damned if it all didn’t read just like Manning Lee Stokes. Then I looked at the top of the page, and saw that it was titled “Assignment: Israel!” Award pulled a blunder, at least in this printing, and accidentally inserted a page of a different Killmaster installment, one that was indeed by Stokes.

On page 75 we’re back to The Mind Poisoners, and Nick finds himself in the offices of kindly Dr. Twin, Blossom’s dad, a Chinatown doc who claims to know everything that goes on around here, says he saved Nick at Blossom’s behest, and pleads with Nick not to get into this any further. Nick sort of comes off dumb throughout, as Blossom is clearly working with the heroin-producers – and we get verification in the occasional scenes with her and her Chicom masters, plotting Nick’s death – yet Nick keeps trusting her. Or is he just using her all along?

We don’t get much “Professor Nick,” but we do get “Beatnik Nick” in a humorous sequence which has Nick in black beret and sweater, spraying himself with “essence of Cannabis Indica” and venturing into the Beatnik joint in which Blossom meets her heroin supplier. Nick catches the guy, Pio, and here we have an early stab at the dreaded F-bomb when Pio, threatened with torture, tells Nick “F– you,” which would indicate that the word “fuck” was too extreme for the genre at this time. But then, there’s seldom any cursing at all in these early Killmaster novels.

The last quarter gets onto that hardboiled kick with Nick posing as “Jimmy the Horse,” a mobbed-up dealer. He drives to Vegas in an AXE-provided silver Lamborghini, tracking the heroin pipeline. His cover is nearly blown by Chelsea Chase, who just happens to be singing at the Tumbleweed casino, which is owned by one of the main heroin dealers. Here we have lots of Gold Medal-esque stuff, from a fake deal in which Nick is caught – and knocked out again – to the dirty cop who attempts to beat him up.

White huries through the various action scenes, like when Nick tears onto the ranch of the heroin supplier, tossing grenades from a special compartment of his Lamborghini. At this point the Chicom plot is pretty much forgotten and it’s just Nick versus various underworld lowlifes, which is the same narrative progression as demonstrated in Spykill. The finale has Blossom finally blabbing to Nick her role in the plot, which has been the creation of this new violence drug to subvert American youth – and she’s suddenly very evil, taunting Nick with his imminent death and wanting one last role in the hay beforehand.

Believe it or not, Nick is knocked out yet again, and here he’s drowned in the offal of the sewers beneath the Oriental Export-Import Building(!). But Nick as we know can hold his breath a very long time, and anticlimactically dispenses every single one of the villains (all of them conveniently assembled in one room) with little Pierre, the “gas bomb” Nick keeps hidden on his person at all times.

There was nothing really bad about The Mind Poisoners, but it just didn’t feel like a Killmaster novel to me. Also White’s version of Nick Carter is a little too prone to making mistakes, not to mention getting knocked out. There is a sort of unfinished, hurried feel to the novel, and I suppose it’s just as well that Lionel White never delivered another manuscript for the series.

C.A.D.S. #3: Tech Commando

C.A.D.S. #3: Tech Commando, by John Sievert
September, 1986  Zebra Books

Take Doomsday Warrior, set it a century earlier, remove the radiation-powered mutant heroes and replace them with soldiers in high-tech battle armor, and remove most of the gory ultraviolence and explicit sex, and you’d have C.A.D.S., yet another post-nuke pulp courtesy Ryder Syvertsen (which has taken me much too long to get back to). I had to go back and read my review of the second volume to catch myself up.

For, as with his (superior) other post-nuke series, Syvertsen picks up immediately where he left off, so that a reader new to C.A.D.S. would be S.O.L. It’s two days after volume 2 and hero Dean Sturgis is still trying to find his wife Robin; his armor is almost out of power and he’s hundreds of miles from his soldiers, back at their new base in Okefenokee swamp. Sturgis is attacked by a group of bikers led by one with a “semidissolved, pus-dripping twisted face” who apparently has returned from the first volume, but I’d forgotten him.

These biker scum get the better of our hero, whose suit is destroyed in the battle. Armed with his issued .45 and an appropriated subgun, Sturgis moves on to the old vacation-spot he shared with Robin, their pre-arranged meeting spot…only to find a note left behind by her the previous day! So all that for nothing; Sturgis has missed his wife by less than twenty-four hours. He basically shrugs and figures he’ll check here for her again next year(!). Meanwhile we eventually learn Robin is in Florida, hanging out with “mountainfolk” who fight the invading Reds. In a subplot seemingly lifted from the early volumes of Jerry Ahern’s The Survivalist, Sturgis and his wife are separated by the war and, while separately battling the Russians, try to figure out how to reconnect.

Sturgis has been given a new epithet courtesy Syversten – he is the “Tech Commando” of the title, often referred to as such, sort of like how Ted Rockson of Doomsday Warrior is often referred to as “The Ultimate American.” He proves himself slightly less than the average men’s advenure protagonist when, finally getting back to the Okefenokee, he almost drowns in quicksand; he’s saved by an old coot in an electric (and armed!) wheelchair who is named Boss Peppercorn, a new character very much in the vein of the oddball one-off characters who populate the Doomsday Warrior books.

Peppercorn also enjoys that other Doomsday Warrior mainstay: the plush, comfy home in the midst of all the destruction. His swamp pad is set up with all the creature comforts, and Sturgis knocks back a few beers with him as they watch the Reverend Jerry Jeff Jeeters, a “turncoat” televangelist in a shiny suit, do his schtick on TV. In realtiy Jeeters is a patriot, and his quotes are really “Biblical code” that, when deciphered, give viewers inside info on what the Reds are really up to. Jeeters is such a goofy character – not to mention a clear spoof of the televangelists who were so in vogue at the time – that one wishes there was more of him, but he has yet to engage with any of the main characters. 

Peppercorn helps our hero find his base deep in the swamp, and soon enough Sturgis is on the horn to White Sands, New Mexico, which has become the de facto capital of the new US, given that the President is there. A Cuban force has moved into Orlando – headquartering in Epcot and Disneyworld! – and Sturgis and his C.A.D.S. are to wipe them out before they can act on their plans to further conquer Florida. In the meantime Sturgis is gratified to receive another air drop of armor, weapons, soldiers, and other goods, though he’s pissed that, in the allottment of “nonradioactive cigs,” there’s “Not a Camel in the lot!”

Meanwhile those enslaved women who were freed last volume have moved into camp, lovingly referred to as Swamp Cats. Sturgis begins a casual sex affair with their leader, a statuesque babe named Dieter. In between (off-page!!) boffing the two talk to each other about their missing loved ones. The C.A.D.S. go off to free Orlando, Peppercorn and a legion of “Revengers” (ie American rebels) in tow. Despite the large force, Syversten as ever focuses on just the same few characters, in addition to Sturgis himself: Billy, the slackjawed yokel; Fenton, the bagpipe-playing Scot; and Tranh, the mystic Vietnamese who often flashes back to his days in the war.

The Epcot battle is a lot quicker than one would expect. In fact Sturgis and army make quick work of the Cubans, only getting a bit of a challenge from a swarm of Russian attack helicopters that swoop in. This leads to a memorable moment of Billy flying up in his armor and tearing into the helicopters, breaking the necks of the occupants and tossing out their corpses. Sturgis is a bit wild here, screaming for Commie blood; he too tears into an escaping ‘copter and strangles the commander with his armored hands – even after the dude has surrendered!

Given that this threat is so quickly taken care of, Syvertsen must come up with something else for the C.A.D.S. to do for the next hundred or so pages. So we are quickly informed of another potential invasion threat – the Reds are rebuilding the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel in Virginia in order to bring over more forces. More soldiers are airdropped in, as is a new doctor to help combat the “swamp fever” which has been killing off the troops (including the old doctor). It turns out to be hotstuff brunette Dr. Sheila de Camp, who as we’ll recall is the “brassy woman” who has a hate-lust thing going with Sturgis, which continues here; she constantly challenges him and scorns him, but secretly lusts for him because he’s “all man.”

In another of those curious, unintentional prefigures of the future I love encountering in these old books, a newly-arrived soldier informs Sturgis that White Sands HQ is “going out of control...because of all the refugees.” He reports that the President is barely able to hold it together, thanks to the influx of refugees who have caused untold crime and violence in White Sands. To say this very subject is a hot topic today would be an understatement. Given that Syvertsen also made September 11th a fateful date in a novel published in 1984, one wonders if the dude had a Carnac the Magnificent-type fluffy hat in his closet.

Syvertsen also has a recurring subplot with the invading Russian force, but these characters too lack the memorable qualities of their analogues in the Doomsday Warrior books. But there’s Supreme Marshall Veloshnikov, parading in front of his mirror in all his bullshit medals, fretting over the inability of veteran warrior General Petrin to take out the C.A.D.S. once and for all. Meanwhile Petrin, who commands his own army of armored soldiers, plays vintage video games with his men, pondering over the hidden meanings of Donkey Kong.

In the finale, which has the C.A.D.S. in desperate battle to destroy the bridge while also fighting Petrin’s armored troops, we see the big difference between Dean Sturgis and Ted Rockson. Whereas “The Ultimate American” proves again and again that he will do anything to free enslaved Americans, Sturgis chalks them off as collateral damage; the bridge is being repaired by American slaves who, we learn, are used as bait by Petrin, who is sure Sturgis will try to save them. But he doesn’t count on Sturgis’s “for the good of all” resolve – nor does he gamble on the joyful willingness of the slaves to die if it means Sturgis et al are victorious!

Tech Commando ends on the usual sort-of cliffhanger; the bridge has been destroyed, a few redshirt soldiers have died, and Petrin has now failed hugely, having sworn his life that he would stop Sturgis’s force this time. Meanwhile Robin’s still in Florida, fighting with those mountainfolk and Chris, the teen kid she found a while back and who has become her de facto son.

All told, while the book is certainly a breeze of a read, Tech Commando isn’t a knockout, and one gets the impression that Syvertsen treated his writing duties on this series more so as a work for hire affair, giving it none of the obvious love he gave Doomsday Warrior.

A Friendly Place To Die

A Friendly Place To Die, by Michael P. Faur, Jr.
December, 1966  Signet Books

Signet Books really cornered the market on spy series fiction in the ‘60s, no doubt because they’d scored a coup with the paperback rights to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. It would appear that this obscure one-shot novel was intended as the start of yet another Signet spy series, but for some unknown reason it never got beyond this initial book. This is unfortunate, as in many ways A Friendly Place To Die provides almost a swinging ‘60s spy variation of later men’s adventure series like The Destroyer, at least so far as its almost godlike kung-fu practicing protagonist goes.

Another mystery is who the author, Michael P. Faur, Jr, was. According to the Catalog Of Copyright Entries, it was apparently a real person (ie Faur isn’t a pseudonym or house name), but nothing else seems to have been published by him. A Google search reveals nothing save for an archived news story from December 1975 about a person of the same name being arrested for “issuing worthless checks” at clothing stores in Alabama. The article refers to this Michael P. Faur, Jr as an “Oxford concert promoter,” aged 37, who refused to “furnish background information on himself…because it was of a confidential nature.” Hmmm!

If this is the same Faur as the author of A Friendly Place To Die, then that would mean he was the young age of 26 or so when he published the book. This is interesting, as there is a weariness and wisdom to the novel and its characters that you wouldn’t expect from someone so young. (Barring of course a hippie of the day.) Cord, the hero of the book (no first name given), is in his 30s but acts more like an ancient and wise practicioner of the martial arts, thanks to the decade he spent in a secret temple in mainland China. When we meet him, Cord has finally escaped Red China and is in Mexico, about to sneak across the border into the US; this will be the first time he’s been here since the Korean War, over a decade ago.

Cord’s mysterious history is sprinkled throughout the first quarter of the book. Faur walks an interesting line, having a protagonist who is a bit of a cipher, while at the same time making that protagonist the hero of the book, with most of the narrative filtered through his thoughts. Thus the tantalizing bit on the back cover that Cord might not even be Cord is a bit ruined, as there’s no question for the reader that this is the same man who, a decade before, was captured during the fighting in Korea, later escaped from a POW camp, and after that was captured again in China during a failed cross-country escape attempt. But he escaped yet again, only to be saved by the monks of that kung-fu temple, who spent the next decade training Cord in all manner of knowledge, from the martial arts to languages to philosophy.

Cord is an okay character, if a bit too pragmatic and omniscient. He also uses a lot of annoying Britishisms, from “ruddy” to “bloody;” Faur briefly explains this as an after-effect of Cord spending so long among a people who learned their English in the, well, English idiom, rather than the American. Personally I don’t like an American hero who says “Bloody hell;” it just seems wrong on so many levels. Otherwise Cord is a cigarette-smoking, ruggedly-handsome type of protagonist familiar from this genre, and in many ways is a variation of Fleming’s Bond, only with an “Oriental” overlay. James Bond crossed with a fortune cookie, maybe.

Before crossing the border Cord is approached by a stacked brunette babe who claims she is a schoolteacher who has been separated from her friends, down here for a brief Mexican vacation. She is graced with the Fleming-esque name of Weary Nowe, and Cord is certain she is an undercover secret agent, sent to monitor him. He will be proved correct, and indeed Weary is the character referred to on the hyperbolic first page preview as “a fuming nympho who’s the sexiest anti-heroine in print.” She pleads with Cord to cross the border with her, after which they go back to her hotel room for a sex scene that isn’t hardcore, but a bit more graphic than the era average. (“They fell to the bed where they expertly and erotically made love,” etc.)

Two dudes come out of the shadows to attack Cord; he takes them out with his kung-fu skills and poor Weary is hit “between the breasts” in the melee. On Cord goes to DC, where we learn in an Ian Fleming moment that our spy hero is afraid of flying. He heads to a certain mansion on the outskirts of the city, where he challenges the woman who answers the door to another kung-fu fight, taking on more dudes who come out to fight him. But it’s all a test, and this is the HQ of Central, “a Q secret organization dedicated to preserving the internal security of the country.” Cord walks into a room in which the small, bookish leader of the department, referred to as “Central” himself, waits for him; Cord isn’t very surprised to see Weary Nowe also in attendance.

Central (which here on out refers to the man himself) reveals that he has been monitoring Cord since he slipped out of China. At length the convoluted scheme will have it that Central wants Cord for a mission, but first must determine if Cord is really Cord. Meanwhile Cord is kept in a cozy prison where he’s given gourmet meals and frequent sex visits from Weary, who in between somewhat-explicit boffings (“her voluptuous breasts jutted proudly”) tells Cord how much she hates him, and how she hopes Central “castrates” him once Central realizes Cord’s really lying.

But of course we readers know Cord isn’t lying about who he is, and at length we’ll learn that the reason behind all this nonsense is because Central was really behind the plot to spring Cord from Red China, after all – it was his man who posed as a dude who visited the temple and just happened to know a way to smuggle Cord out of the country. But this dude later ended up dead, as did everyone else who met Cord since he left the temple – all records of him prior to his Korea service are gone, not even any file photos – so there’s this belabored “mystery” of trying to ascertain if this is the same dude who was captured by the Koreans back during the war.

At length the reason behind Cord being sprung is revealed: Central has come across a plot to kill Fidel Castro when the Cuban dictator gives his speech to the UN. (Justin Trudeau would be bummed!!) The assassin will likely be a Red Chinese agent named Mao Ling, who happens to be the same officer who murdered every man in Cord’s unit back during the war, and is the same man Cord has sworn to kill. Indeed it was to assassinate Mao Ling which caused Cord to leave the temple in the first place. The reason Central needs Cord is because Cord is the only person who knows what Mao Ling looks like. So as you can see, the novel is built around two similar themes, neither of which are very believable.

Throughout all this Cord is presented as a secret agent-type bad-ass, always in command of any situation and thinking twelve steps ahead of his opponent. Thus I was a bit surprised to learn after all this that Cord is not a secret agent, has not had any secret agent training, and I guess is just a bad-ass thanks to all that kung-fu jazz. At any rate, Central puts his entire department at Cord’s disposal. Central HQ is revealed to be a spy-fy wonderland, with a radio room staffed by gorgeous babes in “spiked heels” and toting .38 revolvers; the place has an underground exit that goes on for miles beneath DC and is guarded by laser beams.

But Faur doesn’t really exploit any of this and keeps everything on a low-key level. Instead it’s all about the suspense as Cord works with a small team, many of whom are killed off-page, Cord finding their corpses with jade-handled daggers in their backs. Weary flits in and out of the narrative for more jibes and sex (at one point leaving a note on Cord’s hotel-room pillow with the memorable line, “I hurt deliciously, you brutal bastard”), while meanwhile an always-musing Cord ponders how nowhere is “a friendly place to die,” not even the palatial UN building. Oh and he also runs afoul of Niles, a beautiful redhead who, Faur casually mentions later on, happens to be a “dyke” in the midst of a torrid love affair with none other than Weary, and thus hates Cord for wrecking their romance. 

Cord doesn’t even much use the Central-provided team; he relies more on a fast-talking cabbie named Joe Knox and a group of young kung-fu students who are the grandsons of Chang Lee, an old kung-fu wizard whose name was provided to Cord by the temple in China – there is, we are informed, a network of kung-fu helpers all over the globe for graduates of the temple. Chang has a granddaughter, Sally, who is the “most exciting girl Cord had ever seen,” with a bodacious bod and all-around incredible features with those “almond eyes” pulp writers love so much. Cord falls in love with Sally and vice versa, as the two trade all-too-precious dialog, such as:

She kissed him. 

“You are so gentle,” he whispered. 

“Men love gentleness; dogs like food,” she mused. “Love does not convey the idea of pity.” 

“A hungry man is glad to get boiled wheat,” Cord said.

There’s only so much of this sort of thing a red-blooded guy like myself can take. And that is the central issue with A Friendly Place To Die; practically the entire novel is written just like this. I was only half-joking above when I mentioned a fortune cookie. The book in many ways could almost be something a fortune cookie writer churned out in his downtime. It’s all just too precious for its own good, one of those novels where characters speak at one another rather than to one another; Cord and Central in particular banter and jibe relentlessly, and while it starts off enjoyable it quickly begins to grate. But the preciousness of the “Oriental wisdom” stuff is the worst, and in that regard the novel is almost as guilty as the later The Ninja.

Action is also sparse, and generally of a martial arts nature, like when Cord engages a massive Chinese henchman in a battle to the death. Here Cord discovers the charred corpse of Mao Ling, and is devastated by the vengeance that has been stolen from him. Now the suspense ramps up as Cord must figure out who is behind the Castro plot, while Cord must also meanwhile keep hiding the payment Central has given him for the job – a recurring, annoying subplot has the intelligence boss constantly sending Weary around to figure out where the money is and if Cord has absconded with it. 

At one point Cord is caught and tied to a bamboo pole in the middle of a steam room; in a grueling sequence he uses his kung-fuery to break free, and to also save a nude Sally Chang, who is likewise tied up nearby. Speaking of which we get a few sex scenes between these two as well, and Cord’s now in love with the gal. The novel climaxes with Cord having gained omniscient knowledge of who is really behind the plot – the assassin shows up posing as a cameraman.

Spoiler alert: Faur blows through the otherwise tense climax by having a bunch of stuff happening…and then backtracking and explaining what we just read. Long story short, the cameraman/would-be assassin is a Chinese dude in a latex mask, and he’s shot by Weary, who turns out to have been his accomplice, but who had second thoughts due to her love for Cord (which she masked via the constant jibing). But Cord meanwhile has shot Weary, who dies thinking Cord’s accomplice shot her. Cord’s figured out Weary’s duplicity a while ago (Faur only now bothering to inform us of this), and likewise he’s determined that “dyke” Niles was Weary’s co-plotter.

The finale sees a final confrontation between Cord and Mao Ling (who may have been posing as Central all along; Faur really confused me here – and that charred corpse was just a decoy), with Cord shooting Niles and trading a line or two with Mao Ling before the Chinese villain escapes. Yep, folks, Cord fails to get the vengeance he’s spent the entire novel wishing for.

And that’s that…Faur ends the tale with Cord likely about to become an agent for Central (who has been the captive of Mao Ling, though again I was uncertain if he’d been so from the beginning or just since Cord’s been on the case). But no further novels were to follow, thus this is where we must leave our fortune cookie-esque hero Cord.

The Warlord #1

The Warlord, by Jason Frost
No month stated, 1983  Zebra Books

First of all, I want to apologize if I’ve been writing a string of negative reviews on here. I hope it should be clear to everyone that I love these series books and would rather read them than anything else. But I’m not going to sugarcoat things when the situation arises – sometimes I’m really let down, and by god, I’m gonna tell you about it when I am. And unfortunately, such is the case with this first volume of The Warlord, which was by the usually-gifted Raymond Obstfeld, writing under the name “Jason Frost,” which he also used to write the incredible Invasion U.S.A. novelization.

I really wanted to like this book. I’d been meaning to read it for a while, having picked up the six volumes of the series over the years. But I was really let down, and in a major way – to the point where I was skimming through stuff, something I never thought I’d say about an Obstfeld novel. As for the series itself, it’s hard to tag Warlord, as it was packaged like other Zebra post-nuke pulps, only the series occurs after a natural disaster rather than a nuclear one. Otherwise the series has all the trappings of post-nuke pulp: a threadbare society dealing with the ravages of a destroyed, dangerous world, one populated by even more dangerous survivors. Given this I’ve decided to label the series as a post-nuke pulp as well, even though technically it’s not. I have my lawyers filing the necessary paperwork.

The novel runs to 398 whopping pages and suffers for it. In defense of Obstfeld, my guess is he was handed this unwieldy word count and struggled to meet it. This means that the reader is barraged with unimportant, trivial information – usually egregious background info about one-off characters – throughout the book. It also means that the overriding drive of the narrative is ultimately lost in the clutter. The book wants to be post-catastrophe action but instead comes off like a bloated bore, one with uninvolving, unlikable characters.

It takes a long time for the catastrophe to occur. Instead we are slowly brought into the world of Eric Ravensmith, former ‘Nam Special Forces badass, now assistant professor of history at a college near Los Angeles. He’s a mountain of muscle with a livid scar that runs along his jaw. Folks, Eric Ravensmith is ‘80s Arnold Schwarzenegger in tweeds, and it’s a laughable image, but an image Obstfeld strives to convey. He’s married to former hippie Annie, a big-bossomed babe with whom Eric has raised two preteen kids, Jennifer and Timmy. Only later do we learn that neither of the kids are Eric’s biological children; in another of those long backstories we read how Eric came across the corpse of Annie’s soldier husband in the war, wrote her a sympathy letter, and then ran into her years later at an anti-war protest, after which they fell in love and got married.

Plaguing Eric’s idyllic life is the recurring nightmare that his old ‘Nam enemy, Colonel Dirk Fallows, will one day come after him. The novel opens with this event occurring, Eric waking up in his bed and realizing an intruder is in his home, sneaking up the stairs to kill Eric and then slaughter the rest of his family. Eric takes the guy out in a tense scene, one which sees almost buddy cop-esque humorous dialog between him and Annie, who takes the attempted murder of herself and her two kids pretty much in stride for a former tree-hugging hippie. And then we get a clue of what we’re in for, as instead of Eric breaking the bastard’s neck…we instead flash forward to two months later, and Eric’s in the midst of a court case against him and Fallows!

Eric is building a case that the assailant was under the employ of Fallows, a Shakespeare-quoting sadist from Eric’s Nam days. Back then Eric was in a top-secret unit called The Night Shift (Stephen King references run throughout the novel, by the way), which was basically an assassination and massacre detachment of the Special Forces. Fallows was the commander, and with his sadism, glee for killing, and prematurely white hair, he brings to mind the main villain in Avatar (I couldn’t believe that was the same actor from Crime Story, one of the best TV shows in history!!). Fallows took Eric under his wing, grooming him as his second in command, but one day Fallows went too far, and massacred an entire village, babies and all, crucifying the lot.

Turning in his commander, Eric succeeded in having Fallows put away for twenty years – but he’s just been released, eight years early. And Eric is certain Fallows is coming for him. Annie is aware of all this but is a bit too pragmatic about it…if I told my wife some dude who crucified an entire village was after me, she’d probably be out the door before I could finish my sentence. More Fallows-hired thugs come after Eric, including one unintentionally-humorous bit where one attacks him with nunchucks in a courthouse, having to resort to the wooden weapons to get around the courthouse metal detector. Speaking of Arnold, we get a prefigure of the famous line from Commando, two years later, when Eric bluntly states “I lied” to a man he’d promised not to kill.

The series occurs in a California rocked by massive earthquakes, and the first doesn’t happen until around 60 pages in. But Obstfeld hopscotches through a long patch of time in the opening half, with the action resuming two weeks after this big quake. There’s been mass death and destruction, and now the government’s going around to take guns from people, to stave off the violence or something. Eric gives up his pistol, but meanwhile he’s recently bought a Barnett Commando crossbow, which we’re informed has a pump action like a shotgun. Fallows is still out there, and Eric is certain his old enemy will be coming for him, quake-destruction or not.

Another massive quake hits; in this one Eric’s mom is killed (she’s a fellow teach at his university, and Obstfeld devotes more page-padding about her and her boyfriend). From this we jump to three months later, and we learn that Los Angeles has practically been destroyed, most of the coast is underwater, and California has broken away from the continent. (Sounds like a win-win for everyone!) A “dome of chemical gases,” nicknamed “The Halo,” surrounds the new island, courtesy various chemical weapons plants that were destroyed in the quake, resulting in “a super acid fog” that keeps the Californians in and keeps everyone else out. Yep, folks, all just like in King’s Under The Dome, only this was published decades before.

The Halo has basically psychedelicized California (well, only more so, I guess), with “gray-pink night and yellow-orange day” casting everything in odd new lights. Meanwhile Eric and family have barrickaded themselves on Eric’s college campus, along with other survivors; the outside world is referred to as “the Dead Zone” in another (this one credited) Stephen King reference. The place is run by the Council, comprised of a group of elected officials, and humorously enough it’s completely socialist in its makeup (well, this is California…), much like the post-apocalypse society in Doomsday Warrior. Eric is the Security Chief; he constantly butts heads with the dumbass Council, which refuses to grasp the dangers of this new California, at one point informing them, “You are a war council and I am your warlord.”

But they don’t listen, bullying him into taking a group with him out into the Dead Zone to trade with another community of survivors. Eric is against it but goes anyway. He takes along a small team of former students, each of whom is given inordinate backstory and too much dialog. None of them are likable. The trade turns out to be a ruse and, after a minor action sequence in which we see Eric’s crossbow in use against would-be brigands, the team returns to campus only to find destruction and death. The Council lied to Eric, sending him off on a wild goose chase so they could do the deal he warned them against; unsurprisingly, it turned out to be a plot courtesy Dirk Fallows.

Now young Timmy and Annie are gone, abducted (and we were treated to another Eric-Annie XXX boff which practically announced something bad was about to happen to the poor gal – complete even with some “I might die some day” dialog from her!), and worse yet little Jennifer’s throat has been slit. Eric is only briefly numb with shock. He gets nude and goes through a ritual he learned in his youth among the Hopi Indians (I forgot to mention he was sort of raised by them), emerging from the cathartic ceremony as “the Warlord,” the old Eric Ravensmith dead and gone, the new one “more Dirk Fallows than Dirk Fallows” (?).

I was hoping that this ritual would turn Eric Ravensmith into a sort of post-holocaust Rambo, but instead it just turns him into a jerk. Losing even the bare modicum of likable qualities he possessed before, Eric is more of a grump than anything. He takes off – that same group of kids in tow, all of whom volunteer for the mission – tracking down Fallows. Another campus resident, the lovely Tracy, follows behind. Tracy is another character given inordinate word count in the early half, a freelance newspaper artist who took a shine to Eric during the Fallows trial, threw herself at him right before the earthquakes hit, and now is best buds with Annie…and indeed is the babe Annie has suggested Eric hook up with “if anything ever happens to me,” in some of the most telegraphed foreshadowing I have ever encountered.

There follows a moment one doesn’t often encounter in the world of men’s adventure; while navigating through the post-quake wasteland, Eric and followers come across a mutilated young girl, clearly being used as a sex slave or something. Her “owners” soon arrive, biker-type scum who taunt Eric and team. Eric merely hands over the young girl, and continues on his way – no attempts at saving her and taking out the scum. Eric cares solely for his own interests at this point. This causes much frustration in the group, most of whom say they’re done with Eric at this point; even Tracy claims that, the way Eric is now acting, Annie wouldn’t even want him anymore.

Meanwhile, poor Annie is being held captive by Fallows, who tortures her and the reader with “I’m evil” dialog that goes on much too long. He keeps telling her all the bad stuff he’s gonna do to her. And meanwhile he’s going to brainwash young Timmy into loving him and thinking of Fallows as his father and making him hate Eric – Fallows assures Annie that this will be simple for him, as he’s been successfully brainwashing soldiers since ‘Nam. He’s got such hatred for Eric that one can’t help but see a jilted lover sort of angle at play, whether it was Obstfeld’s intention or not, sort of like the chainmail-vested Freddie Mercury-looking dude and his hatred-love for Arnold in Commando. 

Those biker scum came from a place now named Savytown, and Eric learns that Fallows has been through here. He tries to barter for information, only for it to be yet another Fallows trap. The long-delayed climax has Eric and Fallows having a brief face-to-face – one in which Cruz, Fallow’s herculean stooge, breaks Annie’s friggin’ neck. Our hero gets his ass knocked out, only to wake up in this goofy contraption that has him and Cruz hanging across from each other, dangling above flames…some sort of double-dish punishment deal courtesy Fallows, who is pissed at Cruz for disobedience or something. We get pages and pages of Eric and Cruz fighting to the death. Fallows doesn’t even stick around to watch, having left with new “son” Timmy.

The finale ignores all the Fallows stuff – Eric basically shrugs and figures Fallows has gotten too much of a lead on him(!) – and instead has Eric and crew going back to liberate Savytown after all. Indeed it must be such a simple chore that Obsfted flash-forwards through it, giving us a summary of the action. One thing we can be happy about – Eric leaves those annoying former students in Savytown, taking off on his own to continue the hunt for Fallows, and meanwhile Tracy follows him. Obstfeld ends the novel on the awkward note of Eric realizing there’s “something about” Tracy after all…whereas meanwhile Eric just saw his beloved wife’s neck snapped a few pages ago.

As mentioned The Warlord ran for five more volumes, and it looks like the rest of the books are shorter, which as far as I’m concerned, so far as this genre goes, is a good thing. I’m not giving up on the series yet and have faith in Raymond Obsfted, who is usually a very gifted, entertaining author – I still think there were some editorial/imprint constraints which prevented this first volume from being all it could be. But as usual, these are just my thoughts, and doubtless others out there will think this book is just fine. I just wish some of the fat had been cut from it.

The Venus Probe (Peter Ward #5)

The Venus Probe, by David St. John
October, 1966  Signet Books

Yet another spy paperback series Signet published in the ‘60s, Peter Ward was special because “David St. John” was in reality future “Watergate conspirator” (as he was proclaimed on the ‘70s reprints) E. Howard Hunt. A prolific pulp author going back to the hardboiled era, Hunt supposedly was tasked by the CIA to come up with an American James Bond…I read this somewhere, though to tell the truth it sounds like baloney. The simple truth was probably more along the lines that Hunt wanted to capitalize on the spy boom created by Fleming’s famous creation.

Anyway, there appears to be some legal requirement that all reviewers must state that St. John was really Hunt, so now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, on to the series itself. The Peter Ward series ran for nine volumes, the first six published by Signet, the seventh by Dell (and that one, The Mongol Mask, also got a hardcover edition), and the last two were published by Fawcett Crest. The series ran from 1964 to 1971, and for the most part appears to have strived for realism throughout – to the point of boredom, unfortunately.

For while he is a gifted wordspinner, Hunt suffers from some of the most belabored, ponderous plotting and storytelling I’ve yet encountered. Simply put, it takes forever for anything to happen in The Venus Probe. This is the sort of book that would even make Manning Lee Stokes grumble to himself, “Good Lord, man, get on with it!” The other year I started in on the sixth volume of the series, One Of Our Agents Is Missing, only to give it up after nearly falling to sleep with each attempted reading. Luckily, this early volume is slightly better, and benefits from a couple elements lifted from Fleming. 

Hero Peter Ward is a pipe-smoking, horse-riding CIA veteran in his thirties who studied law at Harvard. He is a widower, his occasionally-referenced wife a Chinese lady who was killed at some point in the past. Ward’s only relative is a sister, whom he brings along to a CIA banquet at the opening of The Venus Probe, in which Ward is the man of the hour and his prior (top secret) assignment is discussed openly(!). He’s a stuffy upper-crust type who lacks any of the charisma of James Bond or Nick Carter, and likely is an indication of a real-life CIA agent of the time. The dude doesn’t even pack a signature weapon, and goes about the globe without even a gun.

One similarity between Hunt and Fleming is that Hunt too had an Intelligence background, thus he injects a lot of “behind the scenes” stuff into the novel. He also gives a lot of detail on foreign agencies; the book is stuffed with footnotes, even more than the average installment of Death Merchant. To Hunt’s credit, he does all this mostly via showing instead of telling. But whereas Fleming used his factual roots to (gradually) get a bit far out, Hunt is instead fine with keeping it all for the most part grounded in reality – even when, as is the case with this particular volume, the climax takes place in an underwater installation which has been built in preparation for an eventual space probe to the planet Venus.

Ward reports to Avery Thorne, Deputy Director of the CIA, a guy who uses “vis-à-vis” in everyday conversation. Thorne is one of the more patient spy agency bosses in history, basically sending Peter (as Hunt refers to his protagonist) around the globe on nothing more than a hunch. I mean, this dude racks up some serious frequent flyer miles. It all starts the night of that award dinner; staying over at the palatial house of his fellow CIA friend “Pip,” the CIA’s sciences chief, Peter is almost drugged by an assailant, who after a brief scuffle himself dies while trying to escape in a car.

Thorne pieces it together that the assailant mistook Peter for Pip, and perhaps Pip, with his scientific acumen, was the planned latest abductee of whoever has been kidnapping noted scientists over the past several months. Thorne has it that the missing seven scientists, all of whom have been announced as dead, could make up a potential “lunar team” that might advance the Soviet drive to get to the moon before the US – for Thorne is certain “the Sovs” are behind the apparent “deaths” of the seven men.

Peter’s eager to helm the project and is sent over to a sort of proto-X-Files department, headed by a eccentric coot named Milo Dunster. His group tracks weird info, like UFO sightings and whatnot, and is a sadly-unexploited element of The Venus Probe. For the most part Peter will sit in the cluttered office of Dunster’s team, read paperwork, and then drive somewhere for dinner. Peter Ward does a lot of sitting around, by the way. He also has an apparent-steady girlfriend, a nightclub singer with whom he enjoys two (off-page) sex scenes with over the course of the novel.

In the course of investigating the missing scientists, Peter goes to Paris, where he watches a topless dancer in a Caribbean-themed nightclub in a sequence that seems very reminiscent of Live And Let Die. This is Monique, ex-wife of one of the scientists; she dances with an “asexual mulatto” as part of her act. Peter romances her (no sex, though) over the course of a few days, then breaks into her apartment one night (shades of Watergate!) and rifles through her “dead” husband’s paperwork, where he conveniently finds like a paystub from the man’s secret Commie backers. Later Monique comes in and has a three-way with that “asexual mulatto” and another gal while Peter hides in an alcove and listens!

Back at Dunster’s, Peter is informed of a “sea monster” spotted in the seas of Micronesia, one that spouts flame and has been wreaking havoc on the natives. Having apparently read Doctor No, Peter immediately realizes it’s likely a hydrofoil with machine gun and flame-thrower, a la the marsh buggy in Fleming’s novel. But forget about that – off Peter goes to Buenos Aires to chase another lead. It’s suddenly Jack London as Peter mounts a hike into the snow-swept mountains with a local guide who claims that his charge, one of the missing scientists who supposedly died in the hike, didn’t die after all; he was kidnapped by Russians who paid the guide to keep his mouth shut. But the guide has a sickly wife and will tell Peter all about it for more cash. 

Meanwhile Peter has another no-sex romance, with a British national babe who lives here as a travel agent. Indeed she gradually falls in love with him, and saves his ass when Peter is almost killed by an unseen sniper out in the mountains. This is the closest we get to an action scene, well into the novel; Peter’s even armed with something called a “Mendoza automatic,” which he purchased before the trip…and he doesn’t even fire it! Instead he himself is shot in the leg and crawls for his Land Rover and passes out, only to awaken in the hospital. Not to worry, though, as off Peter goes next to St. Thomas, to recuperate for a week in the sun.

One wonders how the CIA stayed afloat in Hunt’s (fictional?) world, as Thorne next sends the recovered Peter to Berne, Switzerland, to investigate a “coy whore” who tangled with another of the missing scientists. Peter actually gets in a fight here, having walked into a honey trap – back to the girl’s place for sex, where two dudes attack him. Peter hits one guy with an ice hammer and gets away; later he discovers the “coy whore” herself has been murdered. Off Peter goes again, this time to Micronesia, to finally look into that “sea monster” business brought up so many pages ago (we’re now past page 100 of a 176-page novel with some super small and dense print).

Posing as a marine biologist, Peter navigates the ocean in a ketch with a few natives, acting as bait for the hydrofoil. It attacks them – and Hunt gets rid of it in a few paragraphs as Peter whips out a bazooka and destroys it. Rather than investigate further…Peter flies back to DC. This after he’s enjoyed the sexual talents (off-page) of the island chieftan’s daughter, a “laughing, full-breasted maiden,” that is. Thorne figures Peter should investigate the area in which the hydrofoil operated, so has him test out the Snark, the Agency’s new one-man submarine, which is actually a two-man submarine; many pages are devoted to Peter and an Agency pal piloting the thing around Florida, only for the friend to get injured and not able to take part in the actual mission(!).

In the final thirty or so pages, The Venus Probe gets fairly interesting. In his one-man submarine Peter searches the floorbed of the ocean, eventually encountering a massive underwater structure. His sub is caught in a net and he’s hauled in. It’s a Russian place, and of course the captured scientists are all here. Peter continues to pose as a marine biologist, and the KGB man in charge of the installation, Borsulov, eventually buys his story. In fact Borsulov even puts in a call to Moscow to have Peter be made a member of the team of scientists the Sovs have put together.

For it isn’t a lunar team after all – the Russians want to exceed the US-USSR space race, and go to Venus itself. Peter finds that the captured scientists are split into two parties: those who rebel against the Russians and the “progressives” who are liberals and have willingly joined the Commies. Eventually Peter manages to recruit one of them, a former Army man who fights against the Russians, into an escape plot. Peter then waltzes into Borsulov’s place…and announces he’s a CIA agent and that it’s against the law for Borsulov to hold him here against his will!?

The action finale is more humorous than thrilling, mostly because Peter Ward himself doesn’t do anything more than tie up a few guards. Meanwhile it’s that army vet scientist who does all the heavy lifting (off-page, at that!). Peter does shoot one guard in the thigh – and then another scientist, a proclaimed pacivist, shoots the guy in the chest…and then blows the smoke off the barrel of his pistol! Meanwhile that vet takes out three guards and Borsulov, who humorously enough has a self-destruct button for the entire underwater installation on his desk!

Peter and all the scientists desperately escape in scuba gear, trying to swim up from a great depth before the installation blows up. Oh and Peter’s gone around to warn everyone, hoping that the sexy KGB babe down here – provided as sexual release for the men (Peter turns her offers down, too) – somehow manages to escape. Doubtful, though, given that all of the scientists except one actually die in the escape. Personally I’d say Peter has failed in his mission, but I’m sure he’ll get another award dinner.

And that’s that. Peter, once again on a hospital bed, wonders if he’ll head back to Micronesia for more chieftan-daughter sex, or maybe to Buenos Aires, to hook up with that travel agent babe he promised he’d see again. As mentioned I started the sixth volume the other year, and I can tell you neither of these things happen in One Of Our Agents Is Missing.

But then, not much of anything appears to happen in the Peter Ward books at all. Even the seventh volume, The Mongol Mask, sounds to be a bore, despite the cover promise of “atomic sex” and other thrills – just check out Jure’s review.