The Penetrator #47: Orphan Army

The Penetrator #47: Orphan Army, by Lionel Derrick

September, 1982  Pinnacle Books

If you’ve ever been reading an installment of The Penetrator and thought to yourself, “This is great and all, but it would be even better if Mark ‘The Penetrator’ Hardin was wasting a bunch of kids,”, then have I got the installment for you! 

To be honest, though, Orphan Army isn’t all kid-killing, all the time. Mark Roberts fills pages with abandon, and in addition to the orphan plot we have appearances from past characters, an egregious “perfect storm” middle section, and a “military combat” climax that wouldn’t have been out of place in Roberts’ later Soldier For Hire. 

And also I should clarify. Either due to his own decision or some behind-the-scenes editing, Roberts never specifically has Mark killing kids. The brainwashed orphan soldiers he does take out are all carefully specified as being teenagers. Kids, still, but certainly a different image than the Penetrator blowing away some seven year-old. 

But otherwise I’m happy to report that some of the bloodlust of the earliest volumes has sort of returned; at the very least, Mark kills a few people this time, and Roberts dwells on the exploding brains and gore. That said, he knocks just as many out with his plastic dart gun Ava, which also makes a return appearance here – it seems to me to have been a few volumes since we saw it, but then I take many months between volumes so at this point the entire series seems like a blur. 

Roberts must have been feeling some nostalgia for the series, as with this one he brings back the SIE, the Societe Internationale d’Elite, that New World Order organization first introduced in #3: Capitol Hell and which then later appeared in #25: Floating Death, both Roberts installments. We’re told that the events of Capitol Hell were “a few years back,” but meanwhile that book was published eight years before this one. Then again, later in Orphan Army we’re told that Mark’s “Brown Beast,” a 1977 Ford camper, is “getting old,” and there’s a go-nowhere diversion where we are informed that Mark has tasked David Red Eagle, back in the Stronghold, with getting a new vehicle for the Penetrator. Nothing comes of this in the novel so we eagerly await developments in the next Roberts installment. 

We’re informed that the SIE has gone somewhat legit, no longer just a shadowy organization and now posing as an up-and-up NGO that meddles in the politics of various nations, skewing things in a progressive-leftist direction. In other words the SIE is the deep state in all but name. We see them in action in the first chapter, when a Walter Cronkite type of newsman is murdered just as he’s putting the final touches on a report about the SIE – and folks the ‘80s have entered The Penetrator, the age of computers is here, as we have a lot of stuff about the “chip” in his electric typewriter that stored what he was typing out, even though the assassins made off with the printed pages. 

Then again, the age of computers extends to the book itself; Orphan Army has big, blocky print that looks nothing like previous Pinnacle publications, making the book come in at nearly 200 pages. All of which is to say the era of the ‘70s paperback was well and fully over by 1982, and honestly a lot of the charm was gone as well. 

Dan Griggs – the Justice guy who heads up the task force that is dedicated to bringing the Penetrator in, remember – puts Mark on this one, telling him about the SIE connection. Mark talks to the people who worked with the Cronkite type and discovers that there was something about orphanages, and from there Mark will ultimately learn that the SIE is funding orphanages where kids are being brainwashed with socialist drivel and turned into combat-ready killers. 

There’s quite a bit of stuff with the SIE types themselves, from Felder, the new head of the SIE, to a guy named DiFalco who runs one of the orphanages. Roberts doles out some of the expected sleazy stuff with random mentions of the “photographs” DiFaclco and some others keep of some of the orphans, though fortunately Orphan Army doesn’t go as far down that dark, sleazy road as the contemporary Ninja Master #7. 

But honestly, the “kid killer” stuff really comes and goes in the plot. I swear, Mark Roberts was bored as hell with the series at this point and just wanted the damn thing to end – possibly one of the reasons he decided to end it so permanently in the 53rd and final volume. We have long digressions on how much Mark Hardin likes trains, to the aforementioned digression on what type of new truck he’s going to get, and then the most egregious part is an endless sequence where he endures an ocean storm in Japan. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s also stuff from the point of view of Dennis Roberts, a prepubescent orphan in one of the SIE orphanages who takes umbrage with the socialist drivel being taught…and is constantly punished for it. Mark sees this kid when making his first sortie of the orphanage (posing as a safety inspector), and eventually this kid will help out in an action scene – and, ultimately, will be adopted by none other than Dan Briggs. 

I almost forgot, Roberts also goes way overboard with esoteric martial arts terms in this one, like he’d read a couple volumes of Mace. It has the same lame impact, too, with no real verve to the plentiful hand-to-hand fights, Roberts just namedropping various kicks and punches as Mark fights sundry North Korean experts. I also almost forgot, but the SIE turns out to be working with North Korea. 

As for the firefights, these two are unusual because many scenes feature Mark going up against brainwashed kids. Almost halfway through he blows away an 18 year-old, hating himself for “killing a kid,” and later in the book he will unwillingly kill a few more teens in various firefights. But for the most part he goes up against North Koreans, and Roberts indulges in his usual in-jokery by naming one of them “Chiun.” 

After Mark has hit a few of the orphanages the SIE takes all the kids and heads over to Korea, and at this point Mark has been warned off the case by Dan Griggs, due to higher-ups in Washington who want the SIE left alone (again, the deep state connotation). Mark goes over anyway, hooking up with some commando types in Japan…and leading to that aforementioned scene where he’s on a boat in a massive ocean storm, and folks this part just goes on and on and on. 

Then in South Korea he engages in various military skirmishes with the SIE orphans, and here it is very much like Soldier For Hire, lacking the lone wolf action escapades of earlier books and instead featuring Mark commanding various fire teams in combat. I’m not so much a fan of this and all told it’s probably why I prefer the installments by co-writer Chet Cunningham. 

Roberts also brings back Angie Dillon, first introduced in #29: Aryan Onslaught and then in #35: Black Massacre; both Roberts installments, and as I argued earlier Angie was likely Roberts’s attempt at the “perfect match” for Mark Hardin, competing with Chet Cunningham’s own perfect match(es). Angie as we’ll recall is a widower with twins, and surprisingly Roberts treats us to an all-too-brief conjugation between Mark and her, though it doesn’t reach the sleazy heights of the earliest volumes. That said, Angie disappears from the book, then shows up at the very end, somehow in Japan as a “surprise” for Mark – and Roberts ends the novel there. 

Throughout the novel Roberts doles out some of his patented clunky sentences, my favorite being: “A long, two-second silence followed.” But overall he keeps Orphan Army moving, though I still bet he was relieved when the series soon came to an end.

Star Fever

Star Fever, by Nancy Weber

April, 1971  Signet Books

As mentioned in my review of $500, Star Fever was Nancy Weber’s first novel, a paperback original published by Signet that is so obscure I didn’t even find it when I was obsessively searching for rock novels a few years ago. 

This slim novel, barely over 150 pages (the last several pages are comprised of song lyrics by Weber’s fictional musicians), is very much of its era…sort of a more literate take on what J.R. Young was doing. In her 2014 interview Weber described Star Fever as a “a silly work-for-hire about groupies,” but really it isn’t – it’s more along the lines of the later Rock & Roll Retreat Blues, a sort of surreal slice-of-rocker-life sort of thing, with the caveat that Star Fever is like so, so many other “rock novels” of this era in that it really isn’t about rock music at all. 

No, the focus is on Susan O’Brien, sexy young socialite reporter (apparently a Weber staple; the same sort of protagonist featured in $500) who is doing a magazine expose on groupies…and to this end a lot of the book is comprised of taped conversations between Susan and Star, essentially the top groupie of her day: a young groovy chick who is the main woman of Frog Johnson, a Bob Dylan-esque folk singer with big underground cred. 

Then a lot of the novel is comprised of the pseudo diary entries of Jan, a teenager who saw Frog in her hometown of Seattle, had sex with him in his hotel room, and now is obsessed with him, to the point that she’s run away from home and is trying to be with him because she thinks they were meant to be together. The novel starts off on very casual footing; Susan “rapping” with Star, diary excerpts from Jan…the actual rockers, ie the focus of the novel, are barely even seen! The editor at Signet is to be given much credit for sifting through the novel and making it seem like it’s going to focus on the “sleazy rocker stuff.” Just check out this first-page preview: 

And also the back cover, which promises a completely different novel than what we get: 

So yeah, it develops eventually that Susan, a roving magazine reporter who comes off like a proto Sex and the City character but a lot less shrill and self-involved, once had a casual fling with Pete Kettle, drummer for top British sensation The Boys. That Susan is determined to get him, as per the back cover, is not really an element in the novel…though she does eventually get him. 

As for the porno flick hyped on the first-page preview? It happens so casually in the novel that it barely even resonates. Once she’s hooked up with Pete Kettle again, Susan is at a party and smoking pot and all those usual late ‘60s things (the novel is set between 1969 and 1970, though curiously there’s no mention of Woodstock), and someone decides to shoot a porno for another guy’s birthday present, and Susan says what the hell, she’ll be in it. But the actual shooting of the movie happens off-page and indeed, Weber keeps all the sex-scenes off-page or so obfuscated that even the most depraved reader will have to do some heavy lifting in the imagination department to make things juicy. I mean, this ain’t no $500, but even that wasn’t too explicit. 

But really, this isn’t a “plot” type of novel. As with the later $500, Weber really excels at bringing a lost New York to life – though again, hers is a New York of upper-crust socialites. One of the subplots of the novel is Susan, “old” in her late twenties, learning to let herself loosen up and join up with the young hippie crowd. 

But where are the rockers? Sadly, they’re window dressing. Star Fever could’ve just as easily been about movie stars. Frog Johnson and Pete Kettle are only there to deliver a few lines of dialog, otherwise the novel belongs to the women. That said, Weber gets major props for bringing an unexpected magickal direction to the novel; Frog hangs out with a black guy who fashions himself as a wizard and Star sees herself as a witch, and there’s a lot of groovy ‘60s ritual stuff when Jan is indoctrinated into the world of magick. 

Oh and speaking of random metaphysical things…now this is crazy, but then again it would really only matter to me, but still. As I mentioned in my review of $500, I discovered that book in Montreal. Well, folks, guess where Susan O’Brien just randomly decides to go early on in Star Fever? That’s right – for no reason than just to be spontaneous, Susan catches a flight to Montreal and hangs out in Old Montreal for a few days, which I thought was crazy – what Jung would’ve called synchronicity, especially because as mentioned the coincidence of it all really only mattered to me (the essence of a synchronicity…or at least that’s what Robert Anton Wilson always said, but what the hell did he know?). 

I seem to be losing the plot. And speaking of plot, one gradually develops in Star Fever. Basically, Star learns that she will never have a child due to all the abortions she’s had, and she thinks that’s a damn shame because Frog Johnson should have a child. So on one of her witchy ritual trips she gets the idea for one of Frog’s fans to carry the child. And guess who it turns out to be? That’s right: Jan. So the teenaged Jan spends the last third of the novel very pregnant – something her desperate-to-be-hip mother thinks is just grand, but something that might not resonate very well with sensitive readers of today. 

As for Susan, her story has her wondering if she should just hook up with her agent, with whom she’s had a long-simmer “will they or won’t they” relationship (another $500 carryover), but then after the trip to Montreal she runs into Pete Kettle again – hanging out in a hotel a la John Lennon  – and soon enough she’s spending New Year’s with him and heading down to Majorca and whatnot. 

But man, there is absolutely no scene here where Frog Johnson or the Boys have a concert, or perform music – other that is than randomly strumming guitars during parties. This is very much a “rock musician’s life” novel instead of a “rock novel,” and even the “groupie” element Nancy Weber mentioned in her decades-later interview is minimal. Star is already established as Frog’s girl, the groupie who managed to snare her idol. That said, her parts are by far the most entertaining, including randomly bizarre stuff like when she decides to drive against traffic in downtown Manhattan. 

As for Weber’s writing, as with $500 it’s exceptional, with the note that her skill is snappy wordplay and dialog. There are some narrative portions that are a bit muddied because Weber is trying to capture the fractured mentality of a drugged-up hippie girl (that “driving against traffic” scene mentioned above). 

Overall Star Fever is entertaining, and in its easy-going attitude toward plot it manages to capture the era very well. But it isn’t really a rock novel. It’s more of a “socialite woman in her late twenties decides to get with the Now Generation” sort of novel, and even then it’s really easy-going…like a part early on, where Susan attends a party at Star’s and apparently has an orgy with Star and Chinese cook “The Wok,” but Weber doesn’t dwell on the sleazy details and the reader is left wondering what actually happened. 

Finally, Star Fever wins the award for most abrupt ending this side of an average installment of The Sharpshooter; Jan is pregnant with Frog’s child, Susan is in Majorca with Pete Kettle and wondering if she should take this cushy new deal to write a roman a clef about The Boys…and then the novel just ends, and suddenly we have a few pages of song lyrics. 

But I guess in that way too Star Fever succeeds in capturing the vibe of its era, but apparently the novel made little impact when published, and is so obscure today that I had to hunt to find a reasonably-priced cover. And it’s got a groovy Gene Szafran cover, too, despite the naked male ass on display. But hell, a woman did write the book, so… 

Black Samurai #8: The Katana

Black Samurai #8: The Katana, by Marc Olden

June, 1975  Signet Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead Run

Dead Run, by Jonathan Black

October, 1981  Jove Books

So obscure there isn’t even a cover image online, Dead Run is presumably by the same Jonathan Black who turned out a series of paperback originals in the 1970s before finding more fame in the 1980s (in the UK, at least) with super-fat, super-long blockbusters like The World Rapers and The Carnage Merchants; as I mentioned in my review of The Ms. Squad #2, “Jonathan Black” was a pseudonym of prolific writer Bela von Block. 

Was this Jonathan Black that Jonathan Black? I have no way of knowing, and really, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just judge the book on its own merits. For one, we have here a serial killer novel. The particular type of victim this killer goes after is…joggers. Joggers in NYC. Jonathan Black, whether it was Bela von Block or not, has a theme and he’s sticking with it…Dead Run is so of its moment, capitalizing on the then-current fad of jogging, that you start to hate the joggers as much as the serial killer does. 

But then, perhaps that was Black’s intention. Dead Run is also curious because we have here a book where the author clearly hates every single one of his characters. There is this droll, eye-rolling tone to the narrative that makes it clear Black is “taking the piss” as the British would say, but ultimately it serves to make the book uninvolving. When even the author doesn’t give a shit about the characters he is killing off, why should the reader? 

Well anyway, Dead Run is also very much a New York novel. New York landmarks are mentioned, New York personalities are presented and dissected. We’re only talking Midtown-type people…trendy, affluent people who have given up cocktails to take up jogging, the big new fad that’s swept the city. Every single character in the novel has something to do with jogging, from the many victims of the killer to the ostensible “hero” of the book (I use quotes because the guy barely appears in the text), a former cop turned private eye – he too is pulled into jogging by a young woman who has her eye on him, despite being married. 

Oh, and that’s another thing. Jove Books as expected hypes up the sex quotient of the novel…but friends, there is none. Jonathan Black relishes in dangling the prospects of juicy a-doings, from the aforementioned young lady who just desperately wants to get laid by anyone who isn’t her husband, to the big movie star who is focused on her body, to the widow of one of the victims who keeps throwing herself at the ostensible hero…but nothing ever happens. Sex is always brushed off – the private eye in particular brushes off sexual advances, from both the widow and the horny married girl, to the point that the reader starts to get one of those “hmmmm” suspicions…especially given that the guy just wants to run home and give his dog a walk. 

I guess I should start using names for the characters to make this thing easier. Simon Larsen is the hero of the tale, a former NYC cop now barely making a living as a private investigator. The back cover has it that he’s brought in by the cops to crack the case, but that’s not really true – as usual I doubt the copy editors actually read the book. Instead, an old acquaintance named Ritalin who is still on the force (presumably he too later quit, to come up with a drug named after himself for hyperactive children) comes to Larsen to get an outsider’s view on the case…in other words, Larsen is strictly off the books, with no official involvement with the case. 

That is, until the sexy widow of the first victim comes to him and hires him, showing off her lush legs and basically telling him she wants to do him right there in his dingy office. Clearly Jonathan Black is catering to the private eye trope – the widow herself claiming as much – but our boy Simon fends off her advances, grudgingly takes her job, and gives his dog a walk. Hmmmm…. 

Black follows the formula of the standard mystery novel by given frequent chapters over to one-off characters who are about to become victims of the murderer. As mentioned Black’s distaste for these people is so palpable that the reader ends up siding with the killer; or then maybe Black is going for a dark comedy approach, which seems to be the case. It just gets old for 250-some pages of small, dense print. 

We have the guy who has become a devoted runner despite his wife’s distaste for the whole thing (ie the widow who later throws herself at Simon Larsen), the movie queen who jogs to keep her spectacular body in shape (truly a dark comedy scene, as she worries about a roll of fat beneath her chin – which is exactly what the killer’s attack dog latches onto when it mauls her to death), the young woman who signs up for the NYC race and who has the misfortune of being paired with…the killer himself, and so on. 

There are many other victims besides, and to his credit Black varies up the kills. The aforementioned dog attack is one avenue…the killer gets into the whole killing business by “accidentally” running a guy over while he’s jogging, then wondering if he did it on purpose, then realizing he enjoyed it. This is another of those novels where we know who the killer is from the start – a disaffected businessman who runs over the first victim on a whim, then realizes he wants to kill more of those goddamn joggers – but we are never given his name. He’s just never mentioned by name in his infrequent chapters. 

The mystery is more concerned with Simon Larsen figuring out who the killer is…that is, after pages and pages have been focused on Simon picking up jogging, at the behest of sexy young Katie – the horny married girl. As I say, Black’s distaste for his New York personalities is palpable; they’re all paper-thin, focused on the latest trendy thing; Katie wants to have an affair because she writes about them for her women’s magazine, and she’s always wanted to try one for herself, but she keeps striking out. 

The cops too are pugnacious, stupid, more prone to petty backstabbing than solving the case…and meanwhile the killer wracks up some impressive kills, often focusing on the various marathons that run through the city. And oh man. Tons and tons of narrative is given over to the discussion of these marathons, from organizing them to planning their routes…just so, so many characters involved in the jogging world, talking about jogging, thinking about jogging….just on and on and on. 

It’s one of those books where Simon owns a gun that he never carries, and besides he informs Katie he’s a “lousy shot.” So forget about action. Dead Run really is a mystery novel, one with a darkly droll sense of humor, given a “trendy jogging” overlay. 

So then a lot of the narrative is focused on those one-off characters, how they got into jogging, why they jog, going out for a jog…and getting killed by the murderer while jogging. There’s a very slow buildup as the cops and the people of New York slowly come to grasp that there is a “jogging killer” afoot (lame pun alert), and eventually the novel morphs into a procedural where Simon and the cops try to figure out who he is and stop him before he kills again…and meanwhile all these big marathons are being planned. 

It was curious reading Dead Run after the Boston Marathon bombing. The killer never achieves anything so drastic – once again fiction pales in comparison the horrors of reality, especially when radical Muslim terrorists are involved – but Black does manage to convey a sense of horror as the runners go about their race, oblivious that a killer is among them. That said, even here the victims are treated with tongue firmly in cheek, like the guy who finally succumbs to taking a drink from the water stand as he staggers by it, thirsty from running…and ends up drinking water that has been fatally spiked by the killer. 

Jonathan Black as expected centers everything around jogging in the finale: the big NYC marathon, Simon running it with Katie, on the lookout for the killer. At least his gun makes an appearance, but the finale is pretty anticlimactic (spoiler alert: Simon shoots the killer, the killer dies, that’s it). Oh and at the end Black has Katie casually reveal she’s filed for a divorce and now Simon had better give her some good lovin’! 

Overall Dead Run was fun for a peek at a lost Manhattan – like a lot of novels of its day, it manages to bring to life that lost era of the city, with the caveat that Black’s characters are too highfalutin to hang out in the seedier areas of New York – but overall the droll narrative tone lets the project down. Not to mention the hero who somehow manages to fend off the advances of two sexy women…hmmm….

Snowball In Hell (Dennison’s War #6)

Snowball In Hell, by Adam Lassiter

November, 1986  Bantam Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unreleased (?) 1970s Destroyer Poster

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

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

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

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

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

1983  Plon Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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