The Viking Process

The Viking Process, by Norman Hartley

February, 1977  Avon Books

Many years ago, somewhere, I picked up a copy of the Avon paperback edition of Norman Hartley’s 1979 novel Quicksilver, which appeared to be a thriller with a sci-fi overlay, taking place in the era it was published but featuring a sort of “near future” gloss. The book looked cool but for whatever reason I put it away in one of my many book boxes and forgot about it. 

Flash forward to last week, and I was watching the 1981 movie Looker for the first time, and apropos of nothing it made me think of that book I’d bought long ago, the paperback with the shiny silver cover. It took me a while to figure out that it was Quicksilver I was thinking of…and then it took another couple minutes of research to discover that Quicksilver was Hartley’s second novel; this, The Viking Process, was his first, published in hardcover in early 1976 (and getting a review in Kirkus), and coming out in this paperback edition the following year. Avon Books, by the way, retained the same cover art aesthetic for the two Hartley paperbacks, even though the books are not part of a series. 

As with Quicksilver, The Viking Process is a contemporary super-thriller that has a sci-fi gloss, mainly via the tech that is used. It could be that Hartley intended the book to occur “the day after tomorrow,” but if so the text does not specifically state so. The main takeaway is that The Viking Process was so gripping that I read it in like three days, which is pretty impressive given that the book is 310 pages long. That’s like…let me get my calculator…a hundred pages a day! 

To be sure, there are some problems I’ll quibble about, the main being something I’ve mentioned here before: it’s quite hard to read a steady diet of men’s adventure and then go to a “standard” novel, because you keep wondering why the protagonist isn’t kicking ass and wasting his enemies. Such is true throughout The Viking Process, which concerns a narrator named Philip Russell who is blackmailed into helping a radical terrorist group called the Vikings which wants to bring down the international corporations. I kept waiting for Russell to break someone’s neck, but it never happened…indeed, even in the finale he is reduced to bystander while the professionals take care of business. 

But other than that, The Viking Process really kept my attention throughout, and Hartley’s writing is so assured you’d never guess this was his first (of three) novels. With its first-person narrative, thriller vibe, and “future 1970s” angle, there were parts where The Viking Process reminded me of Lawrence Sanders’s The Tomorrow File (which, by the way, I am thinking of more and more as my favorite novel); for example, the opening features Russell in a high-tech hotel in Montreal, which features such sci-fi amenities as a crystal-web window that becomes opaque as the sun dawns, and an electro-magnetic pulse that powers everything, including the telephone, so you don’t even need cords. 

This opening also introduces Michelle, a hotstuff brunette Russell has picked up the night before; the first time he has ever cheated on his wife, Julia, who is back in England. I’ll buzzkill right now and inform you all with much regret that there is no sex in The Viking Process, which of course is typical of a lot of British pulp (Hartley, I might have failed to mention, is British). Indeed, despite being a beautiful and well-built sexual psychologist who runs a sex clinic where patients have orgies, Michelle will serve more as a foil than a bedmate, given that she is aligned with the Vikings. 

The Montreal pick-up turns out to have been a con, and the morning after Russell discovers that his life will never be the same. The Vikings, who have a base near his home in the English countryside, have had their eyes on Russell for quite some time, and he’s going to help them foster terrorist attacks whether he likes it or not. To this end his wife Julia has been abducted, and Russell has to do what the Vikings say or she will be punished. 

The Vikings are led by a rail-thin “prophet” by the name of Peace, another American, one given to grandiose speeches but also capable of violent actions. He claims that Russell, who has written books on terrorism, will be able to take the Vikings to the next level, but Russell soon learns that this is a con, too. This terrorist group is interesting, given that it is made up mostly of former ‘60s radicals, ones who have turned to technology; one of them, an American who is covered in hair (and named Hairy), is clearly modeled on Owsley, but there’s also some proto-Steve Jobs, too: he’s a former acid chemist who now turns out high-tech gizmos for the movement. 

The only problem is, Hartley doesn’t give these characters much room to breathe. Given that we are locked in the narrative and perspective of Russell, we only see what he sees. And he’s always focused on the wife that we readers have never seen; Julia, in fact, doesn’t even appear until the final third. This is a crutch the novel really recovers from, as is the never-explained reason why Russell became an expert in terrorism. We know he was in the British army, and he was a climbing instructor there…but why he got into the “terror research” game is unexplained. 

Oh, and the climbing. There’s quite a bit of it in The Viking Process. Indeed, Hartley cleverly works a climbing sequence into the climax of the novel, but the problem is that it once again takes Russell away from the action; we want to see him finally doling out comeuppance to these Viking bastards, but instead he’s scaling a wall of experimental glass in a massive shopping mall while the cops do the, uh, comeupping. 

But really the reader keeps waiting for Russell to fight back, and it never comes. The Vikings quickly prove their threats are real, giving Julia a shot with a virus in it when Russell tries to talk to people during Julia’s faked funeral, and after that Russell just does whatever they want. There’s a long sequence where they go to the British countryside and Russell sees the Vikings being trained; there’s a vaginal spray can that can hide a combustible paint that explodes when you shoot it, and then there’s a long scene where Russell and a fellow captive must race through the streets of a town as a squad of Vikings chase them on motorcycles. It’s here, by the way, that Russell makes his first of two kills in the novel. 

Some of the book reminded me of the later Fight Club, in that a lot of the Viking terror schemes have to do with mean-spirited schemes carried out by menial workers who can go about ignored. Which is to say, Vikings will get jobs as cleaners or mechanics or whatnot, menial-level jobs that aren’t paid much attention to, and will stage their sabotage, like when they set booby-traps in rental cars and the Vikings put out fake “contest” rules of how “a few lucky winners” might get a car that explodes. 

Some of these “scenarios” are also more lurid, like a part where Peace takes over a hotel where execs from a corporation are having a business function and he turns cameras onto some of the rooms, so people can see the naughtiness they’re getting up to. But even here Hartley is shy with the lurid details; indeed, there is a recurring schtick of Peace turning off the monitors anytime things get too extreme, like an earlier part where Russell is about to witness the sexual torture of a Viking who has slighted Peace. 

Regardless, The Viking Process moves at a rapid clip and Hartley has a definite knack for catching and keeping the reader’s attention. But things just sort of unravel in the final third. Peace reveals that the Vikings have possession of an experimental chemical that turns people into “monsters” by melting faces and causing massive boils in the skin and other grossness, and this is unleashed on innocent people in a grocery store. It’s so vile and extreme that Russell detects chips in Michelle’s armor – oh, and by the way, Michelle has been set up as Russell’s mistress, living with him in his countryside home while Julia’s off-page in captivity, but Hartley never once explains how their live-in situation is, whether they are sleeping together or etc. 

Russell works on this chip by insisting that Michelle take him to her sex clinic – a scene that Hartley completely fails to exploit. They sit there and watch sex films of Michelle’s clients, and Michelle clearly wants to spend a little time with Russell…but instead he knocks her out and slips off to talk to his old friend, who just so happens to be a secret agent(!). Russell manages to talk a bunch of security officials into letting him stay with the Vikings as an inside man.  That said, the scene at the sex clinic is notable because Hartley makes clear that, like Lawrence Sanders, he has been influenced by Alvin Toffler: “future shock” is specifically referenced several times.

We get the novel’s only sex scene when Julia briefly appears, the Vikings allowing Russell to have a conjugal visit with his wife in a Viking safe house; Julia’s skin has been darkened to avoid her being spotted (as the world thinks she’s dead), which leads to Julia’s awesomely pre-PC line to Russell: “Here’s your chance to have a black girl.” That said, even here Hartley doesn’t go full-bore with it, and truth be told Julia is more of a plot contrivance than a character; her peaceful acceptance of her life as a captive is very unbelievable, and one would think she’d harbor just a little resentment at her husband for having gotten her into this mess. 

This sequence has an unexpected and touching payoff, but as mentioned the climax just sort of loses all the steam Hartley has been building. It turns out the Vikings will unleash that monster-making chemical in a massive shopping mall in America, and Russell and a kick-ass terrorist-busting commando guy fly over there…and there’s lots of red tape as the Brits stand around and the Americans explain how they’re going to handle it. 

It’s a strange decision on Hartley’s part; the reader wants to see Russell getting revenge, but instead it’s a bunch of newly-introduced cops and terrorism experts from the US, and instead our hero scales a massive glass wall to get the cannister of chemicals. Hartley clearly knows his climbing and mountaineering, but I found it all overdone and would’ve been more satisfied with an old-fashioned firefight…which is the one thing we don’t get. That said, Russell does take out another terrorist, by jumping down on him, but it’s kind of too little, too late. 

It seems that Hartley rectified this in his next novel, Quicksilver, which is also in first-person but features a more action-oriented protagonist. Russell himself is the chief problem with The Viking Process, and I also wished for more payback on the individual terrorists. But the world Hartley creates, this post-Sixties world of radicals who have embraced technology as the new way to fight the system (while, it is gradually revealed, selling out to the system in the process), is a very compelling one. Like The Tomorrow File, Hartley here gives us a “future ‘70s” that never was, and if Quicksilver is more of the same, I’ll be reading it soon.

The Spider #32: Slaves Of The Dragon

The Spider #32: Slaves Of The Dragon, by Grant Stockbridge

May, 1936  Popular Publications

One of the best volumes of The Spider I’ve yet read, Slaves Of The Dragon features the return of the “Yellow Peril” storylines as seen in previous Spider yarns as The Red Death Rain and Emperor Of The Yellow Death. This one is just as good as either of them, given that it deals with a rather risque topic for a 1936 pulp novel: sexual slavery, or rather “white slavery,” as it’s most often referred to, given that the titular Dragon is a Chinese sadist who is kidnapping thousands of white American women to be sold as sex slaves to the Mongols, the women fated to give birth to “half-breed slaves” until they are no longer fertile. 

Norvell “Grant Stockbridge” Page lays the “evil Chinese” stuff on thick, but I saw little to get my panties in a bunch over; I mean seriously, if you are woke or easily offended, you shouldn’t be reading 1930s pulp to begin with. But there are random asides on how loathsome and cunning the Chinese are; Richard Wentworth, The Spider, clearly fears them more than any other enemy, and there are many times where he gives in to a paranoia when he discovers, early in the book, that his opponents are Chinese. 

Page as ever keeps the plot moving, and one thing I’ve noticed with the Yellow Peril storylines is that he doesn’t waste our time with the usual “red herring” subplot that mars so many Spider yarns. This is clearly because the villain is Asian, and not someone who would be in Wentworth’s upper-crust circle, so there’s no opportunity for Page to do his usual “it was really so-and-so!” schtick…but at the same time, it’s an interesting reminder of when Chinese people were a rarity in New York City, sequestered solely to Chinatown. 

Random subject-change warning, but did you all know that Princess Ariel on Thundarr The Barbarian is Chinese?? I’ve been watching that show with my kid – I loved it when I was a kid, back when it first came on in the very early ‘80s – and there’s an episode where they go to Chinatown, and Ariel says something to the effect of “This is where my ancestors might once have lived.” Anyway, I was surprised…I mean the animators gave Ariel dark skin (and a very impressive rack that those perv animators prominently feature in every shot they can, god bless ‘em), so I assumed she was Arabic or something, but I was surprised to discover she was Chinese. 

Anyway, I think I was talking about Slaves Of The Dragon. Well, it’s a good one, and not marred by the usual red herring stuff, which I think I already mentioned. It hits the ground running, per the Page template, with Wentworth coming across a lingerie shop in the city that’s being hit by the cops. Only Wentworth soon figures these aren’t really cops, particularly the one holding the machine gun who is clearly under the influence of heroin. 

Page gets pretty risque here with “models” from the store being taken out by the pseudo-cops, many of them in various states of undress; the idea is they’re being arrested for indecency and the like, this being 1936 and there still being standards of decency and stuff like that. But when Wentworth sees the badge number on a cop heimmediately knows the guy is imposter – Wentworth knows the real cop who has that badge number, you see – it’s blazing guns to the rescue as Wentworth takes on the bad guys. 

We do get the expected random subplot with the appearance of Margaret Stone, a hotstuff young woman who sees Wentworth put the Spider seal on the forehead of a corpse, while in his everyday guise as Wentworth, something he’s never done before. And of course Margaret immediately suspects Wentworth is really the Spider, and there’s a dangling plot that she might out him to the police – which is a laugh, because the police already know – but then Page changes his mind and has Margaret infatuated with Wentworth, in a plot development that makes little sense. 

A cool thing about Slaves Of The Dragon is that the threat is a little more smallscale and personal than previous volumes, which adds more impact to the narrative. That said, the women-kidnapping scenes aren’t as prevalent as you might think, but I did think it was interesting that the novel was essentially a precursor of the later Super Cop Joe Blaze #2. 

Page as ever excels in scenes of personal and heroic sacrifice, and also as ever puts his hero through the wringer. One thing I learned about those wily Chinese from Slaves Of The Dragon is that practically every place they live in is filled with traps, though I learned this already many years ago in my in-laws’ house, where the bathroom door didn’t close unless you really pushed it in. Nothing like taking a leak and then turning around to discover that the door was wide open behind you the entire time. “What’s for dinner, everyone?” Those wily Chinese! 

I keep getting distracted. Yes, there’s a great part where Wentworth goes into the bowls of the Dragon’s crypt, led by the “childlike” and small female servant expected in the Yellow Peril trope, here named Ya Hsai. But she leads Wentworth to this crazy trap where starving rats are in the floor below and somehow Ram Singh is here and he’s been shot in the chest by Wentworth (unintentionally, of course), and there’s a desperate scene where they gun down rats and chop them with knives and Ram Singh begs to give up his life for Master Wentworth. 

We also get a lot of Spider appearances here, with Wentworth disguising his face with makeup and a floppy hat, including a humorous part where he walks around Broadway in full Spider get-up. But as ever the entire thing is a ruse because everyone knows Richard Wentworth is the Spider; there’s a part early on where they even attack him in his home. A scene, now that I think of it, that Page doesn’t follow up on; Wentworth’s fiancé, Nita Van Sloan, comes over with a young boy whose mother was kidnapped, and Nita mentions that she might adopt the child…and the child is never seen nor mentioned again. 

As for Nita, she really shines here, as she has been in the more recent volumes. There’s a great part toward the end where Page for once actually breaks away from Wentworth’s perspective and features Nita alone, outside Washington, D.C. (believe it or not, in the swamp! Talk about timely – they need to drain that thing!), and she’s been captured with the other women, and she gets hold of a whip from one of the female guards and starts up a slave revolt. 

The only failing with the book is the Dragon himself, who is just an old Chinese man; Page doesn’t do much to make the villain memorable. There’s no costume, no grand speech, nothing. He’s just a wily old Chinese guy who has an army at his disposal and has been hired to kidnap white women to be given to Mongols for slave-breeding purposes. In other words, pretty forgettable as a Spider villain. 

Action is frequent and as ever sees Wentworth using dual .45s; there’s a modern Paul Verhoeven vibe where both he and Nita start using corpses as “human shields” during the bloody firefights. Unfortunately Page delivers an overlong aerial combat sequence later in the book, and I’ve never been a fan of those in the series. 

There are a lot of “big moments,” though, particularly a part where the Dragon announces that the Spider is dead, and right after he says that the Spider himself shows up, guns blazing. Page also tries to do something different with the character of Ya Hsai, building up a rapport between her and Wentworth. But the stuff with Margaret, who develops an almost fatal attraction for Wentworth, is much less believable. 

Page has so much fun with Slaves Of The Dragon that he ends the novel mid-battle; Chinese military planes are attacking the Dragon’s ruined base in the Virginia swamps, and Wentworth, Nita, and a G-man are shooting at them, and Wentworth tells Nita to call the FBI, and the novel ends! Speaking of which, there’s a lot of talk about “Hoover’s FBI,” all of it praiseworthy, and so far as I can recall this is the first time the FBI has been mentioned in The Spider. 

Overall Slaves Of The Dragon was certainly entertaining, and moved at a faster clip than many other Spider stories, mostly because it followed a single plot from beginning to end and didn’t jump wily-nily to various action setpieces.

Serpent's Eye (The Year Of The Ninja Master #3)

Serpent's Eye, by Wade Barker

September, 1986  Warner Books

Man, this Year Of The Ninja Master series is perhaps the strangest in all men’s adventuredom, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Ric Meyers takes the simple, pulp concept of original series Ninja Master and turns it into a metaphysical head-scratcher that makes the bloated ninja epics of Eric Van Lustbader seem like fast-moving action extravaganzas. 

What I find humorous is that Meyers came onto Ninja Master because the original series author (Stephen Smoke?) turned in a second volume deemed subpar by Warner Books…well, why wasn’t another “Wade Barker” brought in to replace Meyers? Surely no Warner editor could’ve read this third volume of Year Of The Ninja Master (not to mention the first two!) and deemed it worthy of publication. My only theory is that the demand for anything ninja was so great in the 1980s that publishers were desperate for product. Even crazier is that there was another volume of this series, and four more volumes of another series, War Of The Ninja Master, all written by Meyers! 

Told in three “books,” Serpent’s Eye is notable because it’s the first book in this series to solely focus on Daremo, formerly known as Brett Wallace, the hero of the original Ninja Master series…and before that, we’re told, his name was Brian Anderson, which always makes me laugh because that’s the name of a guy I know from work, and he sure as hell is no ninja. The previous two books featured Jeff Archer, Brett Wallace’s former sidekick; Archer, who was taken through hell by his sadistic creator in the previous two books, does not appear in Serpent’s Eye. 

Rather it’s Daremo alone, and he is a far cry from Brett Wallace: confused, adrift, following instincts that he himself does not understand. Meyers gives us a protagonist who is more so a puppet, being pulled around on the strings of fate. There is a dreamlike, metaphysical texture to the novel that is more stupid than profound, because it is so at odds with what this genre requires. Often Daremo will “find himself” somewhere, like say Hong Kong, and have no idea how he got here – granted, Meyers explains this at the end of the novel, but at that point the damage is done. Even Pinnochio had more free will. 

What makes it crazier is that I had flashbacks to Traveler in that I now have no idea when exactly this series takes place. Okay, so the opening features Daremo drifting around in his “fate leads me” state, finding himself on the east coast, and sort of invisibly shadowing a ‘Nam vet named Scott Harmon who has the most bizarre character intro I’ve ever read: beating up some neighborhood prick who was putting razors in candy bars on Halloween night. WTF? Well, Daremo slips into the guy’s home and tells him all about himself and “recruits” him. 

Then Daremo puts together and entire team, and they all fly over to the Middle East(!?), and then they rob a bank in Iran, and then they fly out on the C-130 one of the guys in the team owns…and I mean they’re also armed with machine guns and rocket launchers here…and then we’re told that all this happens in 1979, right before Iran fell to the mullahs. (Talk about a timely read, folks!) 

Okay…so the series is set in the late 1970s?? Did anyone else know this?? 

But then Book Two opens and Daremo is suddenly in Hong Kong, again on the trail of the mystical Chinese ninjas who have been fighting him since Dragon Rising. I almost got the impression the Iran stuff was a dream, but I’m not sure. In fact, Serpent’s Eye opens with a vague bit of Daremo, gutshot and dying, sitting on top of the world and reflecting on his end, which lends the impression that everything that follows in the narrative is a death delirium. 

This section in Hong Kong is so tonally at odds with the rest of the series that I laughed. Meyers, perhaps flashing back himself – namely, to his days writing The Destroyer – retcons Daremo into a Remo Williams stand-in, and has his superhman martial arts warriror blitzing through the Hong Kong underworld as he chases down a high-level gangster who is sending assassins after Daremo. 

The action scenes are written in such a lazy, first-draft way that I came to the conclusion that the entire novel was a first draft. But otherwise this sequence is so similar to The Destroyer: lots of witty dialog, Daremo so superhumanly skilled that his safety is never in doubt. In pure Remo form, Daremo even manages to hook up with a beautiful American babe who happens to be here, serving as a hooker for the gangster Daremo’s searching for, and just like Remo, Daremo is superhumanly skilled in the lovemaking department, but has no actual “drive” to do the deed…and when he finally does do it (or does her, I guess I should say), it’s of course left entirely off page. 

The girl’s name is Michelle Bowers, and despite himself Meyers makes her a memorable character: a failed actress who has ended up a hooker in Hong Kong. A recurring joke has her wanting to tell Daremo why she became a hooker, and Daremo not being interested in knowing. Anyone who has read a Meyers novel will know that at some point Michelle will be captured, tied up, and degraded, and of course this happens in Serpent’s Eye, but with a different outcome than expected. 

Book three is almost tiresome in its lameness. More of a puppet than ever, Daremo needs to get into mainland China for reasons he cannot comprehend, and ends up hanging out with a traveling theater group that’s a Peking Opera type of affair. Eventually this builds to a low-rent psychedelic affair where Daremo climbs this high mountain, beset by gods the entire time – and I forgot to mention, but Daremo often meets and converses with gods in the course of the book. 

SPOILER WARNING: Skip this paragraph, but I’m noting it here for my own sanity whenever I get up the courage to read the next book and need to remember what happened in this one. Anyway, it is revealed in some of the laziest bullshit-first draft writing ever that “Daremo” has actually been Scott Harmon all this time, ie the ‘Nam vet introduced in book one of Serpent’s Eye, and I guess he’s been Daremo in the previous two books? The real Daremo all along has been “The Figure In Black,” ie what we thought was the villain, but has really been Daremo guiding his puppet Scott Harmon along the path…which explains why Harmon was so confused as to his own objectives and whatnot. Not only does Harmon die at the end of the book, but so does the superhumanly-powerful Chinese ninja that has been a plague since the start of this series. “He died” is literally and lamely how Meyers describes this major series event, showing absolutely no ability nor desire to draw out the dramatic import – and folks I kid you not, the novel ends with Daremo laughing happily on this big mountain in China. 

End spoilers. Serpent’s Eye was super stupid, and overlong at 244 pages, but if the entire series was more like the sub-Destroyer section in book two, Year Of The Ninja Master would at least be worth reading. But man I think I’d be more willing to read The Miko before I take the plunge and read the next – and thankfully last – volume in this series.

Springblade #8: Betrayal

Springblade #8: Betrayal, by Greg Walker

August, 1991  Jove Books

I keep forgetting about the Springblade series…and then when I read one of the books, I remember why I keep forgetting it. Seriously though, this is military fiction more so than men’s adventure, and the escapism one expects from the latter genre is not to be found. It’s all military jargon, acronyms, and characters who talk about their time in the service. 

This one’s even more military-themed than the others, as the entire novel takes place during the Vietnam War. A more accurate title for this volume would’ve been Flashback, as that’s all we get for the majority of the 188 pages…series protagonist Bo Thornton flashing back to 1965 and all the shit he got into when he was in the SOG outfit in ‘Nam. 

What’s unfortunate is that the opening of Betrayal promises something else. Two DC politicians plot against the Springblade team and want to get them killed off; one of them holds a personal grudge, because back in #2: Machete his “balls were smashed in” by team member Jason Silver when Springblade was faking a hostage attempt for reasons I cannot recall. 

Well, these two guys have a plan up their sleeves to get Springblade, and it would appear that this is only so far as the copyeditor read the book…because that’s the story that’s sort of promised on the back cover, only it’s not the story we readers actually get. Instead, as mentioned, the entire damn thing is a flashback to Vietnam. 

Presumably occurring in the previous volume, Bo Thornton has finally married Lisa, aka the Smurfette of Springblade, the one who used to sit at home in the earliest books but has now been retconned into “the computer girl” on actual missions. Now she’s become Mrs. Thornton, and Betrayal opens the morning after their wedding, with the entire team hanging out at the Thorntons’ beachside home, which is where the wedding took place. 

Nothing says “men’s adventure novel” like telling us your main protagonist just got married, but Springblade is only packaged as men’s adventure. More than ever the focus this time is on the military life. While everyone else is asleep, Bo and Lisa sit on the beach and Bo lights a cigar and proceeds to tell Lisa, his new wife, all about his days in ‘Nam, down to the last Cong-blasting detail, and Lisa sits there avidly listening! But I guess Bo is smart to do stuff like this in the early days of a marriage…I could just imagine Springblade #25, in which Lisa tells Bo she’s sick to goddamn death of hearing about Vietnam, and when the hell is he going to fix that garage door?? 

We head back to 1965 and stay there for the duration. Betrayal tells the story of how young Bo Thornton become involved with SOG, the Studies and Observations Group, going deep in-country in ‘Nam and getting in various commando fights with the VC and NVA. His teammates are not ones who would eventually feature in the Springblade team, and there are also a few Montagnards who fight alongside him. Rather than telling a cohesive tale, the novel is more about the various things Bo had to do in SOG, like collecting dog tags at crash sites, and etc. There is also an extended bit in which they rescue some POWs, and curiously this is where the titular “betrayal” occurs, as there’s a turncoat soldier at the VC compound where the POWs are being held, so Bo and pals get double bang for their buck: freeing prisoners of war and killing off a traitor. 

The only enjoyment I got from Betrayal was that, apropos of nothing, it brought to the surface a memory I’d long forgotten, so I guess in a way I should be grateful. Back in college I was friends with this demented guy named Tim, a big football player type who I always thought looked slightly like Henry Rollins – this was back when the video for the Rollins song “Liar” would play on MTV, and we’d joke that it looked almost exactly like Tim at times. 

Well anyway, Tim was slightly “batshit crazy,” as one might say, and he’d go through various phases – like he’d go all-in, whole hog crazy over some new pursuit or activity, usually as a way to impress some girl (there were precious few girls at our college – as one very astute young woman once asked me, years later as she looked through my college yearbook and noted the lack of girls in the photos: “What did you guys do, jerk off all the time?”). 

For example, just a few of Tim’s phases were: “solving” the JFK assassination (which entailed Tim wearing a suit and tie every day, carrying around a briefcase that had nothing in it, and watching the Zapruder film over and over in slow-motion on the Oliver Stone JFK VHS); being a cowboy (which entailed wearing a cowboy hat, chaps, and learning to ride horses – we had an equestrian program in our college, and yes, one of the girls he was interested in for this particular phase was in that program); and also there was a brief phase where he wanted to play hockey, which entailed him wearing his hockey gear all the time, even at lunch and dinner. 

But my favorite of all Tim’s phases was the “mission” phase, where Tim would don black clothes, blacken his face, and go run around at night, like he was a commando in Vietnam. As I recall, the “mission” phase came soon after the “JFK” phase, so I guess it was a logical progression. Our college was in West Virginia, but it was early on the “multicultural” front, so there were literally students from all over the world, in particular from Japan. Well anyway, one night Tim insisted that I go out on a mission with him, and this is the memory Betrayal brought back for me. 

As it turns out, I also remembered that I’d taken a photo on this particular night! It’s hard to believe, but once upon a time it wasn’t very common to constantly take photos…I mean you needed a camera and you needed film. But for whatever reason, the night Tim insisted I go on a mission – which of course entailed dressing up all in black – I took a photo. And here it is, straight from the Glorious Trash Archives: that’s Tim with the blackened face, kneeling, and that’s me standing beside him: 

To the best of my knowledge, this photo was taken in late winter or early spring of 1995. Thirty-one years ago, as hard as it is to believe. I was a junior in college, and I would’ve been twenty years old at the time. That was my dorm room, and note the blacklight Grateful Dead poster, with the fun fact that I am not and have never been a Grateful Dead fan!! Also note the Japanese girl calendar on the wall…now that I think of it, I might still have both of those somewhere, the poster and the calendar. 

But as you can see, Tim went all-in when he was on a phase: note the blackened face and the thousand-yard stare. So this night we went out and our college was right in the woods, right in the mountains of West Virginia, and it was slightly cold and very foggy – very cinematic. Tim’s “missions” would have him sneaking around the dark woods and pretending to be a comando; I went along that night as an observer, because I realized even then it wasn’t too common to be around someone so batshit crazy, so why not enjoy the experience? 

Anyway, here is what Betrayal made me remember, and it’s a wonder I almost forgot it, because previously I’d always thought it was one of the more funny experiences in my life. There was a steep hill with a wooden bridge that connected two of the dorms, and as we were running around in the cold, misty night, Tim caught sight of two Japanese students coming toward us on the bridge – I remember we could just see their silhouettes in the moonlight, as it was pitch black out there, and the two Japanese couldn’t see us. 

Tim turned to me and whispered a certain slur you’ll often hear in Vietnam War movies, referring to the race of the poor unsuspecting Japanese students who were approaching us, and then he pushed me down so that we were crouching in the shrubs beneath the bridge as they walked over us. Folks it was just like a movie, I kid you not, because the two Japanese students even stopped on the middle of the bridge and each of them lit a cigarette, all while talking to each other in Japanese, totally oblivious of the fact that they were being watched by two American guys in black and facepaint – like something out of every single Vietnam War movie ever made! All the two of them needed was an AK-47 slung across their backs. 

Now I do recall at this point I was trying not to lose it, hiding below them in the dark, but one of the rules of a mission was to stay silent. But to make it even funnier, Tim leaned to me and whispered, “Give me the knife.” The two Japanese students obliviously went on their way, and then I recall Tim said something like, “That was close,” and then we were off on the mission…and I can’t recall much else, only that I got bored and decided to go back to my room and get drunk, which is pretty much how every night ended. And still does today, in fact! (Just kidding…sort of.) 

As I was writing this post, I realized the impact Tim had on my life: it was because of him that I moved to Dallas, back in 1996. He moved out here after college to get in the Dallas Police Department, but for reasons I cannot recall he did not get in (they probably found out about his JFK file), and he eventually left Texas.  But when he first moved here he convinced me to come down to Texas, and I stayed here after he moved on. I wonder what my life would’ve been like if I had not come down here and eventually met my wife and had a son...and honestly I can’t imagine a world without at least one of those two people, so batshit crazy or not, I owe Tim a debt of gratitude.

Anyway, if not for Betrayal I might have forever lost this memory of that crazy Vietnam mission in West Virginia, which once upon a time was one that would make me chuckle. I can’t remember the last time I even thought about the incident, but man for a long time I’d laugh, because I kid you not it was exactly like stepping into a Vietnam War movie. But otherwise this novel has nothing to do with the Springblade series; it starts off being about one thing, and then veers off into an interminable flashback…something I’ve attempted to replicate in my own review, as you might have noticed.

Code Name: Gypsy Virgin

Code Name: Gypsy Virgin, by Max Nortic

No month stated, 1971  Midwood Books

A big thanks to Johny Malone, who recently left a comment on my review of Black Swan #2: The Cong Kiss, and suggested I read the source novel for that series, Code Name: Gypsy Virgin. His suggestion hit me at just the right time, and now I’ve read the book and by god I’m here to tell you about it! 

As I mentioned in my review of The Cong Kiss, author “J.J. Montague” of the Black Swan series was clearly the same person as the “Max Nortic” who wrote Code Name: Gypsy Virgin (and whose real name, as Johny so helpfully informed us, was James Keenan, of whom I can find nothing). This is because the plot of Code Name: Gypsy Virgin is the same as the plot of the first Black Swan novel, The Chinese Kiss: a hotstuff nympho secret agent takes a crash-course in lesbianism so she can take down a hotstuff nympho Commie secret agent who has “an obsession with cunnilingus.” 

I read The Cong Kiss nearly ten years ago, so memories of it are dim. Per my review I found it overly literary and stilted, and also per my review I’d given up reading Code Name: Gypsy Virgin not long before I read that Black Swan novel; I’d read it recently enough that I was able to detect the same writing styles, characters, and plots between the two books. I’m not sure why I stopped reading Gypsy Virgin at the time, because reading it all these years later I thought it was pretty great – perhaps proving once again that the more pulp you read, the more your brain rots. Well, brain rot is very popular now, as anyone who has a kid will know, so I’m fine with that. 

I went into the details in my review of The Cong Kiss, but simply put, Nortic/Keenan published Code Name: Gypsy Virgin via Midwood Books in 1971, focused on hotstuff brunette spy babe Erica Wilson, who had sex every Friday with a random pickup, exclusively focusing on well-hung guys, given her “obsession with big pricks;” even her apartment in Newport Beach was filled with phallic sculptures. 

Then in 1974 Keenan changed Erica Wilson’s name to Shauna Bishop, changed his by-line to “J.J. Montague,” and retitled Code Name: Gypsy Virgin as The Chinese Kiss, sellling it to Canyon Books and getting a series deal in the process. Yes, the exact same thing J.C. Conaway did when he switched publishers and turned Nookie into Jana Blake, and when Nelson DeMille switched publishers and turned Ryker into Keller. So, a pretty common practice in the wild and wooly world of ‘70s paperback publishing! 

So then, Erica Wilson in Gypsy Virgin is the same character as Shauna Bishop in the Black Swan series, just with a different name – her code name is different, too. Per the title of this Midwood publication, Erica’s codename is “Gypsy Virgin,” and Shauna’s codename is “Black Swan.” Regardless of her name, she is 24, a trained spy who has killed (but only in self-defense, we’re told), incredibly beautiful and built, the daughter of “a Polish janitor and a Swedish maid.” She is not patriotic and works only for the money, and has total control of her emotions – and, we’re informed, her, uh, womanly parts. 

She is also “obsessed with big pricks” and has littered her home on Newport Beach with phallic sculptures and paintings. She lives a quiet life of solitude, but every Friday she lets out her pent-up energy by spending the afternoon looking at her “vintage erotica books” and then going out at night to a bar to pick up a guy…and, somehow, she’s always able to get a guy with a huge dick. Perhaps she has X-ray vision which Nortic/Keenan has not informed us of. Her most recent lay was over ten inches long(!), and we’re informed Erica implored him to take her in the rear, so she could be “hurt.” Good grief! 

We know about these backdoor shenanigans because the agency Erica works, ICS, has bugged her home, something Erica is well aware of; Nortic deftly injects a ‘70s paranoia into the yarn, as Erica figures that everything she does and says is being watched by someone, and she’s always right. Code Name: Gypsy Virgin opens with our heroine being stymied out of her usual Friday tussle, much to her mounting chagrin, suddenly summoned by her agency for a top secret assignment – flown off to Baltimore where she will spend the next several days locked up in a room and learning to become sexually attracted to other women(!). 

Nortic displays a gift for dark humor with the sardonic Erica knowing she is being subjected to head-fuckery, being monitored in her private room and laden with aphrodisiacs in her food as she watches lectures on lesbianism on closed-circuit TV, complete with female models acting out lessons in cunnilingus. And plus there’s that stacked blonde beauty Shirley who brings Erica her food and looks at her with those limpid blue eyes...Erica knows she’s being brainwashed into going lez, and she also eventually knows there’s nothing she can do to stop it from happening. 

The reason behind all this is Erica’s latest assignment: Nitro Five, another hotstuff secret agent, but one who works for the Chinese. She is, however, Caucasian (hence the title of the retitled Shauna Bishop story is a bit confusing), and while the woman’s background is known – roughly the same age as Erica, a hardship life that saw her essentially raised into becoming a merciless field agent who uses her beauty and body to ensnare victims for the Chinese government – we also learn she has never been photographed. 

Nortic opens up the tale with chapters from Nitro Five’s perspective; or, Loraine, which is the name she happens to be going by as she sets her sights on a scientist who specializes in ultrasonics. Posing as a socialite in DC, Nitro Five corners the professor at a lecture, coming on to him and taking him back to her place where an explicit sex scene ensues, but as with the Black Swan books, the author brings a literate touch even to the sleaze. We also learn that Nitro Five is deadly, as she takes out a man who inadvertently snaps her photo via some sort of mind control; an eerie scene that has the man waking up, after a short visit from Nitro Five, receiving a phone call from her, and then, his mind panicked, jumping out of a tenth-floor window. 

Like with a lot of these sleaze novels, Keenan/Nortic writes a worthy novel, to the point that the extensively-detailed sex scenes become a nuissance…something I rarely complain about. But as we know, sleaze writers were expected to deliver sleaze, and Nortic does throughout, with a focus on girl-on-girl. He varies it up with occasional scenes of straight sex, in particular with the ultrasonics professor, who is seduced by both Nitro Five and Gypsy Virgin, in sex scenes that are pretty similar, the good doctor under the effects of cantharides (aka Spanish Fly) and unable to orgasm, even after superhuman bouts of sex, all of which is detailed. Erica’s success at getting him off is pretty crazy, involving her fondness for those backdoor shenanigans. 

The author works in a grim Cold War storyline that concerns Gypsy Virgin being assigned to find out how Nitro Five assassinates from afar and to also try to get her to defect; meanwhile, Nitro Five’s assignment is to lure an ultrasonics scientist into defecting to China, seducing both him and his virginal teenaged daughter in the process. These characters all engage in sex either together or in groups, the longest sequence featuring both female agents making use of the professor’s daughter in an all-girl three-way that would press a lot of readers’ buttons, given that the girl is underaged. 

But then there is a strange focus on adolescent girls, par for the course in the grimy world of ‘70s sleaze paperbacks, I guess. Nitro Five is obsessed with adolescent Chinese girls and there is a lot of stuff about the excitement of deflowering the professor’s virgin daughter. Even Erica, who we’ll recall just got into the sapphic scenario courtesy agency programming, finds her heart pounding in excitement at the thought of sharing the girl with Nitro Five. 

What’s crazy is that, as proven with The Cong Kiss, the author is quite capable, delivering a narrative style that is more refined than scuzzy. He has a definite knack for dialog and for characterization, and the sex scenes are more erotic than repugnant, as is too often the case in a lot of these dirty books. I find it interesting that he did not write mainstream trash under his own name, but we do know from this Pulpetti post by my man Juri that Keenan was quite prolific as “Max Nortic.” 

I don’t have a copy of The Chinese Kiss, but it would be interesting to read it, for the ending certainly had to be changed. Code Name: Gypsy Virgin has a mega-downer ending that to be honest isn’t very surprising, as novel maintains a mean-tempered vibe throughout. 

SPOILERS: Well basically, Nitro Five’s grim backstory has it that she was taken in as a child and abused thoroughly by her trainers in Peking as they molded her into a remorseless killer, and this same fate awaits the professor’s daughter and Erica/Gypsy Virgin; Nitro Five has traded the two of them as well as the Professor in exchange for her own freedom (as an extra dig of the knife, we learn that Erica’s agency was in on the exchange from the start), and the novel ends with the villainess going off to her Happily Ever After while our heroine (and a teenaged girl) are shipped off to be raped, abused, and trained into becoming remorseless spies by the Chinese. End spoilers! 

So then, clearly this was changed when Erica Wilson became Shauna Bishop, and I’d be curious to know how it was changed. Not much pickup was provided in the second Black Swan, The Cong Kiss, which as we’ll recall was a flashback story to Shauna/Erica’s first mission, four years ago, so I guess I’ll just have to wonder unless I get really stupid some day and pay the exorbitant prices for a copy of The Chinese Kiss, which isn’t very likely. 

Anyway, a big thanks to Johny Malone for suggesting I read this, and also to Tiziano Agnelli, who recently left a comment on my review of The Cong Kiss to confirm that JJ Montague/Max Nortic was in reality a writer named James Keenan!

The Undertaker #3: The Thin Black Line

The Undertaker #3: The Thin Black Line, by John Doe

February, 2026  Tocsin Press

Great news, everyone – the third volume of The Undertaker is finally here! Published by Tocsin Press, The Thin Black Line sees everyone’s favorite funeral director-slash-executioner Victor “The Undertaker” Underhill return for more darkly-humorous payback…and this time his sights are set on contraband and human trafficking, the immensely talented John Doe delivering a plot that takes in ICE, Border Patrol, and the Cartels. 

You’ll want to just order the book, but I’ll go ahead and rave about it anyway. This one comes off like a combo of Death Transition in that it has a serious plot that is treated with dark humor, and only later on does it bring in the slapstick vibe of Black Lives Murder. It’s also slightly longer than the previous books, but Doe does a phenomenal job of ramping up the tension as the book progresses, expertly bringing together the various strands of plot. 

One thing I was surprised about was that ICE protesters are not given much narrative space; after the pitch-perfect gutting of the BLM and antifa cannon fodder in the previous book, I figured we’d get more spoofery of people who are so deluded that they carry around “No Kings” signs without it occurring to them that they live in a society where they actually have the freedom to carry “No Kings” signs. Instead, Doe’s focus is on ICE, Border Patrol, and the Cartels, and the protesters are mostly in the background – save for a hilarious part where redheaded dufus Deputy Harris, returning from the previous two books (and the guy who so humorously re-enacted the George Floyd situation in the previous book, though Harris was just trying to give a special Vietnamese massage), acts as ICE liason during a protest. 

It’s a year after Black Lives Murder, and series protagonist Ivan Gore, a deputy in charge of homicide in Milton, is proud of himself that he’s gone all this time without encountering Victor “The Undertaker” Underhill, that John Milton-quoting funeral director with a penchant for disguise and for avenging the dead – an interesting take for sure, in that unlike most lone wolf men’s adventure protagonists, Underhill isn’t so much concerned about the living as he is about the dead. 

John Doe also elaborates on a sort of metapysical bond between Underhill and Gore; that Gore has the same sort of potential as Underhill. As I’ve said before, The Undertaker is very much a Destroyer for today, and it seems clear that Ivan Gore will eventually become the Remo to Underhill’s Chiun, but I could be wrong. The Thin Black Line is cool because it focuses on how Gore keeps trying to ignore his “true self,” even though he and Underhill only share a few pages together in the book. 

As we’ll recall, Gore has a history in the funeral business himself, given that his family ran a funeral home; Doe delivers a great prologue in which we see young Gore helping his uncle with the pilot light on a cremator – which so beautifully sets up a tense moment in the climax that I won’t spoil it. But now Gore is in his 30s and is a homicide detective for the sheriff’s department in Milton, and he’s trying not to think about Underhill anymore – and also not to think about Underhill’s sexy assistant, Alyssa Jensen, who was introduced in the previous volume and has a much larger role in this one. 

As ever the series is set in the present day, and Doe brings in the current hot topic of ICE, which has shown up in Milton and nearby blue city Pandemont. Gore gets involved in ICE action when he responds to a call for cars, and he sees an Hispanic guy shot down by ICE as the guy is frantically knocking on the door of a house in a residential area – setting up a recurring “ringing ears” syndrome that plagues Gore through the book. That, and Gore’s certainty that something rotten is going on. 

Taking up the dead man’s cell phone while no one is looking, Gore eventually goes to Alyssa, knowing she’ll be able to break into it. Meanwhile we readers learn via a variety of new characters that the cartels are involved, and – again not giving anything away – it also involves childcare services and human trafficking. The main character for a long stretch of the novel is none other than Deputy Harris, who is desperate to join ICE so he can be a big man; Doe’s humor is particularly acidic as the bumbling Harris is witness to all sorts of illegal activity, but is blissfully unaware of what he is really seeing. The Warren Murphy vibe is very strong in the scenes with Harris. 

There are also great parts where Gore’s devotion to his wife, Amanda, is sorely tested. Out of state with family for the weekend, Amanda leaves Gore home alone, and he’s plagued by those ringing ears and his certainty that something rotten is going on, but struggling with whether he should go to Underhill with it. This sets up a great part where Gore first tries to take his mind off things by reading a “dog-eared copy” of a Super Cop Joe Blitz novel – probably the best imprint in-jokery since that night watchman mentioned that he had been reading too many volumes of The Executioner in The Penetrator #5 – and then later Gore must fend off the clear advances of Alyssa Jensen, who shows up with a bottle of wine and wants to talk about Underhill. 

John Doe has long hinted that there is something special about Gore, which allows him to “be like Underhill,” per Alyssa, with the possibility dangling that there is a supernatural bent to The Undertaker. The implication is that Underhill, looking at a corpse, can detect whether the corpse was murdered or came to death via foul means, and thus goes out in vengeance. The difference here is that Gore is more concerned with preventing murders, which sets up a nicely-handled confrontation between Gore and Underhill. 

This volume introduces a slightly more risque vibe with the Harris storyline; hanging out with some ICE agents – who curiously are all Mexican, sport tattoos, and appear to be former criminals – Harris sets his sights on a hotstuff Latina babe who takes him into her room for some drug-fueled shenanigans. This subplot has a great payoff later in the book, when Harris first goes to the massage parlor to proudly boast to his Vietnamese girlfriend that he’s now with ICE – which sets off a massage-parlor girl freak-out that could come right out of The Benny Hill Show – and then later Harris finds out he’s in hot water with the Latina babe, as well. 

This however sets up an even more humorous situation, which to continue with the ‘70s TV comparisons is full-on Three’s Company: in one of the goofy misundertandings that was central to the comedy on that show, Gore makes a panicked call to Harris, having figured out that the cartel is trafficking “girls,” and Harris misunderstands Gore and thinks the “girls” he means are the Vietnamese massage-parlor girls, all of whom are here illegally. This brings more of the risque vibe in a houseful of naked or semi-naked Vietnamese girls, many of whom are just looking for their panties. A very funny slapstick scene, up there with anything in Black Lives Murder. 

It isn’t all laughs, though; Gore’s painstaking trackdown of who the murdered Hispanic was and how he ties into another murdered Hispanic (this one a girl, who is coldly killed off in an affecting opening scene), is skillfully handled and the reader soon wants to see the villains pay, no matter what the reader’s politics or feelings about ICE may be. I thought this was incredibly pulled off, as John Doe makes the reader care about two illegals…both of whom are already dead. 

Milton County is again brought to life – I loved the goofy Krispy-Tako place Gore eats at – and series regulars Sheriff Bullard and Deputy Jackson also appear, bringing a lot of continuity to the books. The one character who does not appear much is the title character; as with Death Transition, Victor Underhill is behind-the-scenes taking care of business, only appearing infrequently to dole out poetic justice. His hearse also plays into the finale, and once again his gift for disguise makes for a lot of surprise appearances. That said, when Underhill does appear, he always makes for the most memorable character. 

The novel ends with Gore finding out something from his past that might indicate which side of the “thin black line” he’s on. And also, if he was concerned about his feelings about Alyssa Jensen before, its’ nothing compared to how he feels about her by novel’s end. She features with Gore in a great climax, which again I promise not to spoil, in which John Doe brings together the entire plot and the mechanics of cremation, even tying back to the opening scene with young Ivan Gore. 

All told, this was a great novel, and again Doe brings in a slight bit of a Don Pendleton vibe to the narrative, from periodic one-sentence paragraphs to paragraphs that begin with “Yeah.” He also does that Pendleton-esque stylistic gimmick of introducing a phrase early in the book and then periodically referring back to it; in the case of The Thin Black Line it’s how Gore, as a child, would stubbornly run through wild kudzu, and this becomes a metaphor of the overwhelming corruption and red tape the adult Gore still tries to run through. 

Overall, The Thin Black Line is another highly-recommended novel in The Undertaker, and you should head over to Tocsin Press to pick it up…and the first two volumes, if you haven’t already! Once again I’ve failed to get across how truly a gifted of a writer John Doe is…despite coming in at 270+ pages, the novel never lags, and the insanity builds and builds to such a feverish pitch that you’ll be wrapped up in it by the end. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take another four years for the next volume!!

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

Chaos, by Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring

June, 2019  Little, Brown and Company

I thought I was done with Manson Family books, but the other week I was asking Gemini to seek out books that were written by former Rolling Stone reporters, particularly books that hewed to the old New Journalism style, and Gemini included Chaos in its list, saying that even though it was recent it came off like a lost piece of 1970s Rolling Stone journalism. 

Well, it sort of does. I guess Chaos is “New Journalism,” or perhaps “Gonzo” in the Hunter Thompson sense in that author Tom O’Neill inserts himself into the narrative. But otherwise we do not get the excessive word painting that most draws me to vintage New Journalism; interestingly, this is how Chaos pales in comparison to the book it is trying to attack, Vincent Bugliosi’s major bestseller Helter Skelter. 

While O’Neill spends 500+ pages excessively detailing how Bugliosi hid evidence, prodded witnesses to lie on the stand, and also beat his mistress half to death(!?), never once does he achieve the mise en scene that Bugliosi and co-writer Curt Gentry brought to Helter Skelter. O’Neill even seems to be aware of this, directly quoting the effective opening line of Helter Skelter; there are no equally-quotable lines in Chaos. And I doubt it will still be in print 50 years from now, like Helter Skelter still is. 

Granted, the difference between the two books is that Bugliosi and Gentry were writing back then, back in the era where it was all happening – when the Family was still out there, with the dangling threat that more murders might ensue, a la the plot of Manson cash-in novel The Cult Of Killers. O’Neill is writing decades later, after Manson himself is dead, not to mention Bugliosi, Gentry, Susan “Sadie Glutz” Atkins, Linda Kasabian, etc, etc. Thus his book is more of a history piece, about picking up the pieces of a puzzle many decades later. 

But then Chaos isn’t as much about the Manson mystery as it is about how hard it was for Tom O’Neill to write the book. Folks, I kid you not. A large majority of the text is comrpised of O’Neill telling us of his many and futile attempts to write about his findings over the course of twenty years. Yes, twenty years: Chaos started life as a magazine article O’Neill was assigned to write for Premiere magazine in 1999, but he kept jumping from one new revelation to the next...so many revelations that he couldn’t figure out how to write the article, which was so big it eventually had to be a book. 

And friends the funniest part is…he never does figure out how to write the book! You patitently read Chaos, pondering over the glaring inconsistencies O’Neill reveals about the entire “Helter Skelter” case and Vincent Bugliosi’s methods to prosecute Manson et al, and you keep waiting for this big moment where O’Neill ties it all togeter. That moment never comes. That moment never comes! O’Neill refuses to tie his many loose ends together, refuses to make a daring claim – instead, he presents his findings, and then at great length tells us it’s all supposition on his part, given the glut of circumstantial evidence, and ends the book by telling us he’s “still looking.” Twenty years on the job, and he’s still looking. 

Back when I was really into this Manson stuff I recall reading a lot of theories online, many of them more compellingly-presented than O’Neill’s own; for example, there is zero here about a compelling theory that the murders were really masterminded by Family members Tex Watson and Linda Kasabian, as revenge on a drug burn…O’Neill does not mention this theory, nor does he talk about the character Paul Krassner claimed without question was behind the murders in a 1975 Rolling Stone article (Charles Winans), after which Rolling Stone was sued and Krassner was forbidden from writing more about the subject. This is especially curious because Krassner’s suspect Charles Winans was a former military man who got involved with the counterculture movement, which aligns exactly with the theory O’Neill concocts in Chaos. I’ve even come across a theory that Winans was the “Candyman” Tex Watkins mentioned in his testimony. 

But you will find nothing like this in Chaos. Tom O’Neill has spent so long researching his book that anonymous blog runners and site runners have beaten him to the punch – and have given us more juicy storylines in the process. But what’s crazy is that O’Neill actually meets with Paul Krassner in the course of his research, but the Winans theory is never mentioned; instead, Krassner merely warns O’Neill that the Manson thing can “take over your life.” 

And yeah, chasing one red herring after another for twenty years would certainly constitute taking over one’s life. Now, I don’t want to say that Tom O’Neill has wasted his life on a twenty-year quest that brought up no concrete evidence; I mean, surely it wouldn’t be much more of a waste than being married to one’s worst enemy for twenty-plus years. (Just speaking theoretically, of course!) Still though, the helluva it is that many others have trod the same twisted path as O’Neill, but many of them have come up with more believable theories. 

For you win a no-prize if you guessed that O’Neill brings in that hoariest of hoary conspiracy theories: MK-Ultra. To his credit, he doesn’t jump right into it, and builds his case…but then it took him ten years of real-time research to get there. It was only after he hit one brick wall after another with the LAPD and the LASO (sheriff’s office). And the threads connecting are tenuous at best; there were shady individuals hanging around at the time, in particular one guy who claimed to be at the Tate house the night of the murders and might have been an undercover CIA agent (or, just as likely, he might have been a bullshit artist), and O’Neill follows the trail to Dr. Jolly, a CIA-funded shrink who was doing LSD research for the Agency in the Haight just when Manson happened to be there, in 1967. 

The only problem is, O’Neill can never find anything that ties all of these people together…as if the Agency has a book somewhere titled “How We Used LSD To Brainwash a Group of Hippies Into Killers.” Which, of course, would be placed right next to their book “How We Killed The Kennedys.” 

The thing about these alternate Manson theories is that they are no less believable than the Helter Skelter theory. I mean, you can’t claim that it’s unbelievable that Manson’s drug-fueled cult would kill innocents as a way to start a race war, all of it inspired by a Beatles tune…and then come up with an alternate theory involving government spooks and mind control and say that’s more believable. 

This is why I say Bugliosi ensured in Helter Skelter that all challengers would immediately be deposed, with the statement that Manson had claimed “No sense makes sense.” Like Frank Barone said on Everybody Loves Raymond, “You can’t argue with a crazy person.” And, to build on that, you can’t expect a crazy person to make sense. This is the problem with O’Neill and the other “myth-busters” of today…they are looking for an explanation for why lunatics hopped up on LSD and God knows what else would randomly butcher people. I mean, it’s kind of like when a Muslim guy runs his truck into people while yelling about “Allah” and the media wonders what his “motive” was. 

Then again, that’s the difference between Bugliosi’s day and our modern day. We’re a lot dumber now. 

O’Neill does keep the reader’s interest for the majority of the text, in particular in the first half, before Chaos deep dives into arbitrary digressions on MK-Ultra, LSD research, and Federal anti-leftism initiatives (we need to bring those back!!). Just as Bugliosi documented in his own book, there were many mistakes on the part of law enforcement…but O’Neill expands on this by focusing on Bugliosi’s mistakes, many of which appeared to be intentional. 

Getting access to police documents that had not been seen since Bugliosi’s day, O’Neill discovers discrepencies thatwould have undermined the entire “Helter Skelter” conceit. Chief among them would be a note in Bugliosi’s own hand from a deposition with biker Danny DeCarlo, who claimed that producer Terry Melcher – the guy who once lived in the Tate home, and thus per the Helter Skelter theory was the guy Manson was trying to send a message to with the Tate killings – visited Manson in the desert after the killings. And indeed even fell to his knees and begged forgiveness. This, clearly, would disprove the Helter Skelter theory…why would Melcher still be visiting (and begging) Manson if the Tate murders had really been meant as a message to him? What makes it all the more curious to O’Neill was that Bugliosi scratched out this statement of DeCarlo’s in his notepad…and never spoke about it with his co-prosecutor, or with the defense team, or indeed ever mentioned it at all. 

But here’s the thing…what if DeCarlo was wrong?? I mean folks, we’re talking about a drug-taking biker who hung out with a friggin’ cult, and we’re expecting him to know the exact dates things happened. Hell, we’re expecting him to even be believable! Never once does it occur to O’Neill that DeCarlo might’ve walked back his own statement, realizing he had his dates wrong or hell even had the wrong guy and that it wasn’t even Melcher he saw – hence Bugliosi scratching out the statement. 

No, O’Neill at this point has heard that Bugliosi is a “bad guy” and he immediately jumps to the conclusion that the DeCarlo statement is totally valid and Bugliosi didn’t introduce it to the court due to bad intentions. To make it all the more insane, only late in the book does O’Neill have another face-to-face with his “enemy,” Bugliosi…and is deflated when Bugliosi claims he does not even remember this statement, and certainly would have shared it. Again, the impression is he discarded the statement back in the early ‘70s, at the time DeCarlo was giving the statement, and scratched it out in real-time as DeCarlo realized his own story was wrong. “Sorry, man, I think I got the people and the dates wrong, you can scratch that. Hey, you got anymore beer around here?” 

O’Neill mainly takes issue with how Charles Manson, a convict with a federal rap, was able to get by with so many crimes – up to and including threatening cops with violence and being caught with underaged girls – but was let go time after time. O’Neill presses the surviving cops and deputies on this (many of whom have died in the time it took O’Neill to write the book), and none of them can give a valid reason…then also there’s Manson’s parole officer, a guy who studied drugs and whatnot and who gave Manson much freer rein than one might expect. 

Then there’s the big question, always brushed over in most Manson Family books, of how exactly Charles Manson was able to “brainwash” a group of drug-using losers into murderous psychos. We’re told that the CIA was not able to use LSD to brainwash people, but thanks to his industrious research, O’Neill discovers in the papers of dead Agency contractor Dr. Jolly that the good doctor did indeed succeed in implanting a false memory in someone with LSD and other head-shrink tactics. 

But the thing is…O’Neil’s never able to connect all the dots, because he wants concrete evidence. So the reader must infer from the incessant lead-chasing that the government, in order to quash the leftist counterculture movement, implanted CIA-trained doctors in the Haight and other counterculture areas, studied the effects of drugs on people, figured out via field testing how to brainwash them (ie, MK-Ultra), and then used Manson’s groups as guinea pigs, which explains why Manson was able to evade arrest for so long: higher-ups were telling law enforcement that Manson was untouchable. As one of O’Neill’s interviewees states, the Manson scenario was a case of “MK-Ultra gone right.” 

All of which, of course, is much more believable than some story about a madman going even more mad after too much LSD and binging the White Album and then sending his loyal followers out to kill randomly, so as to start a race war. 

Like so many others have written, “Helter Skelter” does just as good a job of answering all the mysteries as any other theory does. And as for the leniency Manson was given; the parole office himself states that it was “a different time” in the ‘60s, with a lot more leeway than situations would be given today. Indeed, one might suspect that it was due to Manson himself that such safeguards were even put in place. 

Perhaps Paul Krassner should’ve been more direct with Tom O’Neill. It isn’t that the Manson thing can take over your life, it’s more so that you have to keep your common sense about you. If you go around with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. My contention is that it isn’t so much “vast conspiracy” as it is people who did a lot of drugs and thus did not operate in what the rest of us construe as “reality.” I mean, go live in the desert for several months and do a bunch of Orange Sunshine every day and you too will probably start to believe that the song “Helter Skelter” is commanding you to start a race war. No sense makes sense. 

As for the cops and their various mistakes? Again, read Helter Skelter. Bugliosi makes the law enforcement agencies look like fools, complaining about the very mistakes O’Neill writes about here…but in O’Neill’s opinion, Bugliosi is just as guilty, and we’re often told how the cops disliked him so much. Gee, I wonder why? 

Speaking of cops, O’Neill often reminds us that none of the cops who worked on the Tate-LaBianca killings believed in Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter theory. Tellingly, O’Neill never states that any of these cops believe the CIA was behind it, either! 

The fact is, we never are given a theory on why the murders happened. This truly is the most frustrating thing about reading Chaos. As mentioned, we make our way through the book waiting for a big revelation, or an explanation of why it all happened…and nothing ever comes of it. We’re even told of a guy who might have been a later victim of the Family, but even that is inconclusive. 

To quote a certain failed presidential candidate, “What, at this point, does it even matter?” This is how I felt as I read Chaos, and it’s the same thing Bugliosi even asks O’Neill toward the end of the book. Does it matter if the Family butchered people because they were brainwashed by Manson, or because they were brainwashed by CIA spooks? Did it matter to the victims? Which, by the way, Bugliosi shows much more compassion for; O’Neill even informs us that he “made a mistake” when interviewing a reticent Paul Tate, and in desperation to get the man to speak, O’Neill said, “Think of the victims!” To the father of one of the victims! 

I had a similar experience when I read Sticky Fingers; I started to sympathize with the person the author was attacking. In the case of that book it was Jann Werner; here it’s Vincent Bugliosi…that is, until the end of the book, when O’Neill reveals all the many skeletons in Bugliosi’s closet, from stalking a man he suspected of having an affair with his wife to beating up a woman Bugliosi was having an affair with. Certainly not an indication of the man’s quality as a human being, but not really relevant to his abilities as a prosecutor. I mean it’s like saying that just because a guy once made a demeaning, off-hand remark about women, he couldn’t go on to become the greatest president in US history. Right, friends?! 

But on that note, O’Neill also catches Bugliosi on another blunder; there’s a confrontation between the two at the start of the book, where Bugliosi slips on something…and by the time (years later) that O’Neill realizes this, he and Bugliosi are enemies and thus he can’t just ask him about the slip. But basically, Bugliosi makes a casual statement about having knowledge of the Manson Family activities at a certain point before they were even arrested, but O’Neill later realizes that Bugliosi is admitting to being aware of Manson et al before he was assigned the prosecution case, which goes against what Bugliosi wrote in Helter Skelter. 

And since O’Neill never strings together his unified theory, it goes like this: the CIA used LSD to brainwash people and implant false memories, a project called MK-Ultra; Manson was one of the test subjects, likely being practiced on by Dr. Jolly in the Haight in 1967; the cops were told by the Feds to look the other way; Bugliosi contrived and suppressed evidence to create the hoax “Helter Skelter” storyline to dissuade people from finding out the truth. 

And yet these shadowy spooks are the same ones who couldn’t even keep the Iran-Contra deal a secret ten years later. And also, the MK-Ultra angle still doesn’t explain why Sharon Tate and friends, why Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca. O’Neill successfully argues that the Tate hit wasn’t to send a message to Terry Melcher, as Bugliosi claimed, given the wealth of evidence that Manson was well aware that Melcher no longer lived in that house. So then, why? Again, “Helter Skelter” does just as good a job of explaining why. Even better, in fact! 

The major undoing of Chaos is that Tom O’Neill took so long to write it, the book seems behind the times. Given his relentless investigative work, O’Neill tells us, the original 1999 magazine article was dropped, with a book planned for 2009…but he missed that deadline, too. If it had actually come out in 2009 it might have seemed more relevant. As it is, there are a wealth of blogs and sites and Reddit threads about Manson these days that are much more interesting than anything here – the link I gave above, for example, about The Candyman, is more interesting than the entirety of Chaos. But then, those blog runners don’t have to worry about a legal team clearing everything for publication, something which Tom O’Neill definitely had to endure…hence the lack of mention of Charles Winans, I’d imagine. 

Speaking of lawsuits, the cynic in me suspects that O’Neill waited twenty years to publish the book because he’s was waiting the clock until many of these people died, and could no longer sue him. I know this sounds callous, but I think it’s very plausible, especially given that Bugliosi straight-up promises O’Neill that he will sue him if he (O’Neill) publishes any of his “lies” about Bugliosi. Well, Bugliosi is gone, now, as are Terry Melcher, Rudy Altobelli, and many of the cops and other figures O’Neill interviewed over the years. No worries about lawsuits now. 

O’Neill seems aware that his book has arrived late; he tells us his frustation at seeing many documentaries and books that came out over the years, many of them featuring Bugliosi or even former Family members. This to me was one of the biggest “WTF?” moments in Chaos; given the comprehensive nature of O’Neill’s interviews, tracking down practically everyone he could…it never seems to occur to him to contact the Family members in prison! “Say, Tex, do you remember when Charlie started using MK-Ultra tactics on you in the desert? You don’t?” 

But then, shockingly enough, we are told (in the epilogue!!) that O’Neill interviewed Manson himself, I mean the main guy behind it all, but we’re only told in passing at the very end of the book that the interview, conducted long-distance by prison phone, went nowhere due to Manson’s ramblings. And the fact that someone later told O’Neill that Manson didn’t trust him, and would no longer speak to him. But wow…I mean this is how far into the weeds O’Neill got, folks. He didn’t even think to tell us about the whole Manson interview until the book was nearly over. 

Well, speaking of “over,” I’ve gone on way too long. Hell, my review is probably the length of the article O’Neill was originally supposed to write for Premiere! And I wrote mine in a few hours, never mind twenty years!! Man, I got the impression from this book that a reporter job must be the next easiest thing to a government job. (Pre-DOGE, of course!)