Lone Star And The Badlands War (Lone Star #16)

Lone Star and the Badlands War, by Wesley Ellis

November, 1983  Jove Books

It’s been forever since I read a Western; I’ve never been a fan of the genre, though there was a brief time in middle school when I read a few volumes of Lone Star, The Gunsmith, and Longarm; yes, even then I gravitated toward the sleazier representatives of the genre. In fact I have a vivid memory of sitting outside during recess one day in middle school, my back against a brick wall, reading a volume of The Gunsmith that was about hunting Bigfoot while my classmates were playing basketball or whatever; this was sometime in the mid-late ‘80s, probably when I was 12 or 13, and I remember the class bully came by to make fun of me for reading while everyone else was playing sports. I should’ve just showed him the dirty parts in the book. And I also recall he wasn’t even really making fun of me, more like just shaking his head that someone would read instead of playing sports...that said, I also recall the school bully actually never messed with me and generally left me alone.* 

At that time Lone Star and other Western paperbacks were ubiquitous, or at least they were in West Virginia in the 1980s. My dad was a big Western reader, but I don’t think he read any of the “adult Westerns.” I am sure I found my Westerns at the local library – the Fort Ashby Public Library (still there, it appears, the same little building and everything!) – where they were on a spinner rack beside the men’s adventure novels. In fact I bet I grabbed up the Westerns precisely because they were beside the men’s adventure novels. 

Well anyway, I know I read a Lone Star or two at the time, probably because I figured they were like a Western take on The Destroyer, in that they paired a westerner and an Asian. Only in the case of Lone Star there’s no parody or satirical elements, and the westerner is a hot-blooded, hot-bodied redhead named Jessica Starbuck and the Asian is a slender half-Japanese samurai named Ki. And I also bet it was Ki that drew me to the series; this was the mid-to-late ‘80s, when ninja mania was at its peak, and I probably figured the karate-fighting dude on the Lone Star covers was like a ninja or something. In fact I recall thinking he looked like the GI Joe character Quick-Kick. 

The series ran for a long time. I was shocked to recently see how long Lone Star and Longarm actually ran. In the case of the latter it went on for decades and decades. Lone Star ended sooner, and James Reasoner wrote the last volume of the series; it was the only one he wrote. 

Speaking of James, I reached out to him to see if he knew who might’ve written this volume of the series, which was one of three I found recently at a used bookstore – and, contrary to the ubiquitousness of the 1980s, it would seem that Lone Star is not as easy to come across these days. I went to three different Half Price Books in the DFW area a few months ago, and only one of them had any Lone Star books; I bought all three books they had, and this is the earliest of them. 

Per James, The Badlands War might have been written by Jeff Wallmann, but there’s no verification available. Also per James, Wallmann wrote the majority of the Lone Star books, but there were some other series authors that I’m unfamiliar with, like Neal Barrett Jr. and Will C. Knott. 

Whoever served as “Wesley Ellis” for this one, his (or her!) writing is very polished, to the point it is a little sedate. This is very much a long-simmer yarn, and even the expected sex scenes are few and far between…but when they do get started, they go on for quite a while. In this regard the book reminded me of The Baroness; very “upscale” otherwise, but down and dirty and graphic in the sexual material. 

Personally, I love the idea that the Wild West was made up of randy women with the bodies of Victoria’s Secret models, and such is the case of Jessica “Jessie” Starbuck, she of the “flaming red tresses” and big breasts. She’s an interesting character for sure; scion of the Lone Star estate after the murder of her father (by recurring series villains “the cartel”), and thus fabulously wealthy, but also fabuously beautiful and a deadly shot with any weapon. She’s kind of modern in the regard that she’s a “woman with agency” per the latest trendy term, yet at the same time she is not an insufferable ball-buster like a similar female character of today would be; Jessie likes her men, and she likes to give ‘em a good time. 

Humorously, there’s a part early in The Badlands War where Jessie wonders to herself if she’ll ever get married. Given that the series went on for 150-some volumes and she had at least one man per volume, I think it’s safe to say Jessie might never have gotten married, but who knows. Even in this one she basically falls in love with a Clint Eastwood-esque “gunslinger” (who also falls in love with Jessie), but the guy is brushed off into the narratorial carpet at novel’s end. Jessie needs to ride on to the next volume – and her next male conquest. One wonders if she had female conquests as well, but I doubt Lone Star went that direction…even The Baroness didn’t. (Though Dark Angel did!!) 

Ki is also a character who seems to have stepped out of the 20th Century: a half-Japanese karate master who prefers bladed weaponry. If the series had been created a little later he doubtless would’ve been a ninja, and I’m betting there had to have been a volume of Lone Star that tapped into the ‘80s ninja craze. Ki gets along fine in this one; I expected there would be a lot of parts where slackjawed yokels would call him racial slurs, but there’s none of that in this volume…for most the part. 

It’s made clear that Jessie and Ki are not and have never been an item; theirs is a platonic relationship, actually more of a sibling one. We’re told in brief flashback that Jessie was young when Ki first started working for her father, so Ki is clearly older than her, but other than that we aren’t given much to go on. Then again, this is volume 16 of the series, so doubtless stuff like that has already been explained. 

There’s also the question of the year; given the appearance of a 20-something Theodore Roosevelt, The Badlands War must take place in the 1880s. And also Jessie and Ki do a helluva lot of traveling for the era; in this one they’ve come all the way up to the Dakota territory by train and by horseback, to check in on a ranch owned by the Starbuck enterprise that is in danger of being taken over by a sadistic Frenchman named Beaumont. 

Truth be told this is rather a slow-moving yarn, with little in the way of action. It operates on more of a long-simmer vibe, with Jessie slowly figuring out if Beaumont really is a bad guy who has his sights set on the Starbuck ranch here in the Dakotas while Ki meanwhile gets friendly with a Mexican bar whore named Olivia and has infrequent run-ins with Beaumont’s chief gunslinger, Korman. 

There’s also young Teddy Roosevelt, a minor presence in the novel; more focus is placed on Hawthorne, Roosevelt’s taciturn guide in the Dakotas, a Clint Eastwood-style cowboy who serves as Jessica’s only conquest in the novel. I’m wondering if Jessica only ever gets one bang per book, or if the ghostwriters and edtors ever got risque and let her have more than one guy. As for Ki, he too only scores with Olivia. 

This brings me to the subject of the sexual material, always one of the key features of an Adult Western. I was surprised to discover that Lone Star was also like The Baroness in that the sex scenes go on for a few pages instead of just a few paragraphs. No detail is spared and the author clearly has his tongue in cheek with the many memorable anatomical metaphors. 

Action as mentioned is sparse; The Badlands War is more of a suspense story, with it slowly becoming apparent that Beaumont is indeed a villain and has been killing people to take over their ranches. He sends Korman out to murder several people during the course of the book, from a newsman to a family that works at the Starbuck ranch. But it isn’t until the end of the novel that he’s given his comeuppance. 

The climax sees Jessica, Ki, Hawthorne, and some locals staging an ambush on Beaumont’s chatteau; I was surprised (SPOILER ALERT) that Ki took out Korman while Jessica meanwhile ensured Beaumont was arrested…we’re told she’s good with a gun, but she only shoots down a random thug during the climax. 

Ki features in more of the action scenes, like for example an alleyway fight with Olivia’s brother where Ki shows off his “samurai” moves. Also Ki’s sex scenes are written from an “Oriental” perspective, with Ki all concerned with pleasuring his lady and going down on Olivia, essentially blowing the young woman’s mind, as she has never even heard of such things. 

All told I enjoyed Lone Star and the Badlands War, but I’d wager there are certainly better volumes in the series. As mentioned I did pick up a few more, so will be reading them anon.

*After a bit of research I’m fairly certain the Western paperback I was reading was The Gunsmith #21: Sasquatch Hunt, published by Ace Books in 1984 – meaning it was another I got from the library spinner rack.

Big Tocsin Update: New Books, New Covers, and a SUMMER SALE!

Big Tocsin Press update – first up, a new volume of Black Angel has been published! It’s titled Green Hell, and here’s the cover: 

Angie Black has fought killers, madmen, and Satanic cults, but nothing has prepared her for Green Hell! Deep in the steaming jungles of South America, a forbidden clinic offers desperate men a second chance at passion…while far below the waves, a sunken pyramid guards secrets older than civilization itself. Between lust and lost science waits a power no mortal was meant to command…and once awakened, it could remake the world in its own terrible image! 

Now the one woman bold enough to face the unknown must plunge into a nightmare of savage mercenaries, decadent pleasures, ancient machines, and death at every turn. Beautiful, deadly, and unstoppable, THE BLACK ANGEL returns in her most shocking adventure yet! From jungle heat to ocean depths, from forbidden desire to unimaginable terror, Black Angel: Green Hell is a pulse-pounding explosion of thrills! 

More details at Amazon, where you can preview the first few chapters (desktop only). But that’s not all, folks! 

Also new from Tocsin is Carter Nicholson: The Red-Black Terror, one that was out there as an eBook for several years but now, finally, exists in paperback…and with one helluva cover to boot: 

Carter Nicholson, the Masterkiller, aka Z3 of HATCHET, must stop a nefarious Red Chinese scheme headed up by a hotstuff Asian sadist and Nicholson’s old archenemy, the dread Iscariot! From pulling heists on acid rock clubs to battling laser-wielding savages in the desert, to finally raiding a decadent domed city of perversion and wanton lust, the Masterkiller does everything necessary to succeed in his mission! 

Here is the Amazon page for The Red-Black Terror, where you can check out the first few chapters (desktop only). 

 And that’s still not all! Several of the books from Men of Violence have been updated with new cover art (the content of the books is unchanged, by the way)…none more incredible than John Falcon Infiltrator: The Hollow Earth:

Personally, I have a hard time deciding which one I like better, this or the Red-Black Terror cover! 

Next up is everyone’s favorite misogynist tough cop, Joe Blitz! His ultra-sleazy adventure The Psycho Killers has also been graced with a phenomenal new cover: 

Blitz’s other adventure (so far), The Maimer, also has a great new cover: 

And back to one of my favorite topics, Black Angel, that series too has been updated with new cover art, in the vein of Hector Garrido. Hey, he did the covers for The Baroness, so we can just imagine that he did ‘em for Black Angel, too! But again, as with the other Men of Violence books, only the covers have changed, so if you already purchased the books, you aren’t missing anything. And also, you now have a collector’s item! 

First up is the initial installment, Black Angel: 

Next up is the “Women in Cages” second installment, The Doll Cage! 

And who can forget the third volume, Dixie Death Hunt, with its hulking albino mutant freak? 

And finally Satanic Slaughter, now with additional devil-cult-biker-and-wanton-cleavage-baring cover action! 

Speaking of new covers, The Undertaker #2: Black Lives Murder has also been given a great new cover! 

And folks, that’s still not all! Starting today through Monday, ALL TOCSIN PRESS BOOKS ARE ON SALE! You can think of it as a Fourth of July Flash Sale…or, if you aren’t in the United States, you can give it any fancy name you want! The important thing is…SALE! And the other important things are…NEW BOOKS and NEW COVERS! 

Head on over to Tocsin Press, where you can see all the books and order every single damn one of them!! And I’ll get back to regular posting asap!!

The Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder

The Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder, by Mike Barry

December, 1974  Berkley Medallion

Barry “Mike Barry” Malzberg is so far into the headspace of his characters by this point in the Lone Wolf saga that a high-speed chase with cops can feature lunatic “hero” Burt Wulff ruminating about the rotten core of American society, ultimately acknowledging to himself that it’s “heavy thinking for a speeding chase.” 

We pick up shortly after the events of the previous volume, and things are as surreal as ever – no more evident than when Tamara, Wulff’s girl who was introduced in #2: Bay Prowler, is abducted from the home of her parents by goons under the employ of recurring series villain Calabrese; a sequence where Tamara is more baffled than terrified, insisting that she split up with Wulff and has nothing to do with him anymore.

Calabrese meanwhile takes up his own brunt of the inner musings that make up the majority of the narrative of Miami Marauder, and speaking of which, note how once again the titular “marauder,” presumably Wulff himself, sounds more like the name of a serial killer than a mob-buster. This has been such a recurring staple of the series that I figure it’s more of Malzberg’s in-jokery. 

Which is not to say The Lone Wolf is similar to The Destroyer; there is no parody here whatsoever, and despite characters marveling over the surreality of things, events are still real enough that they don’t mock them. Tamara herself takes up a lot of the narrative; Malzberg trades off between the musings of her, Wulff, Calabrese, and Wulff’s partner Williams throughout the novel, to the extent that Miami Marauder is even more in the headspace of its characters than the previous books. 

And yet while this sort of thing bugs me in other action series novels, in the case of The Lone Wolf I think it only adds to the surreal nature of the series. Or maybe it’s just the quality of Malzberg’s writing. As ever he finds a way to insert bitter griping about a host of random topics, from the poor quality of certain cars (a recurring series element) to how women are both encouraged to and shamed for showing off their bodies. 

We even get a peek into the life of truckers; Wulff when we meet him has hitched a ride with a truck driver, Wulff carrying his “bag of shit” with him, ie the heroin shipment he acquired previously, and which Calabrese wants. The surreal texture is present even here, with Wulff and the trucker randomly coming across a guy who has crashed, and Wulff immediately deduces the guy overdosed. Then there’s an equally weird part where the trucker indulges in his casual hookup with a truckstop waitress while Wulff waits at the bar, but Malzberg adds this weird, never-explained layer that the waitress doesn’t seem happy about the arrangement. 

Meanwhile we get a lot of scenes of Williams playing poker and kidding about with his own pair of abductors; he’s being held in a house on the outskirts of Miami, and soon Tamara will be brought there, kept in a separate room with her own minders. Calabrese is there as well, nothing like the powerful figure he was when first introduced; he spends the novel bickering with his bodyguard, obsessing over Wulff, and trying to rape Tamara – but not being able to do the deed, given his impotence. I’d say at this point Malzberg has well rammed home the point that Wulff has completely obliterated Calabrese’s masculinity. 

There really isn’t much in the way of action. Indeed, Malzberg really spins his wheels until the final quarter. There’s a preposterously-trivial part where Wulff, sneaking into the Fountanbleu hotel in Miami (where Calabrese is staying), comes upon an older married couple, and the wife is drunk, and Wulff helps the husband drag the wife to their room, and there follows a long discussion about a previous Republican convention the husband went to. And it goes on and on, having nothing to do with anything, and Wulff finally realizes he shouldn’t be there and leaves. 

We get just as much stuff from Tamara, who at this point is so like Wulff that she keeps reminding herself that she’s “already dead;” she died when she was a speed junkie, and was about to OD before Wulff came upon her in the previous volume. We’re also reminded that her real name is Susan Jenkins, “Tamara” being the name she gave herself when she ran away from home and became a junkie; this furthers the conceit that Tamara is dead, as she now wants to be Susan again – though Malzberg only refers to her as “Tamara” throughout. 

Wulff for his part is learning “the pleasures of criminality;” after leaving the trucker and getting in touch with Calabrese, who boasts that he has Williams and Tamara and will trade for one of them in Miami, Wulff steals a car, thinking to himself how easy it is to be a criminal. But then we have another arbitrary musing on the railways that run through the country, and how the trains were once such big business; I found this personally relevant, despite it having nothing to do with the tale at hand, given that I’d recently gone to the Frisco Train Museum as a chaperone on my son’s school trip. 

Malzberg works an action scene into the train part, though it too is surreal; Wulff has a couple drinks in the bar, realizes the car is empty, and then further realizes he’s been cornered by a pair of hoods. Despite being unarmed, Wulff manages to (possibly) kill both and flee; Malzberg has it at this point that Wulff is so wanted that criminals come out of the woodwork to collect the bounty on his head, thus there’s no need for the author to have to explain the how and why of it. It’s just another pair of goons who saw Wulff and decided to make a play for that bounty. 

Malzberg saves the fireworks for the extended climax, which sees Wulff swimming up to a beach along the Miami coast – a few hundred yards from a resort hotel, we’re told – and evading the fifty or so men Calabrese has waiting for him. Then Calabrese shows up in a ‘copter, Tamara up there with him, and he makes the girl go down to the sand on a rope as everyone watches – and meanwhile Wulff figures this is the perfect time to take possession of the Browning Automatic Rifle that has been set up on the beach. 

Oh and also at this time Williams is on the way, having broken free – another surreal and darkly humorous bit, where his abductors-slash-friends say how disappointed they are in Williams that he broke their trust(!), and then Williams himself steals a car…leading to a long exchange with the young couple in it. Just wild and weird stuff, but darkly humorous throughout. 

But it all climaxes with this big action scene on the beach, Wulff blowing people away with the BAR and Calabrese arguing with his bodyguard as he makes his escape on the helicopter. But again we are so into Wulff’s thoughts that the action is again more so relayed via thoughts and feelings, to the extent that there’s hardly any gore. 

SPOILER ALERT: The biggest outcome of this firefight, and I’m noting here for myself when I finish The Lone Wolf and go back to my reviews to try to make sense out of it all, is that Tamara is gunned down early in the exchange. Curiously, Malzberg never tells us who kills her, and there’s no final scene between her and Wulff; indeed, the two are never even together in Miami Marauder. Tamara is dropped down a rope from the helicopter – after calling out Calabrese as an impotent loser in front of his men, and being slapped around for it – and then she’s on the beach, and then she’s waving toward Wulff, like trying to tell him something, and then she’s gunned down. END SPOILERS. 

It seems that this is an accident, though, as it’s the final nail in the coffin of Calabrese’s relationship with his bodyguard – that Calabrese “let this happen” – but even here Malzberg goes for a dark comedy…and I forgot to mention the strange and arbitrary parts where the bodyguard keeps puking in the helicopter. But after this crazy action Miami Marauder drifts to an anticlimactic close; Wulff and Williams talk in the airport bar, where Wulff somehow manages to guilt-trip Williams for giving up the fight, even though Wulff keeps telling him to go, and then Wulff flushes the heroin down the toilet – in other words, he flushes the shit. 

MORE SPOILERS: This one has the most bizarre ending ever; Calabrese takes a passenger flight back to Chicago, for once without his men (the majority of them wiped out on the beach by Wulff), and he wakes up from a dream where he’s giving it to Tamara good and proper. Then he orders a drink after arguing with the stewardess, then the plane suddenly “drops in the air,” then the pilot comes on to say drinks are on the house, and due to this Calabrese “knows it’s bad”…and after that we cut to Williams, back in New York and finding out he has a baby son…oh, and then a few days later he realizes that the “plane that went down” is probably the one that Calabrese was on(!). In other words, the huge, ever-building confrontation between Wulff and Calabrese is brushed away in the most brazen deus ex machina possible, and Calabarese (apparently) dies in an airplane crash. END SPOILERS 

That’s it for Miami Marauder, and the last we see of Wulff, he’s on his way to Chicago to mete out some payback…unaware that fate (might have) already handled it for him. Overall this was a good one – I’ve enjoyed every volume – but it must be said that Malzberg’s fast writing is slightly getting the better of him, and too much of this one comes off like stalling and arbitrary internal pondering.

Black Angel: Satanic Slaughter

Great news, everyone: a new volume of Black Angel has just been published by Tocsin Press! It’s titled Satanic Slaughter, and here’s the cover: 

The Black Angel is back – and this time she’s plunging headfirst into a nightmare of Satanic cults, kidnapped starlets, and a conspiracy so twisted it reaches from the sleaziest back alleys to the mansions of the rich and powerful. 

What starts as a simple rescue job explodes into a blood-soaked battle against black magic, brainwashing, and a secret empire built on sin. In a world where every shadow hides a knife and every smile masks corruption, the Black Angel is the only one who can fight back – and she’s bringing hell with her! 

Brace yourself for a shock-loaded descent into ritual murder, mind control, and unholy desire as the Black Angel takes on the ultimate evil! 

Savage violence! Forbidden rites! And a heroine who’s as beautiful as she is deadly! 

This isn’t just a mission – it’s a one-way trip into Satan’s playground…where survival means killing before you’re sacrificed! 

Head on over to Amazon, where you can preview the first several pages (on desktop only) and order a copy! 

And while you’re at it, check out the Black Angel page on Amazon and pick up the other volumes you might’ve missed! 

Maneaters

Maneaters, edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle

No month stated, 2021  New Texture

A big thanks to Bob Deis for sending me this copy of Maneaters some years back, and apologies it took me so long to get to it! Compiling a selection of shark-centric tales from the men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s through the 1970s, Maneaters comes highly recommended, and as usual Wyatt Doyle’s presentation of the art is both eye-catching and, more importantly, respectful of its sources. 

 

Unfortunately the same can’t be said about a particular modern interpolation that Maneaters has been saddled with, but more on that anon; I want to focus on the good stuff first. I wasn’t sure what to think about an entire book featuring shark stories, as other than Shark Fighter it’s a genre I’ve never cared much about; indeed, to this day I still haven’t seen (or read) Jaws, but I did see Jaws 3-D in the theater when it came out, when I was 9 years old, and for some unfathomable reason I had Jaws 4 on VHS several years ago…I think I bought it at a resale store for a quarter, and I watched it repeatedly; I came to the conclusion that it was so terrible that it actually achieved a sort of greatness. That said, I have the tie-in novels (by Hank Searls) of Jaws 2 and Jaws 4, and I keep meaning to read them… 

Well anyway, there are a lot of stories in Maneaters, ranging from ones that are only a page or two that ones that run a handful of pages. There are no “Booklength Extra” tales here; as any vintage men’s mag reader will know, the “Diamond Line” in particular would often publish epic-length stories, especially in the 1960s, and I wonder if any such shark stories exist. But I guess Bob wouldn’t want to devote much space to those, as they’d fill up practically the entire book; at least this way there’s more variety. 

Or at least, as much variety as several shark stories can provide. Because really, they all share the same setup: virile yank “skin divers” take on sharks all over the globe. What I found most interesting about the stores here was that the ones from the ‘70s were actually the best; usually the men’s mag stories from the ’50s and ‘60s are superior, before the mags descended into total sleaze and porn, with editors who were more concerned with telling good stories than in just showing bare breasts. Now personally, I like both (as my kid once angrily declared when he was around 3 or so after I kept pressing him on who he thought made the better French fry: Chic Fil A or McDonalds). But what’s interesting here is that these ‘70s tales are just as good as the earlier ones…no doubt because Jaws was such a big hit, and the anonymous authors were trying to compete with Peter Benchley’s big seller. 

Oh and one minor point of contention: Bob refers to these stories as “MAMs,” ie “Men’s Adventure Magazines.” I personally do not like this term; it is much too estrogenic for the virile men’s mags of mid 20th century. But then maybe Bob is just “taking the piss” as the British say, or at least they said in the few British sitcoms I’ve watched. 

For once I won’t focus on every story, because as mentioned some of them are very short, more so punch lines than actual yarns, like for example the story about the shark that “delivered the mail” to a particular ship. Indeed, the earliest stories are pretty short, indicating that shark tales were relegated to the back pages, and doubtless few and far between in the ‘50s. 

“The Shark Who Hated Women” is the first really good one; it’s by S.P. Free (a relative of I.P. Freely, perhaps?) and from the August 1960 Peril. This one’s narrated by a guy who worked as a marine biologist and then one day said to hell with it all, bought a boat, and sailed off to an island, which alone is a story in itself, of the sort collected in the vintage men’s mag anthology Yankee King Of The Islands. But the shark’s the focus, here; our narrator informs us of a “black shark” that has a mysterious fondness for women, and our stubborn narrator doesn’t believe it…leading to a horrific sequence where not only does this guy’s native bride suffer, but he too is wounded woefully in the climactic fight with the shark. 

“The Giant Shark That Guarded Rommel’s Treasure,” by Peter Fall and from the January 1961 Fury, is interesting in that the shark actually gets in the way of the otherwise good story. This third-person tale relates how a WWII frogman, a few years after the war, is hired by a scar-faced Austrian to recover gold from the bottom of the ocean, gold that was dropped there by Rommell when he was retreating from the Allies. Of course, the Austrian will turn out to be an old Nazi, but author Fall skips all that as he focuses on a great white shark that attacks the protagonist as he’s retrieving the gold. 

“E Mao Ariki” is by Robert Edmond Alter and from the July 1968 Argosy. Alter was a crime author of the day and as expected his yarn is of a different caliber than the men’s mag average, with a lot of word-painting and characterization. That said, Argosy was unlike the average men’s mag in that it was up front that many of its stories were fiction, and not fiction gussied up as nonfiction. (Back in 2000 I met a girl named Gussie at a wedding in Tampa, Florida, a beautiful blonde-haired girl who for some inexplicable reason seemed to be interested in me, and to this day I think of her when I write the word “gussied;” isn’t that strange and sad?) This third-person narrative focuses on a scuba diver who’s been hired by a wanna be director who wants to get footage of a massive shark (the titular E Mao Ariki) that reportedly attacks the natives during a weird “get pearls from the ocean” test of manhood. The modern reader will easily detect that Alter implies the director is gay, but that aside, this is a good story, with the protagonist becoming a hero despite himself as he goes after the huge shark with his spear gun. Yet at the same time the yarn is inferior to many of the others here because Alter is too focused on word-painting and introspection, thus his narrative misses the weird fire typically found in men’s mag stories. 

“A Man-Eating Shark Pack Against Scuba Divers,” by Walther Sturm and from the January 1975 Action For Men, is my favorite story in Maneaters. As mentioned above, these later stores are superior to the earlier ones, as post-Jaws the authors were more focused on exploiting the sharks. This one’s cool because a shark is randomly attacking people along the New Jersey coast and the president of a scuba club puts all the various “scuba teams” together into a sort of shark attack squad, and they wage war on the sharks along the coast. Then a marine biologist comes along to get in the way, but really he just wants the killer shark alive to study its brain. I liked this one, particularly the off-hand revelation that the protagonist was a plumber by day; even the heroes of men’s mag stories were blue collar, same as the readers. 

“The Headhunting Shark That Destroyed A Texas Family,” by Bob Trotter and from the January 1976 For Men Only, was my second favorite story. It’s another fast-moving third-person narrative that could easily have been expanded into novel length, featuring a trio of Texas brothers who take on the same shark: the surfer, the ‘Nam vet, and finally the “cattle rassler.” Trotter writes the yarn with a style uncommon for the men’s mags, focusing on the unusual Texan diction in his narrative. But otherwise it’s a cool story, however the character I thought would be the main hero, the ‘Nam vet, is dispensed with quickly – even though he has the most typical men’s mag story setup, jumping into the drink with nothing more than a knife and the will for vengeance. 

“The Madman Who Ruled A Killer-Shark Pack” by Brett Harper and from the January 1976 Man’s World is the last story here, and another good one. It’s also the only one in Maneaters that follows the traditional men’s mag setup: an opening incident (usually depicted by the splash page art), then a flashback to how the opening incident came to pass, and then a harried resolution. In this case the third-person yarn opens with a guy and a girl (“one lovely breast” exposed due to her torn shirt) being towed by a boat through shark-filled waters, the girl’s insane husband laughing madly at the prow. The backstory doesn’t really meet the craziness, but then they rarely do: the girl’s husband is a nutjob marine biologist obsessed with sharks, and insists on catching sight of some great whites. Unfortunately his wife likes to come on to the various men the biologist employs; she sleeps with one of the men, who later “accidentally” falls off the boat and is eaten by sharks. Then our hero is merely suspected of having an affair with the girl, and next thing you know they’re both bound and being dragged in the water…a harried climax in which some other guy saves them and the nutjob villain receives the exact fate you expected he would. 

Now, the one thing I don’t like about Maneaters is that each story is given a “Biting Back” postscript in which modern marine biologists, scuba divers, and other assorted pearl-clutchers have been invited to point out all the errors in the stories. The concept alone is baffling; men’s mag stories are fiction, and should be treated as such. But what’s worse is the insufferable condescending tone of many of these postscripts; I kid you not, one of them literally begins with the comment, “The racism and sexism aside…” One can almost imagine the snowflake crying softly in his soy latte. But after each story the vintage fun is buzzkilled by modern virtue-signallers who tell us what the men’s mag authors got wrong about sharks in their stories. Well, who cares? Even worse, many of them try to mock or poke fun at the stories. I mean, if I wanted smarmy attempts at comedy from an unfunny pearl-clutcher, I’d watch Jimmy Kimmel. 

Fortunately, you can do what I did, and just skip the “Biting Back” stuff entirely. I do want to note that one or two of them are written by Bob Deis himself, and these as expected are worlds better than the others, showing a true appreciation for the genre and being respectful to the authors. 

But honestly, that’s my only criticism. Overall Maneaters is another excellent publication in the Men’s Adventure Library, and I highly recommend it. With summer coming up it’s the perfect beach read, though like James Reasoner said, you might want to read it far away from the water. 

Deceit And Deadly Lies (Kevin MacInnes #1)

Deceit And Deadly Lies, by Franklin Bandy

No month stated, 1978  Charter Books

I picked up this fat paperback original many years ago, excited to read it, and typically it took me all this time to get to it. Running over 400 pages, Deceit And Deadly Lies won the Edgar Award and was the first of two novels featuring protagonist Kevin MacInnes, a former Army Intelligence officer who now makes his living as “The Lie King,” going around the world with a lie detector and working for high pay. 

I believe it was the 1980 Mystery Fancier review for the second MacInnes novel, The Blackstock Affair, that made me aware of this book several years ago; it’s hosted at Mystery*File.  (The reviewer mentions an earlier review for this first MacInnes novel, but I don’t think that one has ever been uploaded.) Anyway what got my interest was the note that author Franklin Bandy (real name Eugene Franklin) included “all the sex and violence modern readers want,” which of course set my sleaze instincts a-tingling. 

Well, folks, maybe that’s true for The Blackstock Affair. As for this first book, Deceit And Deadly Lies, both the sex and the violence are nil. Indeed, I ultimately found the novel a chore to read, wondering why a few hundred pages hadn’t been cut from it. More than anything else I got the impression that Bandy was another contemporary author influenced by Lawrence Sanders; there is the same clinical prose style, the same meshing of the crime genre with the trappings of the standard “airport fiction” of the day, and of course there’s the bloated page length. The big difference is that Sanders’s novels are, judging from the ones I’ve read, entertaining and fast-moving. (And also I’ve come to rank The Tomorrow File as my favorite novel ever.) 

What makes it most egregious is that the potential is there. MacInnes, in his 40s and wealthy, goes about the world with his mistress, a stacked blonde named Vanessa. There is not a single sex scene between the two, and Vanessa is not exploited at all; the most we get is that she’s beautiful. This is acceptable, but where the problem arises is that Bandy spends the narrative having MacInnes wonder if Vanessa is in love with him. There are entire chapters where he will sit around and ponder whether Vanessa truly loves him; he even secretly records their conversations and plays the tapes back on his Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), trying to gauge whether or not Vanessa is lying to him. Lame!! 

Bandy works a host of “crime novel stuff” around this main story – MacInnes figuring out if his mistress loves him, because he loves her – and none of it is compelling enough to save the book. One big demerit is that a lot of it takes place in Mexico, with MacInnes talking to a lot of Spanish people with easily-confused names who speak in the polite, formal diction that Spanish people use in novels of this type. The main “crime” plot has to do with MacInnes stumbling on to a plot to assassinate a major political figure, but the setup for this plot – a taxi driver overhearing two guys discuss the plan in a Bowery bar – is so ludicrous that the believability factor is ruined. 

Well anyway, MacInnes is incredibly wealthy; he rents out his services to all and sundry, and his prices are high. Probably the highlight of the book is the first sequence, where we see MacInnes at work; a group of businessmen have hired him to find out the rock-bottom price they can pay for some land they want for development, land that is owned by a man who claims he wants ten million dollars. Here we see that MacInnes doesn’t parse truth from lies, per se, but uses his machine to detect stress levels, allowing his instincts to figure out whether the person is lying or not. In this way it is made clear that the PSE is more so an instrument, and how well it performs relies on the skill of the user. 

It doesn’t sound like the setup for an action-packed novel, and Deceit And Deadly Lies certainly is not. MacInnes carries around a .45 and we are reminded of his Army background, but the action scenes are usually over and done with quickly, and more time is spent on introspection and pondering. Folks I kid you not, there’s a part in the final quarter of the novel where MacInnes is bored and he’s suffering from inexplicable impotence, and it goes on and on and on. I mean if you’re writing a 400+ page crime thriller, never have a part where your protagonist is bored…it’s like even the character himself is letting you know your novel is too long. 

After dealing with the land-buying job – and later on MacInnes reads in the paper that the dude selling it has killed himself, and MacInnes brushes off any sense of responsibility – we get to the main crime plot, the assassination. An Assistant DA in New York calls MacInnes and brings a taxi driver over to his hotel, and there the guy tells a ludicrous story about hearing two men discuss killing someone “big” in a bar. MacInnes judges the cab driver to be telling the truth, and ultimately this will take us into a storyline involving a “Hitler” of a third-party candidate who is the target of assassins. 

But this is not the only lie detecting work MacInnes does. There’s also an overlong sequence where he goes to Mexico to find out whether a man in prison killed the son of an influential crime boss, or if it was an accident, or whatever. Bandy works in the assassination plot with MacInnes also tracking down one of the men the cab driver saw in the bar, an Australian who serves as the novel’s main villain, even though most of his appearances feature him slipping into wherever MacInnes is staying, trading banter with him, and then slipping off. Truly the novel is nothing but 400 pages of stalling. 

Action is infrequent but at least handled well, like a part where one of the Mexican gangs adbucts MacInnes and takes him out to the countryside, where they’ve dug him a fresh grave. Working with the CIA on this caper, MacInnes has been given a bunch of spy tech out of a Eurospy flick, like for example a pen that fires projectiles. What’s interesting is that the action scenes are over and done with quickly, and Bandy will spend more time on MacInnes brooding over whether his mistress Vanessa really cares about him. 

Even more ridiculous, MacInnes finds out that Vanessa is a best-selling author, and indeed has been publishing books the entire time she’s been with MacInnes, but “The Lie King” was oblivious to all this, just thinking of her as his deluxe mistress. I mean WTF?? And then there are all these parts where he sits around wondering if Vanessa is writing about him in her books, and then he goes out and buys one of them, reading it to see if there are any parts that seem to be about himself(!). 

This is the sort of thing I mean when I say Deceit And Deadly Lies is such a misfire. It’s stuff like this that takes the center stage, and MacInnes’ lie detector work is not interesting enough to salvage the novel. I mean for that part, Bandy even repeats himself with the setups; there are two different jobs MacInnes is hired for that concern a murdered child. And there are a lot of sequences of him just talking to cops, feds, CIA agents, or district attorneys. 

The climax plays out in Madison Square Garden, where MacInnes has discovered the assassination attempt on the third-party candidate will occur. MacInnes at least is personally involved in the finale, blowing away one of the main villains, but a curious note is that MacInnes himself is shot in the chest at the end of the book, and the novel ends with Vanessa appearing there, crying over him (yes, friends, she does truly love him!!), and telling him to keep breathing. Bandy ends the novel by informing us that MacInnes does exactly that, but it could in fact be taken the other way: that MacInnes does not keep breathing. 

But the dangling cliffhanger is moot, as MacInnes returned two years later in another papberback original, also published by Charter Books. I have that one too, and here’s hoping it’s better than Deceit And Deadly Lies.

The Specialist #11: American Vengeance

The Specialist #11: American Vengeance, by John Cutter

November, 1985  Signet Books

Boy, I forgot all about The Specialist, didn’t I? The first volume was one of the first reviews I posted on this blog, back in the summer of 2010; I bought the entire series from a single seller back then, and at the time I had no idea it would take me sixteen years to read all eleven books. 

It’s been over six years since I read the previous volume, and unfortunately American Vengeance serves as a direct sequel. I’d pretty much forgotten the entire story, but John Shirley (aka “John Cutter”) does a good job of catching up readers who missed the previous book – or, like me, who just plain forgot it. Long story short, Jack “The Specialist” Sullivan is all fired up to take down Hassan the Red, an Iranian terrorist who was responsible for every Iranian attack on American citizens. 

Yes, this was a timely read. But in a way it was a refreshing reminder of how once upon a time America understood that the terrorist-supporting regime of Iran was evil, something our leadership has forgotten in the ensuing decades...with such notable “progress” as sending Iran billions of dollars and even helpfully putting them on the path to attaining nuclear arms. Gee, what could go wrong? 

Indeed, author Shirley dedicates American Vengeance to “the resistance fighting for freedom in Iran.” One wonders if he still supports the Iranian resistance, or if TDS has rotted away his brain (as it has for so, so many others). Some years ago I attempted to read Shirley’s Eclipse trilogy from the ‘80s – I dutifully picked up the original paperback printings many years ago – and as I was reading it I happened to come across a recent interview with Shirley (I think this was around 2019 or so). Eclipse is about characters in a cyberpunk future fighting a fascist government, and folks if you think Shirley in the 2019 interview compared his fictional future fascist government to the Trump administration, you win a no-prize. He even did the old leftist trick of comparing populism with fascism, when the two are altogether different (but then people today conveniently forget that the Nazis themselves were socialists…“Socialist” was even in their damn name!!). 

Does the Iranian resistance get any love today? We get stories and stories about the people suffering in Ukraine, even the friggin’ king of England proclaiming we must defend Ukraine to the US Congress(?!!), and yet not a peep about the countless thousands who have been butchered in Iran. It’s curious, isn’t it. Back in the late ‘90s I dated a girl from Iran, and for several years her dad had been a prisoner of the regime, kept in a cell and beaten. Somehow he’d managed to get free and immigrated to the US with the rest of his family. What was most curious was how blasé they were about it: “That’s my dad. He was a prisoner in Iran for a couple years. Hey, you wanna watch The Nanny?” But anyway even then, as a non-political idiot in my 20s, I wondered why the US still hadn’t taken that goddamn tyrannical regime down. 

Anyway I digress. It just makes me sad when smart people say stupid things, and Shirley’s TDS comments were enough to make me drop reading the Eclipse books. (Plus I found the first volume ponderous and lacking any of the spark Shirley brought to the men’s adventure novels he was writing at the time, so there’s that.) But this political digression has a point: there was a time when the despotic government of Iran was seen for what it was. It’s unfortunate it has taken so many years – and so many presidents – to finally address the situation. And I’m curious if the people who felt so strongly about stopping Iran back in the ‘80s have become so brainwashed by their own leftist bullshit that they no longer feel that way today. I mean, it’s not like the Iranian regime has become a kinder and gentler government, is it? How many protesters did they butcher last year alone? Then again, we live in a country where losers can stand beside a Starbucks with a “No Kings” sign for a couple hours and declare themselves heroes of democracy, so clearly we’ve lost all sense of what heroic struggle actually means. 

So since nothing was being done then, Shirley has his hero Jack Sullivan taking on the brunt of “American vengeance,” squaring things away with an almost mythical Iranian terrorist leader called Hassan the Red. Sullivan’s been chasing the bastard since the previous volume, and as American Vengeance opens he’s busting into the hotel room of a pair of Hassan’s followers, a scene artist Mel Crair depicts on the cover. 

Hassan’s army is called the Warriors of Islam, and a lot of them are in France; the majority of the novel plays out in Paris. It seems to be not too long after the previous volume – merc Merlin is still in the hospital, we’re told – yet it’s long enough that a little time seems to have passed. Sullivan’s colleagues this time are a group of Israeli Mossad agents (yet more timely material! One wonders if you’d encounter heroic characters from Israel in today’s woke publishing landscape…). 

I wonder if Shirley knew this would be the final volume. There isn’t much indication he did, other than a random part where Sullivan calls Bonnie, his hotstuff girlfriend back in the States…and tells her he loves her. This is usually a bad sign for things, either for the series overall or just for that particular character. Also, we are informed the two have “unofficially adopted” the little orphan girl Sullivan saved a few volumes ago. One wonders if, had there been another volume of The Specialist, either of these characters would have encountered a rough time. 

Humorously, just a few pages after telling Bonnie he loves her, Sullivan is having somewhat-explicit sex with a beautiful Israeli secret agent named Sabra. While reserved when compared to the overdone sex scenes of earlier volumes, it still has such humorous lines as, “Sullivan slowly lowered her onto his prong.” Which of course made me think of the metal band. 

The problem with American Vengeance is that it lacks the pulpy fun of earlier volumes; this one is a standard “terrorist of the week” yarn, similar to innumerable other Gold Eagle publications of the day. In fact I wonder if Shirley wasn’t given orders from the publisher to cut back on the weird stuff and do what Gold Eagle was doing. 

Thus, a lot of the book is repetitive; Sullivan will track down Hassan in Paris and just miss him, lending everything the unintentional (or not) vibe of a Looney Tunes cartoon. It happens over and over in American Vengeance, with the wily terrorist bastard setting bombs in the places he was staying, resulting in several innocent bystanders getting killed. And each scene caps off with Sullivan becoming even angrier and more determined to kill Hassan. 

The climax takes place in Iran, where Hassan has managed to get a nuclear bomb. Again working with Mossad, Sullivan is able to slip into Hassan’s base and prevent nuclear Armageddon, and the bomb actually goes off, but humorously Shirley quickly retcons everything that “it wasn’t a big bomb” and thus the damage is only relegated to Hassan’s patch of Iran – in other words, the poetic justice of the terrorist blowing up his own country. But again, American Vengeance was written in the days before Muslim terrorists strapped bombs to their own children, so the finale doesn’t have the impact today that it likely did then. 

The last we see of Jack Sullivan, he’s on an airplane, looking down at the nuclear blast, affirming to himself that America has been avenged. And this is the last we’ll ever see of him, as no future volumes of The Specialist were forthcoming. The book does not promote itself as the final volume, so I’ll wager that low sells quietly killed the series; the question is whether Shirley wrote any further volumes that went unpublished. 

Overall The Specialist was mostly entertaining, particularly the middle of the run, when Shirley had fun with various crazy things like Sullivan achieving “Hulk power” or fighting Satanic subway mutants. But as the series progressed it appears that he was asked to write more “standard” fare, and the series suffered as a result, coming off like too many of its contemporaries.