The Baroness #3: Death Is A Ruby Light (second review)

The Baroness #3: Death Is A Ruby Light, by Paul Kenyon

April, 1974  Pocket Books

I had a grand old time re-reading this third volume of The Baroness; I found that I remembered many things from the first time I read it, back in 2011. This is still my favorite cover art in the series, courtesy Hector Garrido, and overall Donald “Paul Kenyon” Moffitt does a great job keeping the story moving while indulging in his sci-fi interests…and featuring his frequent, pages-consuming sex scenes. 

I still wonder about the explicit sex in The Baroness; it’s more explicit than most any other Lyle Kenon Engel action-series production (save perhaps for The Man From Planet X), and either it was given such a focus due to Engel’s request, Pocket Books’s request, or because Moffitt himself wanted to write it. I don’t believe Moffitt’s sci-fi books indulged in such rampant sexcapades, and given that Engel’s productions all had sex in them but not this much sex, I contend that Pocket Books, publisher of the paperback editions of Harold Robbins, perhaps requested it. Like many paperback publishers of the day, Pocket really hyped the sexual content of their books – sometimes quite misleadingly so – but as the official publishers of Robbins I suspect they felt that they had a cache on “upmarket” filth. It’s tempting to think that it was they who requested that Penelope “The Baroness” St. John-Orsini get down, in super-‘70s detail, frequently and explicitly, in each volume. 

Of course, I could be wrong. However, this seems to be proven posthaste, as Death Is A Ruby Light opens with Penny (as I’ll mostly refer to her; Moffitt himself, in true “house writer style,” refers to her by multiple names in the narrative, which I always find messy writing – I mean, the characters can refer to each other by various names, but the author should only use one name in the narrative…and here ends the sermon) getting in super-busy detail with a visiting Norwegian film director. 

The action goes down in Penny’s palatial Italian villa, and she ends up screwing the guy in the pool…after a few pages of foreplay where she keeps him from getting too excited too soon. The ensuing sex goes on for a few pages and is, again, more detailed and descriptive than any other Engel production I’m aware of…and I’m aware of them all by god, even the ones I haven’t reviewed here yet! Moffitt again shows a superior talent for sleazy details, like telling us how “the jellied evidence of [the Norwegian director’s] passion float[s] away like a water lilly” post-orgasm, or how the water rushes into Penny’s, uh, body cavity after the Norwegian pulls out of her. 

There’s a subplot, which gradually disappears from the narrative, that the cover identities of spies are being compromised and they’re being killed, on both the US and USSR side. Penny wonders why her wrist bracelet hasn’t “pinged” in a while, ie giving her a mission, and we learn in a cool scene that she too has been compromised – men in hoods come into her room late at night. One of the few times the Baroness is caught completely unawares, but the sequence is more of a plot convenience than anything else, as it’s John Farnsworth, here to tell Penny that her cover is in danger of being blown. 

As ever Moffitt makes a big deal out of Penny being “Coin,” super top-secret spy whose identity is only known to her handler, Farnsworth. Which means this series is like The Butcher in that it has a misleading title – Bucher’s codename was “Iceman” and the Baroness’ is “Coin.” Oh and on page 97 Moffitt shoehorns Penny’s backstory into the narrative: widow of an intelligence world bigwig who died in a plane crash, then wife of an Italian baron who died in a car crash…then deciding she wanted to become a spy and, after a few handy courses and whatnot, emerging as “Coin,” using her cover as a famous jet-setting baroness. It’s all very belabored and particularly hard to buy because Penny does not have much personality. 

I’d forgotten that’s the one element missing in Moffitt’s otherwise superb writing: there is zero character motivation and zero in the way of personality or memorable character traits. The Baroness is essentially perfect and likes to call people “darling,” and she certainly likes sex with handsome (and usually foreign) men, but what drives her is very remote. Why exactly did she want to become a spy? Then again, in a way it’s refreshing: Penny’s job is to find out what is knocking satellites out of the sky, and she goes about her mission with steely resolve; there is none of the hand-wringing or dramatic histrionics one might encounter in a similar story today. The only problem is, Penny is a cipher. 

This is proven when, with absolutely not setup or explanation, she straight up sleeps with Alexey, hunky GRU agent, the night she meets him; the complicated setup has it that America and Russia, at much page expense, have determined that China is behind the satellite affair, courtesy a large laser installation somewhere in Mongolia, and so a joint US-USSR commando team is to be sent in, led by Coin. 

Alexey is the leader of the USSR faction, and readers of the series know that he eventually became a supporting character, appearing a few more times – most notably in the unpublished ninth and tenth volumes (where in the latter he presumably was killed in the final pages…though I suspect Moffitt was only bluffing). Anyway, he and Penny exchange a few lines of dialog as the teams are united…and then they just go to bed together. Again, it’s kind of refreshing on one hand – Moffitt just delivering the sex scene everyone knows is coming – yet again it makes our heroine seem like a cipher. 

The same is true of Penny’s unwieldy team, which we know from Moffitt’s conversations with Baroness Yahoo Group honcho ppsantos were foisted on him by the publisher. The only team member with much spark is, as ever, Tom Sumo, the electronics whiz; it’s clear Moffitt likes him, and maybe hulking American Indian Joe Skytop, the best of all the team…with Dan Wharton coming in a distant third. The others are so bland and faceless that they fade right into the background…and this time the reader can sense Moffitt chortling to himself as he finds a way to dispense with all of them, having it that Penny can only bring a few members along on this particular caper. 

The villains actually have more spark. There’s Major Sung, who very much enjoys torturing people – we get a grueling scene of him happily chopping up a slackjawed native who accidentally came across the secret laser silo – and also Professor Thing, a towering Chinese albino with a ruby for an eye who is behind the laser cannon and who has a wanton hatred for America because, as a professor in the United States, he was blinded when someone burned out his retina with a high-powered telescope…or maybe it was an accident. But anyway, there are a lot of scenes with Thing and Sung, and as ever Moffitt fills the 207, small-print pages of the book to the brim. 

The spy-fy focus is also again here, with Penny and team using a host of high-tech equipment, most notably their super-thin winter gear which, like much of the equipment in The Baroness, is a by-product of the Space Race. Moffitt clearly was a follower of the moon launches and NASA ventures of the day; the climax of Death Is A Ruby Light features Professor Thing plotting to use his laser to destroy a US-USSR linkup in space, which is quite similar to the plot of the unpublished A Black Hole To Die In. 

Moffitt seems to cater to Hector Garrido’s recurring cover depitction of the Baroness in an off-hand mention of a “black body stocking” she has in her luggage and which she wears for only the briefest of moments. This is so similar to the outfit Garrido consistently depicted the Baroness wearing on his covers that I figure Moffitt was trying to cater to it…because otherwise the Baroness does not wear any such outfit in the series. That said, the Baroness also has jet-black hair, whereas Garrido consistently depicts her as having shoulder-length brown hair. 

Action is infrequent but memorable when it happens – and pretty hardcore, too. The Baroness is not only atypical of a female protagonist but also of men’s adventure protagonists in general in that she kills in cold blood; frequently, at that. There’s a grueling scene where she and a few hand-picked team members slip through a camp of sleeping Chinese soldiers and slit their throats. 

Another great action scene mixes violence with Moffitt’s lurid inclinations when Penny is knocked out and wakes up in the hut of the hulking Omogoy and his fellow Yakuts. Penny feels a “burning” in her loins and realizes, quite placidly, that she’s been raped – further evidence provided by the “crusting” she sees on the penises of two of the native men, who are walking happily nude around the hut! Curiously Moffitt doesn’t have Penny really getting vengeance on her rapists, though she does as expected run roughshod over them in her escape. Omogoy too is shuffled out of the narrative and meets his fate in an unsatisfying way, a fate dealt out by Professor Thing instead of Penny. 

Alexey doesn’t contribute much to the narrative, other than providing a team of redshirts who can die so that the Baroness’ team will, as expected, survive. And also he engages Penny in a few more sex scenes – lots of description of his uncircumcised “pole” and Penny doing her “rotary” movement as she rides him…another recurring series schtick, like Penny’s tendency to “crush” the throats of unsuspecting guards. 

That said, late in the game the Baroness says to Tommy, speaking of Alexey: “I think I love him, a little.” This “love” is not developed at all in the narrative itself; for the most part, Penny and Alexey trade barbs about the mission, as they each have confidential info they are not willing to share with each other until necessary. So there’s a lingering tension of whether Penny and team can really trust Alexey. So Penny suddenly admitting she loves Alexey is a little hard to buy…yet at the same time, it goes hand-in-hand with her overall cipher-like nature. After all, this is the same woman who woke to discover she’d been raped by two men, a discovery which was dwelt upon and passed over in the span of a few sentences, and never mentioned again. 

The climax is pretty good, with Penny and team captured and taken to the massive base of Thing and Sung, where Penny has the series-mandatory tete-a-tete where Thing reveals his motivations. There’s also a memorable part where he pulls out his ruby eye and tosses it to her. But once again Tom Sumo proves himself the most indispensable member of the Baroness’ team – perhaps including even the Baroness herself – when he uses his gee-whiz science knowledge to undo Thing’s laser cannon. 

Unfortunately the finale sort of peters out with Penny and the others again silently killing a full base of sleeping Chinese soldiers…sort of anticlimactic after the big bad guy and his henchman have been deposed. But Moffitt goes on to write even more, with a scene in which Alexey, back home, learns who “Coin” is – thanks to Dan Wharton’s casual reference to her as “Baroness.” This leads to a surprising finale where Alexey goes to Italy to surprise her, tells her he has a week off and wants to spend it with her, and they go off together – so clearly from the get-go Moffitt had Alexey in mind as a recurring character. 

Overall Death Is A Ruby Light remains one of my favorite installments of The Baroness, even though the majority of it occurs in a frozen tundra. Sure, there’s not much in the way of personality or motivation, but otherwise Donald Moffitt’s writing is a cut above the men’s adventure norm, doling out exactly what producer Lyle Kenyon Engel wanted. One imagines that Engel must have been ecstatic to acquire Moffitt for his writing stable; compare to Manning Lee Stokes, another gifted writer, but one who “did not adhere exactly to the approved outline,” per Will Murray’s Killmaster article in The Armchair Detective volume 15, number 4 (1982). Moffitt turns in books that actually deliver on what the back cover promises.

Operation Nuke (Cyborg #2)

Operation Nuke, by Martin Caidin

March, 1974  Warner Paperback Library

(Original hardcover edition 1973)

I get the impression Martin Caidin took a trunk novel and turned it into a Six Million Dollar Man novel after the success of Cyborg, because truth be told Operation Nuke has absolutely nothing to do with the bionic world of Steve Austin, and for the most part really does come off like some generic thriller Caidin belatedly refashioned to get something to market quickly. 

I mean, Steve Austin doesn’t even use his bionics until the final few pages, and there’s no pickup from Cyborg, not even a mention of the Israeli woman Austin fell in love with at novel’s end. No, the Steve Austin of Operation Nuke could be literally any other Cold War spy hero, with nothing to make him notable…other, of course, than his bionic legs, left arm, eye, and other augmentations, none of which Martin Caidin makes use of during the course of the novel. 

I got a bit of a postmodern chuckle picturing some misguided kid in the ‘70s picking up the paperback edition of Operation Nuke, with its painted cover of Lee Majors in action, expecting some cool story about the Six Million Dollar Man taking on an underground army…and instead being baffled by this slow-moving “thriller” that more so comes off like a prototype of Tom Clancy. 

And really, that’s the exact sort of story Martin Caidin was writing. I’ve mentioned before that I am not a fan of his writing. He is one of those authors who info-dumps with abandon, stopping his story cold to declaim about this or that scientific discovery, or to tell us about the latest piece of military hardware, all while forgetting about his characters and his plot. This happens for the extent of Operation Nuke. 

Frustratingly, the setup is cool: there’s a massive army/world power called Pentronics, Inc. (which of course made me think of the vocal group Pentatonics) that operates under the radar and is so massive it has its own jet fighters, soldiers, and even steals nuclear arms with seeming ease. One expects a pulp yarn where the Bionic Man takes these motherfuckers down. Instead the reader gets a middling, tiresome novel where Austin goes undercover and joins them, gets bossed around by their leader and takes it for fear of blowing his cover, and then spends the final quarter of the novel sitting in front of a nuke and having to program numbers into it every several minutes. Oh, and the “climax” features Steve Austin breaking free from a chair he’s tied to. Something that would be accomplished in a few seconds of screentime on the vastly superior TV series, here goes on for pages and pages and pages. 

But as mentioned the setup is really cool. The opening alone is effective, with a commando squad led by an American named Sam Franks setting off a nuke in an African country. We then learn that this commando squad is part of a massive army that operates out of Madagascar and other places around the world; big enough to have its own staff and resources and whatnot, yet still unknown to the world at large. This is Pentronics, which will turn out to be the sole pulpy conceit Caidin gives us in the novel; otherwise he plays things very on the level. Which is to say the book is boring when it should be fun. 

Austin isn’t even given the assignment to infiltrate this syndicate due to his bionic augmentations; no, it’s because he’s a friggin nuclear scientist, Caidin gleefully retconning his character so as to shoehorn him into an unrelated novel. As part of his military training and whatnot, Steve Austin learned all about nuclear bombs and dismantling them! So he’s called in by OSO to find out the mysterious group that is stealing nuclear bombs and setting them off for the highest bidder. 

One thing I forgot to mention in my Cyborg review is that Oscar Goldman is not the boss of OSO in Caidin’s novels; rather, Goldman is a sort of second in command, and an old spy master named Jackson McKay heads up the organization. This is the character who does the heavy lifting of giving Austin his assignment and checking in on things during Operation Nuke, whereas Oscar Goldman is for the most part a minor character. I found this interesting because Jackson McKay didn’t even exist in The Six Million Dollar Man. 

How Steve Austin goes undercover is pretty damn goofy and baffling. He appears on a Johnny Carson-esque late night talk show along with his pal Marty Schiller, the parapalegic who trained Austin how to use his bionic limbs in Cyborg. There Austin, making his first public appearance after the accident that nearly killed him (and the world, by the way, does not know about his bionic implants), randomly picks a fight with a John Wayne analogue, mocking the guy’s fake patriotism and whatnot, and a scuffle breaks out on live TV…and Austin and Marty run away…to an airport…and there they steal an empty passenger plane, flying off into the night… 

I mean, WTF? Apparently this belabored ruse is to get Austin noticed by Pentronics, which is precisely what happens, but it’s all so ridiculous. Anyway they swoop in with MIG fighters and escort Austin and Marty to the secret hideout base on Madagascar. Here Austin will spend the rest of the novel ingratiating himself into the fold, pretending to be a man on the run who will gladly give his plane-flying abilities to a mercenary outfit with more firepower than the average country…not using his bionics one time. 

It’s all flying military craft and bombing places as Operation Nuke proceeds, and again it’s like we’re reading some decade-early take on Tom Clancy. Military acronyms, jargon, and exposition fills the pages and one can just imagine some poor kid in the 1970s trying his damnedest to read the book, perhaps after playing with his Steve Austin doll and various “action playsets.” (My brother had the astronaut suit with the cool red visor and the Bionic Transport and Repair Station, and probably some other stuff I’ve forgotten). 

There are other expatriates here at the Pentronics HQ, like a surly Russian MIG pilot who keeps to himself and clearly distrusts Austin. Action is infrequent and when it happens it is overshadowed by Caidin’s typical insistence on telling instead of showing, plus for a lot of the action scenes Austin is flying a bomber and isn’t even down on the ground fighting. But he soon becomes the main man of Pentronics honcho Sam Franks, commandeering nuclear weapons and even using them on enemies…and all the while Austin bides his time, for reasons Caidin can never really justify. 

We get the smallest promise of pulpy thrills when Austin, in bed, is approached by a scantily-clad woman who turns out to be an assassin, but she gets away, and later Austin briefly uses his bionics to take out two more would-be assassins. But really it’s humdrum and mundane for the majority of the novel, nowhere more so than what passes for the climax. In the US, Austin is tasked with overseeing a nuclear bomb and programming a code into it every time the phone rings, otherwise the bomb will go off. The reader thinks this will be a short blip and then we’ll get to the big action finale where Steve Austin finally remembers he’s a cyborg and takes on an entire commando force with his bionic limbs and augmentations. 

Instead, this sequence goes on for pages and pages and pages, with Austin having a nervous breakdown from the constant tension. Then that female spy turns up…and we learn she’s been posing as a man for the majority of the novel in a surprise reveal that isn’t believable, yet is unwittingly prescient in the whole trans aspect…and Austin is tied to a chair…and as mentioned he takes a couple pages to break free of the friggin’ thing! And to make things worse, he passes out after disarming the bomb, then he wakes up later and we are told in exposition that the Pentronics group has been taken out, including Sam Franks, all of it off-friggin’ page, Steve Austin sleeping in a hospital bed while it all happened, and brazenly enough Martin Caidin ends the tale there. 

Folks, if you’ve ever wondered why Martin Caidin’s Cyborg books are all out of print, and went out of print rather quickly, wonder no more. The guy couldn’t piece together a gripping story to save his life, and as I argued in my Cyborg review, the TV producers were able to better reap the potential of Caidin’s creations. Operation Nuke is a slow-going “thriller” that has nothing whatsoever to do with The Six Million Dollar Man, and here’s hoping the next novel, High Crystal, is better. It couldn’t get much worse.

Cherry Delight #3: Silverfinger

Cherry Delight #3: Silverfinger, by Glen Chase

No month stated, 1973  Leisure Books

Other than Where The Action Is, which was written by Len Levinson, I’ve never had any interest in Cherry Delight. Like Ted Mark’s books, it’s another of those spoofy spy-parody series with goofy acronyms and lame attempts at comedy and, even worse, it’s written in first-person -- a male author writing in the voice of a woman. But then I saw this third volume for a few dollars at an antique store and figured what the hell. 

There were actually two series: this initial Cherry Delight, which ran in the early 1970s, and then the later The All-New Cherry Delight (which is the series Len wrote one volume of), which ran in the late ‘70s. Veteran writer Gardner Fox handled all 24 volumes of the initial Cherry Delight, which is another reason I’ve never had much interest in the series; I’m not the biggest fan of his writing, as noted in my reviews of his two Commander Craig novels. 

But for a few bucks I couldn’t say no. However, Silverfinger turned out to be another reminder of how I just don’t like Gardner Fox’s work. It’s a slow-moving caper that operates on a threadbare setup with few thrills and hardly any action at all, only livened up by the occasional sex scene – sex scenes that are admittedly odd in that they’re written by a man but relayed in the first-person narrative of a woman. The conceit has always baffled me. 

In the 1960s Fox was one of the authors on the similar Lady From Lust series, another spoofy spy-fy series featuring a lusty female protagonist. But by the ‘70s The Executioner had overtaken James Bond and thus Cherry Delight is a spy who fights the mob, and she works for NYMPHO…the goofy and punny (and unfunny) ‘60s acronym titles making their unwelcome way to the ‘70s. 

Otherwise Cherry is essentially a spy who takes on the Mafia, and she’s a redheaded beauty with huge boobs (which she often reminds us of), and somehow she finds the time to narrate her adventures for us. The same thing Nick Carter began to do around this time. Personally I think any editor or publisher who demands a men’s adventure series be written in first-person is an editor or publisher who doesn’t know what the hell he or she is doing. 

 But then, one might argue that Gardner Fox doesn’t know, either. Case in point is this third volume, titled Silverfinger. Clearly it’s a take on Goldfinger, and the reader might envision a sex-and-violence-filled yarn about Cherry Delight taking on a Mafia chieftan with a penchant for painting women in silver and having his own personal army at his disposal…maybe with grand plans for taking over Fort Knox or somesuch.

Instead, the reader gets a threadbare, mundane, humdrum yarn about a Mafia boss in rural Italy who wears silver clothes, drives a silver car, and goes around to a shipyard to try to talk the employees into working for him. This, folks, is the threat Cherry Delight is up against in Silverfinger. It’s baffling how mundane and inconsequential the story actually is. 

What’s even crazier is that Fox writes like his life depends on it; the book runs 150-some pages of small, dense print; Silverfinger is similar to the “sleaze” paperbacks of a few decades before in that for the most part it’s made up of crafted narrative…but frequently will cut over to hardcore sex scenes. But as mentioned these sex scenes are odd because “Cherry” tells us all about the dudes she’s banging, and she has an odd way of referring to her anatomical parts. 

In the course of Silverfinger Cherry will have sex with a brother and a sister (not at the same time), and then later on she’ll conjugate with her NYMPHO handler, Mark Condon. Bizarrely enough, back in high school I dated a girl named Jennifer Condon…the name being so unusual that I of course remembered it. Plus she was a dead ringer for Elizabeth “Bewitched” Montgomery…but built like Barbara “I Dream Of Jeannie” Eden. No, I don’t know why I didn’t marry her, either!

I really need to stop drinking before I write these reviews. Okay, I’ll focus. Cherry is in Italy, with her red hair dyed black, trying to convince a trio of siblings that their shipyard is about to be taken over by the Mafia. The siblings, all young jetsetters, don’t believe Cherry…until mobsters start showing up to make threats or try to kill them. 

Cherry soon deduces that the mysterious “Silverfinger” is behind the group, and ultimately she’ll discover the otherwise dapper and silver-garbed older man who is indeed in charge of them…but for a main villain, he lacks bite. Then again the same can be said for the entire novel. 

Probably the highlight is a random bit where Cherry and Ines, the hotstuff sister of the trio, goes to a friggin Satanic ceremony in an old abbey, one attended by the shipyard workers. Cherry and Ines get so turned on by the nude congregants that they enjoy a brief lesbian fling, Cherry informing us that she’s done this sort of thing often. A lesbian fling that features the memorable image of Ines dipping her nipples in Cherry’s womanhood before dining at the Y. Hail Satan! 

The sex goes on for pages when it happens, but truth be told it lacks any heat and is undone by the bizarre decision on Fox’s part to suddenly become guttural; Cherry, otherwise highfalutin in her narrative, will suddenly be referring to her “pussylips” and her “girly-girl body.” There were parts, honestly, where I got the impression of an AI program attempting to write hardcore sleaze from the perspective of a human female. 

And really, the sex is the only thing Silverfinger has going for it. There certainly isn’t any action. Cherry takes on a few thugs with her bare hands early in the book, and gets in the odd shootout or two, but there’s no big action scene and for the most part the novel operates on a long-simmer approach, with Cherry more concerned with figuring out what Silverfinger’s plans are. To this end she goes undercover as a country girl working on the shipyards, gaining her way into Silverfinger’s confidence. 

More frustratingly, the finale comes on us without us even realizing it; Cherry gets in a protracted catfight with Silverfinger’s girlfriend, and some of Cherry’s hair is pulled out and she sees that her red roots are showing, so doubtless Silverfinger will realize that Cherry is the mysterious redhead who has been hitting his places. Then suddenly someone is sniping at Cherry moments after she’s had sex with Mark Condon, then there’s a harried action scene…and then the novel’s over…and Silverfinger has gotten away; Cherry figures she’ll see him again. 

Personally, I don’t give a damn whether she did or didn’t. Len’s Where The Action Is was worlds better than this, so unless I ever come across more volumes of Cherry Delight for a pittance, I figure I won’t be reading another volume of this particular series. I know Gardner Fox is well respected and all, but his writing just isn’t for me.

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!