No month stated, 1973 Award Books
The first of two Nick Carter: Killmaster by an author named Linda Stewart, The Peking Dossier is from the unfortunate era in which series packager Lyle Kenyon Engel had let go of the reins and Award Books was fully in control, turning the series over to an army of ghostwriters with none of the unity or continuity that Engel had maintained for the series. Even worse, the series is now in first-person, with “Nick himself” relaying his adventures to us.
This is problematic enough for me; I mean Nick Carter is this super-agent who is always “on the job,” so how the hell does he have time to write books? And indeed, The Peking Dossier is a slow-as-molasses read, another of those deceptively-slim ‘70s paperbacks. This sucker has some seriously small print and, despite “only” being 188 pages, it took me forever to finish the book. This is because Linda Stewart has a tendency to draw things out a little too much at times…and also, she makes the even worse mistake of putting her tongue a little too far into her cheek.
It's the sort of thing Engel never would have allowed: Nick will often refer to himself as a “hero” when telling us his story in The Peking Dossier, usually in a “taking the piss” sort of vibe. Like a part where he scales a wall, and Stewart has an exhausted Nick tell us, “Sorry, I know heroes aren’t supposed to get tired.” There’s other stuff, like later on where Nick knows someone’s broken into his hotel room, and Nick informs us he has his own special way of monitoring this – and it isn’t the “hair on the doorway” trick Ian Fleming wrote about in James Bond. Nick further complains that Fleming gave too much away, and Nick himself isn’t going to give away his secrets “for ninety-five cents.” Ie, the cost of a Nick Carter: Killmaster paperback in 1973.
This breaking of the fourth wall (or whatever the literary term for it is) might be fine in something like The Destroyer, but Killmaster is supposed to be more of a “straight, no chaser” affair…or at least it was when Lyle Kenyon Engel ran it. As Engel himself noted, he did not like the first-person narrative for the series, but it was insisted on by Award Books. One can see Engel’s point, as ultimately first-person narrative will lead to this…a writer thinking himself (or herself) too clever for the material, and poking fun at it in the narrative. Also the entire “Nick Carter is also the author” conceit is ridiculous, as one must imagine super-hero Nick Carter traveling the globe as he stops villains and beds exotic babes…and yet somehow finding the time to write a 188 page book of teeny-tiny print. A book that is then published under his own name!
Another issue is the first-person narrative makes Nick seem altogether too gabby, as Manning Lee Stokes frequently demonstrated in his own first-person offerings for the series, a la The Red Rays. Since Nick narrates the entire story for us, he comes off like a neurotic fusspot, and it’s hard to square with the image of a virile man of action. But then, it all depends on the narrative voice, and again given the army of solo ghostwriters working on the series at this point, “Nick” comes off as a different narrator every time. In the hands of Linda Stewart he suddenly sounds more like a private eye in a bad ‘50s film noir, as Nick’s “voice” is decidely hardboiled in The Peking Dossier.
That said, Linda Stewart wins the Leigh Brackett award for “female author who can write almost exactly like a male author.” Folks, if I hadn’t known going in that a woman wrote this one, I never would’ve guessed it. Speaking of Stokes, Stewart makes her version of Nick just as aggressively macho, and there’s none of the pussyfooting around certain subjects that one gets from other female authors invading the world of men’s adventure, like for example Blood or The Peacemaker. Unlike the few other female authors in the men’s adventure genre I’ve read, Linda Stewart knows to keep things moving, with a focus on action – of the violent and sexual variety. Even more so than the previous female author on the series, Valerie Moolman.
That said (again), Nick does fall in love in The Peking Dossier, and indeed only has sex with one girl in the book (the one he falls in love with, naturally), so there is that giveaway that our author is a woman. Otherwise, Stewart knows enough to not emasculate her Nick Carter too much; we still get the topical description of women and there’s a fair bit of action…though, again, the sex is for the most part off-page or relayed in metaphors, and the violence is not gory it all. This is one of those books where Nick tells us he “shot” someone and leaves it at that. Or even, “In ten seconds they were all dead.”
Again like Stokes, Linda Stewart has a little fun with some in-jokery; just as Stokes would often refer to himself, his pseudonyms, or etc in his own work for the series, so too does Linda Stewart. Indeed, she does Stokes one better, introducing herself into the book. The Peking Dossier ultimately concerns Nick Carter facing off against a master assassin with a clone army who is looking to kill every US senator and ultimately the President, and early in the book Nick is told to meet with the AXE agent who will be working the assignment with him…a lovely redhead with an incredible body who gives her name as Linda Stewart.
Nick will soon learn it’s a lie: the redhead’s name is really Tara Bennett, and she’s a scientist for AXE. But it’s interesting that Linda Stewart slipped her real name into the book…doubtless unaware that fifty years later some random reviewer would be writing about it on his blog. It’s also interesting that she made herself Nick’s dream girl, in a way; later Nick will tell us that Linda/Tara not only has the best body he’s ever seen, but she’s the best lay he’s ever had – and, as Nick himself reminds us, he’s been with more than a few women. But Stewart doesn’t dwell much on the juicy goods. In fact, the most we get is stuff like, “Tara was something else.” The reluctance to dwell on all the juicy material also comes off as humorous, given how gabby our narrator is about vitually every other subject.
Another interesting thing, given that The Peking Dossier was written by a woman, is Nick’s insistence on asserting his dominance over Tara. Moments after meeting her, and learning that she’s an AXE scientist who will be working with him, Nick ensures that Tara is under no question of who is in charge. Again, Stewart’s Nick Carter has the same aggressive macho tendencies as Manning Lee Stokes’s, but then it could because Stewart’s goal is to show how Nick goes from being a macho boss to a guy who falls in love with Tara.
And for an author who is brand new to the series, Linda Stewart really goes to bat to have Nick Carter explain himself and his philosophy to us. We are also told without condition that he’s not wealthy: “If you were out of work for six months last year, you probably earned more than I did.” Frequently Nick will confide such thoughts in us readers, and I have to admit I kind of appreciated Stewart’s self-confidence in such things…I mean here she was, the first female author on the series since Valerie Moolman, ten years before, and she dove right into it without any hesitancies. One could easily believe “Nick himself” really is telling the tale of The Peking Dossier, Linda Stewart’s narratorial voice is so confident.
The only problem is, the novel is incredibly sluggish. It just seemed to take forever for me to finish it, and my assumption is Stewart’s word count came in higher than expected and Award just shrank the print instead of cutting the fat. The helluva it is, the main idea is kind of cool: there’s this group of assassins from Red China that calls itself “KAN,” and Nick tells us that no one’s ever figured out what the name means, so AXE just refers to it as “Kill Americans Now,” which is what the assassin group specializes in. As if a cabal of “A1” assassins wasn’t enough, Stewart also throws in a cloning subplot; one of the chief KAN agents has apparently cloned himself, and is sending out his duplicates to kill United States senators.
This is how Tara Bennett comes into the picture; Hawk sends her to meet up with Nick, and it turns out she is a scientist who has guessed clones are behind the plot…given that the killers have all been Chinese men who look identical, even to the same mole in the center of their forehead. Stewart’s footing is a little off with her presentation of Hawk; she has the AXE boss withholding info from Nick, for reasons that make little sense other than plot convenience. For example, why exactly Tara goes through with the “Linda Stewart” charade is not properly explained, nor is how she is under orders – from Hawk – to not tell Nick certain things about the assignment. Regardless, Tara as mentioned will be Nick’s sole bedmate and ally throughout The Peking Dossier, first going with him to Nassau to get a lead on the KAN plot, and then later to England, and then finally to Hanoi.
One thing Linda Stewart shares with other female authors in the men’s adventure genre is her reliance on knocking Nick out for the convenience of the plot; Nick Carter is knocked out or drugged into unconsciousness at least five times over the course of The Peking Dossier. It gets to be comical after a while, and it’s clear it’s because Stewart has painted her hero into a corner and has to resort to the easy way out and knocking Nick senseless. The funny thing is, Nick’s opponents just conveniently don’t kill him when he’s out cold! But anyway, poor Nick certainly picks up at least a few concussions in this one.
At any rate, Stewart does pack in a bit of action throughout, but as mentioned it is spectacularly bloodless. Nick uses his three mainstay weapons – the Luger, the stiletto, the gas bomb – and even here Stewart, again brand-new to the series, has Nick explain to us the usefulness of Pierre, the gas bomb. You know, the one he hides by his balls. Stewart, with her tongue again in her cheek, has Nick tell us how men never search there, adding to the benefit of the bomb, yet at the same time he humorously tells us how hiding something behind your balls can be a little embarrassing if the wrong person sees it. Otherwise Nick doles out quick, clean kills in The Peking Dossier, but he does gas-bomb a group of KAN killers at one point.
The plotting is pretty busy, and overly so, to the extent that fun stuff is unexplored. Like there’s a part where Nick is cornered by some KAN killers, and they end up fighting with each other over who gets to kill the infamous Killmaster, as apparently there’s a points reward system in the KAN organization. Nick wonders how many points he’d be worth, but Stewart doesn’t do much with the setup. Same goes with the clone stuff, which isn’t really dwelt on until the final pages. Essentially, a top KAN killer hopes to create a clone army to topple the west, and he also plans to clone Nick and Tara! Nick because he could have an army of Killmasters (we are told clones inherit the exact abilities of the source), and Tara because he would have a super-smart genetic scientist at his disposal.
The finale plays out in a temple in which the KAN villain manufactures heroin (another subplot), using a group of naïve monks to do the work. We have some B-movie sci-fi stuff, like Nick and Tara seeing little jars with growing embryos in them, knowing that they are looking at clones of themselves. But a lot of it is ruined by Nick constantly getting knocked out, or dosed by drugs into oblivion. Oh, and also falling in love with Tara. After a lot of off-page lovin,’ Tara admits to Nick that she’s fallen in love with him…and Nick, after telling us that under normal circumstances he’d come up with something to tell a girl who’d fallen in love with him – basically, to get lost – tells us that instead he tells Tara he feels the same. Now, one would expect this will mean that only one thing could possibly happen to Tara, but Linda Stewart goes in an unexpected direction.
SPOILER ALERT: Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know. But for posterity, here’s what happens with Tara. Stewart as metioned puts a lot of subplots and extranneous background detail into the book, with Nick often referring to people he knew in the past (who of course have never before been mentioned in the series). Well anyway, one such reference, which Tara randomly throws out, is to an elite AXE agent who was killed in action or lost or something (I forget). Well, despite telling Nick she’s in love with him and even that she wants to have his child…in a hasty final chapter Nick informs us that Tara, who does survive the events of the novel, is already married – indeed, to that very elite AXE agent! Turns out he's been crippled or somesuch, and Hawk at AXE is paying for his care, and Tara used the opportunity to go out in the field and briefly fall in love with Nick and let herself imagine what it would be like to be with him. But she’s staying with her crippled husband. Or something. Nick for his part doesn’t seem much fazed, telling us a married life isn’t one he thinks he’d even want.
Overall The Peking Dossier is entertaining, though a bit ponderous at times and certainly bloated. That said, Linda Stewart proves herself a better series writer than many who worked on Nick Carter: Killmaster, and perhaps one of these days I’ll seek out her other installment, 1975’s The Jerusalem File.
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