No month stated, 1967 Award Books
(Edition shown here circa 1974)
Nicholas Browne wrote four volumes of Nick Carter: Killmaster, and Seven Against Greece was his third one. It’s mainly interesting in how standard it is. This is basically a no-frills Killmaster yarn, Browne hitting just the exact bases that are expected of a series ghostwriter and not offering much in the way of innovation. I only hold him to a higher standard given that he featured an ancient Viking warrior in the last volume he wrote for the series.
But there’s nothing crazy or outrageous aboutSeven Against Greece, other than my suspicion that the title was originally “Seven Against Thebes.” I say this because the published title has nothing to do with the story – if there are indeed “Seven against Greece” in the course of the book, I couldn’t name them – but Nick Carter makes frequent visits to a bar in Athens called Seven Against Thebes, a notorious hangout for a group of native terrorists. Well, who knows.
Regardless of the title, Browne does indeed keep the action centered in Greece for the entirety of the novel’s 158 pages – 158 pages of incredibly small print, to the extent that I figure Seven Against Greece would at least be 250 pages if the print was a little bigger. Maybe longer. And the helluva it is, a lot of the narrative is listless, and given over to padding, so the book seems even longer.
According to Will Murray’s incredible Killmaster research in The Armchair Detective V15 #4 (1982), Nicholas Browne was a merchant seaman who turned in a few Killmaster installments in the mid-late 1960s and then “sailed for parts unknown,” essentially disappearing from the face of the Earth. Maybe he sailed into the Bermuda Triangle.
Murray appropriately makes it all sound eerie, but it’s only now occurred to me that the whole thing might have been a tall tale Murray was fed by series editor Lyle Kenyon Engel. Maybe there was no “Nicholas Browne.” Maybe these books were really written by Engel – who, per Murray’s article, claimed to have done extensive rewriting to “Browne’s” manuscripts. Looking at my 2015 review of The Bright Blue Death, the last of Browne’s four Killmaster novels but the first one of his I read, I see that commenter “halojones-fan” was a decade ahead of me, with his comment: “Was Nicholas Browne an actual person, or just a pseudonym for the Engels?” Good question, halojones-fan!
At any rate, going into the book with an awareness of who Browne supposedly was, there is quite a bit of realistic detail on ports and sailing; Nick Carter hitches a few rides and there’s a lot of word painting about grungy seaside ports and whatnot, conveying a “been there, done that” verisimilitude to the narrative. So who knows, maybe there really was a Nicholas Browne who was a merchant seaman who wrote a handful of Nick Carter: Killmaster novels while sailing the seas, before vanishing. If Robert Stack was still alive, I’d beg him to do a segment on Unsolved Mysteries. While he was at it, maybe he could’ve also clreared up the mystery on who another series ghostwriter, “William Rohde,” really was.
Another note is that Nick’s undercover pose this time is as an “able-bodied seaman,” so maybe there really was something to Nicholas Browne being a real person. But then, Nick has two guises in this one: he also pretends to be an archeologist, and even receives AXE training in the field. This dual-cover setup is not well executed in the narrative, and really just added more bloat to an already-bloated story. Nick has the archeologist guise because AXE suspects an Athens traveling agency of hooking visiting Americans up with young natives, in the hopes that marriage will ensue, and the natives will go to America with their new spouse. There seems to be something nefarious in the works, and an agent working this case is murdered at the beginning of the novel – now it’s Nick’s turn to figure out what is happening.
Parts of Seven Against Greece are similar to the popular fiction of the era, with Nick hobknobbing with jet-setting elite in exotic locales. There’s also Princess Electra, “the most beautiful woman in the world,” with her “luxurious figure,” a former model who plays the field and sets her sights on “archeologist” Nick. Browne is not one of the more explicit writers in the field, but we do get copious mentions of the gal’s breasts. For the most part, though, Browne goes for more of a pseudo-literary style for the naughty stuff; for example, when Nick and Electra have their inevitable fun, Browne leaves it as, “[Nick] felt as if he had crashed through a boundary of the universe.” Well, sure. Okay.
Then again, Nick’s already had his off-page way with another European beauty: Xenia, a portside whore in Athens, with her “perfect and vital young body.” She will turn out to be the main female character in the novel; Browne goes against the series mandate and “only” has Nick conquering two women in the novel, instead of the customary three. But even with Xenia our author keeps all the juicy details off page; what’s worse, Xenia starts to fall in love with Nick, even trying to get him to stay with her.
Browne does have a gift for scene-setting. The port-side material in particular is vivid with description, and when it comes to the maritime stuff you can tell that this is an author who knows of what he writes. But still, it’s rather slow-going. Nick gets in a few fistfights here and there, but he stymies himself due to “keeping cover.” Meaning, when some hoods jump him outside of Xenia’s apartment, Nick can’t become full-on Killmaster and waste the guys, as he’s supposed to be a merchant seaman.
There’s also a lot of suspense material. Browne has a lot of characters in the works, and there are frequent cutovers to their perspectives to fill up the runtime. I found a bit of prescience in the Obama Bin Laden-esque Gorgas, elderly leader of a Greek terrorist army. It’s his men Nick tangles with outside of Xenia’s apartment, and eventually Nick will learn that Gorgas and Princes Electra are in cahoots, working with an Onassis pastiche and a Chinese spymaster. Still, unless my math fails me, that’s only four against Greece.
This early in the series, we are still apparently under the pretensions that Nick Carter is old enough to have fought in World War II, as established in the first volume. But even by 1967 it’s getting hard to buy. For example, Nick hooks up with an old Greek colleague he fought with during the war, a hardy old warrior who seems to have walked out of Homer, but the dude is old, and he and Nick keep talking about “the old days” and whatnot. But Nick is still young enough that he picks up young chicks like Xenia and has gobsmacking international jet-set beauties like Electra chomping at the bit to bed him. So it almost gives the impression that Nick Carter is a Highlander or something, an ageless immortal. It was a wise decision to gradually drop the whole “WWII vet” setup.
We do still have the unintentionally goofy stuff from early volumes, though, like an axe tattoo on Nick’s arm…which designates him as a high-ranking agent of the top-secret outfit AXE, of course. I mean there’s nothing like just advertising who you are when you’re going undercover. One wonders why they even bother with giving Nick cover guises.
When Nick does cut loose, though, Browne doesn’t disappoint. There’s a brutal fight with a couple thugs in his hotel room, which leads to some dark humor where Nick stashes their corpses in a closet…and then goes out for lunch. Browne also caters to the theme of Nick being captured and tortured; late in the tale he is tied, naked, to a pole in a grotto, one that fills with the tide, and all these fish and crabs and whatnot start nibbling on him. Things take a turn into horror when a giant octopus comes in and wraps itself around Nick, biting his chest – the finale here is particularly grisly, with Nick recalling how an old seaman once told him of being in a similar situation, and the way out was to bite the octopus in the brain.
There’s also another good sequence where Nick and his old comrade are cornered like rats in some underground tunnels, and a guy with a flamethrower comes after them. But the finale is a bit too much like a mystery, along the lines of Browne’s previous The Chinese Paymaster, with Nick uncovering who exactly is behind the plot. Browne does have a good way of incorporating Nick’s trademark weapons, though; little gas-bomb Pierre is used twice in the novel, once when Nick throws it into the open bed of a truckful of soldiers, and in another crazy part where he uses it while he’s tied up in a plane that’s in mid-air(!).
Overall though, the biggest takeaway from Seven Against Greece is the mystery of who Nicholas Browne was, what happened to him, and why he didn’t write any more Killmaster novels, as he did write some good ones, like Operation Starvation.
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