Death Merchant #23: The Budapest Action

Death Merchant #23: The Budapest Action, by Joseph Rosenberger

July, 1977  Pinnacle Books

Friends, like The Ninja, this is a read that has been years in the making. How many years? Nearly forty years. Was it worth the wait? Of course it wasn’t, it’s a Death Merchant novel by Joseph Rosenberger! 

To quote The Jimmy Castor Bunch, “What we’re gonna do right here is go back, way back, back into time.” Back to the mid-late 1980s, to be exact, when yours truly was first caught up in the world of men’s adventure. It was probably around 1987, but not much later, and not much earlier. This would have been the height of my men’s adventure fandom, around when I wrote a letter to Gar Wilson. In fact, I no doubt looked very much like this. 

Back then I did my shopping for new men’s adventure paperbacks at the WaldenBooks in the Country Club Mall, in LaVale, Maryland. I have not been in that store in over thirty years – I haven’t even been to Maryland in over twenty years – and the store has been gone at least since 2011, when WaldenBooks folded, if not before. But I went to that store so many times that even now, as a fifty year-old “adult,” I can close my eyes and see the exact layout of that bookstore, and I can walk through it in my mind. 

The men’s adventure paperbacks were along the left wall of the store, almost all the way in the back. Probably a fitting place for them, the cynic might observe. Actually, sci-fi was all the way in the back; it was when heading for the science fiction paperback section in October of 1985 that I finally stopped to look at the action paperbacks that were placed on a shelf right before it. This was how I discovered Phoenix Force, specifically Night Of The Thuggee, which was my gateway drug into the world of men’s adventure. (I really should get a copy of that book and re-read it someday.) 

But for older men’s adventure novels, like earlier installments of Phoenix Force or the other older Gold Eagle stuff, I went to a used bookstore near the mall: The Paperback Exchange. This place was run by a lady who seemed “old” to me, but I’m probably older now than she was then. It had pretty much everything a prepubescent geek like me could want: a robust selection of second-hand books, particularly paperbacks (as you might guess), plus a large assortment of comics, new and old. Indeed, in my teen years, when I moved out of men’s adventure and more so into comics (though I had always liked comics), I would only go to Paperback Exchange for my comics shopping. 

Today I can only imagine what great stuff that lady had in her Paperback Exchange in the mid-to-late ‘80s. Back then, though, the older stuff – ie the stuff from only ten years before, the ‘70s – wasn’t as highly valued, at least by me. I remember going through her “old” copies of The Executioner, which as I recall were half off the cover price, and buying one or two of them out of obligation – #3: Battle Mask in particular I recall buying. But they just seemed so old to me, so outdated, and I had no interest in them – at the time, I just wanted the ‘80s terrorist of the week stuff, specifically the Gold Eagle stuff, and if you could throw that ninja guy John Trent in there, so much the better. I had no interest in reading about Mack Bolan’s Mafia war, which seemed like ancient history. 

But one day at the Paperback Exchange I saw this particular copy of Death Merchant in the men’s adventure paperbacks section, and the cover grabbed me, even though the book seemed so old. As mentioned above, I was already a comic book fan, and I was a sci-fi fan, so this cover – credited on the copyright page to an artist named Dean Cate – fired my imagination good and proper. It looked so cool! A dude in a red jumpsuit with a facemask, a mad scientist on the top of the cover, a lot of uniformed goons getting blown away…it had the potential to even be better than Phoenix Force (though not one of the ones with John Trent, of course). 

I snatched up the book and took it to my mom and she bought it for me; my mom, as a single mother on a teacher’s assistant salary, didn’t have much money, but she always bought me books. And looking back on it now, I never even valued it at the time that she would buy me books that she clearly knew were written for adults, but she bought them for me anyway because she knew I loved to read. I never had to make a sales pitch or anything. I’d just run with the book over to my mom and ask her if she’d buy it for me, and she’d buy it for me. 

So, I can say I was pretty excited to read this one. I’m not sure if I knew about the Death Merchant at the time. I want to say I didn’t. As mentioned, I was squarely into the new stuff. It’s funny that I thought these ‘70s books were so old at the time, but even looking at them today I can see why I thought this – the ‘70s paperbacks were taller, the paper was pulpier, and overall they were less glossy than the ‘80s men’s adventure paperbacks. They just seemed to be from a different, altogether rougher time. 

But regardless, Death Merchant 23: The Budapest Action grabbed my attention, what with its cover promising some guy in a red jumpsuit with a visor over his face blowing away a bunch of uniformed guys with a Luger. Whoever this Death Merchant was, he clearly had “incredible adventures,” at least per the cover. 

Then I went home and tried to read the book. 

No, this was not Phoenix Force, not by a long shot. This was just weird. And it was almost indecipherable, at least for a twelve year-old like me. Who this Death Merchant, aka Richard Camellion, really was, I couldn’t figure out – it just opened with him in action, and he stayed in action for the rest of the densely-written, small-print 202 pages of the book. After some dogged reading, I finally gave up and tried to root through the book for the scene depicted on the cover, before failing on this as well. Ultimately The Budapest Action went on my bookshelf, neatly arranged with all my other men’s adventure paperbacks…but continnuing to loom in my imagination. For nearly four decades. 

A long time ago I picked up another copy of the book – I guess all of my old men’s adventure novels are boxed up at my mom’s place, and I’d love to get them all someday – but it too sat unread in a box with a bunch of other books. I’m not sure why I didn’t try to read it sooner, opting instead for other Death Merchant novels. I guess I just didn’t want to finally read it and get verification of what I knew as a twelve year-old: that the book wasn’t very good. But I finally decided to read the damn thing, which was a curious experience – not the least because, even as a fifty year-old, I still found The Budapest Action nearly indecipherable. 

But first of all, and really a note to the twelve-year-old me: the cover does not illustrate anything that happens in the novel. At no point – at least no point that I caught – does Richard “Death Merchant” Camellion put on a red jumpsuit with a clear visor, arm himself with a Luger, and shoot up a bunch of uniformed guards. Presumably artist Dean Cate was given his assignment by the editors at Pinnacle – who probably didn’t read Rosenberger’s manuscript, either, I mean life’s just too short – and proceeded to illustrate what he thought would be a scene in the novel. 

It’s funny when you think of it; that cover image has stayed with me for decades. I’ve even subtly referred to it in some of my own writing. And now I finally discover that the scene isn’t even in the book! Actually this makes me think of a quote from none other than Rosenberger himself, I think from one of his Mace books, something to the effect of, “As surprised as a kid who went downstairs on Christmas morning to discover that Santa Claus was really a child molester,” or something like that. 

While Dean Cate’s cover art might be misleading, the title itself sure as hell isn’t: this one’s nothing but “action.” I don’t exaggerate when I say that the vast majority of the 202 pages concerns Camellion fighting his way into a castle in Budapest in which a special psychedelic gas is being stored. The entire novel is focused on him trying to get into this place, and he doesn’t even get there until the final pages. 

I determined long ago that there are two kinds of Death Merchant novels: the ones where Joseph Rosenberger bothers to achieve his own potential and the ones where he doesn’t give a shit. The Budapest Action is one of the latter. Examples of the former are rare, but they exist; see, for example, The Cosmic Reality Kill or The Burning Blue Death. Both of these actually live up to the outrageous premise Rosenberger creates. But more likely you get something like Hell In Hindu Land, where the outrageous concept – friggin’ ancient aliens – is nothing more than a Maguffin that Rosenberger uses to tie together several action scenes that seemingly go on forever. 

The back cover, which also did a great job of luring the twelve-year-old me in, has it that Richard Camellion must go to Budapest to destroy a new psychedelic gas that has been developed by a Commie scientist; to be used, of course, to conquer the world. I mean, surely that wild-eyed, vaguely Slavic-looking, lab-coated and beaker-toting sub-Lenin on the cover is supposed to be this mad doctor. Too bad, then, that we don’t even meet him, but spend more time in go-nowhere chapters devoted to General Barthory, who is in charge of security for the remote castle in which the experimental psychedelic gas is being stored. 

I’m not sure if it’s the take I got as a kid in 1987, and it probably wasn’t, but reading the setup now, as an “adult,” I can only think of scenes where the gas is let loose, and people start freaking out, and we see their delusions and the madness that ensues. Sort of like, now that I think of it, The Deadly Spring. But as I mentioned above, this is one of the volumes where Rosenberger doesn’t give a shit; the setup is just there to allow him to lazily tie together several action scenes. 

The novel opens with Camellion breaking into a government building in Budapest to find the plans for the psychedelic gas, only to discover the safe is impossible to break into. This leads to a near-endless action scene, after which Camellion hooks up with his contacts in Hungary, a group of resistance fighters. They are hiding out with some monks, and throughout Camellion disguises himself as a visiting cleric, wearing makeup to make himself look like he’s in his late forties – which we’re told is ten years older than Camellion’s actual age – with a splotchy face and a bald head. Presumably this is how Camellion looks throughout the interminable action scene that takes up the final half of the novel. 

There’s a big annual festival in which the faithful climb the nearby mountains upon which is perched the castle that has the psychedelic gas. So Camellion and his group – one of whom is an American CIA agent – go along with the faithful, secretly toting weapons. Camellion doesn’t bait the monks as much as you’d think, but we do get a little of Rosenberger’s bizarre “Fate Magazine” type stuff, like a random assertion from Camellion that the ages of man are determined by the weather, and we’re heading into a “heat” phase, and etc. It’s goofy, but really not much different from the proclamations of the average climate change “expert” of today. 

But the bizarre stuff too is a Maguffin. The focus is solely on action. That’s really all it is. There’s a lot of stuff devoted to Camellion and team, in the mountains, commandeering a Hound helicopter. Also, before this sequence, there’s another endless action scene that prefigures the later Super Death Merchant, where Camellion commandeers an Armored Personnel Carrier and drives it through the streets of Budapest. But with the Hound, it’s used to fly them over the walls of the castle – and folks, this scene goes on forever. 

Like a fool, I kept waiting for the part where Camellion would pull on his red jumpsuit, don his clear visor, and go charging with Luger raised into the swirling mists of psychedlic gas, blasting away uniformed soldiers. It never happened. As the final page got closer and closer, and more and more time was spent on Barthory freaking out that his defenses had been penetrated, or Camellion landing the Hound where it could easily be gotten into again, I realized that the entire novel was nothing more than getting into the castle. The stuff I wanted – the stuff Dean Cate illustrated on his cover – only happened in my imagination. 

In fact, the psychedelic gas is such a Maguffin that more time is spent on how to destroy it than seeing its effects. Granted, destroying it is Camellion’s entire mission, but still…the reader deserves more. The reader deserves more than just page after page of Camellion and his friends gunning down “AVO” soldiers, ie the Hungarian version of the KGB. Seriously, “AVO” is repeated so much in The Budapest Action that you could make a drinking game out of it. 

As the final slap in the face, Rosenberger is so checked out that he rushes through the finale…and on the very last sentence, apropos of nothing, Camellion is thinking about how he’ll be on his next mission “in less than a month!” It’s like even the friggin’ Death Merchant himself just wants it all to be over, so he can get on to the next one. I can only assume this is how his creator felt. I mean Joseph Rosenberger, of course, not the Cosmic Lord of Death. 

I’m sure it wasn’t fun turning out so many of these books a year, every year, and we know from the Joseph Rosenberger letter that Stephen Mertz sent me many years ago that Rosenberger wasn’t even getting paid very much. So I try not to be too hard on these men’s adventure writers of old. To be honest, I envy them. I mean, Joseph Rosenberger might have been paid squat, and he might have turned out turgid, soul-crushing banalities (though not always)…but at least he was creating something, something that I’m here reviewing nearly five decades after he wrote it. Today, at my work, I wrote the creative brief for a piece of email marketing I’m going to send out in a month. Who’s going to remember that in fifty years? Who’s going to remember it five minutes after opening it? 

So, this is one to mark off my “bucket list,” if that phrase is even still used. It took me nearly forty years, but I finally got around to reading The Budapest Action. I’ll prefer to remember it as the story I originally envisioned, all those years ago. And I’ll hope the next Death Merchant is better. But I won’t count on it.

Barca

Barca, by Lou Cameron

July, 1974  Berkley Medallion

The first of a handful of paperback originals Lou Cameron published with Berkley in the mid-late ‘70s, Barca is like the later The Closing Circle in how it clearly seems to take the work of Lawrence Sanders as inspiration. Indeed, Cameron is at such pains to produce a “legitimate crime novel” that, again like The Closing Circle, he undermines his own pulpy premise and turns in a tale that is much too staid for its own good. As it is, Barca is a slog of a read, a 256-page, small-print slog that is more focused on dialog than it is on thrills. 

Reading the back cover copy of Barca, the reader is promised a tale in which the titular tough-guy cop is shot in the head but survives, and now is on a trail of revenge. The reader will be frustrated to discover that this is not the novel he actually gets. 

Rather, the reader gets a lot of talking in Barca. A lot of talking. Hell, folks, even after waking up in the hospital bed with a bullet in his friggin’ brain, even here Barca gets in a pages-long conversation with his partner, Crane, and his boss, Lt. Genero. And they aren’t just talking about the bullet in the brain, either! It’s almost like a proto-Seinfeld in how their conversation just roams all over the place. 

And this is how it will go through Barca. It was the same thing in The Closing Circle, of course, and it occurs to me now that this was the same thing Herbert Kastle was doing in his own contemporary crime novels – lots of “salty, realistic chatter from jaundiced cops” stuff. I’ve only read a few novels by Lawrence Sanders – and I’m ready to rank The Tomorrow File as my favorite novel ever, these days, surpassing even my old top favorite Boy Wonder – but from what I’ve read, his novels too were dialog heavy. And yet, at least from the ones I’ve read, they didn’t come off as stultifying chores, like these two Cameron novels. 

So here’s the deal: Detective Sergeant Frank Barca is a New Jersey cop with twenty years of experience in Homicide. At novel’s start he and his younger partner Crane are providing protection for a guy in the hospital who is about to turn evidence against the Roggeris, a mobbed-up family with tentacles all over Jersey. Then when Crane goes out for cigarettes and Barca’s alone with the guy, someone sneaks into the room and shoots Barca in the back of the head, then puts the rest of the gun’s bullets into the would-be witness. 

In material seemingly taken from a medical textbook (like Sanders, Lou Cameron wants us to know he’s done his research), we learn how the bullet did a ton of damage to Barca’s neurons but came to rest in his brain in such a way that he survived – and maintained all of his physical abilities. However, the bullet has also come to rest in such a way that to retrieve it via surgery could result in Barca’s death. This too is explained in copious detail, as Barca exposits back and forth with a neurosurgeon some months later, after coming out of therapy. 

Barca struggles with some memories, like when a pal from the Korean War calls him to wish him well, and Barca cannot remember the guy for anything. Barca’s bigger problem however is that it is only a matter of time until his brain rejects the bullet that is embedded in it. When this happens Barca’s mind will blank out, and meanwhile his body will go into convulsions and he will ultimately die. This too is covered in copious expository dialog. 

The premise is interesting: Barca gets the chance to solve his own murder, and he has to do it fast, before his brain explodes. Instead of Plot A, however, we get Plot B: Lt. Genero, reluctantly accepting Barca back on duty, puts Barca on another case, because it would look bad for the force if Barca started investigating his own shooting(!). Which Genero assures Barca the force is totally doing, it’s just a question of manpower and whatnot… 

So Barca gets the case he was working on before he was shot: looking into the hit-and-run death of a guy named Fantasia. It’s maddening in a way; the back cover and first pages set you up for one story, then Cameron pulls the narrative rug out from under you and soon Barca’s looking at the corpse of a dead young black girl who hooked for some boys who lived above Fantasia’s pharmacy, kids who were mostly into a dope and booze scene and not so much into heavy drugs. In other words, you get another story entirely than what was promised. 

Barca’s old partner, Crane, has moved on to a new gig after being promoted, but Barca will occasionally head over to his place to engage in dialog – because, gradually, it becomes clear that the Fantasia death might be connected with the Roggeris, ie the mobbed-up family that was going to be ratted on by the guy Barca and Crane was guarding the night Barca was shot in the head. 

It takes a long while for this to develop, though. For the first half of Barca we have a methodical procedural in which Barca interrogates a cast of characters who knew Fantasia; most memorable is Wrong Way Corrigan, an 18 year-old punk child of wealth who is known for crashing expensive cars. During this Baraca becomes acquainted with Beth Wilson, an (apparently) pretty blonde social worker who was helping the young black hooker who died of an OD. 

For a writer with a pulp background, Lou Cameron is curiously chaste. At least in the novels of his I’ve read. That he pulled off such prudery in the sleazy ‘70s is quite a feat. But there’s zero exploitation of the female characters and there is zero sex; Barca notices that Beth gradually begins to grow feelings for him, but when she asks him on a date late in the novel he turns her down – he doesn’t want her to start to like him and then have her feelings crushed when he suddenly dies. Personally I thought Barca was coming on as a little too self-important; just because a girl asks you out doesn’t mean she’s going to fall in love with you. 

We fare slightly better on the action front, but even here Cameron fails to deliver what he promises. Due to his condition Barca is not allowed to drive a police car, so he finds a workaround and starts driving a motorcycle. It’s a Honda, not a Harley, but Barca also starts wearing “leather togs” and packing two pistols, making the reader think of Chopper Cop, or better yet the bike-riding cop from The Blood Circus. 

But man; we only even know Barca looks like this because other characters mention it (again, the majority of the novel is relayed via dialog), and Cameron does precious little to deliver on his own pulpy conceit. I mean Barca drives the Honda around here and there; at no point does he turn into the leather-wearing, bike-roaring hellraising cop the veteran pulp reader might want. 

The novel’s sole “action scene” is over before we know it; following leads, Barca ends up at a garbage dumb outside of town, and none other than one of the Roggeris pull up. One of the guys with him’s a coked-up “junko,” and Barca shoots him with his Colt Cobra when the guy rushes him. But this scene too is played up more for the suspense angle, as Barca soon learns that there was more to this situation than he expected. 

But then overall Barca is more of a procedural than a thriller. Sometimes it’s unintentionally humorous, like the many and confusing tentacles that make up the Roggeri family. I mean there’s the one who was going to be turned against, the one who is a legitimate businessman, the one who became a priest. Then there’s the old crone who might be the most cruel mafioso of them all. And it’s all talking, talking, talking; even parts where Barca goes to talk to his old priest and they get into various theological debates. 

I mean a part of me can see Lou Cameron enthusing over all this, turning in a meaty and weighty “crime novel” that has more in common with John Gardner (the American, not the Brit) than Don Pendleton. But it comes off as so ponderous, especially given that so many scenes have no bearing on the outcome of the novel. The bantering between Barca and Lt. Genero also gets old after a while, and there are so many parts that are dumb – like Barca figures out another workaround, how to keep his gun even when he’s temporarily removed from the force, but when Genero tries to give Barca back his gun officially, Barca tells him to forget it! 

Probably the biggest issue with Barca is Barca himself. He’s nowhere as interesting as Cameron seems to think he is. There’s a lot of muddled stuff about his Italian upbringing, and how he could’ve been in the Mafia, but again it’s all just dialog with no payoff – like when Barca tries to ask that old priest of his about “omerta” and all this other stuff. None of it amounts to anyting other than making the book seem even longer. 

So, the reader can forget about the plot promised on the back cover of Barca. The concept of a tough-guy cop with a bullet in his brain going out for revenge on the mobsters who tried to kill him sounds like a great story, but it’s not the story we get in Barca. Instead, we get a tough-guy cop with a bullet in his brain who…investigates a hit-and-run death and talks to a bunch of people. Only gradually does he get around to solving who it was who almost killed him – and even this doesn’t have the emotional payoff the reader might want, Cameron going for more of a ‘70s-mandatory downbeat ending. (But an unsurprising one, as it should be obvious to even a disinterested reader who shot Barca.) 

I wasn’t very crazy about The Closing Circle, either, as it suffered from a lot of the same stuff. But that one was marginally better because the subplot about the killer at least kept things moving, and there was certainly more of a sleazy overlay – not via sex or anything, given Cameron’s prudishness, but in the wanton description of people shitting themselves when they’re strangled. To this day when I watch Dateline or whatever and it mentions a victim being strangled, I’m like, “Why aren’t you telling us they shat themselves?!” I mean, it’s the one thing I learned from The Closing Circle. 

Cameron wrote a few more of these “realistic cop novels in the vein of Lawrence Sanders” for Berkley; curiously, one of them is titled Tancredi, a name that appears in Barca. It’s not a cop or even a character in Barca, but a building where one of the Mafia capos operates out of, “The Sons of Tancredi.” There doesn’t seem to be any connection between these novels, so maybe Cameron just liked the name and decided to use it for his next book. But I’ll probably read that one next, and hope that it’s better than these first two.