Nazi Hunter #1

Nazi Hunter #1, by Mark Mandell
November, 1981  Pinnacle Books

Nazi Hunter was an obscure series from latter-day Pinnacle that amounted to five volumes. Currently you can only find a review of the second volume by Zwolf and another review of the second volume at the Point Blank blog. I suspect the series was not a big seller, and the lame cover art which seems to depict a business executive on his way to the office certainly didn’t help matters.

Mark Mandell is the real name of a veteran men’s adventure author who is better known by his pseudonym: Alan Philipson. Under this name he wrote many of the SOBs novels for Gold Eagle in the ‘80s. I was told that Philipson was really Mandell a few years ago by someone who knew him, but since my informant wasn’t sure if this was public knowledge I kept the information to myself. However I see now that Allen Hubin states that Mandell and Philipson are one and the same, so there you go.

Both Zwolf and Point Blank state that Mandell’s writing is pretty good for the genre, and that’s definitely the case in this first installment, which has almost literary aspirations in the scenery and character description. I don’t recall Mandell’s Gold Eagle books being like this, so perhaps he just reined it in once he better understood the market. Nazi Hunter #1 reads like another of those novels that was written as a standalone, as if shooting for the mainstream market, before it was refashioned into the first installment of a series. Thus, there’s a lot more scene setting and character developing than you’ll encounter in the genre average.

Series protagonist Curt Jaeger is a Captain in the US Special Forces, somewhere in his late thirties, passed over for various promotions due to not following orders and always risking his neck in the line of fire. My only problem with him is that he’s fairly generic, at least in this volume, in which he spends more time standing around. But then this first installment serves as his origin story. We learn that he was born in Germany, his parents killed during the war, and he was raised from a very young age in California by a German immigrant couple who did their best to make young Curt seem like all the other American boys. He never learned to speak German, or was told anything about his parents, etc. But Curt’s foster parents just died, and in their estate he found documents which informed him that his father was actually an infamous Nazi, in fact one who ran a concentration camp, and killed thousands of Jews and Gypsys.

Now an enraged Curt has come to Germany for a reckoning with his dad, who was brought to trial in the ‘50s and has been in a US military prison facility ever since. Mandell opens up the story with a group of Nazi hunters from Israel who are shadowing Curt, unsure what side he’s on. They are unaware that he was raised as an American and fear he might be looking to continue in his dad’s footsteps. Leading the group is a bearish sadist named Wolf Geller who quickly grates on the reader’s nerves. There’s also an older man named Jonas who bears the forearm tattoo of the camps; he is internationally famous as a Nazi hunter, bringing various Nazis to trial. Geller on the other hand just wants to blow them away. Finally there’s hotstuff Tyshana, a Gypsy babe Geller wants to score with but she gives him a consistent cold shoulder.

Curt is granted an audience with his father, only to learn the man who has been in this cell for the past few decades is an unwitting dupe, conned by Curt’s father into doing prison time in his name. He pleads with Curt to get him out so that he can show him where his father really is. Curt comes up with one of the goofier breakout schemes in printed history. And the cover painting illustrates it! Curt lugs an attache case of clothes and books into the prison for his “dad,” then has the guy climb into the case. He’s all frail and small, but still over a hundred pounds, and Curt has to pretend he’s carrying an empty case as he walks out of the prison. So for some reason Pinnacle chose this as the scene to capture for the cover.

There isn’t very much action, anyway. An okay sequence occurs here, with neo-Nazis battling it out with Geller’s Nazi hunters, and Curt is captured by the former. Here we get a lot of torture porn as Curt and a captured neo-Nazi are nearly suffocated by a plastic bag, courtesy Geller, who gets off on it. I forgot to mention, but the Nazis live on, operating under various names, and it’s implied that Curt’s dad (who remains unseen this volume) is one of the leaders of the mysterious group. Their goal of course is to take over the world. The problem with these sorts of stories, to me at least, is that they want to develop pulp action off of the monumental horrors of the Holocaust.

Curt at length ends up in a castle near Linz, having escaped Geller and the others with the neo-Nazi. Here he meets the villain of the tale, Adolf Tropp, a superior officer of Curt’s dad back in the war, but now one of his underlings in the so-called “Brotherhood.” Tropp retains a castle full of neo-Nazis who wear black SS-type uniforms and tote submachine guns, plus there’s a gas chamber in the cellar. This Curt learns is where his mother was murdered, along with untold others, during the war. And Tropp has folders filled with before, during, and after photos of innocent men, women, and children being gassed. Ultimately Curt will decide to follow Jonas’s Nazi-hunting methods and steal this incriminating evidence so that Tropp can go to prison.

But even here it’s sort of goofy…Tropp and the others welcome the big blond American as a fellow Nazi, sort of; first Tropp shows off his gas chamber, insists Curt step inside, and then locks him in there. Curt’s sure he’s dead meat when vapors begin to come out of the vents. But it’s just a “joke,” insists Tropp, and thus begins a goofy and unbelievable sequence where Tropp makes pseudo-threats upon Curt, laughing them off as jokes, and Curt makes pseudo-threats in return. It’s all sort of dumb…like after the gas chamber incident Curt “almost” punches one of Tropp’s stooges in the chest, faking out a “heart punch” that would’ve killed the guy. But as I say, Curt Jaeger spends much of this first novel sort of figuring out the type of action hero he wants to be.

Curt bides his time here for a few days, initially plotting to kill everyone but later planning to steal those documents. Tropp meanwhile wants to send Curt off to the Middle East to assassinate a couple people as his first test for Brotherhood membership. So Curt has Willy, the resident gunsmith, devise a custom weapon for him, with the stated intention of using it on this Middle East job but really so Curt can have a trademark weapon. He’s decided to become a hunter of Nazi scum, and he wants a gun that will serve as his bloody calling card. Here Mandell indulges in the firearms detail that would be mandatory in the Gold Eagle books he’d soon be writing:

The gun was based on the XP-100 design of Remington Arms; a single-shot, bolt-action pistol chambered for super high-velocity rifle ammunition. The Remington pistol was created around the .221 Fireball cartridge. Curt’s modification used the full-length .308 Winchester or 7.62 x 51 mm NATO military round, which gave the Fireball’s screaming muzzle velocity to a bullet three times as heavy. 

The unusual, T-shaped stock of the weapon was resting on Willy’s workbench. Beside it was the standard Remington .308-caliber bolt action that the gunsmith had adapted for single-shot capability. What made the gun look so weird was the overhang of the bolt action behind the pistol grip. It ended a good five inches back from the butt of the barrel, which was in line with the trigger. 

It was an extremely specialized weapon, as illegal in the United States as a fully automatic machine gun. Essentially, it was a cut-down deer rifle. When equipped with a telescopic sight, it was capable of pinpoint accuracy at distances well beyond three hundred yards. It could also be concealed very easily, as the overall length was only about fifteen inches. It was a gun designed with man-killing in mind, an assassin’s weapon. 

This is the sort of thing that should’ve been depicted on the cover. Anyway, Curt enjoys the irony that the Nazis will be creating for him the weapon he will use to destroy them, one by one. And as stated the gun’s single-shot; Curt sees this as another way to create an image for himself – a guy so badass he only needs one shot to take out Nazi bastards. To me it sounds more like a headache waiting to happen. As it is, Curt only uses the gun twice in the book, the first in another goofy bit where he acts out an execution with Willy. That’s right…Willy enjoys pretending to be the people he executed with a Mauser, in the war years, groveling on his knees and wringing his hands, all in good fun. The novel trades, somewhat clumsily, between serious material and comedic material like this.

Geller and his Nazi hunters do all the heavy lifting when it comes to the action, like an overlong and arbitrary part where they hit Tropp’s forces and Geller learns he has a traitor in his midst. He’s sure it’s Curt, and I wonder if Wolf Geller turns out to be a recurring character in the series, because this novel ends with he and Curt realizing they are on the same side. As for Curt, he doesn’t go into “Nazi Hunter” mode until the very end. First he wires Tropp’s castle to blow and then he makes off with the old Nazi as his hostage. He blasts away a bunch of goons with a submachine gun, but it’s mostly a one-sided fight because he hids behind a whimpering Tropp the whole time.

The finale sees Curt employing that “cut-down deer rifle” which will be his trademark weapon, assassinating someone from afar outside of a court building. It makes for a nice ending, but Mandell seems to have run out of pages, as the reveal of who betrayed Geller comes off pretty hastily. The novel sees Curt Jaeger prepared to take the war to the Brotherhood, having quit the army to become a fulltime Nazi Hunter. Overall Nazi Hunter #1 was okay, but I don’t have any of the other volumes and I wasn’t sufficiently blown away by this one to track down any more.

The Mark Of Cosa Nostra (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #64)

The Mark Of Cosa Nostra, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1971  Award Books

The last Nick Carter: Killmaster courtesy George Snyder,* The Mark Of Cosa Nostra mines the same territory as later installment Beirut Incident: Nick “Killmaster” Carter, who narrates the novel, takes a break from tangling with the usual foreign agents to take on the American Mafia. However this time he does it mostly in Sicily.

Nick when we meet him is already getting in character in a remote AXE training facility in the Arizona desert. This volume’s unusual in that Nick spends the entirety in his disguise, which has him sporting a thick moustache. He’s posing as a high-level Mafioso named Tommy Acasano but doesn’t know why, nor what the assignment will be. At novel’s opening Nick has been here for a week or so, and as he’s walking from his room one morning he’s approached by a sexy young blonde who appears to be very young. She is – we’ll learn she’s only 19, and she’s a junior AXE agent, here for training.

This girl, Tanya, comes on strong to Nick, and without much trouble talks him back into his room for some hot lovin’. As ever Snyder doesn’t much exploit his female characters, but it must be mentioned that Tanya comes off a lot better than his other female protagonists – and Nick himself doesn’t even show the macho misogyny of Snyder’s other lead protagonist Bill Cartwright, in Operation Hang Ten. But this scene proves to be the first in a series of pretty-funny jokes; Nick starts taking off Tanya’s clothes and sees something metal and cylindrical poking from beneath the waistband of her panties. This turns out to be a “panty gun” which Tanya is testing for AXE; when Nick pulls the panties off the gun barrel snaps forward, the barrel right in Nick’s face, and if it had been loaded he’d be dead.

After this the girl makes a nonchalant phone call to someone to say the test was successful, and that’s that! She has no true interest in sleeping with Nick. To his credit our hero doesn’t come off as brutish as one might expect. In fact he admits that this incredibly young junior agent did get the drop on him. The panty gun appears twice more in the text and in each instance it makes for a memorable moment. At this point Nick’s boss Hawk arrives and over breakfast explains to Nick what the mission is.

Like the later Beirut Incident this is one of the few Killmaster yarns where Nick takes on organized American crime: AXE wants to put to stop the potential Mafia takeover being orchestrated by Nicoli Rizano. Having left America a decade ago, Rizano now rules a fiefdom from Sicily and has made a score selling heroin at dirt-cheap prices to US soldiers in Vietnam. He’s recently had a rival godfather killed off in America and is plotting to return to his homeland as the new main godfather of the United States mafia.

Nick is to pose as Acasano, Rizano’s only friend, who was ordered to compile a list of Mafioso who would support Rizano upon his return to America as the reigning capo. However Hawk relates that Acasano is really dead, killed by an AXE agent. Cagey Snyder figures out a way to slip in a few pages of third-person narration as we read of this undercover agent being outed by Acasano and the two killing each other in New York. Hawk is certain Rizano is unaware his friend is dead, so Nick is to go in disguise to Sicily and turn over a fake list of names to gain Rizano’s confidence and bust up the heroin operation.

This bound-for-failure plan is explained away with the goofy note that the two friends haven’t seen each other in ten years, so it’s hoped that Nick’s disguise will be good enough that Rizano will just think it’s the passing of a decade that’s made his old friend look a little different. No explanation is given on how Nick’s voice would doubtlessly sound different. This is why Tanya is here at the training base; Acasano had just acquired a new woman, a 19 year-old beauty Acasano took everywhere with him.

Tanya is a dead ringer for her (the real girlfriend is being kept in a resort by AXE agents), so she’s to go with Nick to Palermo and help him out. Off they go to Manhattan to wait in Acasano’s apartment for a coded message that should be arriving from Sicily. Snyder finally works in an action scene with the two ambushed by a pair of “Orientals” who lurk in the darkened apartment. Since they have heard Tanya call our hero “Nick” they know it’s not really Acasano, and so must die. Here Tanya proves her skills aren’t just in getting guys into the sack; she actually comes to Nick’s rescue a few times.

More importantly, Nick and Tanya finally get down to the dirty business of screwing. Tanya will prove to be Nick’s only conquest in the novel, a total breach of the series template where “Killmaster” scores with at least three babes per book. However this part does contain the most surreal description of an orgasm I’ve ever read:

There was no way I could hold back. I was a balloon filled with water and rolling across a long flat desert. A large spike was ahead sticking out of a weatherbeaten board. I felt myself pulling and clutching and bouncing until at last I struck the spike, and all the liquid water rushed out of me.

Snyder doesn’t much bring Palermo to life, but then this isn’t really the genre for such things. Instead he has Nick and Tanya locked up in Rizano’s fortress in the countryside, where he’s lived like a mafioso Howard Hughes for the past ten years. Rizano’s in deep with the Chinese Reds, in particular a crafty one named Tai Sheng. Nick as Acasano butts heads with Tai Sheng immediately upon meeting him at the airport. It’s clear Tai Sheng is using Rizano, with the ultimate goal of the Reds taking over the American Mafia. Snyder tries to convey more import to the tale – and also explain why Nick doesn’t just kill everyone – with the idea that Nick plans to steal a list of undercover Red agents from Tai Sheng.

It’s more on a suspense tip as Nick sits around in an opulent room, the “guest” of still-unseen Rizano. Tanya was taken away from him as soon as they entered the fortress. Later Rizano, who turns out to be going to seed and completely controlled by Tai Sheng, happily relates that “Tommy’s girl” was really a duplicate…the belabored story has it that the real girlfriend was spotted by Oriental waiters at a resort(!), and it was instantly surmised that this girl who has been going around with “Tommy” is a secret agent…indeed, an AXE agent! How they even know about top-secret AXE isn’t really explained.

Thus Nick watches on a monitor as Tanya is tied to a chair and beaten around by Tai Sheng – who by the way is also trying to convince Rizano that Nick himself is an imposter. The reader wants “Killmaster” to spring to action, but instead Nick bides his time, hoping for the chance to get that list of agents from Tai Sheng. Snyder wrote this thing in such a hurry that at one point he even has Nick trying to protect his list from Tai Sheng – before Nick “remembers” that it’s a fake list he brought here just to get in the graces of Rizano.

Tai Sheng claims to know someone in Turkey who can attest that Nick is an imposter, and further they’re headed over there for a heroin run, so why not bring along the bound and beaten Tanya as well? What the hell. Snyder all along is building a suspense story, as usual for him something more along the lines of a vintage Gold Medal yarn. The only problem is, he’s up against his word count. So, as hard as it is to believe, the climax of The Mark Of Cosa Nostra plays out on an airport landing strip in Turkey…and features one of the most lame copout finales of any book I’ve ever read.

Here be spoilers so be warned. Okay, Tanya’s already been outed as AXE, and is taken away by a flunky to be raped and killed on one of Rizano’s yachts on the bay near the airport. Soon thereafter, Nick’s cover is blown as well – and he’s blown it himself, slipping up when Rizano asks him a sneaky question, something the real Acasano should know. Okay, so here’s the dumb stuff. Rizano takes out a revolver and shoots Nick, point friggin’ blank. He just shoots him! And Nick falls down behind a car…and doesn’t die!! I mean, I can’t understand any writer who would come up with this sort of a lame bullshit copout finale… “I’ll have my hero get shot, but it’ll just be in the side, and he’ll walk it off…!”

I mean there’s no hidden bulletproof vest, no last-second plan to protect Nick’s cover identity. Nothing! Nick just gets shot! Basically point blank by a guy standing a few feet away! No last second dodging behind a car, or kicking at the gun! Nothing! Hell, even getting shot isn’t part of a plan – Nick’s completely caught unawares by the bullet! Him not getting killed is just a total fluke. I mean it’s just some of the laziest writing I’ve ever encountered…folks, you don’t have your protagonist get shot point blank and just happen to live through the good grace of god or poor villain marksmanship. 

But Nick lays there in a growing pool of blood as Acasano and Tai Sheng have their own final moments together. Then Nick, in a stupor, manages to drive a stolen bus down to the harbor, coming to Tanya’s defense. However the girl, we’ll recall, isn’t the typical defenseless maiden of Snyder’s other books, and has things well in hand. Instead it’s she who comes to Nick’s aid, bandaging him up, and later literally jumps to his rescue when Tai Sheng shows up toting a pistol. This leads to a practically endless fistfight between Nick and Tai Sheng, with Nick’s stiletto also employed, and man it just seems to go on forever.

I’d say the copout stuff is indication Snyder was fatigued on this series, not to mention his contempraneous work on Operation Hang Ten. I see now from a post by Paul Bishop that Snyder died last year, which is unfortunate. I also came across this nice interview with him, from I guess a few years ago. It features such memorable lines as, “I’m a junkyard writer who writes junkyard books,” but also some depressing lines like, “My kids had a new dad they liked better than me.” Judging from the interview Snyder became very prolific in the early 2000s, self-publishing a string of series books. Many of them seem right in-line with Hard Case Crime’s output, so it’s hard to understand why he couldn’t find a publisher, as he admits in the interview.

In fact the entire interview depressed the hell out of me…I mean the guy was a gifted writer, particularly in the hardboiled pulp manner, and sure he hit the occasional wrong note like the above Nick shooting, but let’s keep in mind he was likely overworked and hitting a deadline. But still, to write so long and remain unrecognized is just depressing as hell, and makes one wonder if getting into the writing game is even worth it. But as Snyder also states in the interview, the writing itself was enjoyable, so there’s that.

*Snyder’s name is also attached to the 1974 entry Vatican Vendetta, but as noted in my review that volume was a Ralph Hayes revision of a Snyder manuscript. My assumption is Snyder wrote his manuscript sometime in the late ‘60s and it sat around for a few years until Hayes did some work on it for “producer” Lyle Kenyon Engel.

The Last Ranger #7: The Vile Village

The Last Ranger #7: The Vile Village, by Craig Sargent
April, 1988  Popular Library

The seventh volume of The Last Ranger as ever follows immediately after the previous volume; Martin Stone is just where we left him, caught in the middle of an acid rain thunderstorm. He crashes his Harley and he and his pit bull Excaliber are hammered by the rain into unconsciousness.

A near-dead Stone and Excaliber are found by a pair of redneck boys the next morning and hauled to a big farm owned by a bearish dude named “Undertaker” Hansen, who runs a profitable coffin-making business in this post-nuke world. I went overboard last time on my theories of how Jan Stacy (aka “Craig Sargent”) might’ve been aware of his impending death from AIDS and worked things out via his dark, ghoulish narrative. I won’t belabor the point this time other than that a good portion of the first quarter of The Vile Village is all about the funeral business. But this time the grim vibe is at least tempered with the goofy dark humor Stacy does so well:

Undertaking equipment stood everywhere, embalming fluids in ten-gallon glass bottles lined a whole wall, planking from local trees rough-hewn with bark and splinters erupting from them like a rash were piled up along one wall. Bandages, saws, needles, paint, everything that one might need to make corpses look friendly and happy for their bereaved families. Giving them the opportunity to say, “Doesn’t Tom look nice,” or, “How peaceful Fred went out,” when in fact Tom and Fred and Jervis and the whole bunch of them had gone out screaming and howling, had had to have their guts and noses and tongues sewn back on, or their blue skin painted with rouge and blush to make them look like they had just been out chopping wood in the yard when in fact they were already starting to rot, to stink up the place.

One thing gradually becomes clear, though. Stacy was struggling with the series at this point. Or at least with this installment. For one, he breaks away from the format of the preceding six volumes and has Stone engaged in an arbitrary storyline that has nothing to do with the grander scheme of Stone trying to find his perennially-kidnapped sister April. The back cover promises a Yojimbo riff of Stone putting two rival gangs against one another, but this doesn’t actually occur until the final several pages. In fact The Vile Village is a bit of a chore to get through and I suspect Stacy struggled with it.

Undertaker Hansen is one of those comically larger-than-life characters Stacy excels in, the sort of character you often see in the Doomsday Warrior series. He has a countless number of children – he can’t even remember their names – and rules them with an iron fist. Or actually a hickory cane, as he’s fond of whacking them when they get out of line. But he allows them their freedom, as Stone finds out during some hot and heavy sexual shenanigans with hotstuff blonde daughter Luann, in one of Stacy’s patented goofy-hardcore sequences:

If Stone thought he had made love with wild women before, they had been like Doris Day compared to the creature atop him. For she went wild. Her entire body jerked and bucked and twisted around him. Gritting her teeth hard, almost as if she were in pain, the woman ground around on Stone as if she were trying to grind his pelvis into flour. And Stone contributed his part too. As tired as he was. As much as his muscles just didn’t want to move – the instinct of desire was just too powerful to resist. After all, men with mortal wounds had been known to grab and “have knowledge of” field nurses in wartime. The most powerful instinct of all. To merge, to become one with the other in paroxysms of animal joy.

From Doris Day to philosophy, Stacy covers all the bases. Luann is Stone’s nurse over the course of a week, bringing him and Excalibur back to life thanks to some paste-like poultice she rubs on his acid rain-burned skin. But after this the egregious page-filling rears its head. We learn posthaste that two gangs rule nearby Cotopaxi, Colorado, the “Vile Village” of the title (Stacy must not’ve liked the place, that’s for sure): a biker gang and a redneck gang – this info relayed in a memorable bit where a Hispanic farmer comes into the Hansen clan dining room and displays the gory severed head of one of his kin, murdered by the gangs.

But after this insanity Stone spends pages learning the undertaker business from Hansen. This does include another humorous bit where we’re informed that the Undertaker’s funeral speeches are a combo of Billy Graham and a used car salesman. But it just kind of goes on, and also Stone’s impetus for even going into Cotopaxi is hard to buy. He recalls how he was referred to as a deliverer of death by the Indians “months ago” in the first volume, so he figures he’ll go into the vile village and kill some gang scum. There’s also the barely-explored motive that he’s pissed how the gang killed these farmers right in front of their wives and kids, and Stone wants revenge for them.

That’s all well and good, but the problem is he goes into town and just wastes time for the majority of the novel. Assuming the name Billy “Preacher Boy” Pinkus, Stone waltzes into the only bar in town that serves both the Head Stompers (the bikers) and the Strathers Brothers (the rednecks) and ends up blowing away a goon who works for the former gang – Stone’s first kill in the book, and his only one until near the very end. In fact The Vile Village is mostly bloodless, particularly when compared to the ultra-gory previous volumes.

But while the gore is minimized, the goofy humor is thankfully back – Stone takes a gander at herculean Head Stompers boss Bronson and reckons he “had hardly seen such muscles on anybody since he’d watched his Wrestlemania tapes on VHS back at the bunker.” Unfortunately the biker element is quickly dropped; Bronson and gang make threatening remarks to new guy “Billy” and take off, and Stone spends the majority of the novel ingratiating himself into the trust of the much-less-interesting Strathers Brothers.

The goofy vibe is what predominates. Stone makes pals with Vorstel Strathers, one of the three brothers who run the place, comparing war wounds. After this he’s given a job as a sidearm, Stone having presented himself as smarter than the redneck morons who serve the brothers, thus according more privilege. Vorstel puts him up in the local bordello, and get this, folks – even though he lives in a cathouse for the duration of the book, Stone doesn’t have sex with a single one of the women there! 

In fact the focus here again is on humor, particularly with hijinks concerning Excaliber, stuff which I think is getting to be a bit of a nuissance now. But it’s all “funny” as Excaliber keeps destroying the plush room every day when Stone leaves, and the old whore who runs the place complains about it, and Stone hands over a few silver coins for the troubles, and etc. That being said, there is some funny stuff here and there, like the unforgettable line that climaxes this paragraph:

Most of the early-morning staff hadn’t arrived yet, as it was only 6:48, so the place was nearly empty downstairs but for two old women who polished all the woodwork in the place, keeping it shining for the “gentlemen” customers. They looked at the savage-looking Stone and shuddered, looking away, wondering silently to themselves just how bad the place had gotten if it was taking in clients of such low repute. Perhaps they had better start looking for jobs elsewhere. The Hot Vagina might not be the kind of place they wanted to work anymore.

Things really don’t pick up until toward the very end, beginning with a wildly over-the-top July 4th celebration in which the bikers and rednecks have a truce to celebrate America in their own strange ways. But even here it comes off like page-filling, and for a lot of it Stone just stands around and monitors the proceedings. Finally things get real when he’s sent with a group of thugs to kill some of the local farmers who have been causing trouble for the gangs, and Stone ends up killing his own men to protect the farmers.

This proves to be the undoing of his cover, and thus Stone’s entire plan is blown – his goal is to set the gangs against each other, but it never happens. Instead he’s strung up and beaten and good as dead, but in a lame copout the Strathers Brothers decide to mess around with the just-abducted 8 year-old son of Bronson instead. Stone’s able to free himself and the boy in a hard-to-buy but still tense scene that has him employing the “push dagger” hidden in the heel of his boot.

Even worse, the finale still has Stone just standing around while the Head Stompers and the Strathers Brothers wipe each other out on the streets of Cotopaxi. That being said, Stone does blow up one of them with the missile launcher on his Harley, and Excaliber literally jumps to the rescue and takes on the Strathers Brothers’s pet lion.

But overall The Vile Village just comes off like an afterthought, as if Stacy was just churning something out quickly to meet a deadline. Which I’m assuming was the case, but still. At least the book ends with Stone deciding it’s time to get back on with his main mission and finding that damn sister of his.

Revenge At Indy (Don Miles #3)

Revenge At Indy, by Larry Kenyon
June, 1967  Avon Books

The third Don Miles takes place four years after the first volume, and we’re reminded of this often because ultimately the main villain of Revenge At Indy turns out to be a character from that earlier book. This also means that Challenge At Le Mans took place in 1963, as Lew “Larry Kenyon” Louderback makes it clear that this installment occurs in 1967.

At 176 pages of small and dense print, Revenge At Indy is as busily-plotted as the previous two books. This seems to have been a thing with Louderback, as evidenced by his Nick Carter: Killmaster novel Danger Key, which featured enough plots for ten books. This one isn’t as bad but it’s close. That being said, Louderback is a fine writer and delivers some big action setpieces, not to mention a cool pulp touch. 

In fact the opening is pulp heaven; we meet Don as he’s barreling across some land in Indiana in his Panther sportscar, being chased by a black helicopter. At his side is his secretary, Sierra Stover, a hotstuff blonde who was once a racecar driver herself; I think this is the first time we’ve actually seen her in the series. The helicopter shoots at them and Don crashes, and a bunch of submachine gun-toting women in form-fitting black leather catsuits get off the ‘copter. Indeed, “jut-breasted” women with swishing thighs and knee-high boots, plus eye masks. Leading them is a Fu Manchu type in a cape.

Then some dude yells “Cut!” and we see this is all a movie – Don’s doing stunt-driving work for a TV show pilot called Owlman based on “the old pulp series.” A “high camp for adults” sort of thing masterminded by a fellow vet named Tom Jerrold, who is producing. Jerrold, we learn in complex backstory, was a POW in Korea in ’50 with Buck Garrett, Don’s Texas-drawling mechanic and himself a top-secret agent of SPEED, though in more of an advisory capacity than Don’s field duties. And for any who don’t get the Batman spoofery, we’re informed that in the show Don’s Panther will be referred to as the “Owlmobile.”

Playing the female Owlman lead is Chan Pelletier, a super-gorgeous and stacked Eurasian babe who has made her name modeling and is now starring in her first movie, mostly as a favor for her new husband Tom Jerrold. But it’s clear Chan can’t be contained by one man and is having an open affair with the lead actor. All this we learn in opening setup with the various characters congregating on the shooting location, among them the mysterious Hong, a professional magician who is playing the Fu Manchu-esque villain in the pilot.

Soon enough yet another new character is introduced: Kay Yen, one of the “black leather gang-girls,” all of whom are Asian women who are part of Hong’s magic show. Part of the belabored setup is that Owlman is being filmed here in Indianapolis because Hong’s a locally-famous magician and refused to go to Hollywood. But this is also tied in with the upcoming Indy 500, which of course Don is about to take part in.

Kay asks Don for a ride back to his hotel and he gives her one, and given the genre and Don’s studly manliness and all it’s clear they’re about to have some sex. Kay is worried and claims she’s in trouble, and further has come to Don for help, but she refuses to divulge any details until after she and Don have screwed. But when Don comes out of the shower and is ready for some lovin’, he finds a nude Chan waiting for him in his hotel bed and Kay is gone without a trace.

Don isn’t one to stand on ceremony, though, and gives Chan some brutal loving. There are only two sex scenes in this volume, but they each get more risque than the previous books. The Don-Chan conjugation goes on for a few pages and doesn’t leave anything to the imagination. Also Chan wears an expensive French perfume which stirs memories of Ulla, the hotbod evil spy from the first volume; there are frequent flashbacks to Ulla and that first volume throughout, so you certainly want to read Challenge At Le Mans before this one.

On his way out of the hotel Don sees a crowd of onlookers and sure enough there’s Kay’s corpse on the pavement; she’s clearly been tossed off the roof way above – and Don’s suite is on the top floor. This sets up an annoying, go-nowhere subplot where a local redneck cop sets his sights on Don and is determined to bring him down on murder charges, mostly out of jealousy because the cop himself is a never-was on the racing circuit. This entire subplot could’ve been taken out and the book would’ve benefitted from the loss.

Don soon learns that Kay was really an American Indian of the Namakan tribe who was briefly famous several years ago for leading an all-female “squaw squadron” in rebellion over fishing rights in Namakan territory, in Minnesota. Yet now here she was posing as an Asian actress in a magic act in Indianapolis. The Indian stuff ties in with Buck’s time as a POW, as one of his fellow soldiers was a Namakan Indian named Wayne Deerfleet who turned traitor and began working with the Reds, before coming home to the US.

Louderback piles the “Indian stuff” on pretty thick: when one of his crew gets sick, Buck basically hires some guy off the street named Gump Pine Tree who himself is a Namakan Indian, but Buck doesn’t see anything coincidental about that. Later in the book Don goes to the local university and checks out a thousand-page tome on the tribe, treating us to lots of page-filling “excerpts” from the book. But when Don sees it’s been written by a teacher at the college, he heads onto campus to grill the guy.

Only, in one of the more arbitrary “I need to write another sex scene” incidents I’ve ever encountered, the professor who wrote the book turns out to be a hotstuff blonde babe…who is more than ready to hop in bed with Don. It’s not as long as the material with Chan, and Louderback tries to incorporate more exposition about the tribe here. Ultimately all this stuff will play out, with the Namakan Indians being part of the latest plot against the United States, a plot which has something to do with Buck and Tom Jerrold’s POW time in Korea seventeen years before.

Louderback’s scheme gradually becomes clear, and he carries it off well – the opening fake-out Owlman stuff turns out to be the ultimate course of events. For it becomes more and more apparent that Hong really is evil, and he also retains a squad of Asian women…indeed, the very same women who portray the “black leather gang-girls” in Owlman! Halfway through the book I figured that’s the way it was going, and hoped I was right. Sure enough the final quarter of the novel sees Don in full-scale combat with Hong and his black leather-garbed female commandos – and Louderback is one of the few men’s adventure writers to actually have his hero killing female opponents.

The book as usual is a little overstuffed; part of the elaborate, overly-complex plot has it that there’s a guy in Hong’s circus called Mr. Memory, who can spout all kinds of trivia and answer high math questions in seconds. But otherwise he has the mental capacity of a child; Don eventually learns that Mr. Memory was in prison and was part of a test group that was taken to a top-secret experimental weapons factory in Texas called the Jefferson Proving Grounds. Don flies down there and goes on a tour of the facility, complete with a lecture on its setup, and again it’s material that should’ve been cut.

In fact the problem is the plot becomes hard to buy, which is sometimes the kiss of death in this genre. Like for example Chan chases after Don’s Panther on the freeway and another car shoots at her and Don comes to the rescue. She claims her husband, Tom Jerrold, is trying to kill her. Further she claims to be a secret agent, and says that Kay Yen was also an agent, and these people who were trying to kill Chan also know that Don himself is an agent. But she offers no more details. So Don hides her from Tom in his trailer at the speedway.

And through all this…Tom Jerrold continues to film the TV pilot, with Sierra Stover doubling for the missing Chan. And Tom keeps confronting Don over “stealing” his wife/lead actress…and it becomes more and more evident that Hong isn’t just a villain on-screen but off as well. Yet the wheels just slowly grind for a good poriton of the narrative as Don slowly puts things together, even though they should be apparent to him from the get-go.

But things perk up in the final quarter. There’s a fun action scene where a carnival barker shoots at Don while keeping up his spiel for the audience over the P.A. system. Also here we first see Hong’s female soldiers in action, complete with Don hitting one of them right in a delicate part of her anatomy. After this, again as if in complete disregard of plot logic, Louderback has Don getting in a helicopter with Tom Jerrold as he films the make-believe takeover of a small town.

And sure enough…fantasy is reality, and those gang girls in black catsuits and eye masks are toting real submachine guns, and the residents of little Indian Springs, Indiana are being taken hostage for real. Tom here reveals himself to be part of the plot (duh) and Don’s taken captive; he’s put on various manual labor duties with the other captured townspeople. The belabored plot is this: Jerrold and Hong plot to simulate a nuclear explosion, which will not only trigger a US-USSR war but will also entail the removal via train of various top secret weapons from the Jefferson Proving Grounds. This they happen to know thanks to the photographic memory of former prisoner and Jefferson test subject Mr. Memory.

Honestly you wonder why Louderback even put so much effort into this stuff – the series is about a racecar driver who doubles as a secret agent. The plot almost writes itself but Louderback insists on turning out intricate storylines that are a lot more complex than they need to be. Oh and by the way Don’s racecar driving is more of a nuissance than anything this time around; there’s actually more of it, with pages-long sequences every few chapters of him racing various heats. But it has no bearing other than to fill the “racing quota” Louderback doubtless was given by series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel. In fact the novel ends with Don about to start the Indy 500, so we don’t even see him actually race in it.

But the finale’s pretty cool, and makes all the busy plot-building mostly worth it. Don frees himself, arms some of the townspeople of Indian Springs, and kicks “black leather gang-girl” ass, then gets back his Panther and books it at a steady 150 mph for several hours, racing for Minnesota. Apparently not a single cop is on duty during this cross-country race, but whatever. Here everything gets even more pulpy, with Namakan Indians in full war paint taking Don captive upon his arrival in their territory.

Louderback does an admirable job of tying the disparate strings together. So the gang girls aren’t Asian after all…they’re really Namakan women, and Hong himself is a disguised imposter. The entire thing is really an American Indian plot, in conjunction with the Red Chinese. Pretty bonkers stuff, and it gets even more surreal…spoiler warning here friends so skip to the next paragraph if you don’t wanna know. But Chan herself is an imposter…she’s really Ulla, the evil spy babe from the first volume, after some cosmetic surgery to make her look Asian! She became part of this plot and, against orders, involved Don in it so she could exact her revenge (and get a little more sack-time with him, I guess). Anyway Ulla is sucked into some quicksand at novel’s end and seems gone for good now, but Don wonders.

Louderback always keeps the action moving, save for the aforementioned plot and exposition heavy stuff. He’s one of those men’s adventure authors who knew how to deliver the goods but at the same time seemed to doubt himself; you don’t need this much setup for a series about a racecar-driving secret agent. I guess readers in 1967 must’ve felt the same, as there was only one more volume to follow.  

Bodyguard #2: The Blonde Target

Bodyguard #2: The Blonde Target, by Richard Reinsmith
No month stated, 1980  Tower Books

The Bodyguard series started off at lowly Tower Books for two volumes before moving over to sister imprint Leisure, and Richard Reinsmith, a real person and not a house name, handled the entire series. This second volume is the first one I’ve read and the writing is better than I expected it would be, but be aware there’s some lurid material that might not sit well with sensitive readers of today – or probably did with readers in 1980.

The titular Bodyguard is Ray Martin, who, other than his gray hair, isn’t much described. This is because Ray narrates the books. I’m really not into first-person narration in men’s adventure novels, I think it always comes off more like hardboiled detective fiction than action fiction, and such is the case with The Blonde Target. But this seems to be Reinsmith’s intent, as the novel is more influenced by Spillane than Pendleton.

A unique thing about Bodyguard is that, at least judging from this installment, the action comes to the hero. Usually it’s the other way around – the men’s adventure hero tracks down some quarry and eliminates him. But Ray Martin is a bodyguard, operating out of the Maryland area, and the quarry comes to him…it seems he just locks down his latest client in one of his two safehouses and waits for the bad guys to take a shot at them.

Another unique thing is that Ray Martin is constantly – practically incessantly – referring to past cases. A good quarter of the narrative is comprised of references or even straight-up flashbacks concerning previous bodyguard jobs. This does lead to humorous revelations, like that Ray doesn’t actually pay anyone. His assistant Pop is a retired private eye who does the work for fun, and Ray’s secretary (unseen this volume) performs her duties in exchange for living in one of the houses for free. We also learn of Ray’s other cost-cutting measures.

The “blonde target” of the title is April Harris, an up-and-coming Farrah Fawcett-type actress on the cusp of fame who has been targeted by some unknown killer. In bizarre backstory we learn that April made her break thanks to a photo of her signing a bum’s autograph in an airport. Now whenever she goes to an airport she’s surrounded by bums looking for autographs, all of it a strange PR gimmick thanks to her agent, Tony. But most recently the bum April was autographing a photo for got his head blown off by a sniper, and Tony has insisted she get a bodyguard.

This is how Ray has come onto the case, and when the novel opens April has just moved into his safehouse deep in the Maryland woods; probably around where I grew up, now that I think of it. Reinsmith takes care of the expected sex scene posthaste – the first-page preview even spotlights this scene – with the two trading some dialog after Ray wakes April up in bed to get more info on the stange case.

Here Reinsmith displays his talent with dialog and character, at least when compared to the genre norm; Ray won’t be bought by anyone, and ends up literally burning five hundred bucks of April’s money – she wants some orange juice, he tells her where to get it (he’s her bodyguard, not her assistant, he says), and when she gives him $100 to go get the juice, he puts the bill in an ashtray and burns it. They go through this four more times.

The cash-burning does get April nice and randy, though, leading to the aforementioned boink. It happens completely off-page; Reinsmith isn’t even one to exploit the ample virtues of his female characters (though he has no qualms with having them raped, as detailed later). He is though pretty good with the dialog, with humorous exchanges between April and Ray. Reinsmith isn’t as good with the lame “mystery” behind the plot, as it’s clear from the get-go who is trying to kill April, given that only one person knows where she is.

There are a lot of red herrings, like Ray making a few calls to have a lecherous old movie producer checked out, or even dumber Ray checking to see if the killed airport bum was the true target of the sniper hit and not April. This even after Ray himself is attacked at an airport; agent Tony is having a screenwriter flown in to hand over his script (as explained in ridiculous backstory), and while on an escalator April is attacked by a dude with a switchblade. Ray ends up pushing him off and the dude falls down and breaks his neck.

Ray’s arm is slashed up and he recuperates in a very hardboiled manner; mixing up endless pitchers of some vodka cocktail. Meanwhile April successfully sex-blackmails him (man I wish I could get blackmailed that way) into letting her friend Jackie come stay with her. Jackie turns out to be a cute brunette but again Reinsmith doesn’t do much in the way of describing her. She expectedly comes on strong to Ray when Pop and April leave for the other safehouse, Ray staying behind to see if any strangers come by to scope out this house, thinking everyone’s left.

Again it’s mostly done via dialog, with Ray and Jackie monitoring a strange car from the cramped, sweltering attic space, and the conversation somehow turns to blowjobs. Here Jackie reveals she’s “one of those girls” who just love oral stuff, and gets to work posthaste. Later they end up in bed for another off-page go around. But Ray isn’t too smart because he just casually leaves the house, and he and Jackie are instantly knocked out and taken away by the occupants of that strange car.

Here comes the stuff that will be off-putting for sensitive readers. Ray wakes up to find himself on a ship, bound to a chair, and across from him is a half-nude Jackie strapped to her own chair. She’s been raped repeatedly and while Ray lays there the four captors come in and have their way with her again and again. This is the only novel I know of where a female character keeps up a humorous running commentary while being raped; the “punchline” is that Jackie claims she has an orgasm with each rape. Later though she’ll reveal this was all an act for Ray’s part, so he’d think she was strong, and she suffers a sort of nervous breakdown, but still – the rape stuff goes on for a long time, with even Ray tossing in his own jokey dialog.

Here Ray realizes that the captors show absolutely no interest in where April Harris is; not once have they even asked him about her. Instead they just tell Ray they’re going to kill him, but claim they’ll let Jackie go, but this seems to be a clear lie. Their escape from this situation is hard to buy, but Jackie talks one of the rapists into untying her so they can use the bunk bed, and further asks for her purse so she can put on lipstick. Of course it turns out she has a little pistol hidden in there. Something neither Ray nor we readers were aware of.

Reinsmith isn’t one for exploitation of the violence, either. Jackie shoots two and Ray shoots two, but there’s no gore to speak of. The vibe is very much of a hardboiled tale from decades before, other than the sometimes-raunchy dialog and the rape stuff. Even the beatings Ray endures comes off like a hardboiled yarn; at one point he’s even run over by a car, but literally walks it off. Ray’s customary weaponry is a .38 and a Schmeisser submachine gun he carries around in a case. He doesn’t use the latter until the finale, which sees him taking out a group of would-be assassins in similarly-bloodless fashion.

Despite the title being The Blonde Target, Jackie is actually the lead female character of the book; April disappears for the majority of it, in the safe house with Pop. The biggest setpiece is actually Ray and Jackie’s imprisonment on the ship and Jackie’s rape. After freeing themselves Ray and Jackie get a motel room and here Reinsmith further brings the poor young girl to life, with her backstory, how she inadvertently became the owner of a charter boat, and etc, and all of this Ray’s gambit to keep her talking so she doesn’t have a complete breakdown, the reality of what happened to her finally coming home.

Also Jackie is adamant that April not find out she was raped, so Ray has to lie to April and Pop about their abduction. All that taken care of, he goes back to chasing a few red herrings, one of them an old boyfriend of April’s who turns up dead so clearly isn’t behind anything. At this point it should be more clear than ever who is behind the assassination attempts. And sure enough the finale features this character showing up to take April home, only for Ray to confront him on what’s really been happening. This leads to that assault on Ray’s house by a squad of armed men, but Ray takes them out in pretty quick fashion.

And that’s it for The Blonde Target. Overall what I liked was the snappy dialog, and I also liked Ray’s close knit group of recurring characters. But the mystery itself was subpar, as was the action. I’ve only got two more volumes, from later in the series, and I doubt I’ll hunt down any more.

The Adjusters #3: Doomsday Vendetta

The Adjusters #3: Doomsday Vendetta, by Peter Winston
No month stated, 1968  Award Books

My assumption is this third Adjusters was written by whoever did the second volume, which I’m guessing was Jim Bowser, who, in addition to Paul Eiden and Jack Laflin, was one of the three writers on this short-lived series. I don’t think it was Eiden, who clearly did the first volume, given internal evidence. Eiden’s style doesn’t seem as apparent in Doomsday Vendetta, the “Adjusters” setup follows that of the previous book, and the female characters are only mildly exploited.

However the similarities to The ABC Affair are strong; “hero” Peter Winston is pretty much a sexist asshole, even more so than the genre norm, and one gets the impression the author watched the Connery Bond films, took notes, but forgot to temper his hero’s assholic, arrogant nature with any charm. I’m repeating myself because I wrote the same thing in my review of the previous volume. Well anyway the complaint holds true for this one. But if anything it’s more overboard. Winston, who has a “special kind of viritily” which makes him have to shave twice a day, is such a babe magnet that he merely has to look at a woman and she’s his. But like with the previous book, his frequent scores are off-page.

With no setup from previous books, we meet Peter (as he’s referred to for the most part) as he’s just arrived in Tangier – and promptly being propositioned by the sexy young babe who acts as the White Whittle rep here. Like last time there’s a huge underground network of “A” operatives for the company, which is known around the world as a construction and etc type of outfit, but also dabbles in a little “adjusting” for liberty and justice. So this girl, Pat, knows that Peter is a specialist from the company, but apparently has no idea he’s an undercover agent sort of dude. Anyway she’s too busy telling him she’s going to jump his bones as soon as possible.

Peter is here because Pat’s boss, the main White Whittle rep in Morocco and another of those undercover “A” agents, has been murdered. Our hero will stay here in Morocco for the duration of the novel; this is the first installment that doesn’t give us a scene at the company HQ in New York. While checking out the office Peter’s shot at by some unseen assailant, and ends up chasing him through the bazaar, toting his Magnum revolver. This will prove to be one of the few action scenes in the novel; like last time, much too much narrative is given over to Peter sitting around.

The action scene out of the way, the author gets to the sex posthaste; this volume I guess you could say gets a bit more raunchy than the last one, mostly courtesy goofball lines like, “They fused together and [Peter] gave her the caveman type of love she begged for.” As mentioned Peter’s a bit of a dick, so to speak, so he makes sure Pat understands this is a casual sex sort of thing and he’ll be free to screw any other woman he pleases, and also don’t expect him to stick around ‘cause he’s an important Adjuster and all. I mean this sort of thing should be understood, it just comes off as assholic when the dude bluntly tells it to the lady’s face.

And right on cue Peter comes upon another lady, Kristina, sexy blonde who is part of an all-female magic act. No exaggeration, Peter will spend the rest of the novel banging her. That’s pretty much the extent of what he does in the novel. Honestly it’s like a pseudo-sleaze paperback with Morocco travelogue replacing the actual hardcore material. The murdered Adjuster uttered a phrase to the attending doctor, his last words: “Newk she wrote.” Peter at length deduces the “she” is Kristina, blonde American beauty who had a thing going with the murdered Adjuster – or was it another girl in her magic act? Peter also deduces – quite ridiculously – that the dying Adjuster was struggling to say “new king,” which just came out as “newk,” likely referring to the new king of Morocco, who is pro-American and in danger from the native radicals for it.

If nothing else this allows the author to pad pages as Peter investigates this line of reasoning, even though it should be clear as friggin’ day that “newk” means “nuke.” Peter won’t figure it out until near the end of the book – which by the way is again deceptively slim. This is a very slow-going book. Gradually Peter will hit on the fact that Kristina and her magic group are up to something nefarious. And meanwhile Kristina’s throwing herself on him with abandon, which leads to more of that Peter Winston “charm” in action: Kristina rakes his back rather sharply before the expected sexual tomfoolery, for which Peter slaps her “hard” in the face, telling her, “Don’t you ever, ever do that again, you hot little bitch!” Of course, this only makes Kristina all the more eager for some of that good Adjuster lovin’.

And as mentioned this is pretty much the extent of Peter’s “work” for the majority of the novel…he dates Kristina, going around Morocco with her group, sleeping with her every night. Along the way he also finds the time to get cozy with Toni, the other hot blonde in the magic group; she’s initially frosty, but that rugged Peter Winston virility soon thaws her out for some more largely-undescribed sex. There’s also some lame mystery here that Toni might’ve been the “blonde” seen with the murdered Adjuster in his final days; she wears a wig during the shows, because Kristina demands she get the star treatment as the only blonde in the group. 

Action is even more sporadic than previously. There’s a part where Peter contacts another local Adjuster – like last time they’re all over the pace – and they pose as air conditioner repairmen or something and end up getting in a shootout and then briefly caught. Peter frees himself with a gadget watch that has a blade in it. We see some of the same gadgets Peter used last time, like the noise blaster thing that deafens opponents. His trip down south here only confirms that Kristina’s involved in some bad stuff – printing anti-American propaganda for the native radicals – but our boy continues to sit on his hands, biding his time.

Later on some dude attacks him and Peter tosses him off a cliff, killing him…and in one of those arbitrary pulp developments it turns out not to be a spy or anything, but Toni’s abusive husband! After showing Peter the proper appreciation, she begins spying on her magic group for him. It just sort of goes on and on. Peter even has the time to head back to Tangier and “reconnect” with Pat. That’s how leisurely-paced this installment is. Not until the homestretch does the author realize he’s writing an action yarn, and suddenly gives us the book this should’ve been all along. Peter deduces that the “newk she wrote” was actually “nuke ship Rota,” ie a nuclear submarine heading into the Morroccan port of Rota.

Now, way too briefly due to the dwindling pages, we have Peter scuba diving and setting bombs, then getting in a gunfight with Kristina’s group. Crazy shit here that’s barely explored due to all the page-padding that came before, like the revelation that one of the “women” is really a dude in drag! Per pulp standards, though, Peter himself doesn’t shoot any of the women, with them either hit by friendly fire or being inadvertently blown up in the explosives Peter set.

And that’s all she wrote for this third installment of The Adjusters, which was marginally better than the previous volume, but still not that great. Man, I know they can’t all be winners, but I’ve been reading some blasé books lately. Well, I still love them all, even the ones that suck – I’d still rather read Doomsday Vendetta than whatever crap Oprah’s peddling.

Beirut Incident (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #92)

Beirut Incident, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1974  Award Books

Forrest V. Perrin, a veteran pulp writer, turned in his sole contribution to Nick Carter: Killmaster with this volume. With a plot about Mafia killers and a back cover slugline announcing “MASSACRE,” it appears that Award Books was looking to ride on the coattails of The Executioner and other mob-busting vigilantes.

However, Perrin writes the novel more along the lines of a hardboiled ‘50s private eye yarn; tellingly, Nick (who narrates the story) at one point reads a novel by Richard Gallagher. Both the sex and the violence are toned down, and the story seems to occur twenty years before it’s set – late in the novel Nick handles one mobster by locking him and a nude girl in a hotel room and calling up a newspaper reporter to exploit the scandalous situation! And yes, Beirut Incident is indeed about the Mafia – one of the few instances in which Nick tangles with the Cosa Nostra – but the title actually does work into the story and isn’t just an example of Award slapping any random title on a manuscript, which per Will Murray’s research they were wont to do.

Beirut, Nick learns from his boss Hawk, is being used by the mob to smuggle in Sicilian killers. Per Hawk, the old dons of the American Mafia are pissed that the organization has been taken over by new blood, young punks who act more like lawyers or businessmen. They want a return to the old ways – the violent ways, where things were resolved by force and not paperwork. To this end they’ve begun importing goons from the Old World, natural born killer types who will help these old mobsters show the new, wussified mobsters how it’s done. Through some laborious reasoning, Beirut is the locale they’re using to secretly bring the Sicilians into the States. Actually now that I think of it maybe “Beirut Incident” was a title Award came up with and Perrin had to figure out a way to work it into a story about Sicilian mobsters.

Nick, who when we meet him happens to be in Lebanon, chasing down a terrorist in the desert, is brought onto the job by Hawk. His mission is to smash the Sicilian-smuggling ring and also to kill the members of the Council, ie the group of old dons who run the American Mafia. Nick has been especially requested for this job by no less than the President. Nick heads to Nicosia, the “sewer of the Mediterranean,” and bullies an old acquaintance into creating a new identity for him. This guy seems to be working for someone else, but Nick’s a bit clueless this time around and disregards the obvious warning signs – one of the many pitfalls of writing these sorts of books in first-person.

Now posing as “Nick Cartano,” a Sicilian-American, Nick heads for Beirut, the “cesspool of the Mideast” (one can almost detect a pattern here; I kept waiting for Nick’s next stop to be “the shithole of Arabia”). He slums around, hoping to bump into a lead. This happens when he randomly saves some guy from being hit by a car, and the guy turns out to be the nephew of the top-ranking don in New York. This is Louie, an affable sort who, we’ll gradually learn, isn’t involved with the mob’s dirty half and solely works in its legit operations. Regardless Louie is of course here as part of the Sicilian-smuggling ring and as expected Nick’s hit the jackpot without much effort. After hitting a few bars with Louie they’re BFFs, and when Nick drops a few hints that he’s a tough s.o.b. on the run from the law due to some stuff in Sicily, Louie takes the bait and offers him an exciting job in America.

Here the plot becomes even more bizarre because running the smuggling operation is a smokin’ hot and stacked Chinese lady named Su Lao Lin, who happens to be the top Red Chinese agent in the Middle East. Nick knows this because he saw her file recently and has a photographic memory; also because she’s one of the most beautiful women he’s ever seen. When Louie brings in the new guy there is of course some hot and heavy stuff going on in the air when Su Lin gets a gander at Nick. She practically pulls him into the next room and, after much groping, Nick props her up on a desk and does her. Perrin though isn’t too explicit – again, the vibe is of an older pulp novel – with the extent of it being stuff along the lines of, “At the first penetration she gasped aloud.”

Su Lao sends Nick off to get a fake passport, and sure enough it turns out to be courtesy the same dude who did the “Nick Cartano” passport for him. In other words, this is the “other job” Nick suspected the guy of secretly having; he’s the man behind the passports for Su Lao Lin’s Sicilian mobster pipeline. Oh and why the top Chinese spy of the Middle East is helping the Mafia is something left unanswered; Nick wonders about it a bit and moves on to other things, Perrin keeping the ball rolling to prevent any questions. The problem is, this guy not only knows Nick’s an imposter, he also knows he’s an AXE agent, so we get a bit of nicely-done suspense as Nick tries to figure out how to handle him.

And our hero’s a bit heartless, even though he makes a few passing mentions on how he feels bad about it. He also knows Su Lao needs to be silenced. So after yet another somewhat-descriptive boink, Nick plants some plastique under the woman’s bed and catches a redeye flight to New York. He doesn’t even find out the bomb’s gone off until later in the book, getting confirmation that Su Lao is dead. This was one of the lamer handlings of a villain I’ve ever encountered in the genre, and Perrin should be ashamed of himself.

At this point Beirut Incident becomes more of a Mafia yarn and less of an international espionage thing. However it’s clear that Perrin is breaking the back of his story to make it fit in the men’s adventure genre; Nick, new on the scene as a Sicilian mercenary, instantly sets the two major Mafia factions against one another, and it would be clear as day that the new guy is responsible – I mean, reports of course come in from Beirut that both Su Lao Lin and the passport-forging guy are dead, and Nick was the last person seen with both of them! And whereas the two families here in New York have had a friendly rivalry that hadn’t resorted into violence, now corpses from each family are showing up, with clear – ie planted – evidence that the other family was behind it.

Louie’s uncle is Nick’s new boss – Don Joseph “Popeye” Franzini, a Mafia Council bigwig. He’s a wheelchair-bound curmudgeon who keeps Louie and his smokin’ hot niece Philomina out of the family’s illegal activities. There’s more burnin’-yearnin’ in the air as soon as Nick and Philomina see each other, but the latter plays it cool because as far as she’s concerned “Nick Cartano” is just more riffraff her uncle uses in his criminal pursuits. Nick of course is determined to correct this notion. The rest of the novel plays out in New York and I’m guessing Perrin lived there or at least had a thorough guidebook, because like a vintage Len Levinson yarn we get all kinds of ‘70s Manhattan details, down to street locales.

Action is infrequent and usually features Nick pulling some stunts on the mobsters, making it look like the work of the Ruggiero family, ie the traditional enemies of the Franzinis. Along the way he finds the time to get “familiar” with Philomina in somewhat-explicit detail; turns out she’s an undercover FBI agent and has taken this duty to bring down her uncle, who killed off Philomina’s father when she was a little girl. Nick tells her he’s a secret agent and all that jazz, and soon enough she’s feeding him info. However Philomina doesn’t play as much into the action as she would in a similar story of the modern era; there’s no part where she totes guns and helps Nick take out mobster scum, as would be mandatory if this novel were written today.

Perrin’s writing has that typical “veteran pulpster” flair, where he keeps things moving even if not much is actually happening, but like so many of those writers he basically drops the ball in the finale. After cooling his heels the entire book, he rushes through the climax, literally killing off the majority of the villains off-page thanks to a bomb Nick’s planted. Even before this we’re merely told of all the violent action Nick’s caused, with various mobsters getting in shootouts off-page. The last pages feature “so-and-so was killed” sort of expository dialog and most of the time we have no clue who the hell just got offed. As usual with this sort of thing you wish the author had spent a little more time on this action stuff instead of rushing through it.

As mentioned this was Perrin’s only Killmaster. He published a lot of books, some under pseudonyms and some under his own name – one of these was The Don a Godfather cash-in from 1971. I tried reading it a few years back but found it a little too dry for my tastes. One of these days I might give it another try.

The Outrider #1

The Outrider #1, by Richard Harding
June, 1984  Pinnacle Books

What were they thinking [for the cover], having Andrew-Dice-Down’s-Syndrome as the hero? 

 -- Zwolf

Over the years a few people have emailed me about the Outrider series, which was Pinnacle’s attempt to jump on the post-nuke pulp bandwagon. It ran for five volumes, with an unplublished sixth volume. According to an Amazon reviewer who hunted down and contacted Robert Tine, the author who served as “Richard Harding” for the entire series, Tine still has this unpublished manuscript but has no plans to ever release it. Anyway I figured it was time I got around to reading the series.

I remember seeing these books in school back in the ‘80s when I was on my original men’s adventure kick, but I don’t think I could ever find the first volume, so I never started reading the series. Somehow I was under the impression Outrider took place in the immediate aftermath of nuclear war, but it’s at least a hundred years out, so pretty much it’s along the same lines as Doomsday Warrior. Even the writing is similar; Tine goes for what’s almost a juvenile fiction tone, save for the egregious usage of the word “fuck,” which peppers the narrative more times than the average David Mamet script. He also POV-hops like a mother, with the narrative jumping willy-nilly from one character’s perspective to another with absolutely no warning for the reader. This still bugs the hell out of me but these days I’ve tried to consider this lazy writing as “psychedelic.”

Our hero is Bonner (I spent practically the entire book misreading it as “Boner”), a legendary badass in this Road Warrior retread of a post-nuke future. Gradually we learn that years before he was the first “Outrider:” a sort of post-nuke Knights of the Round Table who ventured around the blasted remains of the United States. Actually maybe they were more like leather-clad variations of Lewis and Clark, as they were also mapping out the nuked ruins of the country. But all that fell apart when Leather, formerly Bonner’s friend, went bad and took over “the Slavestates,” running his fiefdom from “the Cap,” aka Washington, DC.

Now Bonner makes his home in Chicago, humorously presented as a safe haven in this future society; it’s basically like an Old West town, in which the gun is still the law but everyone tries to get along and live free of the various tyrants who control the country. Tine doesn’t tell us too much about his setting, likely intending to gradually world-build as the series progresses. We don’t even learn when the nuclear war occurred; in fact, no one knows anything about the society that came before, save for Bonner, who has learned stuff from books. I thought this concept came off a bit awkwardly. At least Doomsday Warrior has the premise that Century City was founded by survivors of the nukes, thus explaining how society is still remembered a hundred years later, or at least looked to as a golden age of sorts.

When we meet him Bonner’s in bed with some woman whose name isn’t mentioned – not that Tine delivers any sex at all in the novel (again, it’s very juvenile in tone) – when some dude comes in and tries to kill him. Bonner is known for using knives and the occasional shotgun, and as mentioned there’s a legend about him, how badass he is and etc. Initially he comes off like any other character in the book, but only eventually do we learn he goes into a sort of kill-lust when engaged in combat, like the living embodiment of death or something. This first action scene doesn’t give any indication of that, though, and mostly serves to set up the sole plot of the book: this would-be assassin reveals that Leather has captured Dara, Boner’s old flame, and has put a bounty on Bonner’s head.

With no explanation-via-narrative of what he’s planning to do, Bonner gets his car gassed up (as Zwolf accurately described it, “basically pipework welded around an engine”) and heads out of town. His destination – much to the consternation of his friends – is the Cap, where he’s going to settle the score with Leather. There’s a goofy part where outside the city Bonner bumps into another former associate – a recurring bit seems to be he knows everyone out on the road, but then the implication is that not too many people have cars, thus it’s a small group of people to even know – and this one too decides to try for the bounty on Bonner’s head. It of course turns out to be a bad idea, however Tine is not a men’s adventure author to dwell on the gory details.

Another guy Bonner runs into turns out to be one of his companions for the trip: Starling, whose schtick seems to be that he’s good with rifles or something. He decides to go along with Bonner basically for the hell of it. A more dynamic personality is introduced in Cooker, a “gashound” the two free in an extended action sequence against the Stomers, Leather’s, uh, leather-garbed goon squad. Foregoing guns, Cooker employs a flame thrower on his massive vehicle, which is basically a rolling gas tank. He’s one of the new breed of men who only think of gas – the comparison is made to the gold rushers of the past – and also foregoes such basic necessities as washing and taking care of himself and etc. The endless banter between him and Starling is one of the high points of the novel. 

Along the way we get a glimpse of Leather’s hellish domain, the Slavestates – this via a random character who is set up in another of those abrupt POV-hops and who makes his laborious way back to the Cap to tell Leather Bonner’s alive and coming for him. Leather as described sounds like he walked out of a ‘70s heavy metal group. He doesn’t do much to bring himself to life – there’s a blandness to all the characterizations, save for Cooker – and indeed his whole sudden idea to get Bonner isn’t much explained. But he’s the villain of the piece so it’s no biggie. We also don’t get too much irony out of his living in the White House, because like the rest of the characters, he has no understanding of the world that came before.

That’s another thing that bugged me. During their trip south Bonner, Starling, and Cooker comment on the ruins of the past and the latter two marvel over Bonner’s book-learned explanations of what such and such a thing was, or what strange customs the pre-nuke Americans had. I felt that the total lack of comprehension was a little hard to buy; the characters were more like aliens on a new world. But perhaps that was the intent. Some of it is pretty hurmorous, like their reaction to astroturf in a stadium. Per the post-nuke template, there’s also an element of horror, particularly when the trio encounter mutant rat-creatures in a New York subway. Just as freakish is Leather’s army of Radleps, apparently a contraction of “radiation lepers:” mutants who are mindlessly devoted to Leather and will fight to the death for him.

Throughout the quest the group gets in frequent firefights with the Stormers, and there’s a cool part midway through where they free another of Bonner’s old comrades from Alcatraz. Here the three ransack the Stormer weapons cache and come out with some unused Steyr automatic rifles. Even these Cooker refuses, torching people with his flamethrower instead. As for the old comrade they free, this is unintentionally humorous because it’s never properly explained why Bonner even needs him. Anyway it’s a guy named Harvey who dresses up in an old business suit because he considers it a sign of status – yet another thing that’s come down to these nuke descendants is that important people wore three-piece suits.

Harvey himself doesn’t bring much to the tale, but it’s through him that Bonner’s party also takes on the so-called “Mean Brothers,” a towering, troll-like pair of brutes who would be more at home in the pages of Doomsday Warrior. In fact it’s hard not to think of the character Archer when reading about them – they eschew weapons save for the odd axe or hammer, preferring to literally rip people apart with their hands. The last addition to Bonner’s party is a bona fide lesbian biker gang: the Sisters, who wear “old jungle fatigues and the bits of high fashion paraphernalia they had been able to loot from the old world,” including knee-high boots.

What makes Bonner’s careful assembling of his special team is the fact that he doesn’t even use them when he makes his final assault on Leather, in the Cap. As if in brazen disregard of the previous hundred-some pages he’s spent on introducing each new “team member,” conveying the idea that Bonner at least has some plan in mind and needs these particular people to make it happen, Tine just has Bonner make a sudden decision to handle things solo, and he marches right into Leather’s lair and confronts him, all by himself! But again, this just only furthers the juvenile tone of the series. He’s of course quickly captured and tied up.

Here another long-developed subplot is abruptly fizzled: Dara, who you’ll recall was the whole purpose behind Bonner’s quest to DC, is barely in the book for a few pages. She’s hauled out by Leather’s goons, already half-dead from beatings and rapings, and Leather announces that he’s going to rape her right in front of Leather. But after she kicks him in the balls, Leather orders his men to “cut her…beat her,” and several Stormers and Radleps set in on her, beating her to a pulp. The brazen disregard for plot structure sort of undermines the intended horror of the situation.

Worse yet, Tine seems to end the story well before his word count has been hit; Bonner’s friends come to the rescue in spectacular fashion, and Bonner and Leather confront one another. Bonner chops off Leather’s hands – per Zwolf, the villain will come up with goofy hand substitutes in future installments – but, like some ‘80s action cartoon, Leather escapes before Bonner can finish him off. This would seem to be the end of the story, but I can only imagine Tine got a phone call asking him to “elongate” (per Carsenio) the tale, thus the final quarter features this newly-introduced character, a badass tracker type named Beck, hunting Bonner and team through the Firelands.

Yet another of Bonner’s old companions, Beck is kept in captivity by Leather and is described as “a huge granite boulder of a man,” even taller and heavier than the Mean Brothers. In what can only be seen as absurd reasoning, Leather is certain that Beck will hunt down Bonner, despite the fact that they were once best buds, because Beck “goes to the highest bidder.” But then Leather’s suffering from a lack of hands so probably isn’t thinking straight. Anyway this whole final part is ridiculous because it’s clear as day what’s going to happen when Leather releases Beck from his dungeon and just swears he’ll give him a bunch of money and let him go free in exchange for hunting down and bringing back his best friend. So in other words the “suspense” is laughable.

As Zwolf also mentioned, the final half of the novel sort of descends into constant action; it also gets a bit gorier, with nice touches like severed Radlep heads being thrown around. But on the whole I’d put this series on the level of Endworld, only with as stated more of an R rating so far as the language goes. Otherwise it very clearly seems to have been written for 12 or 13 year-old boys, and it’s my suspicion that’s exactly what Tine set out to do. In that regard Outrider can be seen as a success. Personally I prefer a slightly more “mature” tone in my post-nuke pulp (say written for 14 or 15 year old boys!), so to me it’s got nothing on Traveler or the almighty Phoenix.

Kane’s War #3: Death Waves

Kane's War #3: Death Waves, by Nick Stone
July, 1987  Ivy/Ballantine Books

It’s been so long since I read the first volume of Kane’s War I had to go back and re-read my review. Good grief, I had to bail on it halfway through – I must’ve had a helluva lot more free time back then. Well anyway, I don’t have the second volume, but as John Lennon said, it’s “nothing to get hung about.” This doesn’t appear to be a series with multi-volume storylines; in fact, I’m not even certain the same author wrote this one. Even though it’s the same exorbitant page count as the last one (nearly 300 pages!), it’s got massive print, and also the “marinara mystery” vibe of the first volume isn’t as prevalent.

Also, hero Ben Kane fares slightly better. As we’ll recall, he spent the majority of that first volume getting knocked out and recuperating in the hospital, and even dropped his own gun in the climactic action scene. That being said, Kane still manages to get knocked out and captured in the very first action scene of this installment, but afterwards he handles himself much better. So who knows, maybe it is the same author, just with a lesser word count, so less of a need to pad pages; as it is, Death Waves sort of rolls along and is much pulpier than its predecessor, featuring mind-controlled soldiers and a Bond-esque super villain intent on world domination.

One thing I’m not sure about is if the second volume introduced Kane’s latest girlfriend, Karen, but I’m guessing not; even though she’s introduced to us cold, as if we’re to understand she’s Kane’s latest steady woman, later on it’s explained that she’s come down here to the Virgin Islands for a brief vacation before she starts work on Mica Island, a closed-off retreat owned by mega-wealthy Ted “Link” Mica. But when we meet Karen at the start of the book she’s about to become something else – the latest victim of white slavers who are operating here in the Caribbean and who have kidnapped several other lovely young ladies.

What itself could provide the main plot of the book instead becomes the obligatory “opening action scene,” as Kane tracks down the missing Karen to a desolate island and decides to go in alone, no weapons or anything. But it’s a return of the clumsly bufoon from the first volume, as he’s knocked out and captured posthaste. We don’t get too much info on these white slavers – they’re mostly just presented as modern pirates of Middle Eastern descent – because soon enough attack helicopters land and soldiers in black uniforms get out and decimate them. Our “hero” stands and watches as some newly-introduced group of characters come in and handle the job he was supposed to do himself. 

What Kane finds most odd about the situation is that the black-uniformed soldiers operate almost like robots; there is no emotion, no reaction to getting shot, even. Even odder is the dude commanding them – Ted Mica himself. This, he casually explains to the freed Kane, Karen, and other hotstuff babes, is his security force, which he declares the greatest combat outfit in the world. He invites Kane and Karen to dine with him on his opulent yacht that night.

One thing retained from the first volume is the somewhat-explicit sex; Kane and Karen head back for Kane’s junk, the Wu-Li, and get busy posthaste (“One finger found her dewy crevice and he felt the warm slippery passage tightening, aching for him,” and the like). Later in the book Kane also scores with Jessica, the British beauty who figured so heavily in the first volume; as for his other casual bedmate, Michelle, she stays off-page for the duration, off on some trip for her dad’s business or somesuch. If you’ll recall, she was the one captured in the first volume, with Kane desperate to save her; this time Karen gets the honors, as of course it turns out Mica Island is a hellhole of brainwashed employees and, to quote the Eagles, “You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.” 

The schtick is that Mica Island is where the rich and powerful go to get cured of their various hang-ups; in just a short time it has become known for curing any addictions or other undesirable behaviors. Mica’s got a world-class psychiatrist at his disposal, but soon Karen, herself a behavioral specialist, detects something is up, as even this guy has no idea how Mica is curing people so quickly. But as mentioned this installment’s a bit pulpy; it’s clear from the get-go that Mica, that depraved genius, is beaming subconscious signals onto the island. I mean good grief, there’s a sign over all the beds demanding that people wear the provided headphones while sleeping. Mica and his people insist the headphones just play harmless white noise to aid sleep.

Meanwhile back in the real world Kane learns that all kinds of mysterious stuff has been going on at Mica’s place; none of the natives hired to work there have returned. Kane’s buddy Ganja (good grief how I wish I had a buddy named Ganja) tells him of one particular guy who took a job on the island to pay for his wedding, but suddenly sent his fiance a terse note stating that he was staying on for several more months. We readers have already seen this guy get the forced brainwashing treatment employees receive for not wearing those damn headphones at night. Ganja of course is back from the previous volume, as is the rest of Kane’s network of buddies and colleagues, including cipher-like Miles, another ‘Nam pal who I don’t think even appeared in that first volume.

At least this time we get to see Miles at work; he and Kane scuba dive onto Mica Island and scope it out, leading to the first of several action scenes. The action is very much in the blockbuster movie mold, not overly gory or even bloody, with Kane using his customary Magnum revolver again. This I felt was the action highlight of the book, with the two here to save Ganja, who has gone undercover as a new recruit in Mica’s security force. Oh and the sadistic security force leader is named “Major Frank,” folks. Surprisingly Ganja doesn’t get brainwashed, as he foregoes the headphones (as any sensible friggin’ person would do) and is instantly outed as a spy.

Curiously though the book sort of runs out of steam, no doubt due to the still-unwieldy word count. By this point not only is Karen brainwashed, but Kane’s learned that Mica intends to brainwash all the bigwigs of the world in his insane quest to ban nuclear weapons. In a belabored setup Jessica goes undercover on Mica’s yacht, with Chief Bukowski (another recurring character) posing as her security guard, and here they learn the brainwashing mechanism is stashed on the yacht itself. However, and folks I kid you not, Mica has a notebook with the workings of the mechanism, including a section headlined “how to reverse the brainwashing process,” and the finale turns out to be a race to get hold of this particular Maguffin. Worse yet, Mica disappears in the finale and another character tells Kane what has supposedly happened to him.

I do like the beach read vibe of the series, though it wasn’t as heavy this time around. In fact, very rarely did I get the impression this was taking place in the Caribbean. But I also like the large cast of characters; even Kane’s old CIA boss-enemy, Weaver, makes an appearance, and late in the novel we meet one of his operatives, a black guy named Brock, who seems primed to appear again. Anyway, this one, despite being an insane 280 pages, was a fairly quick read – and hopefully so was this review.