Operation Nuke (Cyborg #2)

Operation Nuke, by Martin Caidin

March, 1974  Warner Paperback Library

(Original hardcover edition 1973)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cyborg (The Six Million Dollar Man)

Cyborg, by Martin Caidin

March, 1974  Warner Paperback Library

(original hardcover edition 1972)

The beginning of the Six Million Dollar Man saga is a novel made up of many parts, as if Martin Caidin were running a theme around the bionic parts that make up his hero Steve Austin, the titular Cyborg of this novel. The first part of the 318-page book with its tiny print is like something out of Caidin’s Space Race novels, then the book becomes a Michael Crichton-esque sci-fi medical shocker…then it becomes a wild pulp yarn, then it becomes a Cold War thriller, and finally it settles in for an overlong “desert survival” climax that leaves the reader more exhausted than thrilled. 

The main thing, though, is how little Cyborg resembles the family-friendly Six Million Dollar Man. Only the original telefilm, which I reviewed ten years ago, comes closest to resembling this source novel, but having read the book I can see that a lot of it was changed, no doubt for budget reasons. Cyborg would have benefitted from a big screen treatment, but then if it had it might not have made as much of an impact on 1970s pop culture…there might not even have been a Steve Austin doll! And man, I still wish I had mine…the fake skin on his arm was so cool! Not to mention the red rubber Adidas sneakers that would always fall off and you’d have to search for them! 

Actually, I was wrong – Lee Majors’ portrayal of Steve Austin is the closest thing the series ever came to resembling Martin Caidin’s source material. Majors nails the character, which is to say he comes off like the distillation of every astronaut of the Space Race, from Mercury to Apollo: laconic to the point of being terse, so calm under pressure he could be comatose. And we are informed here that Steve Austin was indeed an Apollo astronaut, the youngest one in the program and the last to walk on the moon, in Apollo 17. 

As in his earlier The Cape, Caidin again unwittingly prefigures Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff in his detailing of Steve’s current job: test pilot for NASA. And yes, Caidin mainly refers to his character as “Steve,” unlike Michael Jahn, who called him “Austin” in the later Wine, Women, And War. Here Caidin gives us a lot of background detail on NASA and missions once the moon shots had been scrapped. 

I have to say that at this point I can safely state that I’m not a fan of Martin Caidin’s writing. He constantly tells instead of shows; his novels come off like lectures, given the wealth of detail and minutiae. Forward momentum is constantly stalled as Caidin eagerly dives into the weeds, usually with no consideration to what he’s doing to the narrative. It happens constantly throughout, and if this material had been gutted Cyborg would be a much smoother and more entertaining read, because as it was I really found it a chore. 

We all know the story, so I’ll skip all the details. Steve crashes out and is completely destroyed – both legs and his left arm are gone, as is his left eye, and a bunch of other stuff is wrecked. Enter OSO (which became OSI in the series), headed up by Oscar Goldman…much closer here to Darren McGavin’s portrayal in the original telefilm than the easy-going nice guy Richard Anderson would deliver in the ensuing series. Goldman is a figure of the shadow world, clearly duplicitous and not feeling the need to explain himself to others. 

Given his fame and his background – athletic and karate expertise, his service as a combat pilot in ‘Nam, etc – OSO wants to invest in Steve Austin…though, humorously enough given the famous name of the ensuing show, we are never told the exact amount they are willing to pay. Steve’s good buddy-slash doctor, Rudy Wells, helps talk Steve into the offer…and here, as in the telefilm, there’s a lot of grim stuff as Steve isn’t sure if he even wants to live. 

A little over a quarter of the way in, we get into the nitty-gritty of bionics, courtesy endless blocks of exposition. Interesting to note, the majority of the work is done by a character who did not exist in the series: Dr. Killian. Martin Caidin shows absolutely no understanding that he is writing a novel, with Killian and the other characters gabbing about bionic parts and how they work, even down to minor details the average reader wouldn’t care about. I mean Caidin’s grip on dramatic fiction is so loose that there’s a part where someone makes a minor comment about red blood cells, and Steve – confined to a hospital bed without either leg, his left arm, and missing his left eye – asks for more information about red blood cells, like how exactly they work and what they do and whatever. I mean, just put the bionic limbs on him and have him go crush someone, already! 

Boy, does Caidin really take his time here. Let it never be said that he rushes into the story. It goes on and on, with each and every part Steve gets being relentlessly detailed for the reader, usually via bald exposition. But he’s given bionic legs that allow him to run at incredible speeds (we’re just told he brakes all Olympics records), and a left arm that is equally superhuman (changed to his right arm in the TV series). Also, we are told ad naseum that Steve cannot see out of his bionic left eye – I mean this is hammered home repeatedly – but he can take photos with it. 

Caidin displays an unexpected pulpy flair with the augmentations to these bionic limbs, things that did not make it to the show. For one, there’s a compartment in Steve’s left leg with an oxygen tank for underwater missions, and also with a few changes Steve can turn his feet into fins. There are also handy little compartments on his feet for storing things. His left arm can fire poisonous darts from the middle finger – I’m assuming Caidin was showing subtle humor here by having us imagine Steve Austin giving people the finger as he kills them. He also has a steel skull plate and a radio transmitter in his rib. 

The bionics finally added and Steve having proven himself by saving some children from a burning bus, the novel suddenly turns into a pulpy sci-fi thriller as Steve is dropped into the ocean by the South American country of Surinam, to make a daunting underwater swim and take photos of some submarines the damned Russians have stashed somewhere. And for company Steve has a pair of cybernetic dolphins, one of which is an automated decoy and the other that Steve pilots, like his own one-man sub, and all this is presented to us on the level, as if it were of a piece with the grim, incessantly-detailed “medical science” tone of the first half of the book. 

Not that I was complaining, it was just so wild. But even here Caidin’s “tell don’t show” instincts conflict with the pulp, with our author bogging us down with hyper detail on ocean currents and whatnot. That said, when I started reading Cyborg I never expected to read about Steve Austin decked out like an underwater commando and piloting a robot dolphin. There’s even a bit of action as the Russians start dropping bombs – they’re in the middle of a battle, which has been staged as a diversion for Steve – and then frogmen come at him, but the action is more so relayed as chaotic than thrilling. We learn here that the Steve Austin of the novel – much like the Steve Austin of the first television season – is quite willing to kill if he has to. 

Sadly this is the only part of Cyborg that goes full pulp, and only if the entire novel were the same. Truly, it’s like something book packager/producer Lyle Kenyon Engel might have come up with – and I have a suspicion that both his Attar The Merman and John Eagle Expeditor were inspired by Cyborg, from the “dolphin commando” of the former series to the “look at my cool gadgets, dart gun, and my atomic one-man sub, which by the way is actually named The Dolphin!” of the latter. 

Clearly this entire sequence was too costly for a network budget, so it was removed. But for me it was the highlight of Cyborg, like a pleasant reward for us pulp-inclined readers for having made it through the previous slow-going half. True, Caidin’s fussiness prevents the sequence from achieving its full pulp potential, but overall it’s still entertaining, which can’t be said about the sequence that takes us through the final quarter of the novel. 

OSO used the sub photo mission as a warmup; now Steve is sent to the Middle East, where he is to slip into fictional country Asfir, teamed up with the beautiful but hard-bitten Israeli soldier Tamara. Caidin skirts with more pulpish material by introducing Tamara as she’s stripping casually in front of Steve, but nothing ever happens here; Caidin is much more focused on exploiting his own knowledge than he is in exploiting his female characters. 

The idea here is that Tamara, who is fluent in Russian – just like Steve is, somehow courtesy his time in the space race – is to pose as Steve’s wife, and they must be completely at ease with each other. Personally I thought she was trying to give Steve a hint, but as mentioned Steve Austin is very laconic and almost comatose, so nothing happens – indeed, there is only one sex scene in the novel, Steve finally giving in to the romantic wiles of his nurse, Jean Manners, but the sexual tomfoolery occurs completely off page. 

Steve and Tamara are here to steal the new Russian jet fighter, a MiG-27, so just like he unwittingly prefigured The Right Stuff, here Caidin unwittingly prefigures Firefox. It’s a taut Cold War thriller, but the only problem was that I had no idea why Steve Austin was needed for the mission. That is the central problem with the second half of Cyborg; it’s as if the first “bionic surgery” part has nothing to do with the second part, and Steve Austin could have been replaced by any generic Cold Warrior. 

I mean, at least in the underwater South America sequence it was believable that OSO needed a cyborg; Steve’s oxygen tank augmentations allow him to go underwater and sneak around a lot better than an ordinary scuba diver could. But here in the Asfir sequence, the bionics are almost completely forgotten. Only belatedly are they used, when Steve uses his bionic left arm to snap a guy’s collarbone while he’s in the process of torturing a captured Steve. There’s also a part where Steve uses that bionic left hand to smash some skulls, and I’m happy to report the dart finger is used a few times in the book. But still, any of this stuff could’ve been replaced by a standard spy gadget; why exactly a cyborg is needed is something Caidin can never fully explain. And why would OSO risk losing their huge investment on a suicide mission to steal a jet fighter? 

Even worse, the actual climax of the book is an endless trawl in which Steve and Tamara are trapped in the desert, trying to survive the elements and get to freedom. Good grief, friends, but it goes on and on. Again Caidin resorts to his “tell, don’t show” policy, making the turgid pace of the narrative seem even slower. It’s all grim and gritty, complete with Tamara’s instruction that their urine must be saved so they can wipe their lips with it to stave off complete dehydration, etc. 

Here, more than anywhere, it seems evident that Martin Caidin is shoehorning some other novel into Cyborg, as the desert trek has nothing to do with the rest of the book. That said, Caidin somehow uses it as an excuse for Steve Austin to realize he wants to live, even though he already came to that decision a few hundred pages ago. Also, it is stated at the end of the novel that Steve and Tamara have “found each other” – humorously, poor nurse Jean is just forgotten – and I’m curious to see if Tamara appears in Caidin’s follow-up, Operation Nuke, which was published the following year. 

Overall, Cyborg is a slow-going affair that only occasionally brightens up, and also there are flashes where Caidin will demonstrate emotional investment in his characters and they stop being expository automatons and show actual spark. These sequences indicate the novel Cyborg could have been, and I have to say the TV producers did a better job of uncovering the potential of the material than Caidin himself did.

Serpent's Eye (The Year Of The Ninja Master #3)

Serpent's Eye, by Wade Barker

September, 1986  Warner Books

Man, this Year Of The Ninja Master series is perhaps the strangest in all men’s adventuredom, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Ric Meyers takes the simple, pulp concept of original series Ninja Master and turns it into a metaphysical head-scratcher that makes the bloated ninja epics of Eric Van Lustbader seem like fast-moving action extravaganzas. 

What I find humorous is that Meyers came onto Ninja Master because the original series author (Stephen Smoke?) turned in a second volume deemed subpar by Warner Books…well, why wasn’t another “Wade Barker” brought in to replace Meyers? Surely no Warner editor could’ve read this third volume of Year Of The Ninja Master (not to mention the first two!) and deemed it worthy of publication. My only theory is that the demand for anything ninja was so great in the 1980s that publishers were desperate for product. Even crazier is that there was another volume of this series, and four more volumes of another series, War Of The Ninja Master, all written by Meyers! 

Told in three “books,” Serpent’s Eye is notable because it’s the first book in this series to solely focus on Daremo, formerly known as Brett Wallace, the hero of the original Ninja Master series…and before that, we’re told, his name was Brian Anderson, which always makes me laugh because that’s the name of a guy I know from work, and he sure as hell is no ninja. The previous two books featured Jeff Archer, Brett Wallace’s former sidekick; Archer, who was taken through hell by his sadistic creator in the previous two books, does not appear in Serpent’s Eye. 

Rather it’s Daremo alone, and he is a far cry from Brett Wallace: confused, adrift, following instincts that he himself does not understand. Meyers gives us a protagonist who is more so a puppet, being pulled around on the strings of fate. There is a dreamlike, metaphysical texture to the novel that is more stupid than profound, because it is so at odds with what this genre requires. Often Daremo will “find himself” somewhere, like say Hong Kong, and have no idea how he got here – granted, Meyers explains this at the end of the novel, but at that point the damage is done. Even Pinnochio had more free will. 

What makes it crazier is that I had flashbacks to Traveler in that I now have no idea when exactly this series takes place. Okay, so the opening features Daremo drifting around in his “fate leads me” state, finding himself on the east coast, and sort of invisibly shadowing a ‘Nam vet named Scott Harmon who has the most bizarre character intro I’ve ever read: beating up some neighborhood prick who was putting razors in candy bars on Halloween night. WTF? Well, Daremo slips into the guy’s home and tells him all about himself and “recruits” him. 

Then Daremo puts together and entire team, and they all fly over to the Middle East(!?), and then they rob a bank in Iran, and then they fly out on the C-130 one of the guys in the team owns…and I mean they’re also armed with machine guns and rocket launchers here…and then we’re told that all this happens in 1979, right before Iran fell to the mullahs. (Talk about a timely read, folks!) 

Okay…so the series is set in the late 1970s?? Did anyone else know this?? 

But then Book Two opens and Daremo is suddenly in Hong Kong, again on the trail of the mystical Chinese ninjas who have been fighting him since Dragon Rising. I almost got the impression the Iran stuff was a dream, but I’m not sure. In fact, Serpent’s Eye opens with a vague bit of Daremo, gutshot and dying, sitting on top of the world and reflecting on his end, which lends the impression that everything that follows in the narrative is a death delirium. 

This section in Hong Kong is so tonally at odds with the rest of the series that I laughed. Meyers, perhaps flashing back himself – namely, to his days writing The Destroyer – retcons Daremo into a Remo Williams stand-in, and has his superhman martial arts warriror blitzing through the Hong Kong underworld as he chases down a high-level gangster who is sending assassins after Daremo. 

The action scenes are written in such a lazy, first-draft way that I came to the conclusion that the entire novel was a first draft. But otherwise this sequence is so similar to The Destroyer: lots of witty dialog, Daremo so superhumanly skilled that his safety is never in doubt. In pure Remo form, Daremo even manages to hook up with a beautiful American babe who happens to be here, serving as a hooker for the gangster Daremo’s searching for, and just like Remo, Daremo is superhumanly skilled in the lovemaking department, but has no actual “drive” to do the deed…and when he finally does do it (or does her, I guess I should say), it’s of course left entirely off page. 

The girl’s name is Michelle Bowers, and despite himself Meyers makes her a memorable character: a failed actress who has ended up a hooker in Hong Kong. A recurring joke has her wanting to tell Daremo why she became a hooker, and Daremo not being interested in knowing. Anyone who has read a Meyers novel will know that at some point Michelle will be captured, tied up, and degraded, and of course this happens in Serpent’s Eye, but with a different outcome than expected. 

Book three is almost tiresome in its lameness. More of a puppet than ever, Daremo needs to get into mainland China for reasons he cannot comprehend, and ends up hanging out with a traveling theater group that’s a Peking Opera type of affair. Eventually this builds to a low-rent psychedelic affair where Daremo climbs this high mountain, beset by gods the entire time – and I forgot to mention, but Daremo often meets and converses with gods in the course of the book. 

SPOILER WARNING: Skip this paragraph, but I’m noting it here for my own sanity whenever I get up the courage to read the next book and need to remember what happened in this one. Anyway, it is revealed in some of the laziest bullshit-first draft writing ever that “Daremo” has actually been Scott Harmon all this time, ie the ‘Nam vet introduced in book one of Serpent’s Eye, and I guess he’s been Daremo in the previous two books? The real Daremo all along has been “The Figure In Black,” ie what we thought was the villain, but has really been Daremo guiding his puppet Scott Harmon along the path…which explains why Harmon was so confused as to his own objectives and whatnot. Not only does Harmon die at the end of the book, but so does the superhumanly-powerful Chinese ninja that has been a plague since the start of this series. “He died” is literally and lamely how Meyers describes this major series event, showing absolutely no ability nor desire to draw out the dramatic import – and folks I kid you not, the novel ends with Daremo laughing happily on this big mountain in China. 

End spoilers. Serpent’s Eye was super stupid, and overlong at 244 pages, but if the entire series was more like the sub-Destroyer section in book two, Year Of The Ninja Master would at least be worth reading. But man I think I’d be more willing to read The Miko before I take the plunge and read the next – and thankfully last – volume in this series.

Mr. Right

Mr. Right, by Carolyn Banks

May, 1980  Warner Books

I recently discovered this one at a Half Price Books. Apparently making a bit of a splash upon its original 1979 hardcover publication – the back cover quotes a glowing review from Cosmo – Mr. Right was republished in 1999 under much “parafeminist” ballyhoo. Curiously this 1980 paperback doesn’t mention that at all, and indeed does a better job of describing the book. 

To be honest, I didn’t get any “feminist” angle from the novel. Sure, protagonist Lida is a sexually-liberated young woman who keeps a list of the 30-some men she’s been with, but at no point does she use this as a proclamation that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Indeed, in another of those unintentionall “tells” that I love so much, Lida thinks something is wrong with her and wonders if she’ll ever find true love. Lol, there goes the “feminism” thing; Lida needs a man, after all. 

Another humorous thing is how much the sex angle is exploited on the back cover. Folks, I have to report that again we have that curious ‘70s phenonmenon of a “sexy book” that hardly has any sex in it, and indeed the vast majority of the sex occurrs off-page. There is nothing in this book to the sleazy length of, say, The Baroness, or even of contemporary popular fiction like Harold Robbins. Rather, the sex scenes we do get to read about are over and done with in a few sentences, and seldom if ever dwell on any juicy details. 

I also found it interesting that there’s nothing different about Lida, at least when compared to the average female protagonist of the day – in Robbins, in Hirschfeld, in Susann. Those authors, and innumerable others, gave us female characters who were both strong and promiscuous, who were literate and witty. All told, the only thing different about Lida is her self-doubt (she’s certain something is “wrong” with her), and also she has small boobs – though, again demonstrating the lack of focus on anything risque, we aren’t even told this until rather late in the game. 

Well anyway, Mr. Right is really more of a mystery, anyway, one that just happens to feature a promiscuous single woman in her 30s who fears that the man she is falling in love with might be a murderer. This is Duvivier, a famous mystery author who writes under other pseudonyms and who might have murdered a woman back in the early ‘60s, though Lida only learns this through coincdental plotting – her friend, Diana, happens to sleep with a guy who knew of a murderous colleage, years before, and Diana fears this man might have gone on to become Duvivier. 

A big problem with Mr. Right is that Duvivier is not built up enough. Lida reads one novel by the guy, brought to her in the hospital by Diana (Lida’s there to have an abortion!), and Lida likes it so much that she writes Duvivier a fan latter. It would have helped tremendously if we had been told more about the man’s novels, or maybe even gotten to read snatches of them; author Carolyn Banks could have had a lot of fun spoofing the mystery thrillers of the day, but apparently this thought did not occur to her. 

So, as with so much of the novel, we are only told of how great Duvivier’s books are, particularly his murders. Lida also responds to the fact that Duvivier clearly enjoys writing his books – Lida is an English teacher at an all-black college in Washington, D.C., and thus responds to what she sees as Duvivier’s gifted mocking of literary conventions. 

We also have a lot of scenes from Duvivier’s point of view; the novel hopscotches a lot, and I’m happy to report that Banks either gives us white space to denote this or just starts a new chapter. In fact there are a lot of chapters in Mr. Right, some of them as short as those in the average Richard Brautigan novel. Anyway, Duvivier is droll, elitist, and condescending – and also enjoys masturbating when devising the murder scenes in his novels. 

The gist of the novel is that Lida belives she’s found “Mr. Right” in Duvivier, due to that one novel of his she’s read; again, it would have been so much better if we’d learned more about his books. It would have helped explain why Lida, a woman who is having sex with one guy on the very first page and will with another not many pages later – and who chastizes herself for being screwed up and whatnot – would fall in love with Duvivier in the first place. 

There’s some cool stuff that resonated with me where Lida tracks down Duvivier’s real name. Showing how this sort of thing was done before the internet, Lida calls the Library of Congress and has them root through varous files; it’s a nice bit of investigative work that impresses even Duvivier, when he learns of it late in the novel. This “uncovering an author’s real identity” was right up my alley, and I’m also happy to report that Mr. Right even refers to Jimi Hendrix, not just once but a few times. 

The pseudonym stuff might have seemed revelatory in the day, but is altogether quaint n our internet/AI world. But it was cool to see the work one had to do to find the real name of an author – and, as Duvivier is told by a librarian who takes his job very seriously, there’s nothing to be found if the author specifically tells the publisher not to share his real name, something Duvivier never thought to do. 

Banks drops more ‘70s topical details here, like mentions of the pseudonymous bestsellers The Sensuous Woman and The Sensuous Man; she also references The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, another real book, but the librarian states that it was by “Mr. X;” in reality it was by Dr. A. This same librarian claims to know who “Mr. X” really is, and tells Duvivier that he’d never believe it; one wonders if Carolyn Banks herself knew that Dr. A was really Isaac Asimov. 

All these things are up my alley, but unfotunately a big problem with the novel is Lida. In another “tell,” instead of coming off as the strong and independent woman the author and publisher(s) intend, she instead comes off like a self-involved whore. Perhaps this is another “tell,” or self-own. Lida sleeps with a married man and even visits him for more sex while he’s in the hospital, all while wondering why she can’t meet a real man – we even learn she had sex with one of the students in her class, a black kid named “George Washington,” just so she could write that particular name down on her list of conquests. Or, as the kid told her – all of this relayed to us via dialog, as a lot of the story is – Lida would be able to put up a sign over her bed that stated, “George Washington slept here.” 

There is a lot of pre-PC humor here that had me laughing at times, but I’m sure it would be forbidden today, as a lot of it has to do with Lida’s comments about her black students, the majority of whom are not intelligent. When Lida and Duvivier meet, there’s also a lot of witty repartee between the two; Banks capably demonstrates how the two were made for each other. There’s also a very funny part where Diana tries to come to Lida’s rescue during a play and starts yelling that she can’t see when the house lights go down, much to the annoyance of the audience. 

But a lot of Mr. Right is made up of incidental scenes that have little bearing on the plot. Also, Banks has a tendency to write in short, punchy sentences, not much setting up scenes or giving us an idea why they are important to the story. In a lot of ways – from plotting to writing – the novel reminded me of another contemporary “spoof” of popular fiction, The Serial. 

Also, a lot of the book occurs in the early 1960s, right after the JFK assassination. This part is very much out of a mystery novel, concerning a nebbish and possibly homosexual young man who might or might not have murdered a woman, and who might or might not have become Duvivier. Banks hopscotches from the ‘60s to Lida in the ‘70s and also Diana (who has her own share of the narrative), so there really is a lot of jumping around in the novel. 

What puzzles me is why contemporary reviewers would think this novel was so different. I mean, this was an era in which a mainstream bestseller featured characters giving each other golden showers, so how in the hell could anything in Mr. Right have been considered risque or boundary-pushing? It’s altogether tame in comparison. And Lida, despite her sparkling wit, isn’t too different from sundry other female protagonists of the time. Only in her previously-mentioned self-doubt is she different, and that begins to wear thin quickly. 

Overall I’m glad I came across Mr. Right in the bookstore, as I doubt I would’ve have learned of it otherwise. Carolyn Banks proves she can deliver witty dialog and memorable situations, but all told I didn’t feel that the actual novel lived up to the sordid spectacle promised by the back cover. But then, do they ever?

Adrano For Hire #4: The Blood Bargain

Adrano For Hire #4: The Blood Bargain, by Michael Bradley

April, 1974  Warner Books

The fourth and final volume of Adrano For Hire picks up three weeks after the previous volume, Gary “Michael Bradley” Blumberg again turning in a slow-moving ensemble piece that could only be considered “men’s adventure” due to the uncredited cover art. There isn’t much mystery why this series didn’t continue, as doubtless readers in 1974 felt swindled by the misleadingly-packaged series. 

Last we saw Adrano, he was relaxing with mega-rich drug buddy Jean Paoli in his fancy retreat in Marseilles, looking forward to reading some literature and whatnot. But when we (eventually) meet up with Adrano this time, he’s chomping at the bit to get back into action. This is set in motion by a long opening sequence in which a wealthy banker is assassinated in Beirut, and ultimately we’ll learn that the banker was connected to Paoli’s business affairs in the drug world. Paoli will activate Adrano as his enforcer to stave off future assassinations – and find out who is behind the plot to take down Paoli. 

But as mentioned this is an ensemble piece, so we also have busy subplots about a girl who witnesses the assassination in Beirut, and becomes another target of the killers. We also have a contract hitman, the one who is doing the assassinations, who happens to be gay (indeed, we learn in background material that he was “gang-raped” in prison)…and wants money so he can have a sex-change operation. I love finding modern-day topicality in old books, and boy, The Blood Bargain is in a league of its own, with subblots involving transsexuals and Palestinian radicals! 

But even at 170-some pages, The Blood Bargain is still sluggish. That cynical vibe of previous books is still here…though “sardonic” might be the more accurate term, as Adrano himself is referred to by Marie, the female character who witnessed the assassination in Beirut…and who happened to sleep with Adrano back in the first volume, when he was posing as “Joseph Abel” and wearing a disguise. Once again she will become involved with Adrano, and author Blumberg develops a subplot at the very end of The Blood Bargain that Adrano and Maria might become a more serious thing, given that Adrano apparently tells Marie he loves her in his sleep after their off-page bedroom shenanigans. 

In fact, Blumberg sets up another subplot at the end of the novel, which presumably would’ve had repercussions in a fifth volume of Adrano For Hire. Namely, Adrano’s benefactor Jean Paoli vows to get revenge of Tony La Rocca, a Mafioso in the US who ultimately turns out to be behind the attack on Paoli in this volume. Both Adrano and Marie are pulled into it, with Adrano not wanting to get involved but knowing he’ll have to if only to protect Marie. I can’t say I’m sad there was not Adrano For Hire #5, as I can already imagine what it would’ve been like: a long-simmer yarn with a “sardonic” protagonist and lots of time-wasting stuff about one-off characters. Such is the case with The Blood Bargain, and such was the case with the previous three volumes. 

To wit, so much of The Blood Bargain concerns new-to-the-series characters like Mickie, the homosexual hitman who wants to “go to Sweden to be a real woman,” La Rocca’s enforcer Tex, and a former Muslim terrorist who through the fortunes of fate has become a smuggler. There’s also a lot of stuff about Rashi Nuhr, a banker in Beirut who was the apprentice of the assassinated banker who managed Paoli’s affairs; it is this banker who is murdered by Mickie in the first pages of the book, the assassination witnessed by Maria, and Nuhr knows he is next on the list. So this entails a drawn-out affair of Nuhr hiding, Tex and Mickie trying to find Nuhr, and Paoli and Adrano trying to find everyone. 

As usual, Adrano is lost in the shuffle. We’re often told he’s bored and ready to get back in action – both of the fighting and the sex varieties – but once the action does begin to happen, he spends the novel sweating in fear. Literally. Blumberg makes a big deal out of Adrano and Marie smelling like “goats” in the climax, stinking of “fear sweat” and “exertion sweat.” Also I thought it was funny that Adrano spent a large chunk of the narrative stuck in a dark apartment. Action is smallscale for sure, with the main villains being Mickie and his boss Tex, who has been called here to Beirut to fix Mickie’s various screwups. Action is also infrequent, and not in the least dwelt upon: “Adrano put a bullet in his head” is literally the extent of it. But then, Blumberg isn’t much of an action writer to begin with, particularly given that he arms Adrano with a .38 revolver that somehow has a safety on it. 

Rather, the author’s focus is on long-brew tension, with lots and lots of stuff about Nuhr hiding in Beirut in various states of panic as Tex and Mickie try to get a lead on his whereabouts. And meanwhile Paoli and Adrano come into town to figure out who is behind the plot. This is how Adrano meets Marie once again, literally bumping into her in a darkened apartment in Beirut, where he’s been taken by a pair of stooges who have captured him. As ever, Adrano is quite prone to getting abducted. And Blumberg further demonstrates how he isn’t much of an action writer when Paoli, in Beirut, provides several guns for Adrano to use, from rifles to submachine guns, and Adrano just takes a .38 police special! At least Adrano eventually uses it here in this “darkened apartment” sequence, but the action scenes are perfunctory and Blumberg is more focused on people running, hiding, sweating, and stinking. 

There’s also a moronic part where Adrano could kill a couple thugs and save himself some future trouble, but doesn’t kill them on account of Marie’s feelings, concerned it would be “too much for her” after she’s been taken captive and all! But Marie does serve as the main female character in The Blood Bargain, at Adrano’s side in the long running sequence that comrpises the final quarter of the book. As mentioned though the sex is all off-page (taking place during a much-needed shower at novel’s end), and here Marie learns that “Joseph Abel” is really a guy named Adrano…though I have to admit it rankled me that Adrano says here that “Joseph” is a “crummy” name. Sure, there’s a crummy President by that name, but the name “Joseph” itself isn’t crummy at all!! The bigger question at the end of the book is if Adrano will tell Marie that he’s really an ex-Mafioso with a price on his head, etc. 

Again, all this no doubt would’ve factored into the fifth Adrano For Hire that never was, as would Paoli’s war against Tony La Rocca. But I’m not upset that this book never came to be; overall I wasn’t much impressed with Adrano For Hire and found each volume a struggle to get through. Regardless, Gary Blumberg at least seemed to be invested in it, as there’s definitely a connecting thread to each volume.  He must have been a fast writer, too, as the entire series was published in two months!  But ultimately I wasn’t much of a fan of this four-volume series.  

No One Here Gets Out Alive

No One Here Gets Out Alive, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman

April, 1981  Warner Books

The Doors are one of those groups that go through phases in popularity. Huge in their day, then forgotten, then rediscovered due to the publication of this book, then again super famous in 1990 with Oliver Stone’s film hagiography of Jim Morrison; I still remember how the rock chicks at my high school traded out their Motley Crue shirts for Doors shirts when that movie came out. I also recall seeing this very paperback a lot around school. It seems that today we might be in one of those phases where it’s more common to see the Doors put down, their impact on the era minimized, and the poetry of their lyrics ridiculed. 

So, just to put all my cards on the table, I think the Doors were one of the greatest rock groups of the ‘60s (which is to say ever), I think Jim Morrison had the greatest voice in rock, and I’d rather listen to them than the The Beatles or The Rolling Stones any day of the week. 

So it’s strange it’s taken me so long to get around to reading No One Here Gets Out Alive. First published in trade paperback in 1980, the book essentially relaunched the Doors as one of the most popular rock acts ever; the previous year saw “The End” on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which probably gave the band’s popularity just as much of a boost. Plus the version in the movie was uncensored, with Morrison dropping some f-bombs that were cut from the original record release; man I spent forever searching for a release with this version (it wasn’t on the soundtrack), but it wasn’t officially released until 1999, when it came out on one of the Doors remasters. 

At nearly 400 pages of smallish print, there’s more to No One Here Gets Out Alive than I assumed there’d be. Danny Sugerman was a young fan of the group who eventually handled their fan mail; for some reason he appears in this book as “Denny Sullivan,” and not under his real name. Jerry Hopkins was a reporter who did the big inteview with Morrison for Rolling Stone, and it’s my understanding Hopkins had wanted to do a bio of Morrison for some time, not finding any interest from publishers until Sugerman came on board – I guess the “sell” being that Sugerman would add a lot of behind-the-scenes info about the band. 

But then…boy, the other Doors are supporting characters at best in No One Here Gets Out Alive. This really is a bio of Jim Morrison, with the caveat that Morrison was such a chameleon – particularly, a chameleon who drank a whole helluva lot – that you come out of the book with no greater understanding of him than you had before you read it. Essentially the book is comprised of Jim Morrison doing this or that other insane thing while drunk off his ass. Big events, like recording albums or giving concerts or whatever, aren’t much dwelt upon, and indeed in most cases they just happen in the narrative. If you are looking for any sort of peek into the creative process, forget about it. And if you’re really into the Doors and want to know about their two post-Morrison albums, Other Voices and Full Circle, you can totally forget about them (if you haven’t already); they aren’t even mentioned. Even the posthumous Morrison collaboration An American Prayer isn’t mentioned. 

Another thing to note is that No One Here Gets Out Alive, despite being the impetus for a Doors renaissance (up to and including Stone’s film, which largely was inspired by the book), is now itself ignored by Doors fans – it has been put forth that the book is mostly fan fiction with little bearing on the real Jim Morrison, and in particular that Sugerman tarnished Jerry Hopkins’s actual research with a lot of b.s. Morrison idolization. See this 1981 interview with Doors producer Paul Rotchchild for a telling condemnation of the book…particularly given how Rothchild’s comments to Hopkins were changed by Sugerman prior to the book’s publication. 

That said, the book reads just fine as a sensationalistic rock expose. I knew I was in for a good time when I saw that, on the very first page, Danny Sugerman in his Foreword wrote “This book neither propels nor dispels the Morrison myth,” and then, in the very next paragraph, wrote, “My personal belief is that Jim Morrison was a god.” And this friends is pretty much the vibe No One Here Gets Out Alive maintains throughout, alternately informative and idolatrous. 

We certainly aren’t talking about a fantastic piece of word-painting like Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child Of The Aquarian Age, still the best rock bio I’ve ever read. Hopkins and Sugerman do occasionally go into literary flourishes to describe Doors music, but for the most part their focus is on the lyrics. Even then their criticism is not on the level of Paul Williams or the like, but more along the lines of a fanzine. We don’t even get much in the way of the behind-the-scenes material Sugerman supposedly would’ve value-added, at least insofar as the music goes, other than occasional rundowns of how such and such a song sounds. 

What we do get is the rambling, exhaustive account of a very gifted but very troubled artist. I have to say, I got very sick of Jim Morrison over the course of No One Here Gets Out Alive, just tired of his constant drunken escapades, but at the same time it was a refreshing reminder of how rock stars were once so casually self-destructive. I mean the flyweight “rockers” of today are too busy hawking merchandise or posing for social media; Jim Morrison would get blitzed and hang from a balcony ten floors up. But man, it isn’t this sort of shit that makes a legend – I mean I’m 49, so I was born after Morrison was dead and wasn’t around at the time…but I’ve known about the Doors since I was a little kid, and I never knew much about Morrison’s personal life. It was the music I knew and responded to, and doubtless that will continue for future generations. 

And Morrison surely was the key to the Doors’s success, even though he himself was uncomfortable with that notion. If you need any indication, just play the albums Other Voices or Full Circle, laughingly credited to “The Doors,” even though Jim Morrison isn’t on either of them. In fact, play “Ships With Sails,” one of the better tracks off Other Voices, with Ray Manzarek on lead vocals, and you might think it’s okay, even if it doesn’t really sound like the Doors. But then…then play the same track with an AI Jim Morrison, and suddenly…suddenly that same track sounds like the Doors. With two songs you can prove who the key to “the Doors sound” was, if for some reason you ever questioned that. 

One thing I’ve forgotten to mention is that the authors also have a tendency to recreate conversations, giving the book the feel of fiction, sort of like Dakota Days. So we’ll periodically have parts wher Morrison is talking to this or that person, and it’s relayed as dialog between two characters, so clearly it is fiction, given that neither writer was there to hear what was actually said. In some ways, No One Here Gets Out Alive is essentially a rock novel; it certainly has the “drugs” part down – though Morrison became more of a heavy drinker than a drug user – and there’s even a bit of sex at times, though Morrison’s conquests are not thoroughly detailed. We do get the random mention, however, that Jim at one point “butt-fucked” a girl…with the quotation marks around it and everything. 

Surprisingly I found myself really enjoying the pre-fame stuff. Usually with these books I don’t care too much about the background, but in Jim Morrison’s case I enjoyed it – particularly the cerebral essays he would secretly write for his younger brother’s school assignments. There’s also lots of stuff about Morrison and his issues with his father, a career Navy officer who was the youngest admiral onboard a ship, or somesuch. Great insight here on young Jim’s part when we’re told how he would see his dad on his ship, bossing around all the men…but then his dad would go home and take out the garbage when his wife told him to. This kernel, while just a quick humorous note in the narrative, actually serves to explain Jim Morrison’s personality more than practically anything in the ensuing 300+ pages; he was never to be bossed around by any woman. 

I also appreciated how the formation of the band was essentially a casual thing that just happened to fall perfectly together. Speaking of the book’s length, the long page count undermines how briefly the group was even together; they were only around for four years, and fame came to them rather quickly. It’s no wonder Jim Morrison, who was the focus of 99% of the attention, struggled with his newfound fame. The book makes it clear that alcohol was the drug he turned to; indeed, No One Here Gets Out Alive is more a document of a (barely) functioning alcoholic than it is an expose on a rock band. For that matter, “rock stuff” is minimal, with minor asides about this or that concert, or this or that personality – I mean we’re told in passing how Morrison got drunk and puked in a bar while hanging out with Jimi Hendrix, with no further detail…meanwhile, I’ve had a shitty bootleg CD for decades that features Morrison and Hendrix performing together on a small New York stage sometime in 1969 or thereabouts. Sounds like the greatest thing in rock history, true, but in reality it’s barely listenable due to poor fidelity and Morrison is drunk as hell, wailing “fuck my baby in the ass” intermittently. Wow, that’s two references to anal sex in the same Doors review! 

I might be an anomaly in that I prefer the later Doors material; I’d rather hear “Five To One” than “Light My Fire.” And the title track of The Soft Parade is one of my favorite Doors songs of all, and I think their last album, L.A. Woman, is their best. But still, it would have been nice to have just a little more info on the sessions that produced the albums. There’s almost this weird sort of inevitability to the narrative, as if the band was just following some pre-ordained trajectory: we’re told “it was time to record the new album” and such, with no topical detail on how they’d worked up the material or whatever. But again this is also a reminder of how labels drove their acts so mercilessly back in the day. One must argue that the methods of the labels did produce results: I mean here we are still listening to music recorded over 50 years ago. In 1969, who was listening to 78s recorded in 1919? 

But it’s less about the music than it is about Jim Morrison getting drunk, with stuff about his “cosmic mate” Pamela often in tow. There’s also a Wiccan rock critic named Patricia, but the merits of the book could be judged on the fact that the authors consistently misspell her last name: they have Patricia Kennely, but it’s actually Patricia Kennealy. Humorously, we’re often given minor asides like how Morrison flies somewhere to see the Stones, or how he went to see Canned Heat, or etc, but the book very much gives the impression that Jim Morrison had no interest in rock music. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but I did get a chuckle out of the part where the Danny Sugerman character asks Morrison if he can get “Denny” tickets to a sold-out Rolling Stones show, and Morrison, giving him a hard time, replies, “What do you need Mick Jagger for when you have me?” Indeed! 

And do not go into the book hoping for interesting tidbits about forgotten Doors lore. Even standard fan stuff like “The Celebration Of The Lizard” is given short shrift, the authors merely leaving it that the band was unable to record it to their liking. And there’s no mention at all of “Rock Is Dead,” that bizarre hour-plus “song” recorded during the Soft Parade sessions that was bootlegged over the years, before officially being released some years ago. Actually that track explains much of what Morrison was doing at the infamous Miami concert, which happened right around the same time as “Rock Is Dead” was recorded. The authors quote some of Jim’s onstage antics during that show, and the lines he is quoted as saying to the audience – “I want to see some dancing,” “I want to have a good time,” etc – are taken directly from what he says on “Rock Is Dead.” So it seems clear that the authors are correct and that Morrison was indeed doing a sort of performance piece at Miami, and it wasn’t just a drunken tirade. 

I’d only read the barest of details about Miami, but the book makes it clear that the charges were trumped-up by biased prosecutors and judges who had an eye on the political field and were looking for votes. Boy, how times have changed. I also got a post-ironic chuckle of how the FBI even got involved in it, further persecuting Morrison. But according to the book, Morrison was inspired by a confrontational play he’d seen in New York and was looking to do something similar on stage, and was only going to strip down to his boxers. What I hadn’t realized was how this Miami debacle essentially killed the Doors, at least as a performing group, given how they were blacklisted in so many places. 

Otherwise the book moves at a good clip, documenting all the high notes in the brief timeline of the Doors, without getting too much in the weeds. We’re also told a little about Morrison’s pursuits in writing and filmmaking, with MGM at one point trying to get him as an actor. But with his wanton drinking and self-endangerment, it’s clear that, subconsiously or not, Jim Morrison didn’t plan on sticking around long. This again is a narrative conceit of the book, which often brings up the destructive bent of the poets Morrison admired. The problem is, Jim Morrison isn’t the most relatable of protagonists, and reading the book one does not understand how people could be drawn to him – we are told nothing of any kindness on his part, or much of a sense of humor other than mean practical jokes. So even as someone who knew next to nothing about the Doors, other than their music, even I could detect that something was missing in this presentation of Jim Morrison. 

But I’m glad I finally got around to reading it. It’s curious that No One Here Gets Out Alive is the book that made the Doors popular again, but I guess it’s an indication of how if something comes out at just the right time, it will resonate. Perhaps in the post-punk, bland New Wave early ‘80s a book about a drunk and disorderly rock star from the ‘60s was just what people needed. But man…in today’s emasculated era, where Supreme Court justices can’t even define what a woman is, we need a rock star like Jim Morrison more than ever. And speaking of which – color me shocked that Morrison was “politically conservative,” at least according to this book! Man…if he’d lived, he could’ve sang at a Trump rally! Come on, people, just imagine an old Jim Morrison singing “Peace Frog” to a packed Trump audience! I can see the incensed CNN reporter now: “They were singing about ‘blood in the streets’ at a MAGA rally!!” 

Seriously though, I wouldn’t say this was the best rock bio I’ve read, not by a long shot, but I did enjoy a lot of it. It also made me decide to read that Doors bio by Mike Jahn I picked up many years ago, which seems to be scarce these days.

Dirty Harry #1: Duel For Cannons

Dirty Harry #1: Duel For Cannons, by Dane Hartman

September, 1981  Warner Books

This first volume of the Dirty Harry series basically encapsulates everything that is wrong with Warner’s “Men Of Action” line: while it has the right intentions, the execution leaves much to be desired. In short, Duel For Cannons was a chore to read, and I constantly had to give myself pep talks to keep reading it. I mean think about that – a story about Dirty Harry that’s a chore to read. 

What makes this surprising is that Ric Meyers wrote Duel For Cannons, and he was one of the few Men Of Action writers who understood the men’s adventure genre. I know it was Meyers who wrote this one due to the words of Meyers himself; once upon a time there was a website devoted to Dirty Harry, which exists now only on The Wayback Machine. In 2001 the site proprietor, J. Reeves, interviewed Ric Meyers, and Meyers not only took credit for Duel For Cannons (as well as five other volumes of the series), but he also ranked it as one of his favorites! And for posterity, because that website was notoriously hard to navigate, here you will find J. Reeves’s brief reviews of all 12 volumes of the Dirty Harry series. 

It's crazy to think Meyers personally rated this one so high, but it’s cool that he did. I personally could barely finish it and found it to be a mess, with Harry thrown out of his element and featuring protracted action scenes that were more exhausting than thrilling. In fact I was under the impression that another of the Men Of Action writers – either Stephen Smoke or Leslie Horovitz – wrote the book, until I remembered to check the old dirtiest.com site. But in hindsight I realized it was obvious Ric Meyers had written it, as not only was the book filled with references to the Dirty Harry films, but Duel For Cannons also opened with a super-long chapter in which a one-off character met his fate in very protracted fashion; a Meyers staple for sure, with the caveat that this time it was a male character getting wasted (gradually). 

This, as the belabored backstory has it, is Boris Tucker, a sheriff from San Antonio who happens to be friends with none other than Harry Callahan, and is here in California on vacation with his family. This opening scene takes place in an amusement park and has the sheriff, who has brought his gun with him on vacation, defending himself against a mysterious assailant who wields a .44 Magnum. But at great length the poor sheriff is blown away, as is an innocent bystander. This brings Harry onto the scene, butting heads with the cops who have jurisdiction on the case. The official story is that Sheriff Tucker shot the bystander and then himself, but Harry knows there’s more to the story. 

Meyers brings in characters from the franchise, like Harry’s chief, Lt. Bressler, from the first film. He also often refers to the movies, sometimes in goofy ways – like Harry thinking of the rogue cops in the second film as “the Magnum Force” cops. Did they actually call themselves that in the movie? I don’t think so. Even goofier is a part later in the book where, for protracted reasons, Harry agrees to be a deputized sheriff in San Antonio, to enforce the law against crooked cops, and thinks to himself how he also became an “enforcer” once before, leading to the death of someone he cared about. I mean good thing Sudden Impact hadn’t come out yet, or we would’ve gotten a goofy reference to that one, too. 

I don’t mean to be so harsh, as I think Meyers is a good writer, and he certainly was the best in the Men Of Action line. But he gets the series off to an ungainly start; as I said, Duel For Cannons demonstrates in its slow-moving 173 pages all that was wrong with this ill-fated Warners line. Meyers’s attempts to mix random action scenes in, like early in the book where Harry gets in a protracted gun fight with a group of rapists, come off as sluggish. But protracted is really the name of the game; not since Terry Harknett have I encountered such ponderous action narrative: 

Acting on instinct, Harry’s finger tightened on the Magnum’s trigger. He immediately loosened his trigger finger for two reasons. First, he remembered that he was not shooting on home turf at a local scumbag. Usually that reason was not suficient for Harry to let someone shoot back at him, but the second reason he didn’t shoot was the more important and the more pressing. Namely, Harry didn’t know whether the keg Thurston was huddled behind was fully or empty. 

If empty, Harry’s bullets would go through like they went through almost everything else. But if it was full and under pressure, it could explode with the force of a frag grenade, sending hunks of sharp metal and gallons of beer everywhere. Under normal circumstances, Harry might have tried it, but these weren’t normal circumstances. He was fighting in front of an innocent crowd and had no cover. 

I mean, just shoot the fucker already! But it’s like this throughout. There is a ton of deliberation on Harry’s part throughout the novel, particularly during the action scenes, bringing them to a dead halt. And beyond that it’s just so excrutiatingly drawn out: 

Callahan ducked down while calculating Thurston’s speed. As soon as he thought the guy had reached the rear door, he shot diagonally through the kitchen door. His aim was good but his timing was a smidge off. The bullet punched a hole midway up the kitchen door and blasted outside, narrowly missing both Thurston’s back and the swinging back door. 

Immediatley afterward Harry was up and out the kitchen door himself, almost tripping over the beer keg Thurston had kicked aside. After noticing that the kick-back man was still hustling across the back porch trying to find a way out of the yard, Harry hefted the metal cask up. It was empty. He carried it with him as he cautiously neared the back door. 

And it just goes on like this, for pages and pages. But at least we learned the keg was empty!! Seriously, this is straight out Harknett’s equally-ponderous The Revenger/Stark series. Even when we branch out of the typical gunfights it’s just as slow-going; there’s a positively endless part halfway through where a handcuffed Harry gets in a boat and is chased by the bad guys. What could have been a fast-moving action scene instead becomes a head-beating for the reader, just going on and on with extranneous detail that slows down the action. 

The non-understanding of action fiction even extends to the names of the characters – or, at least, to the name of the badass .44 Magnum killer of the opening scene. Meyers intends this guy to be the dark reflection of Harry Callahan, a merciless hitman who works for the bad guys and is as good with his .44 as Harry is. And Meyers names this evil badass hitman…Sweetboy. He names him Sweetboy! There’s also a lot of stuff about main villain Nash – who in reality is a Mexican immigrant who has given himself a new last name. This elicits some race-baiting on Harry’s part that might be a little out of line for the character, but then Nash does spend the book trying to have Harry killed. 

Humorously, just as the action scenes are protracted to the point of boredom, the sex scene in the novel is woefully anemic. That’s right, sex scene – Harry gets laid, folks. By the most unexpected babe: the widow of Sheriff Tucker! Here at least Harry only spends a hot second deliberating on his actions, sleeping with the widow of his recently-murdered friend, but Meyers keeps it all as vague as, “They made love,” and that’s that. At this point I was ready to shoot the book…but of course I didn’t know if the book was empty or full, because if it was full… Never mind, stupid joke. But still, the book annoyed me. 

Meyers also wrote #3: The Long Death, which was much better than this one. So again it’s curious he liked Duel For Cannons so much himself. Maybe because it was new for him at the time, and he was excited about writing a new Dirty Harry story. But that excitement does not extend to the novel itself, and at least for this reader Duel For Cannons was a trying, wearying read. 

Finally, there’s the compelling question of who did the cover art; note that in the interview I linked to above, even Meyers didn’t know who did the artwork for the series. As I mentioned in the comments section of a previous review, my guess is that the artwork for the Dirty Harry series was done by artist Bill Sienkiewicz, who was soon to make a name for himself in the superhero comics field with his work on Marvel’s The New Mutants.* This cover and the other Dirty Harry covers all look so much like Sienkiewicz’s work that, if they weren’t by him, they were by an artist who was trying to rip him off. I actually contacted Sienkiewicz via his official website prior to writing this review, asking if he did the art for this series, but didn’t receive a response. That he didn’t respond makes me suspect that he did handle the art, but for whatever reason doesn’t want to acknowledge it. But then, I admit I’m conspiracy-minded; it could be that the guy just didn’t feel like responding. 

*I picked up two of these New Mutant comics at the time, issues #23 and #24, and they essentially blew my 9-year-old mind; I had no idea that comics could be so weird. 

UFO #2: Sporting Blood

UFO #2: Sporting Blood, by Robert Miall

June, 1973  Warner Books

(Original UK edition 1971)

I’ve mentioned before how crazy I am about that ‘60s/70s ultramod Spaced Out vibe, as displayed in such ‘60s sci-fi flicks as Barbarella, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun. But in my mind the highest paragon of this ultramod “future 1960s” look would have to be Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s UFO, which was produced for UK television in ’70 and ‘71 and used many of the costumes, sets, and props from the aforementioned Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun (which was another Andersons “Century 21” production). 

To be sure, UFO is glacially paced, overly grim, and seldom if ever makes use of its colorful ultramod trappings. It’s almost as if all the colorful stuff was from the mind of Sylvia Anderson, from the silver “space age” suits worn by the characters to the purple wigs and miniskirts of the “girls” who worked at Moonbase. But Gerry Anderson sort of flew in the face of this, delivering a “grim and gritty” vibe that was more so just dour, with an often unlikeable lead character and plots that focused too much on loss, suffering, and despair. Only late in the series’ run, when many of the cast members had been replaced due to scheduling conflicts, did the producers bring more of a “fun” vibe to the show, but the earliest episodes – three of which are novelized here – are usually too “serious” for their own good. 

Make no mistake, though: I love the show, and could watch it over and over on permanent repeat, preferablly blitzed out on cheap blended whiskey. I’ve got the original DVD release but the discs are just gathering dust; I prefer to watch the high definition remastered episodes free with ads on Prime, and have watched the series through a few times over the years. There is something wonderful about this modtastic future that never was (the series takes place in the early 1980s), and I’d rather watch UFO than Star Wars or Star Trek any day of the week. 

The show didn’t make much of an impact in the US, where it played in syndication, but there was enough support behind it that the two novelizations Robert Miall had published in the UK in 1971 were brought by Warner Books to the US. However no changes were made to the text: we still have single quotation marks for dialog and British spellings are used throughout. This was the second of the two novelizations, and it’s interesting that Miall (of whom I know nothing) plants seeds for a third novelization at the end of Sporting Blood (the title has no bearing on the plot, by the way). 

This slim, 140-page book novelizes the episodes “Computer Affair,” “The Dalotek Affair,” and “Survival.” It’s worth noting that these are not comprehensive novelizations of the episodes; Miall leaves out scenes and often rewrites stuff to fit these three unconnected episodes together. But then, UFO was an episodic series to begin with; there was only the overall plot, of secret agency SHADO and its various high-tech craft waging an undercover war against aliens – all of it occuring in the “future ‘60s” of 1981 (or thereabouts – the show, as explained below, wasn’t always faithful to its own setting). 

The important thing to note is that the main appeal of UFO, the colorful ultramod setting, is not captured here by Miall. Rather, he has focused more on the “dour” aspects of the show, rarely if ever bringing to life the ultramod futuristic settings but instead focusing on the inner turmoil of the characters. He does at least cater the book to a male readership, with the main characters being the men on the show, and thus there is a narrative focus on the appeal of the shapely female SHADO agents (who themselves of course were another huge part of the show’s appeal). But then, there is very little racy stuff in the novel, with Miall never giving in to exploitation – I mean, the dude doesn’t even use the word “breasts” when describing Moonbase commander Lt. Gay Ellis (aka actress Gabrielle Drake – sister of singer Nick Drake): 

I mean that’s some serious restraint on the author’s part, friends. But then, Miall makes clear something the TV show only hinted at: the male agents of SHADO are damn horny, particularly given that they have curvy dishes like that sashaying around them in form-fitting catsuits and miniskirts…and there’s a friggin’ rule that prevents SHADO agents from becoming romantically involved with each other! In fact this is the plot of fist storyline “Computer Affair,” but then again it’s another instance where the show couldn’t seem to make up its mind, as there’s a lot of innuendo in the show that some of these agents were getting along in more than a professional fashion. 

Robert Miall treats everything with deadly seriousness; there is no camp here, no spoofery. We’re told the “girls” at Moonbase wear purple wigs, for example, but we aren’t told why. (Presumably costume designer Sylvia Anderson said the idea was the wigs were anti-raditation or somesuch…but then this begs the question why the men on Moonbase didn’t wear purple wigs!) Also the various SHADO vehicles are seldom described, and indeed Miall pulls an interesting trick throughout in that rarely if ever does he focus on characters who are operating these vehicles. Rather, the “action” is usually relayed from the perspective of whoever is commanding the mission from afar, watching viewscreens and sweating bullets in the hope that everyone survives. Again, the focus is on the grim and the dour, with very little in the way of fun escapism. 

Back to the glacial pacing of the show: it says something about how padded the average episode of UFO was that Miall is able to novelize a full episode in about 40 pages. I’m not sure how these three specific episodes were chosen for the novelization treatment, but Miall does a fairly good job of making them all seem part of a larger storyline, save for the issue that the aforementioned Lt. Ellis disappears from the text – because the actress was only in one of these three episodes, “Computer Affair.” Her disappearance from the rest of the text is due to a cold, it’s explained to us via dialog between SHADO honcho Colonel Ed Straker and his second-in-command Alec Freeman, and thus she must be quarantined from the safe and secure Moonbase. 

Speaing of Colonel Straker, he is the “unlikeable” main character mentioned above; while Striker (as portrayed by Ed Bishop), with his “bleached” white hair, is the character most associated with UFO, he seldom featured as the protagonist in early episodes, the three novelized here being prime examples. Only late in the series run, when Alec Freeman (George Sewell) was replaced by the uber-sexy Colonel Virginia Lake (aka Wanda Ventham, who would become the mother of actor Benedict Cumberbatch), did Straker take more of a Captain Kirk-esque place in the proceedings. In the earlier episodes, like the ones novelized in Sporting Blood, he mostly stays at his desk, barking orders, pushing his underlings, and looking dour. 

Another thing I want to point out is that not only was UFO episodic, but the episodes were broadcast way out of order from how they were produced; I follow this viewing order when watching the series. But even that viewing order conflicts with this novelization, which places “The Dalotek Affair” before “Survival.” Meanwhile for both the suggested viewing order and this tie-in novel, “Computer Affair” occurs first, yet per the Pop Apostle site I linked to above, “Computer Affair” seems to take place later than most other episodes, given references in the episode to the year. At the end of “Computer Affair” a character takes up a bottle of wine, looks at the label, and remarks, “1984, what a year,” or something to that effect. Clearly this means 1984 is in the past, so it must be at least ’85 (or they just serve really cheap wine at this particular restaurant – or hell maybe wines in this “future” have expiration dates!). Meanwhile “The Dalotek Affair” is stated as taking place in 1981. 

Anyway. The first forty pages of Sporting Blood are devoted to “Computer Affair,” probably one of the slowest-paced episodes in the entire series. In this one Alec Freeman is tasked with figuring out what’s going on at Moonbase, and ultimately determines there’s a blossoming romance between busty Lt. Gay Ellis and burly Lt. Mark Bradley (Harry Baird), one of the Interceptor fighter pilots on the base. Ellis happens to be white and Bradley happens to be black, but this is not a concern – in fact it isn’t even mentioned – for SHADO. Rather, it’s that this romance could conflict with duty and cause havoc. In fact race isn’t even mentioned in the book until the final story novelized, “Survival,” where Bradley is offered the opportunity to command Moonbase and is concerned his skin color automatically prevents him from this honor – a concern just as quickly dashed as it is raised. 

It's pretty slow going. Robert Miall proves posthaste that he is more interested in the inner turmoil of his characters, particularly that of Alec Freeman, than he is in catering to a sci-fi action vibe. The majority of this opening section keeps Freeman in center stage, which makes his sudden disappearance later on in the novel a bit bumpy for the reader. Here he flies in to Moonbase, ponders how friggin’ hot all these Moonbase chicks are, and then tut-tuts the burgeoning romance between these two young people who are trapped up here on a base separated from the Earth on a mission so secret that can’t even tell their closest family members about it. When another astronaut is killed during a fight against a UFO (the entire sequence as well from Freeman’s perspective, even though he’s safe and sound on Moonbase), it’s back to Earth for some computer-assisted psychological testing of Ellis and Bradley. 

Here we get some of the shrill and unlikeable Straker, who alternately bosses Freeman around and then worries over a UFO that’s landed in the wilds of Canada. Even the ensuing “Shado mobile” action is relayed from Freeman’s perspective. But humorously, just as in the actual episode, the Ellis-Bradley romance is passed off as being okay, and indeed the two don’t even kiss or anything…nothing more than an exchange of words…and also the two characters never even appeared in an episode together again! Miall even makes their romance less of a thing than the episode did; the episode ends with an Earthbound Ellis and Bradley in a restaurant, and Bradley’s the one who makes the remark on the wine bottle that’s dated 1984. Miall cuts this scene from the novel. 

This could be because the dates don’t jibe; Miall inserts dialog in the opening of the novel that “Computer Affair” takes place in November of 1981; Lt. Ellis makes the announcement that Mark Bradley was born in November of 1952, “twenty-nine years ago,” which would go against the “1984” reference in the actual televised episode. But then, Miall himself goofs; the second story novelized here, “The Dalotek Affair,” is set in April of 1981 – the date mentioned both in the episode itself and in this novelization – even though Miall has the story taking place after “Computer Affair.” 

Speaking of which, we are sort of thrust directly into “The Dalotek Affair,” not to mention we are suddenly given a new main character: Colonel Paul Foster, virile alpha male type who really was the closest thing to the show’s action lead. Memorably portrayed by Micheal Billington (who apparently was frequently short-listed for the role of 007), Foster when we meet him is commanding Moonbase in place of Lt. Ellis, who we are informed is still Earthbound due to a cold she picked up. Of course, none of this is in the actual episode. This story is my favorite of the three here, and the episode is good as well, if for no other reason than the majority of it takes place on the ultra-groovy Moonbase. This one concerns a mining combine called Dalotek which has insisted on getting to work on the moon, unaware – as is everyone in the world – that UFOs are a constant threat up here. 

But just as with Freeman, we here are often reminded how damn horny Foster is up on Moonbase, with all these chicks! And again all the groovy décor and escapism is ignored, Miall instead focusing on the dourness and the boredom of being stuck in this isolated base on a dead world. This is the closest the book gets to risque, though; one of the Dalotek people is a sexy babe named Jane Carson, and Foster is able to start something up with her even though she’s not on Moonbase and he has to drive across the lunar surface to see her. Miall changes a bit from the episode, though; in that, we know from the start that Jane does not remember Foster due to an “amnesia pill” she’s been given, and the entire episode is a flashback on Foster’s part. Miall ignores that and shows it all as it happens, but with a darker edge – in the climax, Jane does not know she’s about to be given an amnesia pill (so as to forget about SHADO and UFOs), and Foster, about to bed Jane, feels just a little guilty about it. I mean it’s basically a UFO roofie. 

Otherwise “The Dalotek Affair” is slight on the action front, as most every episode of UFO is. Again it’s more down to the turmoil and the arguing, with Straker in “one of his moods” and ranting and raving on Earth and Foster blaming the Dalotek people for causing various SHADO crashes on the Moon. It turns out to be an alien plot, of course – and here Robert Miall cleverly ties things together with the ensuing story, “Survival.” This one also stars Foster, and also is primarily set on the groovy Moonbase; the opening of the episode is very colorful in this regard, with Foster and a pal hanging out in an ultramod rec room and getting drunk before a window blows and Foster’s pal dies via decompression. Miall has it that this pal is the replacement astronaut for the one killed in “The Computer Affair,” and also the alien who shoots out the window was dropped by the UFO that inexplicably came and went in “The Dalotek Affair.” 

Regardless, here’s the goof – when the dead astronaut is given a space funeral, it’s mentioned that the date is April, 1981. Meanwhile Miall had “Computer Affair” as occuring in November of ’81. At any rate this one’s plot is a prefigure of the ‘80s sci-fi movie Enemy Mine, concerning as it does Foster and the alien stuck together on the harsh terrain of the Moon and having to work together to survive. Before that though we have an angry Foster going Earthbound for a bit to seek out Jane Carson for a little nookie – only to be turned down cold, as she has no memory of him. (An incident which, as mentioned, occurs in the beginning of the televised “The Dalotek Affair.”) Then he goes over to his girlfriend’s place for some off-page lovin’, and here we get Miall’s one reference to the show’s groovy décor, Foster noting the “psychostyle painting” in his girlfriend’s apartment. 

Another interesting thing about “Survival” is that it was the last appearance of Harry Baird as Lt. Mark Bradley; any appearances after this were just recycled footage. What’s curious is that “Surival,” both the episode and here in the novel, features a go-nowhere subplot where Straker, thinking Foster is dead, offers Bradley the opportunity to command Moonbase. Bradley accepts…and does nothing but send out a Moon mobile that will ultimately discover Foster is still alive…and Foster will resume command of Moonbase. Bradley as Moonbase commander is never mentioned again, either in the novel or in the show, and given that Bradley wasn’t featured in any other episodes (other than recycled footage, that is!), it almost gives the indication that the dude got pissed off and quit. 

Anyway, “Survival” is also slow paced, and the Foster-alien journey across the Moon isn’t just rigorous for them; it’s boring as hell to watch, let alone read. As I say, UFO was incredibly static and probably would best be appreciated after downing a few tranquilizers. But man it looks great…though as mentioned many, many times now, the “look” of the show is the one thing Robert Miall fails to deliver. That said, he clearly intended to write another novelization at least: Sporting Blood ends with Straker and Freeman discussing their concerns about a SHADO agent named Roper (and Roper’s wife), and they also decide to send Paul Foster to the seabound SHADO vehicle Skydiver for “three months.” These are direct references to the episodes “Flight Path” and “Ordeal,” and presumably these would have been two of the stories that Miall would’ve novelized in a UFO #3.