Death Merchant #30: The Shambhala Strike

Death Merchant #30: The Shambhala Strike, by Joseph Rosenberger
October, 1978  Pinnacle Books

Wrapping up the “ancient aliens” trilogy that began in Hell In Hindu Land and continued in The Pole Star Secret, The Shambhala Strike turns out to be an okay entry in the Death Merchant series, one that takes it straight into the realm of science fiction. Here Joseph Rosenberger manages to combine his interest in mysticism, overly-described exotic locations (and its people’s customs), and endlessly-detailed firefights. Oh, and Camellion teams up with an ancient alien!

Having traveled to Bhutan, thirty miles from the Tibetan border, we meet Richard “Death Merchant” Camellion as he is once again leading a party of CIA agents and army commandos. Heading up “Operation Arrowhead,” in which the CIA has decided to look into the mystery of Agharta, the so-called underworld empire of myth, Camellion commands a group of redshirts, among them Vallie West, a Schwarzenegger-sized CIA commando who apparently has fought beside Camellion before. Believe it or not, there’s even a girl in the group, certainly a rarity for Rosenberger: Helena Banya, a gorgeous blonde Russian “sex-spy” who has recently defected to the West.

As usual Rosenberger shoehorns all kinds of exposition into the proceedings, but when it comes to detailing the “sexpionage” efforts of the USSR, who can complain? As Camellion broods over Helena, who of course he doesn’t trust, he thinks to himself for pages and pages how these Russian sex-spies are taught to use their bodies in various ways. Helena’s story has it that when she defected, she brought along a folder of classified Russian intel so as to prove her honesty; among the paperwork was material on how the Russians recently tried to find Shambhala, supposedly the gate to Agharta.

Since the Soviets are trying to find the place, then America wants in on it too, thus Camellion has been hired to venture into the treacherous Himalayas. He leads a party into the mountains, and once again Rosenberger serves up too many characters who run together, from an anthropologist turned CIA contractor named Paul Gemz to a handful of Bhutanese soldiers who do nothing but quake in superstitious fear throughout the novel. There are also a handful of Black Berets, humorously enough led by a dude named “Red,” which isn’t confusing at all.

Making an appearance here is the rampant footnoting the series was at times known for; The Shambhala Strike is stuffed to the gills with paragraphs of footnotes, most of them absurdly unnecessary. Rosenberger takes a page from John Rossmann, with characters discussing semantics in outright exposition, with Rosenberger often backing up their claims with footnotes. But it’s all so stupid and shoehorned in. For example, at one point while setting up their perimeter defenses in the mountains, Camellion says they’ll at least be as safe as the average homeowner, and in a footnote Rosenberger actually gives statistics on how many housebreaks there are per year in the US!

Much worse though is the exposition. As in Hell In Hindu Land, the characters here will discuss metaphysics at the most preposterous of times, like right after firefights or even when meeting alien beings(!). You’ll have these army commandoes discussing esoteric lore in the baldest of exposition, with footnotes backing up everything they say. And like every other Rosenberger novel, The Shambhala Strike is too damn long, coming in at 208 pages of small type. If Pinnacle had just gutted the expository stuff and removed the footnotes, they would’ve been left with a leaner novel that would’ve been more in keeping with their other action paperbacks.

The first half of the book is pretty trying, very much in the adventure fiction mold, as Camellion and team trek across the Himalayas and Rosenberger footnotes all kinds of uninteresting shit. In fact, the reader isn’t even prepared for the fact that The Shambhala Strike is tied in to those earlier two novels, as Camellion isn’t even here looking for any aliens. He just wants to get to the bottom of the Shambhala mystery, and more importantly wants to get there before the Chinese do. Cue lots of tension as the small party knows they are being followed by Chinese soldiers, just waiting for the hammer to drop.

The action scenes here, for the most part, aren’t written in the same wearying style typical of Rosenberger. They’re more like something out of a war novel, with Camellion laying explosives and blowing up his pursuers, rather than endlessly-detailed gunfights. Once the “riceballs” are out of the way, Camellion makes it into Shambhala, which turns out to be a massive city beneath the earth, the group traversing down miles of tunnels to the place. Here the novel becomes full-on sci-fi, with ancient beings known as “Goros” speaking to Camellion et al telepathically, welcoming them into their underworld kingdom, complete with its “sun” of artificial light, which is just like the one Camellion saw in Thuleandia.

The Goros are humans, but ones who are 18,000 years old. They claim to have been residents of China, before even the Chinese lived there, and they were recruited by the Inelqu, the alien “grays” Camellion refers to as “Sandorians.” We get a long backstory here, complete with egregious exposition and footnotes, in which the Goros relate that millennia ago the Inelqu came to Earth from their planet in the Pleiades galaxy, turned the apes into humans, and eventually got into a holocaustal war with another race of aliens, these ones called the Flimmms, who came from an alternate reality!

Now the Inelqu slumber, having fought their war with the Flimmms to a draw. The Goros, who are cloned into new bodies every few hundred years, are tasked with watching over them. They’ve drawn Camellion and team into Shambhala because the Goros know that the Chinese are on the way, and Shambhala must be kept secret. Since the Goros are forbidden to harm anyone, they ask Camellion if he will fight off the Chinese, of which there are a mere 460!! Camellion, as blasé as ever, makes use of the Goros’s “flying doors,” ie high-tech flying contraptions created thousands and thousands of years before by the Inelqu.

One of the more perfunctory action scenes ensues as Camellion and Vallie West fly overtop the Chinese, who have gotten into the caves which lead to Shambhala, and just throw explosives down at them. But still there are a hundred or so Chinese soldiers eft, and they have tanks – however conveniently enough, all mechanical and electronic gear is negated by the energy field which pulses around Shambhala’s massive dome. Camellion’s team is forced to retreat back into the underworld, where the Death Merchant insists that they wake one of the aliens, something the Goros have said they can only do in “emergencies.”

Here follows a scene that you’d never expect in the world of men’s adventure, as the Goros wake up one of the little aliens, who engages in several pages of expository dialog with Camellion and crew! The alien goes into further detail on the story the Goros told, blithely informing the humans that they were created by the Inelqu. Comically enough, Rosenberger has Camellion and the others seeing all kinds of religious allusions in what the alien says, like when it mentions that the Flimmm’s massive spaceship crashed to Earth, Camellion quotes a line from the Bible about Lucifer’s falling star. In other words, the catastrophic war between the Inelqu and the Flimmm gave us humans all of our myths, and Camellion further informs us that the Inelqu are the Nephilim of the Old Testament.

So, one thing you can’t say about The Shambhala Strike is that it short-shrifts on the “ancient aliens” angle, like The Pole Star Secret did. But then, given the endless exposition and stupid questions and “insights” from Camellion et al, you kind of wish Rosenberger had kept a little mystery to it. But after lots of talk, the alien (one of a hundred sleeping in Shambhala, but woken by the Goros because it was the one in control of the weapons) hands over a few laserguns, stating that it cannot take life and thus Camellion and team must do so.

The novel’s climatic action scene is more typical of Rosenberger’s work, with lots of excessive description and POV-hopping and redshirts getting killed as Rosenberger documents their name and where they’re from and other extranneous details. The laserguns decimate everything in their path, but still it comes down to regular gunplay, with Camellion wielding dual autoloading .44s. By battle’s end only he and a few of his party survive, among them Vallie West and Helena Banya, who you won’t be surprised to know just disappears in the second half of the novel and has no relevance to the plot. In fact you wonder why Rosenberger even created her in the first place. Oh, that’s right – to fill pages.

Now, you’d think an alien being just awoken from an 18,000-year slumber, who told you that his people created your ancestors, would perhaps rattle your worldview a little. But not the Death Merchant, who basically just says, “Well, that’s that,” and leads his surviving party out of Shambhala, which closes off forever behind them. And hell, Camellion’s already thinking about his next mission, which might take place in…North Korea!!! Obviously, such a mission would appear mundane to the average person, after he or she had just met an alien and seen a fantastical underworld kingdom, but not blank-slate Camellion.

While many installments broached sci-fi topics, I think this is the most out-there the Death Merchant series ever got. It’s basically an overly-long trawl in “ancient alien” theory, with lots of egregious detail about this and that tossed in for good measure. In other words, it’s about what you’d expect from Rosenberger, who is the only writer who could have his hero meet ancient aliens and not bat an eye. There is a cool unexplained bit, though, where the Goros telepathically tell Camellion they know he serves “the Lord of Light” and is protected by him.

As I read The Shambhala Strike I kept wishing that Rosenberger was still around; maybe we’d see him as one of the talking heads on History Channel’s super-stoopid Ancient Aliens show.

Massage Parlor

Massage Parlor, by Jennifer Sills
January, 1973  Ace Books

A ‘70s sleaze “true story” that sold millions of copies, Massage Parlor is an obvious cash-in on Xaviera Hollander’s trendsetting The Happy Hooker. Like that book this Ace PBO purports to tell the tale of a sex-loving gal who comes to big-city New York and finds fame and fortune establishing her own massage parlor.

Copyright Ace, the book is credited to Jennifer Sills, who informs us in the opening pages that this is just her working name. However, Sills was actually the pseudonym of a prolific ‘70s writer named Stephen Lewis. Ironically, Ace didn’t do much to hide the secret – a 1973 Ace publication from Lewis (Sex Among The Singles) openly proclaims him as “the author of Massage Parlor” on the cover. But the ruse apparently worked, as what few online comments you can find today are from people who long assumed that “Jennifer Sills” was a real person.

And to tell the truth, Lewis easily fools the reader into thinking that this is the legitimate account of a brothel worker. The voice he uses for Sills sounds just right, of a wide-eyed young woman who doesn’t have a mean bone in her body (so to speak), who fully and openly embraces the sexual revolution (so to speak). The novel is mostly made up of anecdotes and sort of “case histories” of the men (and few women) our narrator has had sex with during the course of her career. And “she” gets quite graphic in her descriptions, so here once again we have that strange conundrum where a male author writes the first-person POV of a female character who explicity describes her sex life.

There really isn’t much of a plot to Massage Parlor, although it opens with the makings of one, as Jennifer is arrested by a “john” just as he’s about to have sex with her. Turns out it’s a raid on the massage parlor in which she works, the Pleasure Palace in the Midtown district of New York, and the john is an undercover vice squad cop who has waited until the second before inserting himself into Sill’s eager body to jump up and tell her she’s under arrest!

Our girl though is able to talk herself out of it…and the cop, Tom, likes her so much that he gets her out of the parlor before the rest of the cops can get there. To pay him for his kindness she takes him back to her apartment for a freebie! This opening makes one think the story will follow from here, and while it does, it takes about a hundred pages to get back to this point. Instead Jennifer tells us about herself and how she got into the business – a wanna-be actress from Chicago, she found herself surrounded by thousands of other wanna-bes in New York, and eventually in desperate need of cash she answered an ad in the classifieds and became a masseuse at the Pleasure Palace.

Lewis doesn’t really bring to life sleazy ‘70s Times Square, like Len Levinson did so capably in Without Mercy, and truth to tell, beyond the general sleazy vibe, there aren’t many topical details to be found in Massage Parlor. In fact we don’t even get a description of what the Pleasure Palace looks like, though you’d expect it would be pretty grimy, given its location and the era. And also per Len’s comments on that time and place, the women to be found in those parlors were a pretty rough-looking bunch, but Jennifer Sills you won’t be surprised to know is a gorgeous and stacked blonde.

Our narrator blithely recounts her many, many sexual experiences in the Pleasure Palace, dealing with all manner of men, from “regular johns” who just want regular sex, to “freaks” who request all sorts of wacky shit. We also learn the many dollar-making schemes of NYC massage parlors, circa 1972, courtesy Dom, Jennifer’s mafia-aligned boss. We go from random “off the top of my head” reminisces, hopscotching around from Jennifer’s brief trip to Vegas as the personal masseuse for a mafia don, to her first day in the Pleasure Palace, where her first client (who of course was a good looking stud) took her through the ropes, telling Jennifer when she should ask him for money and etc.

Each chapter is basically a sex scene, as Jennifer tells us about some john who comes in for a rub, a blowjob, some sex, or whatnot, and the merriment that ensues. Along the way she gets hit on by another masseuse (Jennifer waiting until after the girl has gone down on her to inform her that she’s just not into the lesbian scene!), gets tips on how to invest her money, buys a new apartment due to her new wealth, and eventually decides to go solo, once the Pleasure Palace has been busted and shut down.

In what comes off today as hilariously unsafe, Jennifer starts putting ads in the classifieds and, after a mere phone call, will go to the homes of strangers to have sex with them! Yet it is presented as a super-smart business move, and fun to boot! When placing the ad she meets another masseuse, this one a guy: Tony, an “Italian stud” who also works solo and does both men and women (literally). In another element that comes off as hilariously unsafe today, Tony has unprotected sex with both genders on the job, yet he and Jennifer immediately hit it off and start their own thing. Tony also introduces her to amyl nitrate poppers, which they snort during one of the book’s most descriptive sex scenes. 

Eventually Jennifer, Tony, and Jennifer’s co-worker pal Darlene decide to start their own place, mostly thanks to vice squad cop Tom, who re-enters the picture and tells Jennifer he’s crazy about her. He also warns her how unsafe her classifieds ad is, telling her about a recent case in which an independent masseuse was murdered. Hence, a posh parlor in a better area would be safer. Not only that, but Tom offers to help fund the place!! So Jennifer finds a ritzy 6-bedroom penthouse on the East Side, which costs a bundle, and opens business as “Massagarama,” which I assume is intended to be read as “massage-a-rama,” but instead looks like the name of some Indian dude.

Advertising to a select clientele at much higher rates, Jennifer is able to rake in the cash. She hires a few more attractive women, with Tony helming the front desk and catering to whatever women (or bi-curious men) might happen to come in. (Jennifer also informs us that she and Tony are now “just friends,” due to her hot and heavy romance with Tom, whom she loves…) Jennifer herself is advertised as the parlor’s elite masseuse, and clients must inquire for her prices and availability.

Here Lewis delivers another long sex scene, even in the novel’s home stretch, as a Canadian hockey team comes in and Jennifer handles three guys at once! I should mention that Lewis doesn’t skimp on the descriptions, and Massage Parlor is not one of those novels that clouds its explicitness in metaphors and analogies. After this we get a last-minute plotline in which a few hoods try to extort Jennifer, but after a call to her handy cop boyfriend she sets up a sting which ends with the hoods arrested and Jennifer considered a hero for her efforts!

Suprisingly enough, this was actually the start of a veritable trilogy. The following year saw the publication of the unimaginatively-titled Massage Parlor, Part II, also from Ace, and in 1976 there was Jennifer’s Boys, from Fawcett Crest – given the publisher switch-up, I’m guessing the sales must’ve dried up. I’ve got them all, though, and look forward to continuing the adventures of “Jennifer Sills.”

The Penetrator #20: The Radiation Hit

The Penetrator #20: The Radiation Hit, by Lionel Derrick
May, 1977  Pinnacle Books

I think it’s time I took a long hard look in the mirror and realized that I’ve now read twenty volumes of The Penetrator. And by god I’ll keep on reading them until the bitter end. But man, this one, courtesy Chet Cunningham, is bland and listless for the most part – for whatever reason, Cunningham has been floundering in his past few contributions to the series, and I still think it’s because Pinnacle asked him to soften the edges of his psychotic Mark "Penetrator" Hardin.

The Radiation Hit capitalizes on so many mid-‘70s fads that it almost comes off like it was put together by a marketing department. The Smoky And The Bandit craze must’ve been in full force as Cunningham penned this volume, with all of the CB radio mania that ensued; you can just imagine “Convoy” blaring in the background. (Some of my earliest memories were of the CB craze, and given that I grew up on the West Virginia/Maryland border, you can just imagine how popular it was there in hicksville.)

The plot – and Cunningham, unlike his series co-writer Mark Roberts, never bothers to ground his installments in any sort of continuity – has Hardin in Colorado, where he’s chasing down leads in a possible nuclear factory assault. Another indication of how many books of the Penetrator I’ve read is that I started to experience déjà vu during The Radiation Hit; it’s very similar to an earlier Cunningham installment: #10: The Hellbomb Flight. Just as in that novel, this time Hardin’s up against scientists who have gone rogue due to their fears that technology will be used for the wrong purposes.

Cunningham is in fact more concerned with doling out CB lingo (the back of the book even features a handy CB glossary) and writing about big rigs than delivering a Penetrator novel, as Hardin scopes out a nuclear facility and gradually deduces that the terrorists, whoever they are, will try to steal the highly-radioactive nuclear reactor fueling rods in a tractor trailer. Meanwhile Hardin (somehow) has gotten information from an insider, a scientist named Dr. Richard Banscomb who is one of a trio of nuclear scientists who have quit the facility due to its unsafe practices, and gone public with it.

But as mentioned, the CB phenomenon and truck drivers are given so much focus that Hardin doesn’t even see any action for the first hundred pages, other than a few soft probes of a facility where he knocks out a guard or two with his sleep darts. The Penetrator isn’t really that bright this time out, either, easily falling for a trap set up for him when later he goes back to the same facility and steals the rig in which he thinks the stolen fuel rods have been stashed. Only later does he discover that he’s been duped with a duplicate rig.

Part of the reason for the minimal violence in the first half of the novel is that the villains themselves aren’t a bloodthirsty lot; instead, they’re a team of nuclear scientists who want to alert the world of the dangers of nuclear power. More topical ‘70s material is presented with reams of “dangers of radiation” articles Hardin reads as part of his research, all of it straight out of Silkwood. We gradually learn that these scientists have arranged the heist of the nuclear reactor fuel rods so as to use them to pollute a large flock of sheep with radiation, so the media and thus the world can see how dangerous uncontrolled nuclear power could be. 

Some of the lurid goofiness of earlier Cunningham installments returns with the appearance of Lisa Golden, wife of one of the rogue scientists; Hardin visits the notoriously-promiscuous young lady, posing as a reporter, and she immediately strips down and asks him to tie her up for a little S&M. This is actually yet another callback to The Hellbomb Flight, where Hardin was similarly propositioned out of the blue by yet another sex-starved woman, but Lisa doesn’t immediately drop out of the narrative. In fact she becomes the novel’s main villain, a bloodthirsty, dopesmoking, sex-crazed radical, and not until she becomes so does the book become enjoyable.

Lisa, seducing her elderly husband, convinces him to allow her to go on the late-night run in which the big rig will deliver the fuel rods to the farmland where the scientists will unleash their plan. But Lisa has her own plan – she gets the young co-driver to leave the rig with promises of sex, but instead leads him into a trap where her hippie-terrorist comrades use the poor bastard for knife-throwing practice! The other poor driver Lisa shoots several times in the head with her .25. After which she and her friends make off with the rig, smoke a few joints, and let Lisa’s jiggling breasts decide which turns to take on the road!

Now, well over a hundred pages in, we have the makings of a Penetrator novel. Lisa’s hippie terrorist comrades plan to blow up the trailer in some desolate patch of Colorado, killing all of the locals. They will then use this mass murder to inform the world of how dangerous radiation is. They send out CB messages to the media, informing them of their plans and making demands, however Lisa tells her followers that they will blow up the fuel rods and kill the populace regardless if their demands are met or not.

But as it turns out, Lisa’s followers are more “hippie” than “terrorist,” and Hardin so outmatches them that it’s not even funny. Instead of building toward an action-packed climax, Cunningham instead has Hardin sort of just drive around rural Colorado, trying to luck into wherever the trailer has been hijacked to – there’s a laughable bit here where Hardin tells himself there’s “no time” to involve the Feds, as by the time they got in gear the radiation would already be let loose. As if the government wouldn’t hurry through red tape in emergency situations.

But of course Hardin locates the area, not far from Colorado Springs, and deduces that the rig is hidden in a barn outside of a remote farm. He plays a cat-and-mouse game with the hippies which proves to be the novel’s climatic sequence, just walking around in the dark and looking inside the house, slowly drawing them out. One of them proves to be Hardin’s first kill in the novel (like 130 pages in!), and Cunningham makes you feel sorry for the poor bastard, who lies at Hardin’s feet and calls for his mother as he dies. Meanwhile Lisa, who has morphed into a guerrilla general or something, orders her minions about and threatens to shoot “cowards.”

The finale is very anticlimatic, with the hippies trying to wire the trailer to blow on the farm and escape. Even here Hardin doesn’t kill anyone, but instead plays on their nerves. He’s secretly dismantled the trailer from blowing, but the hippies don’t know it, and they think they only have minutes to get out of there. When the final confrontation between Hardin and Lisa comes, she instead proves her own undoing, accidentally ramming her getaway van into the trailer. Dazed from a concussion, she climbs into the rig, exposing herself to the massive doses of radiation and dying in seconds – and even here Cunningham makes you feel sorry for her, despite the fact that she’s a cold-blooded murderer who planned to kill off an entire town. 

And that’s that. Hardin calls Joanna Tabler, unseen this volume, and asks her if she’d like to spend a few weeks with him in Colorado Springs.  She says she can’t, so Hardin figures he’ll spend some time here alone fishing! It’s just a listless end for what is for the most part a listless volume of The Penetrator, Cunningham obviously enamored with the CB scene and doing his best to shoehorn his enthusiasm into what is a very underwhelming and passable installment.

Corporate Hooker, Inc.

Corporate Hooker, Inc., by Manning Lee Stokes
February, 1975  Pocket Books

One of the last novels Manning Lee Stokes published before his death in January 1976, Corporate Hooker, Inc. is copyright Lyle Kenyon Engel, the book packager who gave us The Baroness, John Eagle Expeditor, Richard Blade, and many other series, employing Stokes on most of them, the latter two in particular.

Given the title and the fact that it was published by Pocket, I figured this book might’ve been Stokes’s attempt at a Harold Robbins-style trashy novel. And while Corporate Hooker, Inc. certainly is trashy at times, and definitely lurid, it’s more of a crime-suspense tale (a very dark one at that). It appears that at this time Engel was branching out into non-series crime novels, and Corporate Hooker, Inc. was one of them. However the title turns out to be very misleading – I’m assuming as with most other Engel publications, Stokes was given a title and a concept and just did his own thing.

But if it didn’t bear his name, I never would’ve guessed this was the work of Manning Lee Stokes. Other than the occasional stentorian narrative tone or the tendency to pad out the pages, Stokes’s style here is nothing like anything else I’ve read by him. It moreso comes off like Herbert Kastle, particularly Kastle’s mid-‘70s work, like Cross-Country. More particularly, though, I’m betting the novel’s tone and style was inspired moreso by the rough and crude 1970s work of Mickey Spillane.

Anyway, as mentioned, the title is misleading. The novel is actually about the horrific murder of a street-level hooker, and how her death threatens to compromise a well-laid plot to blackmail various bigwigs. It takes a while for the reader to learn this; Stokes instead starts off with the sleaze, as we meet an unfortunate young New York City streetwalker named Rita moments before she is horrifically murdered in graphic and unsettling detail. This murder, which occurs in the first few pages of the book, is in fact so unsettling that not only does it outdo anything in Bronson, it actually made me consider not continuing with the book! 

Apparently Rita has attempted to blackmail someone, and word has come down through various channels that she needs to suffer a little. Not die, but suffer. However the two hoodlums who end up with the job are such a pair of sick fuck-ups that they end up accidentally killing her. My friends, this sequence pushes the buttons and then some, as one of the hoods, a sadistic bastard who first makes Rita blow him, proceeds to find a broken broomstick and uses it in the most nightmarishly unpleasant manner possible. The sequence actually raises hackles.

Our nominal protagonist is Detective Tom Banning, a mountain-sized mass of muscle who was once a hero cop but has now been disgraced to serving in “Siberia” (aka Brooklyn) due to problems with alcoholism. Banning is a pure ‘70s pulp cop, taking bribes and graft with ease and working on the side for “The Outfit” (as Stokes, Richard Stark style, refers to the Mob throughout). On the crime scene the next morning, where the cops have discovered Rita’s partially-burned corpse (the hoods having jammed her into a warehouse furnace), Banning is shocked to discover that he actually knows this girl, or at least has seen her before.

Not that Banning tells his superiors; instead, he realizes this dead hooker once had business with Banning’s ex-wife, Ruth Watterston, the 31 year-old Director of PR for Magna Media, Inc, but a high-class madame in all but name. Ruth, “as sharp and amoral as they came,” per Banning’s opinion, oversees the good ship Saracen, a pleasure yacht which plies New York harbor and plays host to publishing world bigwigs, catering to their kinks with a new stable of high-class whores each cruise. (I’ve already checked for it on Expedia, but no luck.)

Ruth is an interesting character – beautiful but merciless, she cares only for material wealth. This is the reason she left Banning so long ago, and due to her business acumen she has risen far in Magna Media, Inc. Plus she’s been screwing the CEO, which always helps. This is Vincent Moretti, one of the mob’s “new generation,” a young Ivy Leaguer who deals solely in the legal elements of the Outfit’s various interests. Magna is Moretti’s jewel, a publishing house that deals mostly in sleaze and porn (their biggest seller a slick mag called Mister which outsells Playboy and the like), but he’s looking to branch out into respectability with the acquisition of Horton House, a literary giant that is on the verge of bankruptcy.

These three characters – Banning, Ruth, and Moretti – have an interesting dynamic, and Stokes constantly plays it up. Despite his impressive bulk and his tendency to bust heads, Banning is a mouse when it comes to Ruth, who can twirl him around her finger. Or as Stokes so memorably puts it, “There were about five billion pussys in the world and he had to get hooked on one.” Banning leaves the crime scene to visit Ruth, earning his keep as one of Moretti’s informants as he delivers early word that the dead girl will no doubt soon be uncovered as once having worked for Ruth and Magna Media.

The opening horrors dispensed with, Stokes proceeds to pad out the tale (the novel runs to 253 pages of smallish print) in his customary style, with the various characters plotting and planning. Stokes sleazes it up once in a while, like when Banning and Ruth get cozy and she marvels once again over the massive “length and diameter” of him (Banning’s size – in all aspects – is constantly hammered home). Gradually the shape of the tale comes together, and it all hinges on an elaborate blackmail scheme Moretti and Ruth cooked up the year before. (The novel takes place in early November, 1973, by the way.)

We learn that Moretti has secretly wired Saracen with the latest in audio-visual bugging equipment, so that all the kinky activities in the opulent staterooms are recorded for later blackmailing. Moretti has used this to commit various swindles, like using the incriminating photos of a pair of incestuous siblings to steal away their paper mills. His method is to anonymously mail his victims slides taken from the hidden cameras, and later demand payment. Of course, why none of these people would suspect that the ship, what with its revolving stable of hookers, is some sort of blackmailing scheme is something Stokes leaves unexplored. 

The murdered girl, Rita, was a hooker Ruth employed just once, on a cruise the previous spring. It turns out that she was trying to blackmail one of the Saracen’s more esteemed guests, John Vance. The Saracen is scheduled to disembark on its last voyage of the year on November 3rd, the day Rita’s body has shown up, and Moretti and Ruth are concerned that this will blow the lid off everything – they’ve spent the past year taping and filming their guests in a variety of intimate acts, all of it working up to this final voyage, when they have the most important “guests” on board.

The biggest problem with Corporate Hooker, Inc. is that it’s just damn boring. After the opening sadism, the novel just sort of becomes this character study kind of thing, and nothing much happens. For example, the two hoods who killed the hooker – Stokes doesn’t even bother detailing their fates. We’re just informed that the lower-level boss who hired them hunts them down so as to kill them, permanently shutting their mouths. And the actual Saracen cruise is rendered to one single chapter, a tepid one at that, in which Stokes provides a view into each stateroom, usually delivering the lurid details, like a fat chick masturbating(!) and Ruth engaging in a little lesbiana with one of the hookers.

Instead the novel just comes off as listless as Stokes pads out the pages. Rather than more exploitative stuff we get long sequences of Banning going around and trying to figure out what Rita was up to that got her killed. Eventually he discovers that it was because she was attempting to blackmail a wealthy pedophile named Jon Vance, and further Banning learns that it was a psychiatrist named Roger Draik who was behind the scheme – Draik, acting as Moretti’s go-to doctor for the medical and psychological check-ups of the hookers used onboard Saracen, was thus privy to both the girls and the millionaires onboard.

Even the finale is anticlimatic, with Vance just jumping off the ship before Saracen returns to port, thus conveniently disposing of himself – not to mention rendering most of the plot moot. Instead Stokes focuses on Banning and Moretti, with the latter suddenly deciding that he’s going to kill off Banning. So Banning goes about leaving evidence which will expose Moretti and the Saracen wiretapping scheme, and talks Ruth into leaving town with him immediately, to go live in Mexico. But Banning, the old lush, can’t deny himself one last drink, which leads him into a bender where he eventually decides to go confront Moretti face to face for a violent climax.

Stokes’s writing is good, delivering the usual character introspection and world building. But his tendency to page-fill really hampers the novel. He page-filled in the other novels of his I’ve read, but at least those were shorter. With Corporate Hooker, Inc. you just wish he would’ve come up with something a little more compelling to fill these 253 pages – not to mention that he would’ve delivered a plot more in-line with the title of the book. I mean, I wanted to read a novel about a corporate hooker, dammit!

Justin Perry: The Assassin #1

Justin Perry: The Assassin #1, by John D. Revere
February, 1983  Pinnacle Books

With a first volume nearly as weird as the final one was, the Justin Perry series gets off to an expectedly-unsettling start, detailing the origin story of our unibrowed, curly-haired, sexually demented hero, who as we’ll recall is a top assassin for the CIA who gets off on killing people. This is surely one of the more unusual men’s adventure series to ever be published, which means of course that I like it.

As with the final installment, this one is heavy on the literary stuff, the word painting and the descriptive flourishes, and short on the action, thus belying Hal Bennett's (aka “John D. Revere”) literary background. In fact, Bennett isn’t at all concerned with the action aspects of men’s adventure fiction, still finding a way to focus on the psycho-sexual elements even when Justin gets into fights. Plus he could care less about realistic weapons description and the like. For example, Justin’s favored gun is a .38 revolver, which somehow not only has a safety, but can also be equipped with a silencer!

But as mentioned this first novel details Justin’s origin story. The book in fact opens with many pages of background detail, as Justin talks to an old man in Germany and flashes back to three years earlier, before he became “Justin Perry,” CIA assassin. We learn that his name was originally Roger Johnson, and he was a 31 year-old colonel in the Air Force, married for 11 years to a ravishing lady named Bambi; together they had a ten year-old son, also named Roger. This background gets a lot of fleshing out through the novel, with Bennett building up several long-simmer mysteries about what happened to Roger in Vietnam, how exactly his best friend died there, and who exactly Justin’s friend Bob Dante is.

All that’s the flashback; the central plot of Justin Perry #1 has our freakish “hero” in Germany, where he’s been summoned by the elderly Dr. Aaron Henkel, a Holocaust survivor who has a strange story to tell.  Henkel relays a horrible story of how his family and friends were killed by the Nazis during the war. Henkel describes how his longtime best friend, Heydrich Kroll, was also a prisoner at Belsen, and was publically strangled by the Nazis as an example to the other prisoners. But now, over 40 years later, Henkel has discovered that Kroll is still alive, going about under an assumed name and living in another part of Germany, and that Kroll was a Nazi collaborator.

Now Henkel, through Justin’s handler “The Old Man,” has contacted Justin Perry so as to offer him the job of assassinating Wilhelm Kappelheimer, aka Heydrich Kroll. I should mention that throughout Henkel’s long story, Justin has either been flashing back to his own past or checking out the hot blonde at the table behind him. We all remember how sex-obessed Justin Perry is, don’t we? And the woman only serves to encourage him, casting salacious looks at him with her “slut-green eyes.” (I admit, I never knew that green eyes denoted sluttishness, but I’ll be sure to keep it in mind!)

The lady asks Justin back to her hotel, where they go right at it. But she has a sadomasochistic streak, begging Justin to slap her and etc. It’s obviously a trap – and to his credit Justin himself knows this – but it gets even weirder when, right as he’s climaxing, Justin sees a knife-wielding attacker leap from the shadows. As Justin pulls away from the girl the assassin accidentally stabs the woman in the chest, and she gets off on it, jamming the knife deeper into herself as she orgasms and dies! Meanwhile Justin, upset over the fact that he’s spilled most of his seed on the carpet(!), merely clubs the now-frantic assassin in the head and ties him up, leaving the hotel room.

I still say this series was begun with the ending already in Bennett’s mind; as we’ll recall, #5: Stud Service featured the revelation that Justin Perry had been chosen by the Halley Society as a stud whose sperm would be cryogenically preserved to sow several generations of descendants. That book was filled with the importance of sperm in general and Justin’s in particular; this first installment too features that theme, with Justin thinking it’s “such a fucking waste” that his seed dribbles onto the floor as he pulls out of the woman immediately after orgasming, so as to fend off the attacker. Of course, this could all be moreso indication of Bennett’s own foibles, but given the revelations of the final volume it just seems like well-planned foreshadowing.

The twisted stuff dispensed with (for now), Bennett delivers yet more literary-heavy backstory, with a long sequence set three years before in which “Colonel Roger Johnson” lost both his wife, his parents, and his son on one crazy day. Actually all of them died except for the kid, who was reduced to a catatonic wreck, now ensconced in an upscale sanitarium in New York. Justin’s wife, a government systems analyst, was gunned down on the streets of Washington, D.C., immediately after discovering that the many recent “computer glitches” which almost started a nuclear war were in fact intentionally set to go off. This discovery lead to not only her murder, but the eradication of Justin’s entire family, and was the incentive which caused him to become a CIA assassin.

But again, all this stuff is playing out in Justin’s mind as he continues on with the Henkel job – the blonde and the would-be assassin were sent by Heydrich Kroll, something Justin is now certain of, given that the blonde turns out to be the much-younger wife of “Wilhelm Kappelheimer.” Flying on the dead woman’s ticket to Madrid, Justin finds himself on a plane filled with priests and nuns. And guess what, moments after arriving in Madrid he is knocked out and taken captive by those same priests and nuns, who turn out to be members of a SPECTRE-like organization of evil.

Here follows more sickly weird stuff where Justin is chained up while a bunch of nude and ugly women cavort around him, half-heartedly licking and sucking him in one of the strangest forms of “torture” you’ll ever read about. And meanwhile a nude Heydrich Kroll watches all while his simperingly gay chaffeur sits beneath him, licking his feet! Oh, and Justin’s pal Bob Dante is here, also tied up and being “pleasured” by these unattractive women; Dante informs Justin that these freaks are minions of SADIF (the Sons And Daughters In Freedom), a worldwide conspiracy with its roots in Nazi Germany.

The problem with Justin Perry #1 is that it’s just overwritten and ultimately dull. The belabored flashbacks hamper things, and Justin comes off like a fool – I mean, he gets picked up by some random chick while his wife is being murdered on the streets of DC, and Justin never once suspects her of anything. In fact we’re informed that this woman, Julie Greer, has in the past few years become the only person Justin trusts! However the “surprise” reveal of her membership in SADIF is so anticlimatically handled that you wish Bennett hadn’t even brought it up. For that matter, Bennett treads a very campish line here; throughout the novel, anytime a character is exposed as an agent of SADIF, he or she immediately becomes the cliched Bond-esque villain, spouting insane rhetoric and acting cartoonishly evil.

The novel limps to a close with Justin flying back and forth from the Bahamas to Madrid, desperately trying to deliver a document to SADIF in the allotted time, or else his son dies. Here we see that practically everyone Justin has ever met or known is secretly in SADIF, including Henkel, and oh, the dead sadomasochistic chick has a twin sister who’s just as beautiful and is also into getting beaten up during sex, something Justin discovers during an “interrogation” on an airplane. Clad in a skin-tight black commando outfit just like the one he wears on the series covers, Justin and a comrade storm the SADIF headquarters in Madrid in one of the more anticlimatic finales ever, Justin armed with something called a “Magnum .57 automatic pistol.” Bennett doesn’t do very well with the action scene, as ever focused more on the psycho-sexual aspects.

As expected, the book’s tone is just damn weird, both homoerotic and homophobic at the same time; Justin we’ll recall becomes sexually excited when killing, and throughout the novel he’s afraid men are about to hit on him (and they do, several times, including his pal back in ‘Nam, who hilariously enough hits on Justin seconds before he’s blown up by the VC). The few sex scenes are explicit, but moreso in a literary style, but still very weird. As Zwolf points out in his great review, one also can’t help but wonder over how all the women Justin meets want to get beaten up while having sex.

Justin Perry #1 builds to a happy ending, with Justin reunited with his son, his wife being avenged, and the current SADIF plot prevented. However judging from future volumes Justin will tangle with them again, SADIF becoming the recurring villains of the series. Strange, then, that they weren’t even featured in #5: Stud Service, in which the Halley Society was outed as Justin’s main enemy. Also, I don’t recall Justin’s son being mentioned in that final volume.

Anyway, while it wasn’t as twistedly enjoyable as Stud Service, Justin Perry #1 still had enough weird stuff going for it, even if most of it was obscured by the heavy-handed prose and psychological probing.

The Sex Surrogates

The Sex Surrogates, by Michael Davidson
February, 1973  Signet Books

The “sex surrogate” story was a trash fiction subgenere of the early ‘70s, cashing in on the recently-published Masters & Johnson sex studies. Publishers released a glut of paperbacks, most of them posing as nonfictional accounts of women hired by various sex research clinics to screw sexually-troubled men in need of help. Of course, the majority of these books were straight-up fiction. Even Herbert Kastle wrote one, the pseudonymous Surrogate Wife, which I’ll be reading soon. 

What’s unusual about The Sex Surrogates is that Signet Books made no pretense of the book being “true;” they clearly labeled it as fiction. Strangely though, the book is written identically to those pseudo-nonfiction books, coming off as an academic tome published by the Colorado-based Foundation for Sex Research, compiled by chairpersons Dr. James Walters and Mrs. Rita Cummings(!). Michael Davidson is credited as a “well-known sex article writer” who acted as the editor. (For that matter, Davidson might be a real person, as the book is copyright him and not Signet.)

At first I was afraid this meant the book would come off as dry and “scholarly,” and while that’s for the most part true, Davidson still trashes it up with lots of fun stuff, from men and women screwing robots to a few explicity-rendered scenes about people trying to overcome their sexual hangups with a little help. The book is presented as the “raw tapes” of four of the Foundation’s “most unusal surrogates:” three women and one man. In this way the novel comes off like a series of first-person short stories, with each surrogate detailing his or her first case.

First up is Tracy, unusually enough not only a wife but also the mother of three children! Our editors have made it clear that Tracy is a special case indeed, and that they were initially against the idea of using a surrogate who was not only still married, but had children to boot. But Tracy is a full-on ‘70s swinger; she and her husband have a very open relationship (her husband’s even overjoyed with the fact that Tracy occasionally screws his best friend!!), and thus they were excited over the prospects of Tracy becoming a surrogate.

One thing that sets the Foundation for Sex Research apart is that it focuses on single people with sexual hangups; apparently all those other clinics solely dealt with married couples. And also the novel is set up as if it’s the Foundation’s response to those critics who have claimed that it’s just a house of prostitution. Like a regular Robert H. Rimmer, Davidson peppers the novel with quotations from various academic tomes (and even includes a “selected reading list” of similarly-themed publications), so we get lots of opening detail on how the Foundation has come under fire in various circles.

But Tracy is a unique case even by the Foundation’s standards. After contacting the Foundation about becoming a surrogate, she goes through a battery of phsyiscal and mental exams. Once passed she moves on to the good stuff – the sexual examination. This entails the robot-screwing mentioned above, as Tracy is hooked up to various “alpha wave” monitors while she pleasures herself with a robotic cock! Apparently this is Dr. Walters’s “orgasm machine,” which measures the power of a woman’s climax. Tracy is such a nympho that, despite not abiding by the Foundation’s request that she abstain from sex for 24 hours before the test, she still short-circuits the machinery with the power of her orgasms, like a regular Barbarella. 

Having proven herself as a more-than-worthy sexual surrogate, Tracy is assigned her first case: Bob, a meek but handsome 27 year-old who suffers from “secondary impotency” thanks to a domineering mother and a shrewish ex-wife. Tracy gamely informs us that she goes out on her first date with Bob wearing “hippie beads,” a “pekaboo pantsuit,” and magenta bodypaint. You’ve gotta love the early ‘70s. The storyline however follows the clinical nature of the novel’s tone, with Tracy carefully following the doctor’s orders as she goes on dates with Bob and then takes him back to their room at the Foundation (which is audio taped for later study), gradually preparing him for eventual, full-blown sex via massages and other stuff.

This story spirals into strange territory as Bob becomes obsessed with Tracy, who succeeds in getting him to beat his problems with impotency. But when Bob can no longer abide by the Foundation’s stipulations that they wait to have sex, he breaks into the files, finds Tracy’s real name and address, and bursts into her home one night (while her husband’s conveniently out of town and her children are upstairs sleeping) and rapes her! And you know it’s the ‘70s when Tracy royally gets off on it, the only sour note being when one of her kids comes downstairs and nearly breaks up the festivities. Also, this rape is seen by the Foundation as a huge sign of the program’s success!!

Next up we have Maria, who becomes a surrogate once she’s discovered her husband is gay – it’s her wish that, if she is paired up with another homosexual man, she’ll learn through the Foundation how to “fix” him, so she can do the same to her husband. This story isn’t as enjoyable as the one before, mostly because too much of it focuses on Maria’s sad story, how she was so bummed to discover that her husband digs other men, but how she gradually learned to accept it. In fact, too much of the stories are devoted to backstory, but Maria's especially just seems to go on and on. 

Eventually Maria becomes a surrogate, and she is hooked up with Paul, a gay man who wants to “go straight,” as it were, and after a lengthy period Maria succeeds. Here we have yet another appearance of “Dr. Walters’s sex machine,” which is used to anally stimulate Paul(!) to the point where he’s able to have sex with Maria. This story, like the one before, ends with group sex, as Maria and Paul go to work on Maria’s husband! (The previous story by the way ended with Tracy, Bob, Tracy’s husband, and Bob’s new girlfriend all going at it in a “happy ending.”)

The third story sees a male surrogate, John; we are informed that male surrogates are quite unusual, and typically come from medical backgrounds, getting into the program for “research” purposes. (Sure they are.) John is especially unusual in that he’s 24 and a virgin, and he’s hidden his virginity from Dr. Walters and Mrs. Cummings. His first case sees him administering help to Sandy, a pretty young girl who is unable to enjoy sex, due to having been gang-raped at a young age.

This story is actually somewhat touching at times, with Sandy distrustful of men in general, and slowly learning that not all of them are scum. Not that Davidson doesn’t once again serve up some ol’ robot-screwing, as believe it or not John, during his testing to become a surrogate, has sex with an acual robot girl! At least, that’s how it’s described, with false but realistic skin and hair and various wires and gizmos connected to its nether regions. John humps it, realizing it’s his first time. It’s all pretty crazy, and it’s too bad the whole book isn’t as wild as these parts; instead, the author prefers to maintain a clinical, pseudo-scholarly tome.

The final story returns to the more trashy vibe of the first. Gail is our narrating surrogate, and like John she’s kept a secret from the Foundation; namely, that she’s a masochist, and gets off on being beaten around. In a preface the doctor explains that Gail was mistreated by her dad, who made it clear that he wanted a boy, and eventually she learned that the only way to incur any attention from him was to piss him off. Thus she now subconsciously tries to piss off the men in her life, so they will give her “attention.” Currently she’s dating a lunk named Bruce, who enjoys demanding that Gail blow him when he isn’t slapping her around.

Gail’s case is Scott, a young married man who suffers from premature ejaculation. As with the John/Sandy story before, this one entails Gail patiently working with Scott, trying to break down his defenses until they can have full-on sex. Also like the previous story, Davidson works in an emotional element, as through the caring and good-natured Scott Gail realizes that there are nice guys out there who will give her attention without her consorting to piss them off or whatever. Finally she breaks it off with Bruce and gets engaged to some nice dude. Unfortunately, this story doesn’t feature any robot screwing.

As mentioned, Davidson sticks with the clinical tone throughout most of the book. In each and every story there are moments where Dr. Walters or Mrs. Cummings will deliver blocks and blocks of expository dialog about reproductive organs and sexual problems and whatnot, so again it seems clear that Davidson was either a doctor (or doctoral student) himself, or that he really was going for the “true story” approach with The Sex Surrogates. But for whatever reason Signet decided to show its hand and acknowledge that the book was pure fiction.

Shark Fighter

Shark Fighter, by Nicholas Brady
No date stated (1976), Belmont-Tower Books

One of Len Levinson's more elusive novels, Shark Fighter was published under the pseudonym “Nicholas Brady,” which was a house name at Belmont-Tower (who couldn’t even be bothered to put a publication year on the book). According to Len, BT editor Peter McCurtin came up with the concept, of a man fighting sharks for cash, and Len ran with it. 

As Justin Marriott mentioned in his article “Labyrinth” in Paperback Fanatic #27, Shark Fighter is so scarce that Abebooks.com usually doesn’t even have any copies listed. So safe to say, it’s a hard novel to find; I was lucky to find my own copy online at a nice price, after random searching over the years. There’s also no e-book edition, at least not yet. This puts me in a strange position, as I’m about to rave about Shark Fighter -- I loved it, and it was one of my favorite novels yet by Len.

To be sure, this novel has absolutely no pretensions. It’s just a straight-up pulp tale about an ex-Navy frogman named Sam Taggart who accepts an offer to fight two sharks on live television for two million dollars. But man, the novel’s a lot of fun, and this lack of pretense just adds to the charm. Taggart is part of the reason; like most every other Levinson protagonist, Taggart is a no-nonsense guy who is focused on two primary things: women and money. Having served his time in ‘Nam, he now enjoys life as a self-described “beach bum” on the fictional Caribbean island of Makura, where he hunts sharks for a living.

Len capably captures the beach-read aesthetic of trash fiction. I almost wished I could book my next vacation in the Republic of Makura, which we are informed lies midway between Cuba and the Bahamas and measures 80 miles long and 20 miles wide. Here Taggart lives basically an idyllic life as he voyages around on his motorboat, smokes copious amounts of island-grown “ganja,” and bangs whatever female he can talk into bed. He’s chosen to make his living in this dangerous profession, hunting sharks and selling them to the chefs of the island’s many five-star hotels. Taggart doesn’t even make much on the deal, and acknowledges to himself that he basically has a death wish. He just likes to risk his life killing sharks.

There’s a fair bit of shark fighting in the opening pages, as we see Taggart on a regular work day, putting on his Scuba gear and taking on various sharks with a speargun that’s equipped with explosive-tipped spears. Once he’s sold the dead sharks to his various hotel contacts, he gets to his other primary pursuit: chasing tail. Taggart sets a precedent for a Levinson protagonist who scores with the most ladies, racking up an impressive eight women over the course of this slim novel. And he only has to pay for a few of them.

First there’s Susan, a “mulatto showgirl” Taggart basically uses whenever he’s feeling randy; Taggart is soon warned by the Police Chief of Makura to stay away from her, as a high-ranking official is courting her. Susan doesn’t factor into the novel much, and at first I thought the main female protagonist would be Pamela Thompson, a young blonde vacationing from America who repeatedly throws herself at Taggart, who keeps brushing her off for being too young. But then Pamela too is dropped from the narrative; given the frequency of her appearances in the first half of the novel I thought she was going to return at some point, but it never happened.

It turns out gradually that Taggart’s top girl is Alison Dandridge, a dropdead gorgeous brunette who has often been featured modeling in Vogue magazine. Taggart sees her one night and falls into instant lust. This entails several scenes of Taggart putting the moves on Allison, who is a self-proclaimed “whore” who will only sleep with men who have money. Hence she has no interest in beach bum Taggart, despite being attracted to him. Allison is vacationing here with Bob Jones, a rotund and balding entrepreneur who has millions of dollars, and who eventually makes possible the novel’s main event.

The first half of Shark Fighter hopscotches around various plots. First there’s the already-mentioned deal with Pamela, after which Len moves on by introducing Hector and Maria Ramirez, a married couple who turn out to be Cuban gangsters. Hector approaches Taggart with a job: a few thousand dollars for Taggart to venture into a shark-infested part of the ocean to retreive a certain box which was lost in a shipwreck. Taggart instantly deduces that this box contains pure heroin, and thus ups his payment.

This entire sequence is pretty bloodthirsty, with the trio going out on Taggart’s boat, locating the box, and instantly being attacked by Mafia goons who come after them on faster boats. A fierce firefight ensues, with Taggart gearing up and taking on the mobsters underwater, knifing them and shooting at their boats with his explosive-tipped spears. What with the mobster villains and the tropical setting, it all comes off like Len’s earlier Sharpshooter installment Night Of The Assassins. But unlike Johnny Rock, Taggart has no particular relish for “tasting Mafia blood,” and tries to get away from the bloody scene without being discovered.

Taggart is an interesting character to say the least; he’s all id, and throughout the novel he barges from one confrontation to the next, all while pondering “how often it is so difficult to be a human being.” He escapes going to Makura’s notorious prisons by giving the heroin-addicted Police Chief the box, but immediately thereafter runs afoul of the cops again by instigating a barfight, Taggart storming away from his latest spurning by Alison and asking a trio of American women if they’d like to have an orgy! Taggart celebrates his freedom from jail (again granted by the complacent Police Chief) by going to a posh cathouse and ordering three women for the night – “one white, one black, and one Oriental.”

Beach bum Taggart has money to blow, now, thanks to Bob Jones, who has approached Taggart with his own offer – for Taggart to fight a shark on live television, for one million dollars. Taggart in his usual manner tells Jones to make it two sharks for two million. Jones gives Taggart a few hundred thousand for downpayment, and Taggart as mentioned spends it on the three hookers, though it must be said that Len doesn’t get too explicit in the ensuing orgy. In fact the sex scenes, while frequent, are rarely graphic in Shark Fighter, at least when compared to some of Len’s other novels, like The Bar Studs or Where The Action Is. 

The anything-goes spirit of the first half of the novel gradually leaves once Taggart’s on his way to becoming rich. The biggest change is Alison, who not-so-coincidentally is suddenly interested in him, even coming over to his newly-appointed hotel room in the Regency and offering herself to him. She claims she’s in love and that it has nothing to do with the fact that Taggart’s now famous and will soon be rich (that is, if he survives). Taggart doesn’t believe her – not that this stops him from screwing her. Eventually she even leaves Bob Jones, moving in with Taggart and thoroughly messing up his head; Len works in a “doomed lovers” storyline between Taggart and Alison, sometimes to the detriment of the novel’s forward momentum.

But as Taggart finds himself granting more and more interviews (set up by PR man Len Robinson, surely Len’s reference to himself and his earlier PR days as seen in his later novel Hype!), he becomes more and more famous – and disaffected. The novel, despite being an obvious cash-in on Belmont-Tower’s part on Jaws (which Len slyly references twice in the novel), almost comes off like Rocky, with Taggart downward spiralling as the big date gets closer and closer. Getting drunk and high every day and skipping his rigorous workout schedules, Taggart instead takes to fighting with Alison, calling her a whore and tramp and insisting that she’s only with him because she wants his two million dollars.

In fact, as the pages grow more thin the reader wonders when in fact this Great Shark Fight is even going to happen. And even in the home stretch, Len focuses more on Taggart’s internal plight with a drunken blowout that sees him going once again to a whorehouse – where he’s abducted by a group of communist terrorists. Instead of being a plot divergence, Len uses this as a means to get Taggart more involved in his fate; whereas before he could care less if he lived or died, now he will give his two million dollars to the People’s Freedom Party of Makura, to help them escape the tyranny of corrupt President Bomack.

Finally the big day arrives, and Taggart like a regular Rocky Balboa has gotten in fighting shape at the last moment – and just like Rocky it’s only after he’s reconnected with his number one lady. After various melodramatic breakdowns and spats, Alison and Taggart make amends before Taggart gets in the pool to fight the sharks; but I do love how Len eases up on the sap by having Alison offer Taggart a few snorts of coke! The actual shark fighting event only lasts a few pages, with Taggart armed with various spears and his trusty bayonet going up against two tiger sharks.

Len rightly understands how anticlimatic this is, given that Taggart makes his living, you know, fighting sharks, so he ups the ante by having the Police Chief set two more tiger sharks into the pool. Due to his informants the Chief knows that Taggart, upon winning, plans to make an anti-President Bomack speech to the reporters of the world who are here covering this international event, and thus this speech must be prevented. Once Taggart has easily dispensed of the first two sharks, the Chief’s people “accidentally” let loose two more sharks into the pool.

So the finale sees a greatly-outnumbered Taggart desperately fighting for his life. The sharks have been starved for a week, Taggart has smeared blood on his body to attract them, and he’s down to just a few weapons. Spoiler Warning (and I’m only giving it away because the novel’s so damn scarce): Taggart lives, but not after suffering heavy damage, including the loss of his left eye. However, Alison really is there for him, and claims she’s going to stay with him “forever,” even though he has given away his two million dollars as promised. The end.

Len fills the novel with those topical ‘70s details I enjoy so much, with people sitting on shag carpets while smoking high-grade dope and listing to reggae music on quadraphonic stereo systems. Taggart himself has a fondness for getting ripped on that native ganja and listening to Pink Floyd records, which I thought was pretty cool. Beyond that though the novel just brims with that ‘70s feel I have always been so enamored with, from the fashions of the jet-set to the liberal attitudes toward sex and drugs.

And as mentioned Len really captures the whole beach-read feel. Part of the novel’s thrust is that Taggart’s life falls apart when he comes into money; he’s much happier in the more plot-free early half of the novel, and Len brings to life the whole tropical feel, with Taggart living on his boat, fishing for fresh seafood, and eating roasted lobster and coconuts by the fire in a lagoon. Taggart loses all of this once he accepts Bob Jones’s offer, and thus is separated from his idyllic “beach bum” life, moving into the posh and opulent Regency Hotel. Soon after, everything pretty much goes to hell, with Taggart separated from the sea, his boat, and his freedom.

I don’t know, maybe Shark Fighter is like the trash fiction equivalent of The Old Man And The Sea. Or maybe not. At any rate, I enjoyed the hell out of it, and regret that it’s not more easily available – though with some persistence you should be able to turn up an eventual copy.

Len recently sent me his thoughts on Shark Fighter:

When Joe Kenney asked me in e-mail to write something about Shark Fighter, to accompany his review - my mind went blank. I wrote Shark Fighter nearly 40 years ago, hadn’t read it since, and didn’t remember anything at all about it. 

In order to comply with Joe’s request, I needed to dive deeply into the memory hole. Gradually certain details came to mind. It all began back in the early 1970s, when I received a phone call from Peter McCurtin, my editor at Belmont-Tower, inviting me to his office for discussion of a novel he wanted me to write. After I arrived, he described the novel’s basic premise: a guy agrees to fight a shark on closed circuit TV for a million bucks. To my best recollection, the cover art already had been completed.

For context, this was during the great Jaws craze, when the media was full of articles and commentary on the movie and on shark lore. So Shark Fighter essentially was an effort to tap into that mass media fascination.

I never saw the Jaws movie because evidently it was a waterlogged horror story, and I don’t like horror stories. Their principal goal is to scare me, and I’m scared enough as it is.

I felt qualified to write an underwater shark story because I’d done some snorkeling in South Florida during the year and a half I lived there, and also dived several times with regulator and tank strapped to my back. So the undersea world was familiar and enjoyable for me. I’d also watched many undersea TV programs by Jacques-Yves Cousteau. I even read his book The Silent World. So all things considered, I felt enthusiastic about writing Shark Fighter.

I still have the contract in my files, signed April 13, 1976. The stipulated delivery date was May 31, 1976. I was supposed to get paid $500.00 upon execution of the contract, and $500.00 upon acceptance of the manuscript, plus a royalty schedule but don’t remember any royalties paid.

I departed Peter’s office and dived into writing Shark Fighter. Now, after passage of so many years, I don’t remember anything about how it was written, and at first didn’t even remember the plot and characters. The only reasonable response was to sit down and actually read it.

To my astonishment, I couldn’t believe it was so interesting. It read as if written by someone else. I couldn’t put it down. All my various obsessions and preoccupations of that era are in the novel. I’d often fantasized about living on a boat in the Caribbean, and one of my highest career goals was to become a full-time beachcomber. Naturally I’d always wanted a beautiful Vogue-type model to fall madly in love with me. 

Shark Fighter evidently was wish fulfillment expressed in the form of a novel. While reading, I couldn’t help noticing how smoothly and quickly the plot moved along. A reader cannot guess what will happen next, perhaps because the author didn’t know either. The characters all have numerous neurotic compulsions and seem believable. The island of Makura apparently was partially based on Haiti under the dictator Papa Doc Duvalier, partially on the Dominican Republic under the dictator Rafael Trujillo, and partially on a trip I once took to Nassau in the Bahamas. Shark Fighter even has a fairly happy ending, unlike many of my novels.

As usual, a few typographical errors either were overlooked or inserted by the Belmont-Tower copy editor. The big shark fight at the end has a sentence that doesn’t know left from right, which is a bit confusing. Some sentences contain too many words. Perhaps the Belmont-Tower copy editor inserted them out of concern for grammatical correctness over swift narration, or maybe the culprit was me.

Perhaps I’m prejudiced, but Shark Fighter doesn’t come across as simple-minded trashy fiction. It’s more of an adventure melodrama with echoes of Joseph Conrad. What a great movie it would make. I’m very proud of this novel, and grateful to Joe for bringing it to my attention. Perhaps I really wasn’t the lowdown hack that everybody including me thought I was. Unfortunately, Shark Fighter isn’t yet available as an ebook.