The Bunnies (Peter Trees #1)

The Bunnies, by John Q.
July, 1965  Avon Books

Billed as a “super-agent” on the cover, Peter Trees was yet another in the long line of would-be Bonds who followed in the wake of Ian Fleming’s death in 1964; in fact, according to a 1965 interview with creator/writer John Quirk in the Palm Beach Post (which unfortunately is no longer online – thanks a lot, Google Books!), the character was specifically devised to fill the void created in the realm of pulp spy fiction by Fleming’s death.

The only problem is, whereas Fleming, when he was on form, was capable of delivering a thrilling tale, John Quirk, at least in this first volume, turns out a total snoozer of a book, about as exciting as the average episode of Antiques Roadshow. The guy can write, though, with clever dialog and good scene-setting, but the plot is uninvolving and the characters are unlikable. You do have to love though how Quirk (branded as “John Q.” on this and the second volume, but the book’s copyright John Quirk) poses as his hero on the back cover, complete with flight suit and helmet.

Also according to that above-mentioned interview, Quirk’s original title for this one was The Black Box, which turns out to be a contraption hero Peter Trees spends the entire novel seeking. Likely Avon changed the title to The Bunnies to capitalize on the Playboy Bunnies Trees encounters at the Detroit Playboy Club, though the cover artist didn’t really capture that – you’d never guess the attractive, half-nude black lady on the lover left corner is supposed to be a Playboy Bunny. She doesn’t even have on the bunny ears! But she does appear in the book, where she is referred to as, believe it or not, “the Chocolate Bunny.”

Anyway, Colonel Peter Trees is a hotshot jet fighter pilot, I believe a WWII vet, who is a millionaire himself but serves as the personal pilot for a billionaire named Michael Archangeli. Trees is quite idealized and in many ways this series is like the later Don Miles, just replacing race cars with fighter jets. Trees has a Crusader jet which he bought from a general in a south Asian war; Trees used to fight periodically in anti-Commie wars, which is where he was serving when approached by Archangeli. This is all relayed via backstory; when The Bunnies begins, Trees has been working with Archangeli so long that he’s basically assumed control of the man’s business empire.

The book is less focused on action and more concerned with “business talk.” Over half of the novel is composed of mundane business meetings and recaps, very similar to the page-filling stuff in Harold Robbins’s  The Betsy and The Adventurers. Trees likes to sit around with Archangeli, “Count” Colombo (Archangeli’s chaffeur), and Arnold Stillwater (head of the Markel Division, a family business he just sold to Archangeli), and “talk business.” But most prominent in these conversations is Jo Court, sexy young secretary for Archangeli and a determined woman decades ahead of her time.

Jo Court must have seemed interesting to readers in 1965, but today she’s as common as bread: a woman who puts work over marriage, career over love, and is determined to prove her worth. She has a contentious relationship with Trees, smarting off to him from first page to last. She was being groomed as Archangeli’s successor, it develops, and thus resents Trees for taking the spotlight from her. I lost track of the number of times these two would politely spat with one another – “Mr. Trees” and “Ms. Court” is icily repeated ad naseum throughout the text, as this was all before the days of first-name-basis in the workplace – and it gets old quick.

Quirk I believe was a WWII vet, so it’s interesting how this guy was able to create such a forward-thinking character in Jo Court…but then he has to go and ruin it with the revelation that Jo’s screwing Mr. Archangeli as part of her job. She even comes on to Trees after another of their periodic spats, though Trees turns her down.

As for Trees, he’s kind of an ass. Very much the straight-jawed, humorless, buzzcutted military man demanded by postwar fiction, there isn’t much likable about the dude. While he spends the majority of The Bunnies in “investigator” mode, he is in fact a spy, something Archangeli doesn’t even know. Reporting to the mysterious Program Committee, Trees’s boss is a dude named Broderick Whitehead but Trees usually answers to the President himself. Not that any of that matters this time, as, rather than a tale of international intrigue, Trees gets involved in a case that’s more along the lines something Mike Hammer would deal with.

As part of his own corporate maneuvering Trees has gotten in touch with a dude named William Bottle, who has designed this “fuel injector” gizmo. Be prepared for lots and lots of expository dialog explaining and describing this thing, which hasn’t even been built – Bottle, who was supposed to meet Trees and Archangeli for the first time in Detroit, turns up dead, and now Trees is on the hunt for the “black box” which apparently contained Bottle’s prototype model of the gizmo. But Trees suspects foul play, as his Crusader jet was sabotaged on the flight into Detroit and it was only his bad-assery which prevented a crash.

The novel plods along as Trees follows clues in the search for who Bottle was, what his fuel injector gizmo was, and who else might’ve wanted it, while trading barbs with Jo Court. Gradually he comes upon a clue about “the chocolate bunny,” which as mentioned turns out to be a black Playboy Bunny named Kelly O’Brien, who knows more about the case than she first admits. Trees also becomes involved with another Bunny, this one named Norah Huddle, who initially is hired by goons to pretend to be someone else so as to fool him.

Trees per tradition is a world-class lover of the ladies, by the way, but don’t expect much naughty stuff. He scores a few times in the book – with Norah Huddle, even with Bottle’s widow (a man-eating cougar who hasn’t seen her husband for years) – but John Quirk isn’t one for the details. Instead he just ends the chapter right as Trees is about to score and then picks up the story the next morning or whatnot. The same goes for the violence, with Trees taking some punishment via torture and also killing a few people with his throwing blade or magnum revolver, but none of it is very descriptive and certainly not graphic.

You see, Trees is bland, so trained and precise as to be robotic, and this blandness unfortunately bleeds over to the narrative style itself. There’s some interesting stuff, like how Trees suffers from PTSD thanks to briefly being a prisoner of the Viet Cong, but the novel is more about Trees the alpha male and his smart business moves and smart business strategy. I had a hard time engaging with this particular hero; he seemed more like one of the humorless WWII vets who used to congregate in my dad’s barbershop when I was a kid and talk about how we should bomb Japan again.

But while I didn’t like the slow-moving plot, which as mentioned is more along the lines of a murder-mystery than spy action, it must be said again that Quirk is a good writer. He peppers The Bunnies with many memorable dialog exchanges, like for example Archangeli’s comment to Trees when he comes to south Asia to hire him: “Patriotism is a laudable immaturity.” In fact Archangeli talks like this throughout, like a Bond supervillain, and he’s more interesting than Trees himself.

Anyway, two more volumes were to follow; in that interview above Quirk mentions he was in the process of writing the third volume, so I’m curious if he just didn’t write anymore due to low sales. The third volume not only had a completely different cover treatment than the first two but was also published by Signet, so I’m assuming the Peter Trees novels didn’t perform very well. At any rate Quirk himself died in 1969, so no further novels would be forthcoming anyway.

Justin Perry: The Assassin #2: Vatican Kill

Justin Perry: The Assassin #2: Vatican Kill, by John D. Revere
October, 1983  Pinnacle Books

Just as twisted as the other books in the series, Vatican Kill is another disturbed, bizarre-o installment of Justin Perry: The Assassin, courtesy Hal “John D. Revere” Bennett, and once again I’m certain this series was some sort of experiment on the part of the author. But what exactly he was trying to prove with the experiment is anyone’s guess – personally, I think it was his attempt at sort of pulling the rug out from beneath the traditional square-jawed/white American hero edifice of action pulp, but who knows.

Because regardless, this series is fucked up to the core. This is displayed posthaste, as a mutilated scientist, having defected from evil terrorist organization SADIF, briefs the CIA in the opening pages on his former organization’s latest gambit. SADIF has armed a space rocket with a thermonculear warhead and aimed it for the planet Venus as a sign of their superiority…and also as a way to draw in new converts(!?). The scientist has defected as he is certain this warhead will cause the destruction of the galaxy. In his escape he was mauled by dogs, who also bit off his testicles – as ever it all comes down to the groin in the world of Justin Perry.

And speaking of our hero, a page or two later and Justin Perry is covered in cow shit, secretly watching as a former Nazi now posing as a Vatican City gardner is being bathed by a nun with a “prominent harelip.” The Nazi is Carl Werner, and he’s taken over the gardner position from none other than Joseph Mengele, infamous Nazi sadist who has been hiding here in the Vatican for decades, controlling the Italian division of SADIF. But Mengele’s too sick and has absconded to Paraguay (which, strangely enough, is where the real Mengele died…though in 1979), and now Werner, who was still a teenager when WWII ended, has assumed his command post.

Werner it gradually develops is runing “Project New Fire” (as the SADIF Venus warhead plot is called) from the Vatican. Justin scraps his assassination attempt when Werner is suddenly called away. Justin washes off the cow shit, appropriates a priest’s garb, and then heads outside the Vatican…where he’s picked up by a horny young Italian girl(?!). Her name is Angelica Montessori and she is a virgin, she announces. She needs Justin, whom she believes is a priest due to his appropriated clothing, for an experiment she wishes to try. So the two walk around Rome all afternoon, Werner and the rocket to Venus totally forgotten, before they go back to a hotel.

There Angelica strips Justin and then gets nude herself, but she makes Justin promise he won’t touch her. We’re treated to her long backstory, during which Justin keeps arbitrarily flashing back to when he was twelve years old and was sent to India by his military bigwig father. There young Justin had his first sexual encounter, with Mrs. Blossom Reed, the fat wife of one of his father’s subordinates in the army. Angelica brings Justin back to the present with a quick blowjob and then Bruno, proprietor of the hotel, storms in, saying Justin was supposed to die; Justin kills him, feels woozy, realizes the wine he’s been drinking was drugged. Angelica tells Justin it’s a trap but she’s “fallen in love” with him and begs him to flee.

It’s not weird enough yet, so then the door bangs open and in storms the “harelipped nun” from earlier, as well as a young German boy who is apparently Carl Werner’s prize possession, and wouldn’t you believe it none other than Blossom Reed, aka “Mrs. Reed,” aka the lady Justin was just thinking of for no reason, who has “lost a lot of weight” in the ensuing decades and who keeps screaming that Justin must be captured. But Justin runs away, escaping nude into the streets of Rome, before he passes out due to the drug, his last conscious image that of Mrs. Reed towering over him and hitting him with a broom.

Oh but meanwhile, all this is actually going according to plan – the “Old Man,” ie Justin’s CIA boss, has planned for all of this with his usual inhuman foresight. SADIF was aware of Justin all along, and thus had Angelica, forced into SADIF servitude, there waiting for him, but the Old Man’s plan was for it to appear that Justin was not aware that he’d already been made…or something.

The book you see is more focused on theological debates, particularly Justin’s own struggling with the concept of a “benevolent” god, which he thinks is an impossibilty. Throughout the novel he flashes back to his youth, particularly an instance in India where he saw a train conductor derail his train, casting himself and about a thousand passengers into an abyss, all so as to avoid hitting a sacred cow that was standing on the train tracks. Cows also thus play an important part in Vatican Kill, particularly cow dung, which is mentioned again and again, as well as Justin’s penchant for running around in shit. We also get frequent flashbacks to a strange incident in Justin’s youth in which his mother made him dress up like Donald Duck(!).

What I’m trying to say, friends, is that this is still one fucked up series, so damned weird that you start to worry about the author’s mental health. While it’s well-written – Hal Bennet is if anything a gifted word-spinner – it’s just so weird, so obsessed with bizarre and unsettling imagery. Characters will be talking and Justin’s mind will trail off and we’ll get these long, morbid digressions on death, complete with more disturbed imagery like an army of crows feasting on those train-passenger corpses back in India.

Mrs. Reed you won’t be surprised to learn is also a SADIF agent – as in the previous volume, it appears that every single person in Justin’s life has been a secret SADIF agent, preparing him from birth for some bizarre reason. The final volume revealed this reason – that Justin was intended to sow future generations after civilization was wiped out by Halley’s Comet – but for reasons I still haven’t figured out SADIF was dropped from the final volume and the main villains were revealed as “the Halley Society,” which doesn’t even exist in these early volumes. SADIF is Justin’s version of SPECTRE, not the Halley Society.

But as mentioned the Old Man (himself outed as the head of the Halley Society in that final volume) is like thirty steps ahead, so we learn in flashback that all this has been planned for. So when Carl Werner tells Justin that if Justin assassinates the king and queen of Spain(?!), the Venus rocket will be destroyed via remote control, Justin agrees to do it, having known all along that this is exactly what Werner would demand of him. Justin’s only request is that his CIA pal Bob Dante, returning from the previous volume, be allowed to go along with him. Werner consents to this. So Justin travels with Mrs. Reed and Bob Dante to Spain, where Justin carries out the assassination…only, in one of the novel’s few clever touches, it’s actually a pair of SADIF agents that Dante has captured and brainwashed off-page.

But wait – I forgot all about the part where Justin’s first captured by Carl Werner and stripped nude and then thrown in with a pack of rabid dogs, and the crazed, ferocious look in their eyes, coupled with his random flashbacks about that train wreck in India and those vultures gorging on the corpses, results in Justin getting a whopper of a hard-on, which he clutches desperately while he fights the dogs to death!! And then when he wakes up he’s greeted with a blowjob courtesy Mrs. Reed, or “taking his milk” as she always put it when he was twelve years old…and then later he takes Angelica’s virginity, after which she’s basically dropped from the narrative until the very end.

And I totally forgot to mention the part where Carl Werner, as some sort of message, ties the “harelipped nun” (who turns out to be Angelica’s aunt) to a big poplar tree, the top half of which is pinned to the ground, and then cuts the lashes loose so the poor nun is nearly decapitated by the thrashing tree as it flings back to its normal position.

But anyway, Justin kills the pseudo king and queen of Spain, fooling Mrs. Reed and thus SADIF, however it was just a lie…she happily reveals that the “New Fire” rocket’s real intention is to impact with the nuclear missile which the US has launched to stop the SADIF rocket; when the two rockets collide there in deep space, the resulting thermonuclear explosion will knock out communication in the west for several hours, during which SADIF will take over the world, or something. But forget that, the regicide has Mrs. Reed all hot and bothered, and here she is with these two good-looking young CIA studs, so what’s an old lady to do…

The sex, while frequent and, really, making up the core of the novel and the actions of the characters, isn’t very explicit. In fact it’s more off-putting than anything. The only “normal” sex scene is where Justin takes Angelica’s virginity, but it isn’t very detailed…more focus is placed on the sordid engagements, like when Justin and Bob Dante double-team Mrs. Reed, which Justin thinks to himself afterwards was like “fucking a bucket of guts”!! Bennett as usual excels in making the erotic disgusting, particularly when Justin peers at ol’ Mrs. Reed’s nether region and thinks that it looks like a bunch of ashes…

Yeah, man, this is one sick series. I should mention the novel ends with Carl Werner being fooled into thinking he’s going over to the CIA, but instead they’re just setting him up for a grand kill – Justin’s mission you see is to give Carl Werner a spectacularly gruesome death, so he spends the novel wondering what he’ll do (that is, when he isn’t thinking about that train crash or the vultures feeding on the corpses or the questionable reality of a “benevolent God”). So what he does end up doing is crucifying a nude Werner upside down, and then a CIA doctor cuts off the Nazi’s dick, stuffs it in Werner’s mouth and sews his lips shut, all while Werner has been dosed with “excitol,” an experimental drug which prevents him from fainting, so that he is super-aware of his misery until he finally dies.

I mentioned this is a twisted series, didn’t I?

Once again Hal Bennett isn’t much concerned with action scenes, nor realistic detail; Justin again uses a .38 revolver that both has a safety and can be equipped with a silencer. There’s hardly any action at all in the entire novel, and what passes for the climax has Justin and Bob Dante, suited up in one-piece black commando suits like the one Justin wore in the previous book, ambushing Werner and his SADIF agents in the caverns beneath Rome. But it’s all pretty dumb, as they just make all the SADIF freaks gather together in a dank well after shooting one or two of them. As usual, more focus is placed on twisted imagery and bizarre thoughts rather than action or thrills.

So anyway, Vatican Kill is strange, off-putting, slow-paced, and yet still well-written, and really just seems to come from some bizarre alternate reality.

The Bright Blue Death (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #30)

The Bright Blue Death, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1967  Award Books

This was a pretty good installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster, occasionally as over-the-top as The Sea Trap and Deep Sea Death while at other times maintaining the realistic vibe of Blood Raid. In this one Nick Carter must contend with laser forcefields, blue corpses, an army of neo-Nazis…and an unfrozen Viking warrior!

Nicholas Browne wrote The Bright Blue Death, and it was the last of the four Killmaster novels he authored. I’ve already picked up two more of his contributions and I look forward to reading them – the dude isn’t bad, though to be honest there were some awkward sentences at times that had me re-reading certain parts of the narrative to figure out what was going on. Also he jumps character perspectives without warning the reader, but that’s par for the course for the men’s adventure genre so it’s to be expected. On the other hand, Browne definitely has a way with setting up scenes and describing locations.

This is displayed posthaste, with an effective opening of Nick Carter scuba diving in the cold dark waters of Sweden, a junior AXE agent in tow. Their mission is to infiltrate the Musko complex, an underground fortress built on an “island of granite” by the Swedes as a sort of underworld bunker in the event of nuclear war. The Red Chinese are supposedly working on laser beams that could cut through all the granite, and AXE is concerned that, if successful, these lasers could eventually cut through the mountains that contain NORAD. Nick’s job is to see if Musko is truly impregnable. 

Things get nicely psychedelic as Nick, diving deep to get below the submarine netting, experiences delirium caused by the dramatic depths. He fights out of his bizarre visions, but the junior AXE agent doesn’t fare as well, going nuts and pulling off his oxygen tank. Nick gives the poor bastard up for dead. He goes on to infiltrate the place, but discovers that another squad has beaten him to it: not Chinese, as Nick expected, but a group of Germans. Nick kills most of them in silent warfare; eventually he’ll learn they are the Teutonic Knights, apparently the vassals of a modern Hitler named Count von Stadee, who plans to take over both Germanys…and then the world.

Meanwhile we’re introduced to this volume’s “Carter Chick:” Astrid Lundgren, the head of Musko’s Engineering and Planning. She’s in charge of working on various high-tech defenses to the Chicom lasers, but there’s a secret drawback: all of the scientists who work on the defense tech are dying, and their corpses are a bright blue. While this element gives the novel its title, it’s actually kind of buried in the narrative, and not nearly as important as you’d expect. Instead, the greater portion of the novel is given over to Nick posing as a German mercenary who tries to join the Teutonic Knights, offering Astrid as barter – von Stadee wants the beautiful, blonde “ice goddess” so as to prevent her from success with the Musko defenses.

Astrid quickly denies Nick’s amorous advances, but she leaves him salivating over her awesome bod and big ol’ boobs; the lady’s apparently one of the best-looking women Nick’s ever seen, and he’s seen quite a few. But after a long action scene in Copenhagen she begins to warm up to him. This develops once Nick, in disguise, meets with von Stadee, offering Astrid; he’s sure von Stadee will try to kill him, and he does, the action scene playing out in an amusement park. It kind of keeps going, from Nick and Astrid hiding on a sort of merry-go-round to Nick fighting off Loki, von Stadee’s insane dwarf henchman.

Meanwhile von Stadee, who was barely out of his teens when the Nazis ruled Germany, has another henchman: Einar, a thousand-year-old Viking! This mountain of muscle was thawed out by von Stadee after the war; the Nazis found a group of frozen Vikings and Einar was the only one von Stadee was successfully able to revive. Humorously, all of this is just casually dropped into the narrative, and Nick doesn’t even seem much fazed by it. Instead he’s more concerned about Einar’s inhuman strength.

Astrid’s sent back to Sweden Nick’s able to get into the Teutonic Knights by kidnapping someone close to von Standee – the neo-Nazi’s girlfriend, an American biker chick named Boots Delaney. Nick kidnaps the petite gal and takes her back to a cabin in the woods of Denmark. Boots is an interesting character, a total hellion who keeps trying to kill Nick with a vast assortment of hidden weapons. Meanwhile she’s getting randy, given the fact that von Stadee doesn’t have sex with her – he just uses her to whip him! Eventually Boots is nude, coming at Nick with a fireplace poker, and the unstated challenge is there: disarm her and she will be his.

Of course this is what happens, and Browne is fairly explicit in the ensuing scene (though nothing too crazy), with mention of “multiple positions” demanded by the insatiable Boots. Von Stadee concedes to Nick’s demands and allows him to join the Teutonic Knights for returning Boots. Now in von Stadee’s castle in Bavaria, Nick has to go through various boring ideals which consume too many pages, like an endless fistfight with a neo-Nazi champion. Shortly thereafter he discovers, through a fluke, that the “bright blue death” is nothing but a hoax, something von Stadee cooked up to keep the Swedes from working on their Musko defenses.

We get another endless sequence, this time as Nick escapes across Bavaria for the border, von Stadee’s men after him. Most Germans are loyal to the Teutonic Knights order, in what is intended as a parallel with Germany in the late 1930s but comes off as too goofy, so Nick has to run from regular citizens as well. At least it climaxes in a memorable sequence, as Nick’s on a barge having a long-denied meal, and a dirigible flies over the boat and an assault squad jumps out, Boots Delaney, in a mask and a leather catsuit, leading it. Nick’s captured but breaks out Pierre, his gas bomb, killing everyone except Boots, who parachutes out after him and promptly disappears from the narrative. (She mails Nick a bomb at the end of the book, but he laughs off her amateurish attempt at assassination.)

The Bright Blue Death rolls into the final quarter with Nick and Astrid together again; she travels down to Bavaria with him to infiltrate von Stadee’s castle and look at his scientific blueprints to see where exactly he is with the laser he’s building for the Chicoms. Meanwhile Astrid’s decided she wants to do Nick, after all. Cue another sex scene, this one taking place in the cheap showiness of nature as the two hide in the woods surrounding the castle, but this one goes more for the lyrical/metaphorical vibe. And right on cue Astrid gets captured and Nick has to go back and save her.

Browne’s action scenes lack much verve or violence, though we do get a memorable part where Nick blows someone’s head off with his Luger. He engages Einar in a too-quick fight, but the revived Viking wants to die. From there we jump to Greenland, where von Stadee apparently has his secret headquarters(?!). Nick and an Eskimo named Joe Shu travel through the ice on a Sno-Cat and Joe blasts the icy caverns the Teutonic Knights hide in with a flamethrower. In the climax von Stadee shows his cowardly roots and Joe Shu chops off the head of Loki, von Stadee’s annoying dwarf henchman – and then Nick heads back to Musko for more adult shenanigans with Astrid.

As mentioned, this was the last installment written by Nicholas Browne, who turned in four volumes between 1966 and 1967. Too bad, as he proves himself to be one of the better Killmaster authors. Browne himself appears to have been an interesting person. From Will Murray’s article “The Saga of Nick Carter: Killmaster,” published in The Armchair Detective volume 15 number 4 (1982):

[Nicholas Browne] did four Nicks and then vanished. It turned out he was a merchant seaman and presumably had sailed for distant points. His Nicks may constitute all his published writing, and many of them had to be extensively revised by the Engels [ie series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel and his wife].

Vanished after sailing for distant points…creepy! Sounds like an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. What makes it even stranger is the melancholy vibe of The Bright Blue Death. There’s a foreboding air to the novel, with Nick often reflecting over how he won’t live long, how his days are numbered. Coupled with Browne’s apparent disappearance, it’s kind of eerie.

The Bamboo Bomb (Mark Hood #2)

The Bamboo Bomb, by James Dark
October, 1965  Signet Books

Mark Hood returns for his second adventure, which takes him from Singapore to New Guinea. We join him as he’s already on his mission; it isn’t until nearly halfway through the book that we are informed why he’s been sent to South Asia. Someone in Indonesia supposedly has an atomic bomb, and Intertrust, the agency which employs Hood and is made up of “the four nuclear powers,” wants Hood to find out if the rumor is true.

The Bamboo Bomb moves a lot more quickly than the first volume. Whereas that installment took its time building to an anticlimactic ending, this one moves at a fast pace, hopscotching from one new character and situation to the next. At a snappy 121 pages of small print, the book almost comes off like a series of short stories, as Hood progresses from point A to B to C and etc, with little pause or reflection. That being said the series overall has still not attained the quasi sci-fi vibe of later installments; I’m looking forward to those.

Hood’s cover is that he doesn’t have one; he goes around the globe on Intertrust missions casually giving out his real name. He’s a world-famous cricket player(!) and race car driver, so he plays up the image of a wealthy playboy-athlete. The Bamboo Bomb opens with Hood doing a replay of his “undercover” work from the previous novel: acting like he’s low on cash due to maintaining a lifestyle beyond his means. So now he waltzes around Singapore, acting brash and drunkenly, trying to catch the interests of whatever shady faction is behind this supposed atomic bomb. This bit includes the goofy scene of Hood ordering an extravagant meal and then asking his date, a lovely English lady, if she has any money!

Hood’s “grifter playboy” act succeeds once again, and soon he’s approached by a slim Asian beauty named Telok Li-Chen. Telok (an awesome name) says she’s looking for a strong man, and soon enough Hood’s meeting with her employer, an underworld bigwig named Mr. Tang, who operates out of an opium den. To prove himself Hood must fight two men to the death; he busts out his karate skills in a fight more brutal than any in Come Die With Me. He kills one and renders the other unconscious, and thus passes the test. Meanwhile he tries to put the moves on Telok, which he figures would be like “mating with a snake,” and she seems interested – but Tang says business first.

Next Hood’s on a boat headed across the Strait of Malacca to Sumatra. The two goons on the boat idiotically open fire on a passing British patrol boat. Hood jumps ship, is hauled onto the British boat, and gives the young skipper a bullshit story about being kidnapped. Here we are reminded that Hood was an exec on a Navy destroyer in Korea. He knocks out the skipper and takes control of the boat, which seems pretty hard to buy, but what the hell, it’s late at night and most of the crew is below decks, asleep. But Hood’s discovered once he takes the boat toward the Sumatran shore, and when he jumps overboard he’s shot in the side.

He comes to in a hospital in Sumatra, and due to his own medical background (Hood is if anything one idealized character – the dude has experience in everything) he knows he’s been shot in an otherwise inconsequential section of the intestines(!). He recuperates for a week, after which he’s flown to Indonesia by Tang’s associates; there he meets Ramsuddin, Indonesia’s Minister of Reconstruction and Development (even harder to buy, Hood is familiar with the dude, as his picture is always in the paper…?!). Rasmuddin puts Hood up in palatial quarters, telling him he needs to recover fully and strengthen himself for his mission.

Rasmuddin wants Hood to venture into the jungles of Borneo and assassinate a Malay oil magnate named Tam Chou. Given how arduous this will be, Hood toughens himself up with calisthenics and hardcore karate practice. Meanwhile he gets rubdowns from Rasmuddin’s personal masseuse/mistress, a hotstuff Balinese beauty named Alor. Hood thinks she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. He even beats up Rasmuddin’s top security goon Subandu for trying to take advantage of her.

The Borneo stuff is yet another in the endless tide of mini-plots; after almost being set up by a wrathful Subandu, Hood makes his rigorous way through the jungle to get to his target. Instead of killing Tam Chou Hood tells him that he’s a secret agent, working against Rasmuddin, and the Malaysian agrees to disappear for a few weeks, to fool Rasmuddin into believing that he’s dead. Hood goes back to Indonesia, a hero now; Rasmuddin even gives Hood pretty young Alor for a night of (off-page) lovin’.

Hood finally gets at his overall objective: Rasmuddin claims to have an atomic bomb, and it’s on Krakotoa Island, which the Minister is currently evacuating. In fact, Rasmuddin wants Hood to go see the bomb and then write about it, so the whole world will know for sure that Indonesia has the A Bomb. Turns out they really don’t, though; when graced with a nighttime visit to Krakatoa, Hood sees a bunch of crates filled with TNT lying around, and Rasmuddin points out some uranium being transported to the site. Hood quickly deduces the Minister’s plan: he’s going to blow up all this TNT, which will disperse the small amount of uranium, and that coupled with Hood’s own article will be enough to convince the world that Indonesia has an atom bomb.

Our hero has about as much finesse as Sean Connery’s version of Bond; he knocks out a few guards, throws some TNT down a cliff, and then runs like hell while everything explodes. He commandeers yet another craft and escapes, injured in the process and almost hallucinating by the next morning, adrift on the ocean. Then a boat filled with Tang’s men chases after him and Chiao, Tang’s massive henchman, a “professor” of kung-fu, boards the boat. Hood knows that despite his expertise with karate he’d be no match for Chiao, so he whips out his gun and shoots the dude a bunch of times! 

And that’s that; Hood is rescued by the same British skipper he kidnapped earlier in the tale, and he figures in all the action Rasmuddin probably died(!). So once again we have sort of an anticlimax, I mean all the characters from early in the book are just forgotten. Hood never goes back to take care of Tang or to even act on Telok’s open offer for sex; rather, the novel comes to a quick close, James Dark once again hitting his word count and saying to hell with it. But the guy’s such a skillfull pulp writer that you can’t complain; I really enjoyed the book.

Come Die With Me ended with Hood losing the lady he had fallen in love with, killed by a nuclear missile strike Hood himself had caused. Dark implied that this would change Hood, make him colder, and that seems to play out in The Bamboo Bomb, though very subtly. For example, early in the book Telok caresses Hood’s hand, and Dark writes that “Hood felt nothing.” At any rate we learn a little more about Mark Hood this time: for one, his age is given as 32 (I know a future volume says he’s 36, so it looks like he ages as the series progresses), and he was an exec on a Destroyer in Korea, after which he served in Navy Intelligence for a few years.

James Dark (aka J.E. MacDonnell) displays his usual cultural sensitivities throughout: “[Hood] judged him to be Malay, but he might have been Indonesian or Filipino, they all looked the same.” And Murimoto, Hood’s karate instructor (unseen this volume), is again referred to as “the Jap.” Also many mentions of the “little brown men” Hood towers over as he gallivants around South Asia. But Dark keeps the story moving, with less of the padding or stalling of the previous book, doling out his pulpy tale with panache.

Humorously enough, Signet appears to have confused the (ghost)writer with the protagonist: the back of the book proclaims James Dark as the “hero spy” of the previous novel.

The Aquanauts #3: Seek, Strike And Destroy

The Aquanauts #3: Seek, Strike And Destroy, by Ken Stanton
No month stated, 1971  Macfadden Books

Manning Lee Stokes turns in his third installment of The Aquanauts , and for the most part it’s as slow-moving as his first. Boy can this guy pad out the pages, and Seek, Strike And Destroy features padding of the worst sort. You know you’re in trouble when the first chapter is given over to an endless sequence featuring a newlywed couple on their honeymoon – a couple who only appears in this opening chapter – complete with long digressions on their history together and plans for the future and etc.

They stop off for some quickie sex in a ghost town near Death Valley, Las Veagas, only for a friggin’ missile to land nearby. It doesn’t explode, lodges there in the ground, and it has Chinese writing on it. Gradually we’ll learn that this is a nuclear missile, fired from a Chinese nuclear submarine, built identically to the top-secret US Polaris sub. The Chinese sub, off the California coast, is quickly sunk (off page) and now it’s up to Admiral Coffin of the Secret Underater Service to make sure the Chinese do not discover that their nuclear sub has been sunk but also to ensure that the US public doesn’t find out a Chinese sub was right off the US coast. Also he’s to destroy whatever other Chinese nuclear subs might exist. 

Meanwhile our hero Tiger Shark is testing out the Paranauts initiative, aka Operation Deep Six, a page-filling gambit on Stokes’s part if ever there was one: another idea of Coffin’s, the “Paranauts” concept is basically parachuting a geared-up scuba diver into the sea. Why exactly this would even require a service name, or what in particular the Paranauts would do that the regular Tiger Sharks couldn’t do, is something Stokes doesn’t explain. What makes it all even more unintentionally humorous is that the Paranauts thing is just brushed under the narrative carpet and not mentioned again. And it’s not even the most action-themed entrance for our hero, if that was Stokes’s intention: all Tiger does is parachute into the ocean and swim around.

Stokes retains his usual glacial pace; it takes fifty small-print pages for Tiger to even get in his high-tech, top secret KRAB submersile and go look for the downed Chinese sub. Meanwhile we must endure so much tedium. Every few chapters breaks over, as has become customary for the series, to Admiral Coffin and his superior dressing in “mufti” and meeting secretly in motels to discuss top-secret stuff. But rather than being gripping or even revelatory, these scenes are slow as molasses, with Stokes detailing every lighting of a pipe or sipping of gin, the two old men going on and on and on about what have you, and usually it’s shit we already know!

It occurred to me that Stokes could’ve made some money on the side by offering a correspondence course on pulp paperback writing. “This month’s lesson – Padding: How to Meet (And Exceed!) Your Word Count.” I’ve said before that I do appreciate Stokes’s style, but there are times where you wish he’d put down the bottle of booze and think up a quality story instead of just banging aimlessly at the typewriter. But as it is, so much time is wasted on inconsequential things and dialog exchanges that go nowhere. And again Tiger himself (“Tiger” being the main way Stokes refers to his hero, whose real name is William Martin) is lost in the narrative quagmire.

But then, as is typical of Stokes, there will be these bizarre incidents that come out of nowhere, jolting the reader out of his stupor…like when Tiger has to knock out a sexy Communist agent by screwing her with a narcotic-laced French Tickler!! The lady is Madame Hee, but despite the name she’s actually Russian; in long backstory we learn that she was born in Russia around 1910 or thereabouts and married a Chinese officer or some such in the ‘20s. Now she lives in San Francisco and acts as the prime gatherer of spy intel for Peking; Admiral Coffin and the Feds are concerned she’ll somehow get wind of the sunk Chinese sub and let her superiors know.

And yes, Madame Hee was born around 1910, meaning she’s “pushing 60,” give or take a few years. Yet, the Feds ensure Coffin and Captain Greene (Tiger’s main contact in the SUS), Madame Hee doesn’t look a day over 40, with most men thinking she doesn’t look over 30. And she’s got a helluva nice body, “a body they could use in the Playboy centerfold.” Plus she’s a nympho who is only “interested in big cocks and staying power.” The sexually-aggressive older lady with the looks and body of a much younger woman is a recurring theme in Stokes’s work; see Gerda von Rothe in The Golden Serpent and Queen Beatta in The Bronze Axe. And like Gerda von Rothe, Madame Hee’s even a wealthy owner of a cosmetics emporium.

In one of the novel’s few intentionally-funny moments (Stokes as usual playing things straight…a little too straight), Greene insists that Tiger not be told how old Madame Hee really is; there follows a few humorous bits where a CIA agent almost slips and mentions that Hee is 60 or so. Anyway Tiger poses as a sort of country bumpkin, which we’re informed at great length is Madame Hee’s type, and saves her from a staged mugging in a park. She takes him back to her place to patch him up and the lurid hijinks ensue. First she gives him a blowjob straightaway, which nearly blows Tiger’s mind. Then she orgasms after a little dry humping(?).

Then it’s out with the ol’ French Tickler, which Stokes only now bothers to inform us is the entire key to this whole sordid puzzle; the SUS brains have coated it with a diluted extract of Puffer Fish poison(?!), and all Tiger has to do is fuck the lady with it and within fifteen minutes or so she’ll be out cold. And I should mention that Stokes gets fairly explicit here, more so than he did just a few years before in the aforementioned Golden Serpent. This is also the first sex scene in the book, nearly 100 pages in – and also, believe it or not, it’s not until here that we have our first action scene, as a muscle-bound hulk comes into Hee’s place while Tiger is searching it.

A knock-down, drag-out fight ensues, one in which Tiger is practically beaten to a pulp. He endures a beating that would faze even Gannon, yet manages to finally overcome his opponent, fracturing his skull with Hee’s telephone. But by next chapter Tiger’s good as new, about to parachute into the China sea, where KRAB waits for him in the waters below. It’s like a week later and Tiger’s been in the hospital.  Admiral Coffin has gotten in touch with some revolutionairies in China who know where the nuclear submarine pens are. Tiger’s mission now is to meet up with a member of the revolutionairies and destroy the subs.

The underwater stuff you’d expect of the series is underplayed, with only a few brief scenes of Tiger either “finning” around the sea in his high-tech scuba outfit (we learn here that he wears a self-contained helmet on his dives, by the way) or hanging out in KRAB while wearing nothing but shorts and a pair of moccasins (Tiger’s preferred KRAB attire, for some reason). He’s got time to kill before meeting with the revolutionaries (because, of course, Stokes himself has many words to kill before he meets his requirement), so he goofs off; here Stokes inserts a bit of his trademark in-jokery:

[Tiger] read a paperback until he could no longer keep his eyes open. As his jaw slackened and his head nodded he wondered where in hell the writers got their ideas. Some of them, the writers themselves, must be pretty weirdo.

More jokery ensues when Tiger swims onshore to meet his contact and has to hide in a rice paddy, fertilized with human shit, as a guard patrol walks by. One of them even takes a piss right over where Tiger is submerged in the foul murk, unseen by them. But who will be surprised when Tiger’s contact turns out to be a young and pretty Chinese woman? Her name is Mary Liu and she meets Tiger in an effectively-rendered scene in the abandoned “Temple of Dogs” which overlooks the sea.

Mary has been carrying on an affair with the General in charge of the nearby submarine complex and has gathered enough info on him and the complex to help Tiger destroy it. Much, much time is wasted on the General’s entrance and Tiger’s subterfuge, pretending he is a Russian here to buy nuclear subs from the Chinese. Finally Tiger kills the dude, and here the novel gets weird again. Stokes, perhaps having watched an episode or two of Mission: Impossible, now has Tiger pull out a latex mask fashioned after the dead General’s features and put it on, along with the General’s uniform. 

Pretending to be drunk, as was the dead General’s wont, he heads to the General’s house in the nearby sub complex, which is built into a hollowed-out volcano over the sea, Mary along with him. But when a jealous Colonel who has long sought to usurp the General comes in on them, Tiger and Mary pretend to have sex on the bed (while still clothed) while the Colonel watches them(?!), until Tiger finally rolls over and blows him away with the lady’s .25 caliber. What is there left to do but drag the bloody corpse into the shower and then have sex all day?

Stokes skips the details but he does decide, for no reason other than general sadism, to gut us readers: Mary, who Tiger finds himself falling for, has come on this mission knowing it’s suicide for her. Tiger will be escaping by the sea once he destroys the subs and he only has air tanks for himself. Mary has taken the job knowing she will die with its success. Tiger spends all day wondering how he can get her out safely, even if it isn’t part of his orders. He finally gets Mary to agree to go with him – only for her to then reveal she’s taken her suicide “L-pill.” She dies in his arms, telling him it was the right thing to do.

Tiger is devastated – but only for a sentence or two. Humorously, Mary is plain forgotten by the next chapter, which has Tiger in scuba suit and helmet sneaking around the sub complex and knifing Chinese guards. Then it’s into the drink to swim around and plant explosives on the fifteen nuclear subs in the pen. Ten pages remain in this seemingly-endless novel (which is actually only 192 pages long – but with the usual super-small print), and only now are things truly happening. But that’s Manning Lee Stokes for you. Four pages from the end we’re graced with the incident depicted on the cover: Red China frogmen in white wetsuits attack Tiger. He takes them out in a few paragraphs.

It’s funny how Stokes charges through the finale, realizing he’s about to hit his word count. The frogmen disposed of, Tiger plants his bombs and swims for KRAB. He just makes it in time for the explosion, which rockets the little sub out of the ocean. Turns out there must’ve been some live atomic warheads on one of the ships Tiger just blew, and an atomic cloud rises in the distance. But there’s only a sentence or two left so Tiger sits back in one of the KRAB’s “contoured seats” and that’s that. So then, all the good stuff was rushed through in about ten or so pages. If Stokes had spent more time on that than inessential bullshit, Seek, Strike And Destroy would’ve been a lot of fun. 

But that’s Manning Lee Stokes for you.

Steel Lightning (Steel Lightning #2)

Steel Lightning, by Kevin Sherrill
September, 1991  Pinnacle/Zebra Books

One of the more obscure men’s adventure series continues with Steel Lightning, the second installment of an un-named, un-numbered series that began with Midnight Lightning. I’ve decided to call this series “Steel Lightning”, given that the third and final volume retains this name, but for what it’s worth the series protagonists refer to themselves as “Street Machine.” 

Whatever the name, Steel Lightning was a chore to get through. At 302 pages of smallish print, each and every page packed with dense blocks of paragraphs, it was an uphill struggle. Once again Kevin Sherrill, apparently a real person, crushes forward momentum with constant backpedalling, inconsequential digressions, repetitive situations, and, this time at least, lots and lots of racist invective. A book like this would cause the mollycoddled college students of today to walk out in protest and their spineless president to resign. It’s hardcore stuff, but honestly just as goofily over-the-top as the sort of shit David Alexander wrote in Swastika.

It comes courtesy the villains of the installment, a group of neo-Nazis operating out of Alphabet City, one of the (then) more dangerous sections of New York. (An irony about this series is how it’s predicated on the rampant and growing crime rate in New York, whereas in real life the ‘90s saw such a dropoff in crime that New York is now considered one of the safest places in the country to live. Wait, maybe that was thanks to the efforts of the Street Machine!) The neo-Nazi scum leader is Niles “Psycho” Dorfman, and he himself reports to a mysterious, never-named bigwig who calls all the shots. Sherrill keeps the bigwig’s identity secret for a “surprise” reveal you can see coming miles away, but meanwhile the back cover copy blows the entire secret, anyway – it’s really a politician who is campaigning for mayor named Rolf Deverak.

Psycho’s crew is the same who caused Street Machine member Moses White so much grief in the first volume, shooting him and leaving him for dead. Moses’s vengeance was left unquenched by the end of that first volume, and I see now why: Sherrill likely planned to center each installment around a specific team member’s revenge. The first volume (gradually) got around to the vengeance of Brian Benson, who had been burned to a crisp by a trio of sadistic bikers. All that was six or so months ago, and when we meet them this time around the Street Machine is busy taking care of business, taking out a crack manufacturing plant in New York.

Speaking of David Alexander, Sherrill again comes off very similarly to the guy, to the point where I again wonder if Sherrill and Alexander were one and the same. But if so, this is a toned down Alexander, for Sherrill only delivers a handful of action scenes. When he does, though, he goes full-blast, with plentiful chaos and gore, and he also shows a penchant for the goofy alliteration Alexander specializes in. And yet for all that, so much of this book is comprised of boring chaff that I figure there’s no way it could be Alexander; 90% of this fat book is a flat-out bore, where hardly anything happens other than constant and repetitive declarations of bad-assed intent from the various members of Street Machine.

Also, Sherrill does himself no favors by, once again, referring to his sundry characters by a variety of names in the narrative. God, this is confusing as hell. Psycho is referred to as “Psycho,” “Niles,” and “Dorfman” before we are finally clued that Sherrill’s only referring to a single character. Likewise the Street Machine heroes are arbitrarily referred to in the narrative by either their first names, last names, or nicknames. Team leader John Dinatale is probably the worst recipient of this confusing mish-mash of narrative naming, sometimes “Dinatale,” sometimes “John,” sometimes even “J.D.” 

Anyway, this opening action scene is appropriately chaotic, but not only is it over way too soon but it’s also one of the very few action scenes in the novel. The Street Machine members hop in their armored Ford panel truck (which Sherrill refers to as “the war wagon,” lifting the concept from Don Pendleton) and escape the cops who are finally rushing onto the scene. Dinatale’s concern that his team will one day be captured by the police is almost realized in Steel Lightning, particularly thanks to an old enemy of Dinatale’s on the force, who has been given orders to find out who is behind this group of guerrilla vigilantes and to bring them all in.

From here the novel stalls for about two hundred or so pages. I thought the previous volume was slow-going, what with the tedious amount of time devoted to the various backstories of each character, as well as the forming of the team, followed by their endless training by Dinatale…I mean you’d think with all of that taken care of, Sherrill could get with the action and gore and have the Street Machine busting heads all over NYC. But no. Steel Lightning is even slower-going than its predecessor, comrpised mainly of the main characters sitting around and flashing back to this or that event, while re-affirming their intent to sow vengeance, the law be damned.

I should give Sherrill the benefit of the doubt, though. My assumption is some editor at Pinnacle/Zebra told him to “elongate” his manuscript (to quote the still-hilarious “Carsenio” skit from SNL). At this point Zebra owned the Pinnacle imprint and Zebra was known for men’s adventure books that were well beyond the page length of the genre norm. Maybe Sherrill’s manuscript suffered from this. Where Steel Lightning should blast full-tilt from first page to last, it instead just treads water, mimicking the first volume in how it’s so listless throughout until finally cutting loose in the very last pages.

There are a few highlights. For one Dinatale’s team gets in an endless chase with the cops, who spot them heading onto the job in their armored Ford truck. While it should be exciting, this sequence just keeps going on and on and on, with Dinatale steering the trusty old Ford through the back alleys of Manhattan until he successfully loses the tail. Then there’s a gruesome, over-the-top sequence, again reminiscent of the work of David Alexander, where Psycho and his Nazis massacre a bunch of people in Chinatown, making it look like a hate crime perpetrated by blacks (they even wear blackface as part of the ruse…!). Sherrill even devotes an entire paragraph to the paths of various bullets as they slam through a pretty young Chinese woman.

Speaking of women, Psycho’s crew has some veritable neo-Nazi She Devils in it, though they’re nothing like their pulpier forebears in the old men's mags. These ones are scurvy, gross harlots with likely poor hygeine; one of them, Heidi, has the pulpy aspect of a swastika tattooed between her breasts, with an SS tattooed on each nipple, but she’s such a nonentity of a character you barely notice her. She, like the other few girls, devotes slavish attention to Psycho, usually reprimanded, beaten, and raped by him for the most minor of infractions. However it must be said that Dinatale, toward the finale, apparently rapes Heidi to death in order to get some desired info out of her. 

Sherrill is at pains to make John Dinatale seem more unhinged and sadistic than the worst “slags” in all of New York (“slags” by the way being a word repeated about a billion times in the novel). Raping a neo-Nazi chick to death (off-page or not) is just one indication of this; hell, Dinatale’s live-in girlfriend is specifically stated as being a teenager. And she brings over another teenager, also a former hooker, and Dinatale bangs ‘em both at the same time. (This too happens off-page; in fact all the sex happens off-page in this volume.) Throughout the novel Dinatale keeps swearing bloody vengeance, and when the shit hits the fan in the final pages he murders neo-Nazis whether they be male or female, armed or unarmed. Some hero.

Meanwhile Barbara Cohen, the Smurfette of the group, is growing feelings for Dinatale, wondering if he’s going to be the stud who gets her off the lesbian bandwagon she jumped on after being raped and tortured in the previous volume. Barbara as we’ll recall is a former porno actress turned model turned rape victim turned District Attorney’s assistant(!!), and she’s getting a case of hot pants for Mr. Dinatale. But this subplot, as interesting as it is, is just another that Sherrill stretches to the breaking point throughout the novel, with nothing resolved by story’s end. By the finale of Steel Lightning Barbara has basically decided that she’s going to tell her girlfriend to take a hike so she can bang Dinatale.  Or will she?

Sadly, this soap operatic bullshit is more interesting than the meat of the tale. As stated, for the most part Steel Lightning is just endless scenes of the various members of the Street Machine stating their vow to fight crime, regardless the cost, while abritrarily cutting over to Psyscho or Deverak spouting racist vitriol. When things do promise to happen – like Moses’s wife accosted by Psycho and gang – it instead leads to a heated argument within the Street Machine, Moses wanting vengeance asap and Dinatale telling him he’ll get vengeance when Dinatale say’s he’ll get vengeance.

Why they don’t barge down Psycho’s doors and blast him and his goons away is obvious: Sherrill has several thousand more words to go before he meets his requirement. Instead it’s back to the stalling and delaying; finally Dinatale orders the troops in when Moses’s wife is abducted. After a gory fight in a neo-Nazi bar, Dinatale corners Heidi, swearing he’ll get the info out of her while screwing her…to death. Next chapter and Dinatale knows where Moses’s wife is being held, and he also intimates that Heidi is in fact dead, so good gravy who knows what happened there. More importantly, the insanity promised by the cover is finally about to be unleashed.

The gun-porn also returns with copious descriptions of the various firearms the team uses. The big, long-awaited action scene sees the Street Machine assaulting Psycho’s headquarters in Alphabet City, machine guns blazing. However there are more neo-Nazis here than expected, so the team is quickly outnumbered. Barbara and WWII vet Joseph Vernick are both shot, though protected by the “Kevlar underwear” Dinatale insists the team members wear. Moses, himself injured, manages to free his wife, but wouldn’t you guess it – Psycho escapes.

Humorously, having gone most of the novel without any action, we are graced with another action scene immediately after this one; Dinatale finds out where Deverak has his secret neo-Nazi meetings, and he and the team grab a bunch of frag grenades and head there. They blast away yet more Nazi scum, and Psycho and Deverak are shot about fifty times each in the melee. It’s at least a memorable finale, but good grief did it take forever to get there.

Steel Lightning could’ve been a rollercoaster of a ride, but it’s just a boring digression. Let’s hope the next volume, which was to be the last, improves things.

Nick Carter: Killmaster #215: The Samurai Kill

Nick Carter: Killmaster #215: The Samurai Kill, by Nick Carter
July, 1986  Charter Books

I bought this installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster fresh off the racks of a Waldenbooks store in the summer of 1986; I was 11 at the time and I was in the grip of Bondmania. I was in the process of reading the Ian Fleming 007 novels and had read all of the then-new “continuation” 007 novels by John Gardner (and I’m unashamed to admit that I actually preferred the Gardner books as a kid!), so I was on the lookout for more spy action. Also, the cover likely drew my interest due to the presence of ninjas.

I’m sure I started The Samurai Kill, but I know I never finished it. I think I put it aside because the opening sequence was too strange for me at the time, and also likely I was overwhelmed by the fact that this was volume 215 of a series; would I be totally out of my depth having missed the preceding 214 volumes?  (Likely one of the reasons Jove Books later decided to make the volume number a lot less prominent on the cover.)  Little did I know at the time how free-flowing this series was, with an army of ghostwriters turning out adventures with hardly any sense of continuity. Also, reading the book now, the weird opening is right up my alley. In short, The Samurai Kill is firmly in the far-out realm of the Killmaster universe, very much along the lines of the later Deep Sea Death, complete with mutant seaweed, underwater cities, and high-tech underwater gear that could come right out of The Aquanauts.

Apparently this one was written by Dennis Lynds, a veteran writer more known by his Michael Collins pseudonym (under which he wrote about detective Dan Fortune). He delivered several Killmaster novels, starting in the ‘70s, and if this one is any indication he would’ve been right at home in the early years of the series, when Lyle Kenyon Engel was producing. Lynds has the same writing style as those early Engel ghostwriters and isn’t afraid to get way out there while still making it all seem realistic (to a point). There’s also a definite sense of fun, which is to say there’s none of that dour, overly “serious” vibe you get from series ghostwriters like Jack Canon (ie Blood Raid). 

One difference between this and the series installments from two decades before is a heavier focus on action, as demanded by ‘80s men’s adventure pulp. In fact The Samurai Kill opens with action, as Carter and his latest bedmate, sexy Australian secret agent Siobhan O’Neill, are attacked while scuba diving near Kwajalein, an atoll deep in the Pacific. Speaking of Siobhan, an interesting note is that she’s never described! This is the first time I can think of where a Killmaster author never once tells us what the main female character looks like – no details on her hair color, eyes, anything. We are of course informed she’s got a great rack, but hell, that’s a given. Anyway the great cover painting by George Gross will have to suffice.

Carter and Siobhan are attacked out of nowhere by a squad of frogmen in black wetsuits, frogmen who aren’t wearing air tanks. A pitched underwater battle ensues; luckily Carter and Siobhan brought along their spearguns. It’s like the finale of Thunderball in miniature and a precursor to the vast amount of underwater action in The Samurai Kill; Carter spends most of the novel in diving gear, swimming around the Pacific, getting in various battles. This isn’t a complaint, as I’ve always been interested in scuba stuff, especially when it’s combined with spy hijinks…likely from watching Thunderball (which is probably another reason I bought this book as a kid, as I’d recently seen that film for the first time and wanted more of the same).

These weird scuba dudes have come from a high-tech submersible that doesn’t look like anything Carter or Siobhan have seen before. It gets even more sci-fi when a gravity field expands from the ship, pulling the attackers back inside, and Carter and Siobhan along with it. They can’t escape and their air tanks are running out. This is a tense scene in which Siobhan saves the day, realizing it’s the metallic tanks that are pulling caught in the gravity field. She and Carter escape and find themselves on a desolate atoll, where they of course have sex all night. Speaking of which, Lynds is more so in the lyrical mode when it comes to the purple prose; Carter and Siobhan screw a whole bunch, but rarely if ever do we get any of the naughty details.

Carter’s here near the Marshall Islands because there have been sightings of underwater flying objects and many locals have gone missing. In addition to the frogmen and their strange craft, Carter next discovers a rampant outbreak of vegetation taking over the coves, mutant seaweed that grows phenomenally fast. Even worse, it’s poisonous, instantly killing anything that touches it. Carter and Siobhan are certain this stuff is connected to the strange frogmen and their underwater craft. Speaking of which, those frogmen are what’s depicted on the cover; turns out they aren’t ninjas, after all. That’s just how their scuba outfits look. In fact there aren’t any ninjas in The Samurai Kill; the 11 year-old me would’ve been bummed!

The seaweed grows more rampant, killing natives and even destroying a nearby Soviet spyship. Carter and Siobhan, who turns out to be like a female version of the Killmaster, venture around the various islands, researching clues, getting in frequent battles with more wetsuited goons, and of course having sex. There’s another long action sequence, this time featuring Carter going up against the mysterious frogmen alone, which takes place on a golf course. This frogmen army turns out to be comprised of both men and women, from various countries, but Japan keeps turning up in the investigation; eventually Carter determines that the mutant seaweed is the product of a chemical research factory outside of Tokyo. 

The focus on action really picks up the middle half, which is otherwise bogged down in too much dialog and redundancy; Carter keeps getting off on one-upping the stolid commander of the US base in Kwajalein, as does Siobhan. But before they leave for Tokyo Carter and Siobhan are again attacked by an assault team of frogmen, which leads to a pitched battle on the army base. Then Carter’s plane explodes on the flight to Tokyo, but he’s able to bail out, just like in the old G.I. Joe cartoon. Siobhan survives too, however we get lots of worry from Carter’s perspective when he thinks the woman he was “just inside of” a few hours before might be dead(!).

Carter and Siobhan’s Tokyo investigation eventually leads them to a research center off the coast where the mutant seaweed was created, but thought to be destroyed. When going to interview the widow of the seaweed’s creator, the two are attacked by samurai. This finally is the introduction of the main villain: Fujiwara, last descendant of the ancient ruling power of feudal Japan, who not only wants to rule the country again but also wants to wipe out humanity and start over again. He plans to infect the world’s oceans with the seaweed, causing the gradual death of everyone on the planet, save for the select group of people who will live…in Fujiawara’s massive underwater colony!

The Samurai Kill gets more and more sci-fi (and again more like Deep Sea Death) as a captured Carter and Siobhan are taken to Fujiawara’s domed city beneath the sea, in which a thousand or so people live. But talk about not reaping the potential. Carter’s in and out of the place within a few pages. Even worse is the lame, last-minute copout of Siobhan going turncoat and deciding to join “the bad guys.” Why? Because she thinks Fujiwara’s all man and stronger than even Carter and she wants to serve beside him. It’s all pretty hard to buy; honestly, Siobhan’s decision to suddenly go evil just comes out of nowhere. At first I thought it was just a ruse on her part, but nope, she stays evil until the bitter end.

The finale continues with the action focus, but rather than taking place in the underwater city (which would’ve been cooler) it instead takes place in a high school(?) on Kwalajein. It’s all like a summer blockbuster as Carter goes in, guns blazing (there’s more of a focus on guns here, too, again befitting it’s mid-‘80s publication), freeing the captured US soldiers and killing legions of wetsuited goons. The climax sees Carter and Fujiwara going at it with samurai swords while Siobhan stands by watching. Speaking of whom, Siobhan survives the book, telling Carter she regrets nothing and will no doubt cop a deal and go free; Hawk later confirms this, saying Siobhan will likely live out her years on a nice pension.

The spy-fy gadgetry of the early years is also here, in particular a pressurized, scuba-ready plastic suit Carter gets from AXE and smuggles into the underwater city beneath his clothes, conveniently enough. Pierre, the gas bomb he straps to his “upper thigh,” is used twice, and also interesting to note is that in this volume Carter loses both Wilhelmina, his Luger, and Hugo, his stiletto. But later on he just breaks out a replacement Wilhelmina, which is pretty funny, I mean the dude must have like a crate of Lugers he calls “Wilhelmina” and stilettos he calls “Hugo,” which doesn’t sound psychotic at all. In addition there’s the vast assortment of sci-fi tech at the disposal of Fujiwara, like those self-contained wetsuits his soldiers wear.

This was definitely one of my favorite volumes yet of the series, but I still wouldn’t rate it as high as The Sea Trap or even Deep Sea Death; there was just a bit too much repetition at times, and also given the expanded word count of these later installments a lot of the book comes off as padding. Also Siobhan’s going over to the dark side was lame and insulting to the reader, particularly given how she was basically in love with Carter throughout the book and even saved his bacon multiple times.