No Man’s World

No Man’s World, by Martin Caidin

No month stated, 1967  E.P. Dutton

Part of a sequence of Space Race novels Martin Caidin published in the ‘60s and early ‘70s,* No Man’s World takes place in the then-future year of 1971: Russia has won the race, first landing on the moon in 1968 and setting up a lunar base “for the enrichment of the entire world.” Meanwhile the United States is still struggling to keep up, and the novel concerns the first-ever Apollo lunar mission, the objective being to set foot on the moon and get America back into the game. 

Caidin then is just projecting out the early years of the Space Race; as anyone who studies the subject knows, Russia really trounced the US when all this first began. First with Sputnik, then with various men and women in space. Younger people today probably don’t realize how huge President Kennedy’s challenge to the nation was in 1961: to get a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Having been born in 1974 and thus after all of it happened, I personally didn’t realize how big of a feat it was until I started getting into the subject. But when Kennedy made his challenge, America was in a serious game of catch-up with Russia. Getting a man on the moon seemed like an impossible task, given that America hadn’t even gotten a man in orbit yet. 

Of course as reality panned out, America slowly but surely caught up with Russia and then overtook it, just as President Kennedy had said would happen. Caidin, writing in the mid-1960s, is conservative in his predictions: he doesn’t see America launching a successful lunar bid until 1971. Reality would soon prove Caidin’s predictions too conservative, with the Russians not only never even making it to the moon but Americans going there a handful of times by the late ‘60s, with a few more trips in the early ‘70s. It’s curious that Caidin was so conservative in this regard, but I’m betting he was writing when the Gemini Program got started, thus he had no idea how successful (and quick-moving) the program would be. For in fairly short order NASA not only caught up with Russia but surpassed it. 

No Man’s World clearly didn’t make much of an impact on the reading public, as it only received this hardcover edition. It’s way overpriced on the used books marketplace, too, so I had to get it via Interlibrary Loan. Plus I had to request an extension on my hold, as this is a doorstop of a book, 414 pages of small and dense print. I know, 414 pages doesn’t sound like a lot, but I think with bigger print and less “stuffed” layout this book would probably come in closer to 600 pages. In a way it’s almost a prefigure of Tom Clancy’s doorstop techno-thrillers; while ostensibly No Man’s World is about the first American lunar launch, it also encompasses polticial infighting, espionage, and even melodrama in a love-triangle subplot. 

The first fifty pages are pretty hard going, and doubtless turned off a lot of readers of the day. We meet Colonel Lev Barkagan, commandant of the USSR lunar colony, the man to have lived longest on the moon – there 3 years, and commanding the base ever since. The moon is a harsh climate that he hates, and there’s lots of buzzkilling here with all the men stinking and the monotonous toil of living on the moon. There are twenty-seven cosmonauts in the base, and many have died on the way here and during their stay. This interminable opening describes the hellish moon and Barkagan’s methods to survive on it. It possibly gave readers of the day the impression that the main characters would all be Russians…lots of backstory to Barkagan’s start as cosmonaut in 1961, his first space trips, training at the lunar training ground, and finally the trials and tribulations of the lunar base cosmonauts. A lot of Russian names and backstories are thrown at us at once. 

Things pick up significantly with the introduction of our Apollo crew: Commander Rance Allenby, Command Module Pilot Gene Stanley, and Scientist Leigh “The Brain” Raymond. Allenby and Stanley are cut from the same cloth as their real-life counterparts: veteran flyboys who have made the jump over to the space program. Allenby started in the Gemini years, and Stanley a little later; he also happens to be a ‘Nam vet, whereas most of the real-life Gemini and Apollo guys had been in Korea. As for Raymond, he’s a scientist, one who learned to fly so as to become an astronaut. According to Tom Wolfe, this means he could never achieve “The Right Stuff,” but regardless the other astronauts respect him…even though Raymond has a monumental ego. In fact we have a long flashback to how his wife learned to hate him, given his complete disregard for other people. This element of characterization, so heavily built up in the opening chapters, is basically dropped. 

No Man’s World is almost as much a technical manual as it is a novel. Caidin thoroughly – one might even say pedantically – spells out the entire operation of the Apollo craft, from launch to lunar landing. But in hindsight I realized that it was only in later years that all this would seem routine; Americans became used to Apollo launches in the later ‘60s and early ‘70s, but this novel was published before an Apollo or Saturn V rocket even had a public launch. In fact, Caidin was likely writing in ’66 or earlier, so before the Apollo 1 disaster, which isn’t mentioned anywhere in the novel. Thus Caidin was writing speculative fiction in this regard, based off what he knew was coming with the Apollo program. For that matter, the ship is constantly just referred to as “Apollo,” with no numerical designation as with the real launches, and also there’s no naming convention for the command service module or the lunar module (ie Columbia, Eagle). 

Another indication of when Caidin was writing is that Rance Allenby is given a backstory – clunkily delivered in expository dialog by Stanley – that mirrors the real-life Gemini 8 mission with Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott. Just as their Gemini almost crashed after docking with an Agina station in orbit, so too did Allenby’s. Also, Allenby’s career trajectory is very similar to Armstrong’s: he started flying at a young age, served as a decorated fighter pilot in Korea, then turned his hand to test piloting before entering NASA with the beginning of the Gemini Program. (All this too is delivered in clunky exposition!) Allenby’s backstory diverges from Armstrong’s in the personal arena, though; in another clunkily-delivered bit of backstory, we learn that he married his college sweetheart, had a son with her….and then she died in a freak skydiving accident! This bit was so random it made me laugh out loud. It’s made even worse because it’s all relayed via a dream sequence, Allenby sleeping on Apollo and flashing back to the event several years before where his wife decided to surprise her family at an airshow, having taken secret skydiving lessons and looking to give them a big surprise, but her parachute failed and she plummeted to her death. 

All this is relayed in backstory and exposition as “Apollo” rockets toward the moon, with arbitrary digressions on this or that and a lot of technical stuff. Finally around page 200 things pick up(!). The first steps on the moon are pretty interesting. In this reality, Russia’s already been on the moon for three years; Allenby and Raymond even see their lunar monorail in action as they glide over the surface to land. Per Houston, Allenby is to take the first steps on the moon, as commander of the mission. But when they land Allenby pulls rank and tells Houston there’s a change of plans, that Raymond will be first. Houston acknowledges that Allenby has the control, as he’s up there and they are down on Earth. Allenby as it turns out has no interest in being remembered in the history books; he explains to Raymond that because the Soviets are already here, America’s lost the moon race. Their only chance to make a big statement for the world is for the first “astronaut-scientist” on the moon be an American. So he requests that Brain hoist an American flag and venture down on the lunar surface and announce, to the TV camera beaming this back to millions on Earth, “For God and country.” 

So this is another curious projection of Caidin’s. In reality, Harrison Schmitt was the first scientist to walk on the moon, on the Apollo 17 mission. Who today could name him? But I guess in Caidin’s imagination this was the only way America could at least get one big development over the Russians; there’s a subplot, not much explored, where a military general bitches at a congressman that America could’ve had a shot at being first on the moon if not for budget fights and restrictions. I don’t see this entire “race to be second” as believable, though. It doesn’t fit the American spirit (or at least the American spirit that once existed). If Russia did get to the moon first, the US would’ve strived to get there sooner than three years later, at least. Caidin tries to work up an underdog sort of spirit to the entire Apollo program here, but it’s just not believable, particularly when the astronauts themselves are dispirited about the situation. 

Caidin brings a tense Cold War element into the tale with the wily Russians “going silent” upon the American landing on the moon; soon thereafter Moscow releases a statement that it’s lost all communications with the lunar colony. And yes, that’s “colony;” the Russians of course have claimed the moon for themselves, given that they’ve landed here first. Meanwhile on the moon, the lunar bug is surrounded by three “Cats,” massive vehicles the Russians use to get around on the moon; they sound very much like the vehicles seen in Moon Zero Two. Allenby again bucks Houston by insisting that both he and the Brain will go out to talk to them, disregarding Mission Control’s orders that one person stay in the lunar craft. But the two are given a frosty reception, Colonel Barkagan flatly announcing that the moon is Russian territory and they are trespassing. 

Barkagan orders Allenby and Raymond to get back in their lunar lander and join up with Stanley on the command module, which will be passing overhead in 45 minutes. Raymond proves he’s not just a meek scientist when he challenges Barkagan, the “low gravity” rifles his men bears notwithstanding. Allenby has to tell him to stand down, leading to a lot of hostility between the two crewmembers; Allenby is “yellow” per Raymond, who is in disbelief when the commander “puts his tail between his legs” and gives in to the Russian demands. This after Barkagan’s men have even broken apart the American flag Raymond just planted. So they return to Earth in great dispirits, Allenby reasoning with Raymond that it was a losing proposition; the Russians weren’t bluffing, and the whole world heard what happened via the radio link. 

After this things get lame again. Incredibly, we’re faced with overlong chapters in which various characters exposit and exposit, from newcasters (who go on in pages and pages of unbroken dialog) informing us of developing situations to even a part where the Russians argue their case at the UN. Finally things sort of build up again when NASA decides to go in a venture with the UN and scrub “United States” off the next Saturn launch and put “United Nations” on it, so as to poke the Russians a bit – see if they’re still so cocky to challenge when the astronauts represent “all nations” and not just the US. Rance and his military pals are chagrined by this; there’s a fair bit of UN hatred here, in particular how it caves under any pressure and will be quick to turn its back on the US. So I guess that was a thing even in the ‘60s! 

But as Allenby said, the Russians aren’t bluffing, and this next NASA crew meets with trouble: Barkagan has his men cut down the commander when he refuses to leave the moon. The scientist-astronaut is taken prisoner. Things are finally coming to a boil. But Caidin cuts back to Earth and puts the brakes on again. At this point a major character commits suicide…and we learn about it from a letter Allenby is sent. This is Caidin’s approach to writing in a nutshell. We already had a bit of backstory devoted to this character at novel’s beginning…backstory that didn’t pan out…after which the character was sort of relegated to secondary status, only to end up offing himself, uh, off-page. One would think that important dramatic developments like this would warrant more narrative space than UN speechifying or newscaster blathering. 

Things again threaten to pick up when Allenby and an Air Force general begin to roll out a massive operation, in which a veritable armada of Saturn rockets blast into the sky, even setting up a space station in “Polar orbit” so that more ships can be quickly assembled for a military assault on the moon. But there’s also some subterfuge afoot, as the Americans successfully fool the Russians that they have more men on the moon than they actually do. This time however the US heads for the dark side of the moon, claiming this area for themselves and thus provoking the Russian bear. Barkagan eventually assembles his Cats and makes his way over there, leading to a skirmish that’s almost altogether ruined by Caidin’s prose style; there’s absolutely nothing thrilling or gripping about it. But by skirmish’s end both Allenby’s team and Barkagan’s team must work together, to either “die separately or live together.” 

The novel ends with Caidin introducing a new element: while Barkagan and Allenby have learned to work together, the Red Chinese meanwhile throw their hat in the space ring and nuke the Russian base, then go about challenging the US position with their own space launches. Rather than get into a major world war, everyone decides to back off from the moon, though Allenby and Barkagan are already looking to Mars as the next desitnation. And with this, mercifully, No Man’s World finally comes to a close. 

Now, as for Caidin’s prose. I think I used the word “clunky” a few times above, and I’ll use it again here. I’ve said it before, but this guy’s prose reads almost identically to that of Mark Roberts or William Crawford. Everything from sentence construction to reliance on exposition, not to mention the obsession with all things aeronautical. Caidin was a sort of infamous pilot himself, so it’s possible he was friends with fellow pilots Roberts and Crawford, or at least knew of them. But Mark Roberts was fond of incorporating the names of his friends in his books, as he did with Crawford in The Penetrator #9; I’ve yet to see a Roberts novel in which Caidin is mentioned. Anyway, given that Caidin was publishing earlier than these two I’m going to assume they were just greatly influenced by his style. 

All of which is to say Caidin’s writing leaves a little to be desired. The reliance on exposition is bad enough, but the overly-thorough technical stuff gets to be a drag, too. It also doesn’t help that he introduces interesting touches but fails to follow up on them. For example, we learn that the Brain’s wife hates him, and is in love with Allenby, but this doesn’t amount to much in the narrative. Same goes for various minor characters who are introduced at great narrative expense but who soon disappear from the text. In most cases it just comes off like Caidin showing off, like the newscaster who drones on and on for his report on the American lunar landing, but before we even get to it we have a lot of interminable background about his start as a reporter and what all he learned about the space program and whatnot. Unfortunately this stuff takes precedence over telling a gripping story with compelling characters. And some of the sentences are incredibly awkward, ie “[Allenby] annointed his inner pain by melting into the intricacies of the space-time velocity vector that would boost them out of lunar orbit to begin the long journey Earthward.” 

As mentioned, No Man’s World only received this hardcover edition, and it’s pretty evident why. It seems to be pretty much forgotten today, with not even a scanned version on the Internet Archive. So if you’re interested, do what I did and request it via Interlibrary Loan. Just don’t pay the exorbitant amount online booksellers are asking.

*The others being Marooned (first published in 1964, then revised as a film tie-in in 1969), Four Came Back (1968), and The Cape (1971).

Time Clock Of Death (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #58)

Time Clock Of Death, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1970  Award Books

Not just “yet another insallment of Nick Carter: Killmaster,” Time Clock Of Death is special for a few reasons: One, it features the last-ever appearance of Julia “Julie” Baron, a fellow AXE agent (and bedmate) of Nick Carter’s. And two, in a 1981 interview with Will Murray (published in Paperback Parade #2 in 1986), series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel stated, “I know I did that one,” referring to Time Clock Of Death.* 

Officially Time Clock Of Death is credited to George Snyder, and the book reads identically to the rest of his work. The only interview I’ve ever read with Lyle Kenyon Engel is Murray’s, and I’ve never seen it stated anywhere that Engel himself wrote anything. He was the idea guy, the one who would farm out plots or concepts to his ghostwriters. So either his claim of authorship for this book (and the others, noted below) was b.s. or maybe it was just exaggeration; maybe Engel just embellished the manuscripts in question. I would believe this one if only because Julie Baron, the hoststuff brunette AXE agent with “almond eyes,” is heavily built up in Time Clock Of Death and her previous adventures with Nick are often referred to. I would believe that the series producer would be more aware of these previous yarns than a contract writer would be. 

First appearing in Run, Spy, Run (ie the first volume of the series), Julie is presented as Nick’s equal in most ways, the yin to his yang and whatnot, and they’re clearly made for each other. In fact she is so empedestaled (I just created that word, btw – you can file it beside “embiggened”) that it’s almost ridiculous; not only is she in love with Nick, but Nick is in love with her! Besides Run, Spy Run (in which the two also seemed to fall in love), I’ve only read one other installment with Julie: Lew Louderback’s Danger Key, and it’s been so long ago I can’t recall how lovey-dovey the two got in that one. The way they come off in this one you wonder why they don’t just quit the spy game and get hitched – a proposition Julie actually makes in the course of the novel. And indeed, Julie was removed from the series for precisely this reason: In Will Murray’s excellent article on Nick Carter: Killmaster in the The Armchair Detective volume 15 number 4 (1982), he states that Engel “eliminated Julie Baron, Nick’s steady girlfriend,” because she “kept getting in the way of Nick’s love life, which became increasingly torrid after [initial series ghostwriter] Valerie Moolman left the series.” 

However the Engel embellishing – if indeed there is any here in Time Clock Of Death – is only partly accurate: Nick tells us that he’s been on “two assignments” with Julie, but meanwhile she appeared in a handful of volumes, this being the last of them. And yes, Nick “tells us;” we’re now in the series’s unfortunate first-person narration years, which, also according to Engel in the above Will Murray pieces, was a requirement of the publisher, so as to compete with the Matt Helm books. I personally hate first-person narration in my men’s adventure, but as I’ve mentioned before, George Snyder’s hardboiled narrative style usually comes off as first-person even when it’s not, like in the Operation Hang Ten series. 

And Time Clock Of Death is definitely the work of Snyder, or at least the majority of it is. It has all the hallmarks: a pessimistic hero, burned-out vibe, focus on fisticuffs and knife-fighting instead of gunplay, and a fair dose of misogyny, not to mention women getting killed. In fact the novel opens with Nick in bed with some chick, and someone comes in and blows her away while Nick’s sucking on her nipple! His life is literally saved because she offers him her “large breasts” before their latest round in the sack. A murdered woman almost always factors into a George Snyder novel (again, the hardboiled connotations), and this one’s no different. 

Nick’s already on the job when we meet him; he’s been handed an assignment so vague that you wonder how he even gets started. But Snyder barrels along so that the novel speeds by; as most others at this point in the series, it’s a mere 156 pages of big print. So Russia has revealed a new “super jet airliner,” a big passenger airliner that’s faster and more massive than anything America has. They were in the process of showing it off in New York when the thing plumb disappeared. Yes, someone managed to heist an actual airliner; we’re hastily informed that a new “antiradar” device onboard has prevented anyone from finding out where it has been taken to. So clearly the plot is implausible, but then also seems to predict the future real-life MH370 mystery (which doesn’t seem to be much of a mystery anymore; the wreckage appears to be in the middle of the Cambodian jungle). 

With this shaky setup Snyder still manages to deliver a fast-moving yarn with plentiful action and a lot of sex, most of it more explicit than earlier instances in the series. And all of it – save for a bit where Nick is raped(!) by a heavyset woman into whips and bondage – is with Julie Baron, again putting forth the notion that the two are a steady couple. Nick, following scant leads, heads over to London, where he gets in a fight with a hulking “Oriental.” This leads Nick to Hong Kong, where boss Hawk tells him that, conveniently enough, Julie Baron’s been working on a case, one involving a mysterious figure known as “The Colonel.” And wouldn’t you believe it, but the two cases soon coincide! Nick is actually excited to see Julie again, and the part where he meets her in a crowded Hong Kong bar is nicely done. 

In Snyder’s hands, Julie Baron is memorable indeed. She too has been looking forward to seeing Nick again, to the extent that she’s taken “the pill” in preparation for her first night with him! This bit is actually turned into a running gag, as Julie fears she’s “wasted” the pill, because duty interferes with the longed-for shenanigans; that “Oriental” from London is here as well, and Nick manages to knock him out and take him back to their hotel. Angered at this intrusion, Julie wants to be a “sadistic bitch” when the guy wakes up, toying with Nick’s stiletto and begging “please let me have him” to Nick in a sort of twisted good cop-bad cop routine. From here – their burning yearnings still unfulfilled – the two fly off to Singapore, trying to track down the Colonel. 

Snyder can’t be accused of spending much time on the plot, though. Nick and Julie, disguised as a traveling salesman and his somewhat-portly wife, merely go around saying they’re looking for “The Colonel,” and the villain comes to them. At any rate they get to the bedroom stuff straightaway. Snyder really pours it on thick here, with Julie telling Nick “I want you so bad I can taste it,” and Nick responding “I’m going to take my time having you.” And he certainly does, as the scene starts off pretty explicit so far as Nick’s oral explorations of Julie go, but then it takes a turn to the poetic, complete with a random bit of present-tense narration (“I’m always afraid I will hurt her,” etc), before getting into a fantastical vibe with stuff about a “cloud” the two are on in some metaphysical astral plane or somesuch. Another Snyder hallmark: “completion” is here and elsewhere used instead of “climax.” Nick and Julie are such a fantastic match that Julie actually cries afterward…not that this stops her from waking Nick a few hours later, for another somewhat-explicit bout. 

Snyder doesn’t let the lovey-dovey stuff get in the way of the random lurid factor, though. Soon enough Nick and Julie are captured, and Nick eventually finds himself naked and chained to a medieval torture rack. He’s now the captive of Fancy, a “husky” woman of indeterminate age (Nick tells us she could be anywhere from her 40s to her 60s) who dresses in an s&m leather getup and employs a legion of similarly-husky women, dressed the same, who wield whips and like to snap them in Fancy’s direction while she rides her latest victim. Fancy works with the Colonel, who of course turns out to be the mastermind behind the plot, coincidence be damned. The Colonel will get Julie, and Fancy will get Nick; both will die, it’s just a matter of how. 

So Snyder delivers this crazed, out-of-nowhere sequence where Julie, clearly harboring a secret plan, gets Nick all worked up so he can, uh, respond to Fancy, and then Fancy gets up on top of Nick and starts riding away while her “leather ladies” snap their whips at them! And then Julie sneaks off and gets a submachine gun. Folks it’s for insane shit like this that I will always prefer Nick Carter: Killmaster to the James Bond books. But unfortunately after this things sort of stall out for a while. First we have some nice running action where Nick and Julie, dressed like coolies to blend in with the other Asian soldiers in the place, blow away scads of goons with various weapons. But then they sneak on a freighter bound for Java and it’s back to that other perennial Snyder hallmark: excessive description of the characters sneaking into and out of places. 

Things finally come back to a boil when Nick and Julie find themselves in a remote location complete with a medieval-style castle. Plus the plane’s here. They set fire to the place to alert the nearby marines, which leads to this curious typo: “My eyes were stinging as I stepped away from me.” Ponder that, friends! Julie really does get in Nick’s way here in the finale; she certainly holds her own in the action scenes, and even proves she’s made of tough stuff when she walks off a major knife wound (actually she drinks it off, more like, thanks to a shot of bourbon), but of course Nick spends the climactic action scene afraid that she might get killed. Snyder has no qualms with his hero fighting female opponents, so we have some nicely-handled stuff where Nick takes on Fancy’s leather ladies, all of whom wear knee-high boots and leather cossets with holes for their nipples to stick out of, by the way. (Yet curiously Snyder buzzkills his own lurid imagination by constantly telling us how fat and ugly the women are!) Nick shoots them, beats them up, and even in one memorable bit repeatedly bashes the face of one of the bondage women into a brick wall. 

As for the Colonel, he’s not nearly as memorable as Fancy: he’s a Napolean-esque squat little guy with a bald head and beady black eyes. He too enjoys his time with Fancy; not content to just have this happen once in the novel, Snyder has Fancy again riding someone while her leather ladies snap their whips around, only this time the guy’s the Colonel and he’s apparently enjoying it. That said, Fancy’s sendoff isn’t very spectacular; Nick doesn’t kill her, at least, but he does as mentioned take her leather ladies through the wringer. Meanwhile the Colonel somehow manages to escape with a knocked-out Julie, and it’s up to Nick to save her. But again, Julie isn’t nearly a damsel in distress. Snyder is at such pains to put Julie’s fate in doubt here, even at one point having her fall off a cliff, that I thought she was going to be permanently removed. 

As it turns out, Snyder could’ve just followed through with the death threats, after all, as Julie wouldn’t appear again after this one. Instead Snyder ends the tale with Nick and Julie about to enjoy some more “down time,” as it were, and again the lovey-dovey stuff is so thick that you can’t comprehend how these two could even bear to separate. Interesting then that she wasn’t to appear again; certainly some readers out there wondered when Julie Baron would return. It makes Nick especially appear like a cad in that he’s clearly in love with her, even as mentioned telling her so, yet in the following books he won’t even mention her again! But then that’s only to be expected when you’re the product of a revolving cast of ghostwriters. 

*The other Killmaster titles Engel claimed to have written were: Cambodia, Ice Bomb Zero, and The Mark Of Cosa Nostra. Curiously, all four of the titles Engel claimed as his are officially credited to George Snyder.

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 15

Even More Space Race Documentaries: 

In The Shadow Of The Moon (2007): Released theatrically in 2007, director David Sington’s documentary (produced by Ron Howard) presents the novel approach of having the lunar astronauts speak directly into the camera and tell us their story, with vintage film footage bringing their words to life. This turned out to be one of the best moon landing documentaries I’ve seen; it doesn’t have the visual sweep of Apollo 11, but it has the most heart of any of these documentaries, for it quickly becomes apparent that these astronauts were profoundly changed by their lunar experiences. As the onscreen legend tells us at the opening, the 27 Apollo astronauts who voyaged to the moon between 1968 and 1972 are the only human beings in history to have actually visited another planet. And it is very compelling to watch them, older now and with decades to reflect on their experiences, as they tell us of what they encountered and how it changed them. In this regard the film pairs perfectly with Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary For All Mankind; there the astronauts also told us their thoughts, but their voices were never credited, and everything seen was archival footage. Here we see them and hear them, and it makes for absorbing viewing. 

But this is not to detract from the film footage. Sure, it doesn’t have the epic visual majesty of Apollo 11, but there is a lot of great material here. And as with For All Mankind, Sington has assembled many of the Apollo astronauts. Neil Armstrong is again a no-show, but Buzz Aldrin’s here, as is Mike Collins. Charlie Duke and Gene Cernan are also present; these two are almost the opposites of Armstrong in that they seem very willing to participate in these documentaries. Another interesting presence here is Edgar Mitchell, who I believe was sort of ostracized from the NASA world after his ESP and UFO interests became well known. In fact the following year the Discovery Channel released When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions (review forthcoming), a joint Discovery Channel-NASA production, and Mitchell’s barely a footnote in it, relegated to half-second archival footage. I’m glad he’s here, as I found his comments fascinating throughout; Mitchell, who died in 2017, would’ve certainly understood that in earlier, more magic-inclined cultures, he and his fellow lunar journeyers would’ve been seen as mystics of the highest order, given that they’d literally walked on another world. 

One of the great things about In The Shadow Of The Moon is that it shows how each of these astronauts have their own personality: Alan Bean comes off like someone’s slightly loony grandpa, Gene Cernan makes every statement as if he expects someone to chisel it in stone, Mike Collins is like the best friend you never knew you were missing, and Charlie Duke just seems happy to be there. In the celebrity lookalike contest, Buzz Aldrin here looks so much like Kirk Douglas that at first I thought it was Kirk Douglas in some sort of weird metatextual thing, and Jim “Apollo 13” Lovell looks a helluva lot more like Kevin Nealon than he does Tom Hanks. What I mean to say is, all these guys come off as just regular dudes, even Mitchell, and the way they talk so forthrightly directly into the camera you could almost get the impression that they’ve come over to your house to tell you about their moon adventures over a beer or two. 

Sington basically just lets the astronauts tell their stories and pieces this together into a running monologue. In other words, he doesn’t do much to mess things up, but I did feel that some of the shots and angles in these interviews were a bit too “art for art’s sake.” Like super extreme closeups of Mike Collins’s eyes while he’s listening to a JFK speech, etc. Sington’s use of archival footage is better, though, visually complimenting the words of his subjects. This documentary also features footage I haven’t seen in any others; when Armstrong and Aldrin break off from Columbia in the lunar module, for example, Collins says to them over the commlink, “That’s a nice looking vehicle you have there, even if it’s upside down.” To which Armstrong responds, in a rare moment of levity, “Somebody’s upside down.” 

Speaking of Armstrong, another thing that becomes clear from In The Shadow Of The Moon is that all these astronauts hold him in high respect. They almost talk about Neil Armstrong the way regular people talk about astronauts. Alan Bean tells the story, told elsewhere (particularly in Chasing The Moon), of how Armstrong barely avoided death by ejecting out of a lunar module training vehicle while test flying it, as shown in vintage footage. Bean, who shared an office and secretary with Armstrong, relates how he heard about this happening later that day, and so he went into the office – immediately after ejecting Armstrong just went back to the office to get back to his paperwork! – and he asked Armstrong about it, and a blasé Armstrong just responded, “Yeah.” Bean gets a lot of amusement out of this, and also he’s the only subject here who discusses The Right Stuff (the original Wolfe book, too, not just the movie!). He also has a laugh out loud bit where he refers again to the book when talking about how Armstrong’s lunar landing could’ve been scrapped due to low fuel. A bit, by the way, that Charlie Duke completely rips off in When We Left Earth! 

But then the humor is more prevalent than you’d think in this documentary. Mike Collins in particular displays a wonderful sense of humor. Another bit that made me laugh out loud was his comment on President Kennedy’s challenge to the nation in 1961: “It was beautiful in its simplicity. Where? Moon. When? End of decade.” I also appreciated his comment on the success of Apollo 11, and how everything about the mission went perfectly: “No one messed up. Even I didn’t mess up!” Speaking of Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin doesn’t feauture as much as you’d think he would, and for the most part his most memorable comments are about how he must live up to his historical moment every day of his life, and also how he was sort of the butt of a joke among the other astronauts in that at the time he was so focused on the lunar “rendezvous” operation that he would rarely talk about anything else, so people would try to avoid him. Aldrin displays his own sense of humor, too; here is likely the only documentary in which the man himself will tell you that he took so long getting down the ladder of the lunar module to the moon’s surface for his first steps because…he chose that moment to, uh, fill up the urine collector inside his spacesuit. “Everyone has their own first,” Aldrin says. 

I’ve mentioned Gene Cernan in previous reviews, and again he’s a memorable presence, and one the director latched on to; indeed, the title of the documentary comes from Cernan’s monlogue about how the entire voyage of Apollo 17 (or maybe it was Apollo 10; he went to the moon twice) was in the light of the sun, until abruptly everything was dark: “We were in the shadow of the moon.” As ever he has a lot of compelling things to say. So too does Mitchell, who relates the feeling of oneness with the universe he experienced on the voyage home, a feeling that was clearly akin to the spiritual revalations experienced by ancient mystics. On the more religious side of the specturm, Charlie Duke reveals that shortly after his own trip he became a Christian. It is very interesting to watch these astronauts – trained scientists and, per Aldrin’s description in Chasing The Moon, “technical people” – talking so earnestly about their spiritual beliefs. Collins too says that his mission to the moon has made him approach life with “more equanimity,” and Bean’s comments are also memorable – he says that since his trip to the moon he’s never once complained about the weather, or about other people: “We are literally living in the Garden of Eden.” 

In fact the final half of In The Shadow Of The Moon is very emotional, a word I don’t often use here on the blog, given how its lost much meaning due to its overuse in our touchy-feely modern era. But man some of the words here are very moving, and you wonder how different the world woud be if men like this were put in positions of power. As Jim Lovell relates, these guys got so far from Earth that you could block out the entire planet with just your thumb; from that perspective, all the bullshit of Earth – the wars, politics, etc – seemed like absolutely nothing. It’s touches like this that elevate In The Shadow Of The Moon above most other documentaries, and I’m thankful of Sington for making this movie, particularly given that so many of the astronauts seen here have since passed on. 

Neil Armstrong’s presence would’ve made the documentary even better, but unfortunately he’s not here. However as things worked out, a year before he died Armstrong gave a rare interview…to an Australian accounting firm! This 2011 interview is now up on Youtube, and it’s highly recommended as it comes off like a postscript to In The Shadow Of The Moon. This 45-minute interview is more fascinating than I thought it would be; Armstrong talks about many of the same topics covered in Sington’s documentary, and we even get his side of the lunar rover training accident in which he ejected. There’s also a great part where Armstrong takes an audience through the actual landing on the moon. Fascinating stuff, and Armstrong is very relaxed and candid, and the reviewer is great as well: he’s very respectful, lets Armstrong speak, and even tries to get him to laugh a bit. He’s also damned determined to make Armstrong understand how important he is to so many people: “You’re a wonderful man,” he tells him at the end of the interview. You can tell Amrstrong really didn’t give many interviews, as most of what he says here is repeated verbatim in Armstrong. 

Armstrong (2019): But if that isn’t enough Neil Amrstrong for you, there’s also this 90-minute documentary directed by David Fairhead, produced with the assistance of Armstrong’s family, and featuring, uh, the voice of Harrison Ford reading material Armstrong wrote, ie “the voice of Neil Armstrong.” It’s cool Ford is here and all, but his gravelly voice sounds nothing like Armstrong’s. That being said, at least Ford’s voiceover isn’t delivered as half-assedly as it was on Blade Runner (though in Ford’s defense I read many years ago that he gave such a blasé voiceover performance in the hopes that director Ridley Scott wouldn’t use it, as he supposedly felt the film was better without a voiceover). But man, a lot of Ford’s voiceover is comprised verbatim of what Armstrong said in that 2011 interview, linked above. One wonders why they just didn’t dub Armstrong’s voice on here instead? Maybe it was a rights issue? 

Indeed, perhaps it was a rights issue, as Armstrong has the lowest production values of any of the space race documentaries I’ve reviewed here. The majority of the footage is unremastered public domain stuff, in particular sequences from Theo Kamecke’s Moonwalk One; even this is shown in the public domain 4:3 aspect ratio. We aren’t talking full remastered widescreen glory like in Apollo 11 or Chasing The Moon. One thing the documentary does have going for it is the participation of Armstrong’s family and friends, which means we get a lot of home movies and photos that you won’t see anywhere else. Otherwise the production sticks to promotional films or archival material that, as mentioned, hasn’t even been remastered. Other than that, we have talking heads who try to tell us their impressions of the man: Armstrong’s ex wife, his two sons, some friends he made later in life, and fellow astronauts Mike Collins, Frank Borman, Charlie Duke, and Dave Scott, along with NASA flight director Chris Kraft (who comes off as a particularly cantankerous 95 year-old!). 

I was gutted, as the British say, by the sequence about Armstrong’s daughter, who died at age two. Here we learn that the little girl, Armstrong’s second child, was immediately her father’s favorite, and that he would ignore anyone else when she was around. Amrstrong carried her early passing with him through the rest of his life but never spoke of it, save to close friends. It’s my understanding that the 2018 Armstrong biopic First Man reaps this for all its worth, even up to the point that the film’s big “emotional moment” is Amrstrong paying tribute to his deceased daughter on the moon…instead of planting the US flag, a moment which was infamously removed from the film. (Tellingly, only professional movie reviewers defended this – so far as audiences were concerned, though, the movie was a bomb.) So Hollywood has shown us something that 99.9% didn’t happen instead of something that 100% did. I’ve read that Armstrong’s wife complained that he didn’t take any mementos of his family along on the Apollo 11 flight, so there goes that particular Hollyood delusion…which, let’s face it, is a ripoff of the subplot in Gravity anyway. Here, though, the little girl’s presence has a real impact, brought to life by vintage photos and film, and is a million times more meaningful than anything some Hollywood hack could conjure up. 

Armstrong’s former wife Janet doesn’t come off as too bitter, but I guess there aren’t too many guys in the world who would be thrilled that their ex-wife showed up in a documentary about them. But it’s made very clear that Armstrong was hardly around and that his wife and family were low priority for him, particularly when compared to the space program. Frank Borman pretty much states the same thing about himself in his portions. But this makes it clear that Armstrong, despite being dedicated to the man at the expense of other NASA figures, doesn’t tell us much about Armstrong, because his family didn’t really ever see him. In fact it also becomes clear that Armstrong’s fellow astronauts knew him better, and even they didn’t know him that well, thus one actually learns more about him in the other docs I’ve reviewed. And for that matter, many of those astronauts had unfortunately passed away by the time Armstrong was produced; doubtless Alan Bean could’ve given us some fun material, given that he shared an office with Armstrong at NASA. 

One astronaut who is still living but doesn’t appear in Armstrong is Buzz Aldrin. But this documentary tries to imply there is a fifty-year rivalry between the two, over who toke those important first steps. Flight Director Chris Kraft happily boasts that he was the one who chose Armstrong to take the first steps on the moon: “I did it!” Kraft says that Deke Slayton pegged Buzz Aldrin for the honor, but Kraft felt that Aldrin wasn’t the right man for such a momentous occasion, and insisted the honor go to Armstrong. Kraft clarifies, “I didn’t dislike Aldrin…I didn’t like him, either.” Curiously, the same year Armstrong was released, Kraft gave an interview in which he discussed this decision further, but in the interview he states that he and Aldrin are still “good friends!” Even more curiously, this interview was published just a few days before Kraft died. Anyway, poor Buzz Aldrin doesn’t come off very well in Armstrong, which is a shame; “the voice of Neil Armstrong” (aka Harrison Ford) informs us that he personally liked Aldrin…but soon noticed some “eccentricities” about him. And yet Buzz Aldrin was just as responsible for Apollo’s success as Armstrong was, in his own way; without Aldrin’s expertise in scuba diving, NASA would’ve taken a long time to figure out how to do EVAs, aka spacewalks; per When We Left Earth (to be reviewed next time), Gene Cernan got his ass kicked while attempting an EVA, and it was up to Buzz to teach his fellow astronauts what to do on spacewalks. 

Armstrong’s post-moonwalk life is almost humorously rushed over. Granted, not many people will be going into Armstrong wanting to know about his spell as a college professor in the ‘70s, but still. It’s intimated that he became “reclusive” for a time, yet no one bothers to mention that Neil Armstrong hosted a weekly TV series in the early ‘90s: First Flights, which played on the A&E Network and featured Armstrong flying various planes. Again, Armstrong himself is a mystery; we learn his wife finally divorced him, fed up with his taciturn nature (“He had forty-eight years to change”), but Armstrong’s second wife doesn’t appear. And also the producers, perhaps chaffed that Aldrin didn’t appear, again try to stir the pot with a quick post-mission press interview in which a reporter asks the Apollo 11 crew how they’ll handle “the future” given their newfound fame. Aldrin gives a somewhat jokey response on wishing he could see the future to properly answer the question, and for no reason Armstrong razzes him: “I think it’s up to you.” Later we’re informed that Aldrin went through a few marriages, had a mental breakdown, and etc, the unstated implication that Kraft et al made the right choice. But honestly, Aldrin’s the only member of the Apollo 11 crew still living, and the dude looks fit enough to get on a flight to Mars tomorrow, so he must’ve done something right. 

Overall though, Armstrong isn’t nearly the spectacle of the other documentaries I’ve reviewed here. It’s a bit let down that a lot of it is a retread of what’s shown in the other docs, and also the footage isn’t nearly as spectacular. I did feel that the doc did a better job of focusing on Armstrong and Scott’s near-fatal Gemini mission than most other documentaries, particularly given that Scott himself is here to talk about it. Oh and Armstrong’s death isn’t even really elaborated on; basically it was completely avoidable. “Bypass surgery” is vaguely mentioned as a risky proposition for an 82 year-old man, but in reality it turns out that some sort of snafu caused Armstrong’s death. According to a news story that came out a few years after his 2012 death, the hospital gave the Armstrong family a $6 million settlement, as it turns out that the staples in Armstrong’s heart had been improperly removed after surgery, or something to that effect, and he bled to death internally. In other words, the man whose entire career had been built on careful attention to detail died due to someone else’s lack thereof. 

Still not enough Neil Armstrong for you? Then check out this clip from a 1983 Bob Hope TV special, shot for the 25th anniversary of NASA, some of which appears in the Armstrong documentary. Here you’ll see the first man on the moon in a comic dialog with Bob Hope! Armstrong’s a little stiff and awkward on stage, but his comedic timing is good…his “things that get off the ground” punchline made me laugh out loud. In the segment Bob Hope plays some clips of Armstrong’s appearance at various USO shows in Vietnam in ’69, and here Armstrong is much more comfortable, even making a risque joke for a couple blondes in the audience. (Though of course Hope – then in his late 60s – has even better ones for the two blondes.) And is it just me, or does Armstrong in the 1983 stage material give off some Dick “Bewitched” York vibes? Same mannerisms, posture, pitch of voice, etc. Yeah, it’s probably just me. 

Bonus Record Review Section: 

Michael Drew and John Petrone – The Flight Of Apollo Eleven (Jamestune Records, 1979): This obscure LP, released on a vanity label, is along the same lines as the earlier Journey To The Moon, telling the titular flight of Apollo 11 in a narrative of audio footage and original music. But there are a few differences: One, there’s no narrator here, and the story of the flight is relegated to a single side, with Side 2 being unedited versions of the songs on Side 1. The biggest difference however is the style of music – just as Journey To The Moon captured the vibe of its era with vaguely psychedelic easy listening tunes, so too does The Flight Of Apollo Eleven capture the vibe of its own era: That’s right, folks, disco! And disco of a decidedly jazz-funk vein. Everything is professionally produced and recorded, and the LP even comes in a very nice gatefold jacket that’s filled with pictures and a glossary of terms on the back, so it’s a mystery why this was released on an independent label. But I must admit that the music doesn’t capture me nearly as much as Journey To The Moon, and relegating the narrative to just one side robs the story of drama. Another difference is that there are vocals here; the last track, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” features a female singer. 

But as with that earlier LP, the actual NASA recordings are interspersed throughout, from the astronauts to Mission Control. We have some stuff here that wasn’t in Journey To The Moon, particularly a bit at the end where you can hear Nixon’s voice asking for the chaplain on the recovery ship to say a prayer. And also the LP opens with a long snippet of President Kennedy’s speech to Congress in 1961, similar to the opening track of Public Service Broadcasting’s 2015 LP The Race For Space. As mentioned Side 2 features most of the songs that were on Side 1, only in slightly different arrangements and lacking, for the most part, any of the NASA recordings. 

I’ve played the LP a few times and it still hasn’t clicked with me, as opposed to the immediate response I got from Journey To The Moon, which is still one of my all-time favorite albums. The Flight Of Apollo Eleven is so obscure I’ve not been able to find out anything about it, and there aren’t even any uploads on Youtube. However it does look like Michael Drew, crediting only himself, released the album under the title One Small Step as an “audio book,” and you can hear a few minutes excerpt on Amazon – heard in the clip is the end of track 1, all of track 2, and the beginning of track 3, all three from Side 1. No idea if this “audio book” features the entire LP, or just the Side 1 narrative. At any rate, I got my pristine copy of the LP for two dollars, so I can’t complain about the price!

The Last Ranger #8: The Cutthroat Cannibals

The Last Ranger #8: The Cutthroat Cannibals, by Craig Sargent

July, 1988  Popular Library

At this point Jan Stacy’s clearly bored with The Last Ranger; the previous volume was a tepid bore and this one I thought was even worse. For some reason Stacy here decides to give us what is for the most part a post-nuke Jack London type of story, only one with the usual absurdist Stacy touches. And not only that but he also cripples hero Mark Stone for the entire tale, having him hobble around with a broken leg. Plus Stone’s lost all his weapons and the Harley Electraglide he’s been riding since the beginning. 

Stacy also co-wrote the earliest volumes of Doomsday Warrior, and everyone knows the template of those books: each will open with Ted Rockson and team heading out into the post-nuke US and encountering all manner of wild flora and fauna. But whereas those sequences are usually over and done with pretty quick in Doomsday Warrior, Cutthroat Cannibals is like that for almost the entire novel. And that’s another thing: the title. If you read the back cover, you expect a splatterpunk yarn; it mentions “The Hunger,” a possibly inhuman group that feasts on human flesh. In reality, this group, which is made up of a mere two individuals, doesn’t appear until the very final pages of the novel. Instead, Cutthroat Cannibals features Stone being assailed by the weather, rugged terrain, treacherous rivers, superstitious Indians, and even a cult-like group of rabid dogs. 

Well anyway, for once we have an installment that doesn’t open immediately after the previous volume. Rather, Stone’s just driving around on his Harley, his pit bull Excaliber as ever with him, when he’s suddenly caught in an avalanche. (“Jesus, mother of God,” he thinks to himself, not realizing this is “biologically and theologically impossible.”) This goes on and on, and sadly is just an indication of the similar material that will occur throughout the book. Ultimately Stone’s caught in a river and swept away – and friends this isn’t the only river he’ll be swept up in during the course of the novel – and along the way not only loses his bike but all his weapons and even suffers a nasty compound fracture on his femur. Now we have more survivalist stuff as he tries to hobble around and survive even more chaotic weather. And meanwhile Stacy keeps up the goofy “banter” between Stone and Excaliber. 

Stone’s bashed into unconsciousness at one point and wakes to find some Indians looking at him. They seem to proliferate here in this post-nuke US, which now that I think of it might be commentary from Stacy that the original inhabitants of America are taking the place over again. And per genre madate they’re the Road Warrior type, a motley crew of bizarre fashions. Oh and they live in houses made of tires. But Stacy’s really focused on dogs this time, so these hardy Indian braves are unsettled around Excaliber, and can’t believe the dog actually listens to Stone. Well anyway they worship a dog whose statue looks nuch like Excaliber, but they end up keeping our hero captive anyway and wondering if they should kill him. 

This too goes on for a long time. Also the shaman shows up, and he’s a former doctor who escaped the world and returned to his Indian roots; it’s intimated that these Indians are so cut off from society that they aren’t even aware a nuclear war has occurred. He tries to fix up Stone’s leg, but it needs to be rebroken first, so he kicks it and then lets it set. Then he makes a crutch for Stone; our hero continues to hobble through the rest of the novel. Honestly I’m not sure what Stacy was going for here, giving us such a defenseless hero for the entirety of the book: Stone’s lost all of his guns, his bike, and can’t even walk around. Humorously he thinks he can make another bike with “spare parts” at the bunker…if only he can get back there! 

Stacy retreads the usual tropes here, with Stone having to prove himself in man-to-man combat with the top brave, yet afterward he’s still doomed to death. But the brave becomes his friend and the two escape. Here we get, unbelievably, even more post-nuke weather insanity, with the two encountering more waterfalls and rushing rivers and etc. Then it gets real goofy when a sort of cult-like army of dogs, two hundred strong, starts chasing them; the brave says these are “demon dogs” and it’s implied they’ve become almost supernatural as they’re able to outwit and outfox the two humans. But even here Stacy proves that The Last Ranger is really just a goofy series at heart, when the demon dogs and Excaliber start “singing” to each other that night:

In the battle – and by the way, the dogs are led by three mutts Stone considers the canine equivalents of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco – Stone is again swept up by a waterfall and thrown around like a ragdoll, to come to in a new predicament. Here, on page 137, he awakens to find himself being watched by a pair of obese albinos…albino cannibals, that is, who have named themselves Top and Bottom. These are the “Hunger” promised on the back cover. Things get real ghoulish here, very splatterpunk, with the cannibals having a sort of mental hold on “Cro-Magnons” who act as their slaves. It’s a charnel house setup, with human skin used as drapes for the village and other horrific displays of past victims dangling everywhere. 

Stone’s thrown in a cage with…you guessed it, a smokin’ hot blonde babe, because he hasn’t gotten laid yet this volume. Even though the girl’s brother and father are also strung up and all of ‘em are waiting for their turn to be eaten – and plus she’s a virgin – the girl insists that Stone take her right then and there, so that at least she’ll have known a man before the cannibals eat her! Or as she succinctly says, “Please, do it, get it in!” The sequence which follows isn’t as hardcore crazy as previous ones, but we do get the added bonus that the girl falls in love with Stone (of course she does), and Stone feels the same – but by novel’s end he’s already preparing to ditch her and her folks so he can get back to the bunker and fix up his bike. 

Norm Eastman’s typically-great cover depicts Stone blasting away with a .50 caliber machine gun. This does actually happen, at the very end of the novel. The girl and her family turn out to have a jeep armed with this gun, and Top and Bottom have just lazily left it sitting there. After a gutchurning bit where the girl’s brother is eaten alive on the dinner table, Stone’s able to escape and commandeers the jeep, getting some bloody .50 caliber payback. And here the novel ends, Stone and the girl and her dad hopping on the jeep to “head north,” but as mentioned Stone’s planning to say goodbye soon so he and Excaliber can go and get their supplies…and, of course, continue the search for his ever-missing sister. 

Two more volumes were to follow, but we’ve had two duds in a row now. We’ll see if Stacy is able to get the series back in shape before the big apocalyptic finale.

Doctor No (James Bond #6)

Doctor No, by Ian Fleming

October, 1963  Signet Books

(Original UK edition 1958)

I certainly didn’t mean to take so long to return to the James Bond novels, especially given that I’ve been looking forward to re-reading this particular volume. As I mentioned in my review of Casino Royale, Doctor No was the first Bond novel I read; it was the summer of 1987, I was 12 years old, and I bought, new off the shelf at WaldenBooks, the recently-published Charter Books edition with the glaring orange cover. I’d already read a few of the John Gardner Bond novels, and now I wanted to read a Fleming original. And I certainly enjoyed it, as soon enough I was reading all the other Flemings I could get my hands on. 

Now that I’ve read the preceding novels in sequence, it’s clear that Doctor No is a cut above. I know you’re supposed to say that From Russia, With Love is the superior novel, with its cerebral plot and probing characterization, but I’ll take pulp over that any day. And Doctor No is certainly pulp; the villain is straight out of Sax Rohmer and Bond is much more of a man of action than he was in previous volumes. In fact Fleming’s at pains to tell us how much Bond’s enjoying himself, particularly when in danger. This is a far cry from the effete snob of Casino Royale. Bond’s so tough this time that his main weapon is a big .38 revolver; humorously, Doctor No sees the introduction (at great narrative expense) of the Walther PPK, which will become James Bond’s trademark weapon, but as it turns out he never even uses it in the course of the novel. Anton Chekhov would not be amused! 

While Bond comes off as fit, recuperated from his stay in the hospital after his pseudo-death at the finale of From Russia, With Love, one can’t say that his boss M comes off very well here. I’m fully with Kingsley Amis, who in The James Bond Dossier states “no thought is taking place behind those damnably clear eyes.” M is a buffoon here. He’s as cantankerous as ever, and clearly blames Bond for almost getting killed at the previous novel’s end. First he strips Bond of his beloved Beretta (“For the first time, Bond hated the man”), then he tasks him with a “vacation” to Jamaica to look up some minor business with Strangways, a character who appeared in Live And Let Die. While we readers know that Strangways and his assistant have been murdered, M is incredibly negligent in his muleheaded certainty that Strangways and his pretty young assistant have just run off together. 

In fact M is so obstinate here that it’s a wonder Bond doesn’t suspect “the old bastard” of having dementia. Even Bond, who has been in the hospital for some indeterminate amount of time, instantly suspects foul play when he’s briefed on Strangways’s disappearance by M and the Chief of Staff, aka Bill Tanner, the pseudonym Kingsley Amis adopted for The Book Of Bond. M even mocks Bond for assuming that he, M, hadn’t himself suspected foul play, but of course the old bastard turns out to be completely incorrect. There’s of course the possibility that M knowingly sends Bond into the lion’s den, as penance for nearly getting killed last time, but there’s no real indication of that. In fact it’s the opposite: M gets his digs in by sending Bond on an “easy” assignment, unsubtly implying that this is about all he could trust Bond with anymore. 

A great thing about Doctor No is how quick it is: Bond’s briefed and on the job within the first few paragraphs. There’s no stalling while he dithers about at home or ponders past assignments or anything. In fact, Bond’s private life is almost a closed book this time, and he never thinks of the events in From Russia, With Love, as if blocking all of it from memory. The novel Doctor No most refers back to is Live And Let Die, given that here Bond returns to Jamaica, the first he’s been here since visiting the country “almost five years ago” in that earlier novel. I should say though that while the novel is quick-moving, at least when compared to previous books in the series, it’s still a little too overstuffed: this Signet edition is only 192 pages, but it’s got some seriously small and dense print. And a lot of this stuff is made up of evocative word painting as Fleming brings to life the flora and fauna of his beloved Jamaica. 

I’ll try not to refer to the film version very much, but I will say that it certainly has more action than this original novel. And “adult” stuff, too; oviously, Bond’s “fiance” doesn’t exist in the novel, as she did in the film (a character that was wisely ejected by the third film), and Miss Taro, the busty evil pseudo-Asian babe who beds Bond in Jamaica, is here a very minor character who has no interraction with Bond himself. Also one of my favorite parts of the movie is all the radiation zone stuff in the finale, with goons in pastel radsuits (not to mention Ursula Andress flashing a bit of skin during the “decontamination” sequence – though in reality it was just a “flesh-colored skinsuit”). The goons here for the most part just wear khaki shorts and are much more brutish than their film counterparts, not to mention foul mouthed; Fleming shows the skittish era in which he’s writing by self-bowdlerizing their expletives (ie “Shut your –ing mouth!”). And on the action front, there’s much more of it in the film, with car chases and shootouts that you won’t find here. 

Yet despite all that, Doctor No is still the most action-packed of the novels yet. Bond blows away several goons in the finale, even gunning down some of them in cold blood. He isn’t nearly the ruggedly virile hero Sean Connery portrayed in the film, but he’s still a much tougher bastard than the man we knew in the earlier books. Here the subtext is clear: Bond’s been toughened up by his near-death experience. He even requests Quarrel, the Cayman Islander who also first appeared in Live And Let Die, to further toughen him up. Also this volume has what I consider the best villain in all of Bond: the titular Doctor No, aka Dr. Julius No, who comes off like a Fu Manchu for the Space Age. Memorably described as a “giant venomous worm wrapped in grey tin-foil,” Doctor No is a towering half-Chinese madman with mechanical pincers for hands and a heart that’s on the wrong side. 

The plot of Doctor No is such a Jungian archetype that it practically became the archetype that all Bond films would follow (I am of course only referring to the original films, nothing with “starring Daniel Craig” in the credits): Bond is briefed, goes to some exotic place, meets some exotic locals, dallies with some exotic babe, and eventually tangles with the exotic villain in his exotic lair – foiling, of course, the villain’s exotic plot. At least viewed after all these decades of repeats and retreads it seems like an archetype, though clearly Fleming in his day was also hewing to established pulp templates. He just does it with his usual skill; to me one of the most humorous things to read in vintage Bond criticism is the complaint that Fleming’s prose is childish or poor. Today it comes off as downright literary. So either the literary critics at the time were just effete snobs themselves (how the times have changed…oh, wait…), or our reading standards have plummeted. Honestly I think it’s a combo of both; I’ve seen early 1900s English primers for Elementary school students at antique stores, and some of them would likely challenge college students of today! 

So given this archetypal vibe – not to mention the fact I suspect that most of you have read the book or at least are familiar with the story – I’ll skip over my usual belabored uber-comprehensive rundown of the plot, and just stick to my impressions. It’s been a bit since I read Live And Let Die, but Quarrel is a very memorable presence here. Fleming seems to have an affection for him, and he brings the character to life. Likely Fleming’s portrayal here would at times be seen as insensitive in our overly-sensitive era, but Quarrel is much more of a strong, capable presence than the stereotype seen in the film. One thing I really enjoyed was how Quarrel developed such a “thing” for Annabel Chung, the “Chigro” news photographer who hounds Bond upon his arrival in Kingston; this bit made it into the film, with Quarrel hurting Annabel per Bond’s order and Annabel slashing Quarrel’s face with a shattered flashbulb. But here in the book it further develops that Quarrel’s pretty damn turned on by the whole thing, and in fact thinks about looking Annabel up one day! 

Ah yes, “the Chigroes.” In what will certainly be considered the most off-putting element of Doctor No to today’s coddled readers, the Chigroes are half-black, half-Chinese natives of Jamaica who have suffered much racism, to the extent that a local rep of the British Government tells Bond it’s only a matter of time until someone rounds them up into a political movement! Of course Bond will discover that Dr. No has done just that, he himself being half-Chinese. The Chigroes are presented as all part of one underground network, almost mindless in their devotion to Dr. No. The men who act as No’s soldiers are especially sadistic, boasting of how they like to torture their victims and coming off as much more vile than any opponent Bond’s faced in the past. It goes without saying of course that I was not offended by any of this, I mean it’s a pulp novel for crying out loud, but these days you can’t even read a modern review of a Fleming novel without encountering the words “offensive” or “racist” or “sexist.” I wonder how much longer until these sorts of books are either suppressed from publication or just edited for content – but then that’s nothing new, either, as the original US editions of Live And Let Die removed some of the “racist” content of the original UK printing. 

I also loved the stuff on the “mount of Venus,” which honestly I always thought meant something else entirely! But at least here, per Quarrel, it’s the span of flesh directly under the thumb; the thicker it is, the wilder in bed a woman is. Well that’s something new I’ve learned! Throughout Quarrel has such little homespun profundities, and his dialog is a lot of fun, but really he so pales in comparison to Honeychile Rider that he must be removed from the narrative shortly after her introduction. Deemed by Amis as “the most appealing” of Bond’s women, Honey is usually voted the fan favorite, at least in the surveys I’ve seen over the years. She is I think the most fully developed Bond heroine yet, and I’m not just talking about her “firm beautiful breasts.” She’s naïve but not innocent, childish but not immature. She’s smarter than Bond when it comes to survival in the wild, and Fleming even unknowingly taps into our modern demand for “female empowerment” in that Honey not only saves herself in the finale, but also gets hold of a weapon and goes after Dr. No for revenge! 

Interestingly though Fleming doesn’t cater as much to the exploitative content this time; Honey is introduced fully nude (save for the fetishistic touch of wearing only a wide leather belt), but Fleming doesn’t go hog wild with all the “chesty” details. This is mostly due to Bond’s very interesting response to Honey; while he certainly admires her ample charms initially (watching her like a true Peeping Tom from the bushes), after this he takes on an almost paternal or at least brotherly approach to her. This is different than how he responded to, say, Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever. The implication here is that Honey is too “pure” for Honey, almost a child of nature; there’s also an age divide, as she’s only 20 and Bond at this point is late 30s, I believe. But when has that ever bothered a guy?? It’s deeper than that, as evidenced by the various insulting names Bond refers to Honey as in his own thoughts: “female Tarzan,” “Ugly Duckling,” even “poor bitch.” 

But Honey so sparkles with life that she seems to exist outside the page, and for my money at least she’s the strongest heroine Fleming’s created yet. From my readings of the following books many years ago I don’t believe any female character impressed me as much as she did, though I do recall liking Kissy Suzuki in You Only Live Twice. Honey was to become such a fan favorite that John Pearson had Bond end up with her in his 1973 novel James Bond, The Authorized Biography. Initially though Bond takes as mentioned more of a protective stance toward Honey; perhaps it’s her horrifically-broken nose, which in one of the more memorable moments of the book she covers instead of her “beautiful breasts” when Bond meets her nude on the beach. In her extended monologue Honey proves here again that she’s not the innocent Bond initially suspected; the broken nose was courtesy a man who raped her, a man Honey later murdered in a very cruel way. Bond’s response to this story is so great it made it into the film, and actually does sound very much like the sardonic rejoinders Connery would soon be known for: “It’s not a thing to make a habit of.” 

Once Bond has met Honey on Crab Key the novel takes on more fantastical elements, all for the better. Not only does the mysterious Doctor No employ legions of Chigro followers, but he also has a fire-breathing “dragon,” which Bond rightly assumes to be a modified vehicle of some sort. When Bond and Honey are taken captive they find themselves in an opulent “mink-lined prison” that’s built inside a mountain, complete with a pair of receptionists who seem to have stepped out of the Hilton – and who in one of the few unexplained bits seem completely unaware of Dr. No’s nefarious plots, even if their “guests” often show up in handcuffs. But then it’s established that No’s hold on his minions is so complete that they wouldn’t even think to ask him of such things. But even here, in the well-appointed suite, Bond still refuses to see Honey as the sexual character she is; she practically begs him to have sex with her, to which our hero responds, “This isn’t the time for making love.” 

Here is yet another reminder that Bond the literary character cannot be much confused with Bond the film character. The film version of Bond’s already been through two women at this point, with Honey soon to follow, while the literary version has presumably been celibate since the previous adventure, having been confined to a hospital bed all the time since then. But Bond is all business at this point, determined to figure out how to stop the seemingly-invincible Dr. No and get them out of this seemingly-inescapable prison. Despite which, he’s still kind of a dolt in that he doesn’t suspect the food they’re given might be drugged. That being said, Fleming here creates a bizarrely domestic scene of Bond and Honey, freshly showered and in silk kimonos, eating a hearty breakfast after their surreal adventures in Crab Key. 

But I do feel we get to a stone wall with the almost-neverending monologue courtesy Dr. No on his past. The villain, while incredibly menacing in his visual presentation, turns out to be a damned bore when he opens his mouth. Sure, it’s all about power and the merciless acquisition of it, but still his interminable backstory just seems to never come to an end. I did appreciate Fleming’s occasional mentions that Bond and Honey would exchange mocking looks throughout the speech, none of which No apparently notices. Here we at least learn Dr. No’s fiendish plot: that he intends to do something! Humorously, his entire plan is to do something wicked as “the next chapter” in his villainous career; currently he’s been messing with American missiles, thanks to some Russian programmers he has in his employ. The film version I felt fleshed this out a bit more satisfactorily, also making Dr. No a member of SPECTRE, which didn’t exist yet in the novels. 

But then the movie doesn’t come close to matching Fleming’s climax, which takes up almost a full quarter of the narrative. Clearly an inspiration for the death mazes that would feature in the later TNT series, this harrowing sequence also seems to go on and on…but the effect is the exact opposite of No’s tiresome speech, with the reader almost breaking out in a vicarious sweat. Bond is placed through a series of obstacles, with the clear understanding that he won’t ultimately survive. Here we see an aspect of Bond’s character that hasn’t been this fully explored: he is a survivor, and will fight until the end. He goes through electricity, fire, spiders (almost too much after the celebrated bit with the poisonous centipede earlier in the book), and even at the climax of it all fights a “kraken,” aka a giant squid. Bond also proves himself a proto-MacGyver in that he makes weapons out of what he has at hand, and also has had the foresight to smuggle a bread knife and lighter out of the dining room. All this is great stuff, more thrilling and action-packed than anything in the previous five novels. 

Another interesting element here too is that Bond’s struggle to survive isn’t even to save his own skin; it’s to get out of this death maze so he can save Honey. She’s been carted off to her own sadistic fate, to be Dr. No’s first “white victim” of the crabs that inundate the beach each night and tear apart everything in their wake. I can only assume this bit was the inspiration for Guy N. Smith’s later Crabs series. But as mentioned Honey isn’t nearly the damsel in distress Bond assumes. Even though she passes out when Dr. No reveals her fate, it’s later revealed that Honey knows more about these crabs than the doctor does, and she passed out because she knew Bond’s fate would be even worse than hers! With Bond and Honey reunited, we do get some of the action the movie series would be known for, with an armed Bond running roughshod through the place. But again it’s nowhere to the spectacle of the film, with Bond only making a few kills – some of them in cold blood. Another part I loved: Bond kills one guy and apologizes to Honey for having to do so in front of her, to which she responds, “Don’t be an idiot!” Man, I really loved her character. 

Here’s one part where Fleming goes to greater lengths than the film: Bond and Honey make their escape in the “dragon.” I kept waiting for this to happen and was glad it did, but unfortunately Fleming doesn’t decide to go all the way with it and have Bond light up the flamethrower and fry up some thugs. Fleming does deliver Dr. No a more gruesome fate than the anticlimactic one he received in the film; in one of the more hard-to-buy bits in the novel, Bond suddenly knows how to operate a crane and manages to dump a ton of guano on the doctor. Even more sadistic is how Bond gets hold of the crane controls; he jams the sharpened bread knife into the operator’s throat. Again, all much more brutal than the James Bond of the previous five novels. 

I feel that Fleming knew he’d created such a strong heroine with Honeychile Rider that he had to establish, even here, that she would not be in the following novel, per the series template of a new “Bond girl” each book. For Bond, once back to safety in Kingston and about to have some much-delayed good lovin’ with Honey, thinks to himself how he can help her get her nose fixed and set her up with a good job. (Another great bit: Honey’s earlier statement, delivered matter of factly, that she’d become a hooker to make enough money to fix her nose!) It’s almost as if Fleming’s telling us now that Honey, despite being such a vibrant character, will have to go. In reality though I think practically any guy would try to hold on to her for good. I know I would. But then, Fleming here has Bond for once reflect on a previous flame, Solitaire from Live And Let Die, so perhaps this material at the end is just playing off of that; Bond already knows that these relationships are not meant to last. But unlike Solitaire, whose fate Bond briefly wonders over earlier in the book, Bond will know exactly where Honey is: with the job he sets up for her. 

There’s an interesting thematic subtext in Doctor No that Bond is constantly being told what to do. This of course plays into Jacquelyn Friedman’s somewhat twisted interpretation of the series in Ian Fleming's Incredible Creation. But it’s pretty obvious here, starting off with the M-Bond briefing which ends with Bond saying, “If you say so, sir,” and M replying “I say so,” and continuing throughout the novel, the last line of which is Honey telling Bond: “Do as your told.” It’s almost overt given how frequently it happens, with Fleming giving the impression that Bond, despite being the action-prone hero of the series, is really just a pawn on a chessboard. Speaking of Friedman, I do appreciate her study, if only because it’s so far-out, but she does miss one thing: in the chapter “Dignity and Grace: The Morality of the Wasteland,” she claims that Fleming never outright states what Dr. No’s plans are. This is only partly true, of course. Otherwise I suspect Friedman took a lot of her inspiration from Doctor No; this novel in particular shows the “decayed death-throes of the white world” in full effect, with all the white figures of authority, from M to the Governor of Jamaica, so disaffected and siloed in their elitism that they have no concept of the “vibrant, non-white energy” that thrives around them – and, as is the case here, that plots against them. 

At the bottom of the post I’ll put up the cover of that Charter edition I got when I was a kid; I’m betting I picked it up right around its publication date of July, 1987. In past posts I’ve been writing “1986,” so clearly I got my dates wrong based off this publication date; maybe 1986 was when I started reading the John Gardner novels. My memory of summer of 1987 is certainly wrapped up with Bond, as I recall reading Doctor No as well as the two new Gardner novels: Nobody Lives Forever, which I had in the just-released mass market paperback edition and loved at the time (I recall telling my pal Jimmy Stevens I’d come over and play with him some other time ‘cause I wanted to keep reading the book – which was a big deal because Jimmy’d just gotten that insanely massive G.I. Joe aircraft carrier and wanted to show it off!), and No Deals, Mr. Bond, which I had in the just-released hardcover edition. 

But it was Doctor No that apparently made the biggest impression on me; it was the first “pure” Bond novel I’d read, in that it was by the creator himself, and right away I could see how different the character was from Gardner’s interpretation. That summer I went on to read as many of those original Flemings as I could. I always held Doctor No in high esteem, but I recall it was the one-two punch of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice that thrilled me the most, and which I ranked as my favorite. I look forward to seeing whether that’s still true, as I have to say Doctor No was a lot of fun and I can’t see any of the others topping it; the older I’ve gotten, the more I appreciate pulp, and this must be the pulpiest the Bond novels ever got. Disregarding of course the ninjas in You Only Live Twice. 

Oh and if you haven’t already, be sure to download my Music To Read James Bond By compilation! I listened to it for the first time in years while reading Doctor No, and it really does make for good music to read Bond by! 

And finally, here’s the cover of the Doctor No mass market paperback (Charter Books, July 1987) that I got off the shelves of WaldenBooks in the summer of 1987; I recall the cover being very neon ‘80s orange, which isn’t really reflected in this cover scan:

The Executioner #16: Sicilian Slaughter

The Executioner #16: Sicilian Slaughter, by Jim Peterson

June, 1973  Pinnacle Books

I’ve been looking forward to this volume of The Executioner for several years now. Even though it’s hated by hardcore fans of the series, Sicilian Slaughter sounded interesting to me because, for one volume at least, it was as if Bruno Rossi or Frank Scarpetta got hold of the keys to the kingdom: the refined, skilled touch of Don Pendleton is gone, and for once “hero” Mack Bolan comes off as vile and sadistic as the mobsters he’s up against. 

Per his interview with William H. Young in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction, Pendleton himself never read Sicilian Slaughter, and never knew who wrote it – however he clarified that he held no ill will toward whoever did write it. Young himself was unable to find out how’d written Sicilian Slaughter, but we know now that it was William Crawford. Young did reveal something I’ve not read anywhere else: That Pinnacle was ready to keep The Executioner going as by “Jim Peterson,” a house name that would be filled by a revolving cast of ghostwriters, and Pinnacle even mocked up covers for the next Peterson volume (which turned out to never be published), Firebase Seattle. This is a mystery I’ve chased for a while, and I have some of the details I discovered below. 

It makes sense that Crawford got the “Peterson” gig first, as at the time he was sort of being groomed as Pinnacle’s flagship author. The imprint published several of his books, even devoting full-page ads to them. And having read a few of Crawford’s novels it was clear to me from the get-go that he was indeed the author of Sicilian Slaughter. Most of Crawford’s hallmarks are at play: an asshole protagonist, rampant misogyny, interminable digressions concerning one-off characters, perspective hopping, periodic sermons to the reader on the shittiness of the world, and an overall dispirited vibe. One Crawfordism that does not appear is the typically-mandatory scene in which a character shits his pants or pukes his guts out. Maybe series editor Andy Ettinger told him to reign that in. 

But then, Ettinger seems to have done some tinkering to Crawford’s manuscript, as it’s more streamlined than most of Crawford’s other bloated books. And also there’s a lot of flashbacks to previous Executioner volumes, so either Crawford did some serious research (which doesn’t seem likely from what I’ve learned about these contract writers) or Ettinger went into the manuscript and added these touches. I suspect the latter, given that Pendleton also told William H. Young that Andy Ettinger wrote the prologue for the following volume, Jersey Guns: this volume saw Pendleton’s return to the series, and given that he refused to read Sicilian Slaughter it was up to Ettinger to pen the prologue. 

And it’s a good thing Pendleton did refuse, as there’s no way he could’ve retconned Sicilian Slaughter into his overall storyline. The one thing we know about William Crawford, thanks to Will Murray’s research in his 1982 article about Nick Carter: Killmaster, is that he was a cop. Thus Crawford sees Mack Bolan as a criminal; he has absolutely none of the heroism Pendleton gave him. In this novel Bolan shoots unarmed people, murders a woman (in a very sadistic manner), gets another woman to take a severe beating for him, threatens a cop, and basically just acts like an asshole throughout. Even established relationships are skewed; Leo Turrin, Bolan’s inside man in the Mafia, basically hero-worships the Executioner in Pendleton’s novels, as evidenced by the various “what a man!” reflections he’ll have when encountering him. Turrin shows up in Sicilian Slaughter as well…and thinks to himself what a “pain” Bolan is, wondering if he should just turn him in to the capos and be done with it! 

Turrin was also in the previous volume, and Crawford tries to pick up the story from directly after. Bolan’s shot up and bleeding and heads to an underground doctor Turrin told him about years ago. Here we quickly see that this isn’t your grandma’s Mack Bolan when our “hero” decides he’s going to have to kill the doctor who just saved him. But as it happens the doctor has ulterior motives of his own and is about to call in some gunsels and collect the bounty on the Executioner. Meanwhile of course our hero has a surprise of his own in store for the good doctor. Bolan is a mean-spirited son of a bitch throughout, almost identical to other s.o.b. Crawford protagonists, like Stryker. But he’s a lot more action-prone than others, carrying along an artillery case of heavy firepower. I’m betting Crawford also had military experience – I know he also published some Vietnam War novels – as evidenced by the firearms and military details sprinkled throughout Sicilian Slaughter. 

Bolan decides to take his war directly to Sicily; this was set up in the previous volume with Bolan getting irked that the American mobsters were starting to import new blood from the mother land. The sequence in which Bolan flies to Italy is like something out of The Marksman or The Sharpshooter; the “Mack Bolan” here could easily be Philip Magellan or Johnny Rock. First he threatens the sleazy private pilot into the job, and then, in the most outrageous moment in the novel, Bolan decides to get rid of the pilot’s busty assistant. She, uh, deserves it, though, given that she’s a former hooker and drug addict and works as a stringer for the Mafia – and plus she’s recognized Bolan and plans to snitch on him. As if it wasn’t enough to show Mack Bolan killing off an unarmed woman, Crawford has it happen in the most vile way possible – the girl’s naked, offering herself to Bolan in the cabin, and Bolan coldly shoots open a window so that she’s sucked out, screaming in terror, thirty thousand feet above ground! 

What’s surprising is that series editor Andy Ettinger even allowed this material to be published. If there’s anyone Pendleton seems pissed at in his intervew in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction, it’s Ettinger. And one can see his point. It’s surprising that the series editor and the imprint would even publish Sicilian Slaughter with its sadistic “hero;” it makes it very clear that they just saw The Executioner as product, something they had to get on the book racks at a certain date to keep up the publishing cadence. They couldn’t have cared less about the mythic hero the series creator had painstakingly built over the preceding fifteen volumes. In fact, the editorial embellishments throughout make it clear that Ettinger was indeed involved in Sicilian Slaughter, and one would think he’d be like, “No, Mack Bolan probably wouldn’t blast some nude and unarmed girl out of an airplane.” 

To be sure, though, I like this crazy stuff and always have, and if this had been a volume of The Sharpshooter or The Marksman it would’ve been one of the best installments of either series. What I do mind is Crawford’s typical penchant for undermining himself; his books come off like bloated bores what with the constant background detail on one-off characters, just egregious crap that’s there to meet the word count. Even the buxom victim has several pages devoted to her sad-sack history, which only further undermines Crawford, given that the reader sort of feels sorry for her…and then the “hero” mercilessly kills her. But then perhaps it’s intentional on Crawford’s part, more indication that he saw the Executioner as a villain. But then again, it’s surprising that the sequence even made it into print, given that the guy who’d served as series editor for the past fifteen volumes was involved. Surely someone at Pinnacle must’ve figured that at least some readers might be shocked by all this, but apparently the driving goal was more to get the product in the stores. 

Another annoying penchant of Crawford’s is that he’s never consistent in what he calls his hero in the narrative. It’s either “Mack” or “Bolan” or “the man in black” (which made me think Johnny Cash had suddenly become the Executioner), and it’s never consistent. But then this is one of my pet peeves, and others might not care. I just personally feel that the author should refer to his protagonist by only one name, and one name only; other characters can call the progatonist by various names, but the author should be consistent. And I’m willing to fight for my beliefs! Sorry, lost the thread there. And also Crawford fails to make “Mack” (or “Bolan,” or whatever) likable. Even Magellan, in all his “cutting-the-heads-off-my-victim’s-corpses” insanity was still at least somewhat likable, if only because he was so batshit crazy. But Crawford’s version of Mack Bolan is like all of Crawford’s other progatonists: he’s just a prick. 

Another thing that bugs me about Crawford’s prose is that he uses this half-assed “omniscient” tone, in that he’ll tell us stuff, while otherwise limited to Bolan’s perspective, that Bolan himself doesn’t know. For example, Bolan might shoot somebody, and Crawford will write like, “Bolan blew out Eddie the Champ’s heart,” or somesuch. But the thing is – Bolan doesn’t even know who Eddie the Champ is! For all he knows, it’s just some random mobster thug. Yet we readers know who it is, because Eddie is one of the many one-off characters we’re saddled with in the narrative, a former military dude hired by the Sicilian don to train some troops. And all this stuff here is just lazy retread of the previous volume, with the troops being trained pure military style, with barracks and hiding out in foxholes and whatnot, all of which is sort of ridiculous because it’s like they’re being trained to invade a country or something, not to act as enforcers for dons in American cities. 

And indeed, the climax is basically like a military novel. Bolan, after having blitzed his way through Italy and even posing as a simple country boy to get to Sicily – which entails him hooking up with some busty local babe and having some off-page lovin’ with her – ends up on the training fields of the Mafia recruits and starts mowing them down (in spectacularly bloodless fashion) with heavy weaponry. Here Crawford shows what appears to be some military background, with sidebars on strategy and also the efficacy of the Browning Automatic Rifle. There’s also weird survivalist stuff, like when Bolan’s shot in the back and kicks in a tree, grabs out the “thick spider webs,” and stops the flow of blood with them. Speaking of which Bolan comes off as a brazen, reckless fool in Crawford’s hands, displaying none of the superheroic planning of Pendleton’s original. Several times Bolan will just storm his way into some situation and realize he’s gotten in over his head. 

But one thing I can say about Crawford’s version of Bolan is that he’s mega-tough. Bolan goes through a lot of pain in this one, shot up and beaten and just in general abused, and he just keeps on going. He starts and ends the novel in a half-dead state. Crawford again goes places Pendleton likely wouldn’t when Bolan, late in the novel, shoots up with some morphine to combat the pain. However he’s not a hero by any means; I’ve already mentioned how the poor local girl gets beaten to a pulp for being suspected of having helped Bolan, and all Bolan does is watch from safety and swear to himself he’ll “make it up somehow” to her. But Bolan’s motives are purely driven by sadistic rage; not content to merely kill the Sicilian don, he goes to great lengths to destroy the man’s entire villa so as to prove a point to the rest of the Mafia. 

An interesting element of Sicilian Slaughter is the finale, which cuts to Seattle and features a muscular dude in his 40s with gray hair named Mr. Molto. This guy runs a sort of underground military operation, and has just been hired by the Mafia to kill the Executioner. Molto has an extensive operation, and via computer has deduced that Bolan’s next strike will be in Seattle. This epilogue – which I’m betting was written by Ettinger – clearly sets up the stage for the following volume, same as how Panic In Philly ended with an Ettinger epilogue that set up this Sicilian adventure. However, the Mr. Molto subplot would never be mentioned in any future Executioner novel. 

As mentioned above, William H. Young stated that Pinnacle had done mockup covers for the next “Jim Peterson” novel, Firebase Seattle. Given the title, it was clearly intended to follow up from the climax of Sicilian Slaughter. This Peterson novel was never published, as Pendleton and Pinnacle worked out their legal issues and Pendleton came back to the series for the next volume, which was titled Jersey Guns. Pendleton did eventually turn in a novel titled Firebase Seattle (I assume using the cover originally designed for the unpublished Peterson manuscript of the same title), but obviously it had nothing to do with the events set up in Sicilian Slaughter. 

This means then that the closing material with “Mr. Molto” was never picked up on, and thus the villain remains a mystery in the Executioner universe. I knew that Gil Brewer had written an unpublished volume of The Executioner, and for a long time I suspected that he’d written the unpublished sequel to Sicilian Slaughter. In other words, I had a hunch that Gil Brewer had been hired to be the next “Jim Peterson.” A few years ago I got my confirmation: the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming has Brewer’s unpublished Executioner manuscript in its Gil Brewer bollection, and friends, it’s titled…Firebase Seattle. And for a mere $50.00, you can get a copy! (They charge 20 cents per page for jpeg copies, and it’s a 248-page manuscript.) 

So I wager that Mr. Molto does indeed appear in Brewer’s manuscript, and further I wager Brewer’s manuscript would have more Andy Ettinger embellishments to keep everything simpatico with the series overall. But I’m certainly in no hurry to fork over so much to read it. Gil Brewer was a great writer, but judging from his work on Soldato he wasn’t a great men’s adventure writer. But if anyone out there wins the lottery and decides to check out the manuscript, let me know!