Long Time, No Kill

I honestly didn't mean to take so long to put up a new blog post, but my internet service has been having some issues.  See, my house got struck by lightning several months ago (just as all the church-going folks in my town have been predicting it would) and it blitzed a few things.  I got off pretty lucky and only had to replace a few DVD-recorders and telephones, but it also whacked my modem.  I got a new one, but for some reason that I'm way too non-tech to understand, my computer doesn't like it much.  So, I hardly ever have the internet at my house.  And I get so sick of looking at it at work all day that I haven't been in a huge rush to get it fixed.   I'm pretty much a luddite, anyway -- I kinda hate the internet, even though I use it a lot.  But, in any case, a friend of mine who's far more net-savvy than me was at the house this afternoon and he played around and got it working.  Will it work next time I turn the computer on?  That's something no one can predict.  Honestly, I'm kind of doubting it... but, since it's on tonight, I figured, better put up a blog post while I can!  My reading's been a little slower than usual lately, and I've been doing more horror than action books, but I had more than enough to make a decent post, so, I figured I'd do one of those. I could probably wrangle a way to get some text up from work, but what fun are these posts without the cover scans?  So, anyway, here goes... sorry for the wait!

Some of these are not technically "series books," but I take a wide approach to that -- it's the same kind of fiction, so the difference between a John Clarkson or Lee Child or Donald Hamilton book and a Revenger book is pretty much just presentation.  If you're into the kind that are more pulpy and number them, you'll almost assuredly like the glossier, un-numbered kind, too, if you give them a chance.


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And Justice For One - John Clarkson   (Jove, 1992)
Tough, violent, uncompromising revenge story pitting a hard-ass security expert against a rich bastard's army of enforcers, who beat his brother into a coma.  Getting some help from a trained martial artist, our hero, Jack Devlin, ferrets out who did the deed and brings down the whole connected-to-the-cops criminal organization, mostly with his bare fists and a couple of martial arts fighting sticks.  Excellent hard-edged modern noir with as much shooting, fighting, and action as you can put into a book and have it remain plausible.  Any more and it'd be in Executioner-novel turf.   Clarkson knows how to write fight scenes, and puts his hero through a meat grinder.  The fights get really brutal and even when Devlin wins he takes a ton of punishment... but always manages to deal out more than he takes.  Great read.

One Man's Law - John Clarkson  (Berkley, 1994)
Second book about Jack Devlin has him still nursing the bruises from all the brawls in the first book, while going to Hawaii to go on a whole new revenge rampage.  A war buddy who'd been through hell with him in Vietnam has been found sliced open and half-eaten by wild pigs, and Devlin wants to put the hurt on whoever's responsible.  So does his buddy's beautiful sister, Leilani, who immediately starts an affair with Devlin just so we can have plenty of sex mixed in with all the violence.  A big Samoan bruiser named Tuli joins them as Devlin hunts down the killer, a vicious psychopath who's been dealing in guns stolen from the army and planning a race war to kick all the haoles (whites) out of Hawaii.  Clarkson is great at setting up situations that land Devlin in some major fight every thirty pages or so;  there's plenty of plot to hold it all together, but you know it's never going to be long because Devlin's throwing down with somebody, be it in brutal street brawls, gun battles, or, often, both.  There's lots of maiming, and Devlin takes a beating himself, but, as in the first book, no matter how banged up he gets it's never enough to stop him from handling another vicious fight; sometimes I pictured him as Marv from Sin City.  He and Tuli even duke it out with wild boars at one point.  The sex is as graphic as the violence, including some pretty hardcore dominatrix stuff that one of the bad guys is into.  It's a little long at over 350 small-print pages, but you can't fault it for pacing -- it never lets up.

                                All these books have practically the same cover... which ain't good.




 Gunships #1 : The Killing Zone - Jack Hamilton Teed   (Zebra, 1981)
First in a Vietnam war series.  Your hero is Col. John Hardin, a tough but weary Special Forces vet who's pretty sick of the war, especially the brass, and isn't adverse to doing things like smoking opium.   He's sent out on a mission he tries to refuse (even telling a general to go fuck himself) and the whole thing's a set-up to get him killed.  But even though the helicopter flying him in gets shot down, he survives and is taken prisoner by the Viet Cong.  A team of murderous misfits -- each explained by a chapter devoted to them -- are sent to recover him.  There's a guy who shot his own men so the helicopter he was in wouldn't have to risk enemy fire picking them up.  Another shot his fellow soldiers while hallucinating on LSD.  Another's a black guy who killed a sadistic prison guard to avoid being raped by him.  Another fragged an officer.  These guys are forced to go after Hardin, and meanwhile Hardin's being waterboarded and beaten.  There's a lot of action and it's not badly written, but there are so many characters that it all goes by in one big non-absorbing blur, like you've just turned on a war movie long enough to see a battle scene;   it's not boring but there are just too many personalities  to deal with in a large-print 250 page book.  Oddly, the book doesn't have much to do with helicopters.  I'm wondering if Teed (whose writing style has quirks that make me suspect he might be British) got handed the series title and was told to work up something around it, and, not wanting to be stuck writing about helicopters, had a grunt lamely compare every man in Vietnam to a "gunship."  It's not a gung-ho or jingoistic book;  the war is presented as pretty much of a life-wasting mistake and the soldiers don't want to be there -- they're just stuck in a bad situation and doing what they have to to survive the day.  The cynicism helps elevate the book above just another pulp book, but in the end it gets lost under its own action scenes.

                                  Don't worry, nobody in the book actually sports a frat-boy haircut like that.



Storm Rider #2: River of Fire - Robert Baron  (Jove, 1993)
Post-apocalypse biker action that's uncomfortably closer to being a fantasy novel than Road Warrior stuff. It has its biker knowledge down tight, but blends it all with something a little too sword-and-sorcery for me.   The world's been wrecked by what sounds like a meteor strike, and biker gangs rule the plains.  The gangs are divided into two main factions, the High Free Folk and their enemies, the Cathead Nation.  Vaguely allied with the Catheads is some mystical quasi-religious cult called The Fusion, complete with Fusion Priests and such.  Our main hero is a High Free Folk dude who in the first book had the cool name of Outlaw One but now is going by the lame Dungeons & Dragons moniker, Tristan Burningskull.  He's the only survivor of a big gang called The Hardriders, who were known as "Storm Riders" because they liked to ride around the tornados that plagued the plains.  The bikers are all mingled with Indian tribes and it's very complex and, frankly, not interesting enough to keep track of, although if you're into fantasy novels that  clan/tribe shit'll probably fascinate your gooberish Game-of-Thrones ass.  The plot is pretty incidental, with the legendary Tristan going to a big gathering of bikers, where he gets in a power struggle with a biker leader named John Hammerhand.  Most believe Tristan is fated to be the new leader because there's a new star in Taurus or some astrological bullshit.  He tangles with some Sons of Thor and defends the gang he's riding with, The Jokers, who catch a lot of flack for having a female president (which the "Man Lodge" can't handle).  Another legendary biker, a little guy in a metal mask named The Black Avenger, shows up and puts a whupping on Tristan with some kung fu stuff (and a metal foot).   Then they have a big battle with the Catheads, where Tristan gets to use his new sword (a lot of the fighting is done with swords, chains, and clubs, because they have guns but ammo's kinda scarce).  Then Tristan goes on a quest to retrieve his father's legendary bike, Wildfyre, from some ugly mutants in the "shaking lands" -- an earthquake-prone zone where people live in tunnels even though that's the least sensible place to live in a fault zone.  Just in case the story isn't fantasy-crap enough for you, Tristan has to get the bike by battling a "dragon" -- a tyrannosaurus that's alive for some reason.    Then he leads another battle against the Catheads.  It's all crazy and whacky, but also has enough biker grit to keep it from floating completely away into  mural-on-the-side-of-a-van land.  The action scenes are too few and aren't terribly strong, which could make a 236-pages-of-small-print book a tedious trip, but the book survives on better-than-usual writing... which is quirky enough to stay interesting.  This is one of those books that's practically written in its own language, which you have to figure out by context (it's usually not that hard, especially if you have some knowledge of biker culture).  The post-apocalypse biker/Indian/mutant/hippie slang is pervasive and some of it is kinda badass, even if a lot of it is silly, too.  It's definitely fantasy-style stuff, though, with wandering bards and such -- it wouldn't surprise me if it was written by a moonlighting Elfquest-type author.  It has shortcomings, it has strengths, it may irritate you but it's still worth reading.  An odd one for sure.

The Devil's Dozen - Nick Carter  (Martin Cruz Smith)   Award - 1973
Killmaster is disguised as a Turkish drug dealer so he can make a sale to the Mafia overseas and get the skinny on who's importing junk into the U.S. -- an assignment that's already killed off another AXE operative.  The Mafia assigns a girl to handle the deal (just so the book can have the required sex scenes), but Nick is dealing in such high amounts of opium that the mob's not sure they wouldn't rather just bump him off so he can't sell to the competition if they don't want to pay the high prices he's demanding.  Escaping the hits means fights and car chases (which are very well-written -- Smith knows his way around defensive driving).  Nick smuggles opium out of Europe by disguising it as marzipan candy; either this would actually work or Smith is a great bullshitter because as silly as that sounds, the details are convincing.   His ingenuity gets him invited to a top-secret Mafia fortress (which sounds like the Nazi headquarters in Where Eagles Dare), which is what AXE was trying to target.   Nick learns that they have  a method of destroying any army that might be sent to save him... and then his cover's blown.  Wall-to-wall slam-bang action that manages to maintain a fairly complex plot without a letup, and it's very well-written.  Nick fights a huge wrestler, tries to out-ski a helicopter gunship, gets caught in an avalanche, and Bond, James Bond, can just go fuck himself.  The only weird things are I have no idea what the title has to do with the story, and the motorcycle chase depicted on the cover doesn't happen.  I have no problem forgiving that, though, because this is one of the good ones, regardless. 

Spykiller - Nick Carter #238  (David Hagberg)  (Jove, 1988)
The plot is a bit like the James Bond Skyfall flick -- a thief steals a list of espionage agents in the Mediterranean area.  The Russians send men after the thief, and America sends out Nick Carter.  It should be great but even though I usually love the Nick Carter books, I really couldn't get into this one at all.  So much time is spent following this not-very-interesting thief around that Nick becomes a bit player in his own book (this is one of the third-person ones, if you haven't guessed).  The action scenes aren't bad and there's some fairly graphic sex, and overall the writing is more than competent, but somehow it doesn't hang together and I couldn't stay interested in it.  Even with all the action going on, it remains uninvolving and dull.  Ah well, with over 250 books, you're bound to get a dud once in a while. 

Confirmed Kill #1 - Mike Morris  (Diamond, 1992)
The government drags top sniper Con Duggan out of retirement because a tech wizard named Stephen Dye has developed a super-gun weapons system known as the See It Kill It Multiple Skill 1000 (SIKIM-1000, affectionately known as the "sic 'em") and they need Duggan's sniper skill.  Why they need a skilled sniper is unclear, because from the way the gun's described it can aim itself and kill anything that's on its screen.  It also seems to fire like a machine gun most of the time, or works as a grenade launcher -- it's not really portrayed as a sniper rifle (although the author is touted as a former Marine sniper himself).  Honestly, I couldn't really make much sense out of the damn gun, which is one of the problems with the book:  it sounds like it has some kind of death-ray function -- an "energy depletion" thing that's described as a "round of pure heat."  A round is a physical bullet -- how can it be "pure heat" then?  It's described as a shell that looks like a dildo (there's some honest gun-porn for ya!) but also only works about half the time.  At times it sounds like a sniper rifle, but they also talk about mounting it on a plane.  It needs Duggan's sniper skill but acquires its own targets and has a fire button instead of a trigger.  You want to know a secret?  Technology isn't very interesting.  In fact, it makes things boring.  During fights these guys are programming this gizmo and it lacks immediacy, tension, and good ol' fashioned oomph!  I'd rather the dude struggle with a rusty ol' M-1 than this death-dealing Dude-You're Getting-A-Dell contraption.  but, it is what it is, I guess... whatever it is.  Anyhow, our two heroes - older grouchy tough guy Duggan and smartass oddball Dye -- form a team (they hate each other for about an hour and spend the rest of the book as BFF's) and are hit-men for the USA.  Their first target is eveil sumbitched Peter Coy Booker, who's planning to kill the President of France and the Prime Minister of England.  Duggan and Booker have a bad history.  Anyway, after some skullduggery of variable interest, they fight it out with the aid of a quirky British girl and her old double-decker bush that they use as a shooting platform.  Morris's prose is good, yet somehow he doesn't draw very clear pictures, and while a lot rests on the interplay between our buddy-team, neither of them are particularly witty or interesting, so it all falls kinda flat without ever actually getting bad.  There's a sex scene or two and the battle scenes aren't bad, but I remain pretty meh on the whole thing and don't feel like it's the "sniper" book it's advertised to be.  There were three more, which I won't avoid but will be in no rush to read, either.

                                                          Pose stolen from Malcolm X


The Revenger #1 - Jon Messman  (Signet, 1973)
Yet another Executioner clone.  A businessman, Ben Martin, resists the Mafia's protection racket, and when they try getting pushy he pushes back, sticking one torpedo's hand to the table with a bayonet.  Even if you're a tough guy -- which Martin definitely is, having been a top trained assassin in Vietnam -- this isn't really a wise thing to do, because the Mafia operates on its reputation and can't let such a thing slide.  So they kidnap Martin's son (who at various points sounds like he's anything from an infant to a first grader).  They don't intend to hurt him but mistakes are made and the kid gets away from them and falls off a roof and dies.  Ben's wife is devastated and leaves him and Ben -- who's an extremely stubborn man who honestly causes a lot of his own problems -- is vengeance-crazed and starts hunting the mob with high-powered rifles.  It's written with more care than most (it's certainly no Sharpshooter or Marksman book) but Messman's style is off-putting for a reason I can't quite put my finger on, since the prose is far from bad.  There's a fair amount of mayhem and it's held together with drama, but it comes across as a little slower than it should be and it's a bit dry.  Martin's not quite a cardboard character, though, coming across as so hardheaded he sometimes undermines himself, but he's also not just some nihilistic psychopathic trigger-puller -- he's careful and follows his training so he gets in as little danger as possible while taking out his targets.  It's not a bad book, just not quite what it could have been.

For more on this book and the second volume, please visit the excellent Glorious Trash blog... which, if you like this post, should be one of your main internet hang-outs, anyway - I know it's one of mine!

Omega Sub #1 - J. D. Cameron  (Avon, 1991)
While the super-secret, top-of-the-line nuclear submarine U.S.S. Liberator is on maneuvers under the polar ice cap, the rest of the world gets decimated by nuclear war.  Thinking they may be the last people alive on the planet, the Liberator heads out to see if there's anyone else to rescue (the first, through AMAAAAAAZING good luck, is the captain's brother in a lifeboat, after his helicopter was shot down by another super-sub, possibly Russian).   Everywhere they go they find devastation and "white shirts" -- people gone homicidally deranged by radiation madness who -- for some bizarre and bewildering reason -- all wear white dress shirts.  The white-shirts are homicidal maniacs but don't seem to make very worthy opponents, trying to fight against the crew's machine guns using scythes and such.    The crew find survivors in San Francisco (where the author thinks the World Trade Center was located!), including a pretty lady scientist so we can get an awkward romantic interest going with Donovan, the sub's captain.  Donovan decides the best way to deal with the radiation-maddened white shirt is to blow them up with one of the sub's missiles, so you get a what-the-fuck? scene of a sub nuking part of an already-nuked American city.   Adding to the rather lunkheaded thought process is the mention of a "Quayle administration"  - I guess the author thought a moron who couldn't spell "potato" actually had a shot at being president.  Then again, there was George W. Bush, so maybe he wasn't too far off the mark with the Quayle thing.  Anyway,  there's more wrangling with survivors about who'll join the sub's crew and more non-eventful confrontations with the enemy sub, which I'm sure will figure into later volumes, and hopefully be more interesting (if the copyrights are any indicator, this one was written by Michael Jahn while the second was by David Robbins).  It's an interesting idea, packed with lots of technological details which might excite somebody who isn't me, but overall it's kind of dry, too timid, and tediously by-the-number.

The Wrecking Crew - Donald Hamilton (Gold Medal, 1960)
Second Matt Helm book has a supposedly out-of-shape Matt being officially brought back into the spying business and given the assignment to find and kill a notorious agent known as Caselius, who's killed off the last several agents who went after him.  Matt is supposed to pose as a photographer taking pictures in Sweden for a hunting magazine, and, since he's supposed to just be an average citizen, if he gets provoked by enemy agents he's supposed to just take the beating, rather than blow his cover by showing how well-trained he is at defending himself.  His contact is a woman but she's not very trustworthy and may be working for the other side, setting him up for the kill.   Forget (as in completely) the Dean Martin movie of the same name -- there is absolutely zero goofiness in this book and Matt is a killing machine who's ruthless about getting his job done.  Everything is kept very realistic so the body count is relatively small, but the kills pack much more punch because of it.  Great stuff. 

                         Please don't judge this book by its cover.  Seriously, what a boring, shit cover.
   It's maybe the dullest cover for a book imaginable, and somebody actually got paid for designing it.

Die Trying - Lee Child  (Jove, 1998)
With Jack Reacher's uncanny knack for the highly improbable, he ends up accidentally kidnapped by crazy militia thugs because he just happened to be helping their target (a woman named Holly Johnson) with her dry-cleaning because she had a bad leg.  This woman, who Reacher never saw before, is not only a highly trained FBI agent, she's also the daughter of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the militia wants to use her as a bargaining chip so they can start their own country in a part of Montana... or inspire other militia groups around the country to rebel by seeing government forces massacre them all.  If you can buy it that Reacher would just end up in such a dire situation by complete happenstance, then you should have little problem with the rest of it.  Child does a great job keeping Reacher and his evenly-matched new girlfriend/fellow captive in seemingly-hopeless situations against a very formidable enemy (the head of the militia is especially evil, fanatical, ruthless, and capable enough to be a problem even for the almost-superpowered Reacher) and there are plenty of tense situations.  Holly ends up in an escape-proof building whose walls are insulated with dynamite that'll go off if it's hit by a stray bullet.  Reacher has to escape by squeezing himself through a narrow cavern infested with rats in total darkness -- it's likely a nod to what Rambo had to do in First Blood but even more harrowing;  it's enough to throw even Reacher into a state of near-panic.  And there are plenty of fights and battle scenes, interspersed with detailed lectures on ballistics that remain interesting enough not to slow down the action even though that's exactly what they're doing -- Child's telling you where bullets are and what they're doing on a thousandth-of-a-second timeline.  It's not quite as "coincidental" as the first book, but also doesn't move quite as fast since Reacher's a captive for most of it, but it's still a good surviving-a-seemingly-hopeless-situation-through-skill-and-wits tale that's hard to put down. 


Now, hopefully the internet connection will hold up and the next post won't be six months from now, but, we'll have to see how it goes. 

Even lightning didn't stop me from Twittering, so you can always find me there.

A One And A Two...

Hiya, it's me again with more reviews of action-series (and books that I can logically force into that definition) books.   I know it's a long stretch between me posting these monkeyspanks, but how can ya miss me if I don't go away?  And at least I give you a lot of bang for your buck when I finally get 'round to it... there's eighteen books reviewed here!  That's at least a dozen more than you probably want, even!   You can count them if you're a weirdo.   By fate, not by design, most of these are the first or second (or in the case of the Sonny Barger books, the first and the second) in the series.  Hence the title.   Anyway, enough intro... after all, you've got eighteen of these things to read!  And with all my lil' I-think-I'm-soooooo-funny intrusions, they're long enough as is.

It's the best infomercial for Sharpfinger knives ever!

Dead in 5 Heartbeats - Ralph "Sonny" Barger with Keith & Kent Zimmerman  (Harper Torch, 2003)

"I'm not no peace creep by any sense of the word," president of the Hell's Angels MC, Sonny Barger, once said, and he brings those sensibilities to his sideline as a novelist.  Gritty and kick-ass biker novel about the  problems faced by "Patch" Kinkade, former president of the Infidelz Motorcycle Club, as he tries to relocate to Arizona.  Almost as soon as he moves, a member of the Infidelz is gunned down and a gang war is brewing, so a reluctant Patch is called back to deal with that, as well an Infidel who's about to spill all the club's secrets to the feds.  It all plays like a really good grindhouse movie (and it's just become one - you can pre-order the DVDs now at http://deadin5heartbeats.com/ - I've got mine in), with realistic action scenes and plenty of fighin' 'n' ridin'.  Patch is a well-drawn character; he's a world-weary guy who'd like to settle down to a peaceful life, but circumstances don't make that feasible, and, being a stand-up fella, he does what (and who) he's gotta do.  

If you ever read the kind of short stories they had in Easyriders magazine (back before it turned "motorcycle enthusiast" instead of "biker") and wished they'd write something longer, this will make you really happy.  Who knew Sonny had it in him?  I hope he's got plenty more, but so far we've only gotten one other novel.  Hopefully the movie will be a hit and inspire him to write some more.  But, I'll forgive him if he's busy making more Sons of Anarchy episodes  (if you're not watching that show, go pick up the DVDs immediately - Breaking Bad and Walking Dead are the only things even giving it a contest for the best show on TV).

6 Chambers, 1 Bullet - Ralph "Sonny" Barger, with Keith & Kent Zimmerman (William Morrow, 2006)

After being burned on a gun deal where they're paid with counterfeit money, four members of the Infidelz MC are found in a meat locker, dead and frozen on their bikes.   Even though he's alienated from his club, Patch Kincaid teams up with a guy named Redbeard -- brother of one of the dead 'Delz -- to find out who did it so payback can be dealt.   They discover a Russian mob connection, and Patch and Redbeard get the snot walloped out of them by twin Russian boxers and their crime crew.  Patch is a hard guy to deter, though, and decides that the best way to get at the killer is to get himself sent to prison.  After a contempt-of-court charge he's sent up, and he works the system to ferret out the killer.  He knows the guy's supposed to have a panther tattoo so he equips himself with a jailhouse tat of a panther trap and a shank made out of a piece of a plastic bucket, and he goes hunting.   But there's a lot going on that Patch doesn't know.   Good thing he's a resourceful dude....  Good, tough biker action novel with a few slightly-far-fetched plot twists but a good sense of pacing and style.  Never gets boring, and Patch remains an interesting character.  Now, how 'bout another one?

Hellrider #2:  Blood Run - Dan Killerman (Dan Schmidt?)    (Pinnacle, 1985)

Jesse Heller (The Man Called Hell... who nobody ever gets around to calling Hell) is still a little banged up from the events of volume one (which was not, but should have been, called Barren Anus Of Suffering - don't be scared, you can click it!) when he picks up a hitchhiker named Lisa.   You'd think she'd find a more effective means of transportation since she's on the run from a motorcycle gang who want her dead.  Her old man was a member of the Sinners MC, and she witnessed them kill some college kids over a drug deal, so they want her out of the picture.   Heller has a vendetta against outlaw MC's, anyway, so he doesn't mind getting mixed up in this too much, even though he's on the run himself because cops want him for the massacre that ended the first book.  

The Sinners are an evil bunch, with foul bad-guy names like Turd, Pisser, and Cheese Nuts.  How tough can these guys really be if they allowed such names to stick?  Anyway, as in the first book, Heller takes almost more of a beating than he can dish out.  Every other page there's some new injury from a fight or a bike wreck, but he still manages to get a few shots off and brutally chain-whips a guy.  He also loses his guns a helluva lot, but manages to find one when he needs one (after taking another pounding, of course).   The Sinners aren't his only problem, either -- he's also got a crazy sheriff on his case.  This all results in a barrage of action that's pretty much constant after a point, but it turns into one big numbing blur. 

It's copyright by Dan Schmidt, so that's probably who actually wrote it, but, hey, "Killerman" is a cooler name, yeah?  A third, The Guns of Hell, must have been written because it was announced on the last page as coming out in just two more months, but it never surfaced.  Oddly, the back of the book says the gang is called The Grim Reapers, but they're the Sinners.  Maybe the existence of a real Grim Reapers MC made Killerman think twice?  I know I wouldn't write a book about killing off guys in a club who might come play kickball with my head. Okay and not badly written, but pretty average.  I still wish they'd made more, but Pinnacle was kinda on the ropes in those days.

 Attention mutants!  Bill O'Reilly has had enough of your shit! And he'd like a kitty to pet!


The Outrider #1  - Richard Harding  (Pinnacle, 1984)

I love the idea of post-apocalypse series (hell, I used to write ‘em) but they always seemed to get goofy on me.   This one starts with the cover.  What were they thinking, having Andrew-Dice-Down’s-Syndrome as the hero?   Then again, he looks a little like Bill O’Reilly, but that’s not really much kinder.  By the fourth book they had a different guy, but the damage may have been done because that dude was set in reader's minds. 

Anyway, that’s Bonner, a guy who used to be an “outrider” when the U.S. was destroyed in a nuclear war.   He, and others like him, drove all over the wrecked country, finding out where people and resources were and trying to unite it in some way.  Some of the outriders turned evil and set up little kingdoms, like the Hotstates, The Snowstates, and the Slavestates.  Bonner has an old enemy named Leather, who runs the Slavestates (in what used to be Washington D.C.), and he has a $10,000 bounty on Bonner’s head.  One of the fools who tries to collect it tells Bonner that Dara -- a female outrider who was Bonner’s girlfriend -- is still alive and being held hostage by Leather (who she was crazed with hate to kill because he’d slaughtered her village).  Bonner loads up his car (basically pipework welded around a engine) and drives out to get her back.  On the way he assembles a motley crew of helpers, including an outrider buddy who uses the ever-popular exploding arrows that captivated the world in the 80’s, a flame-thrower-wielding “gas-hound” named Cooker, a couple of 7-foot-tall mute giants called The Mean Brothers, and a lesbian biker gang.   They have to take on Leather’s squads of “radiation leper” bikers (guys who are eager to die in battle since it’ll save them from rotting away with radiation poisoning) and an 8-foot-tall tracker named Beck. 

There’s lots of gunfights and explosions and Bonner throwing knives into people, and some colorful post-nuke things like subway tunnels full of “rat people” and a trip through the Firelands (the coal belt, which got ignited and perpetually burns).  Past the halfway point it’s pretty much constant fighting, which actually gets kind of numbing even though it’s not badly written.   Bonner cuts off Leather’s hands, which he’ll replace (rather hilariously) with blocks of wood with knives in them -- they’ll fight it out about that in the following books.   A bit goofy, but the writing’s okay and it reads quickly, so you could do worse.

 Attention, heretics!  Marcel Marceau has had enough of your shit!
 (Remember, posing for this cover is on a couple of people's resumes.  I don't advise you to look too hard at the woman... there's something horrifyingly spooky about the look on her face.  And... a crocheted dress?  Ah, the 70's!)



The Inquisitor #2:  The Last Time I Saw Hell - Simon Quinn (Martin Cruz Smith)   (Dell, 1974)

Our hero, Francis Xavier Killy, enforcer for the Catholic Church, is already in deep shit as the book opens.  And I mean that in the most literal sense -- he's been rendered nearly comatose by a dart full of drugs and a couple of goons have tossed him into the fetid slime of the Paris sewer.  The flow carries him through underground pipes toward blades that grind the sewage into liquid mulch.  To find out how he gets out of that stinky situation you're going to have to be a stupid as I am and pay the ridiculously high price these books are fetching on the used market.   And even though I ponied up my dough for this, I still had to wait a hundred pages because it goes into a flashback right before Killy's about to go into the blades.  Gotta admit, Cruz knows how to hook a reader. 

Killy is the son of a Boston cop and worked for the CIA before his Catholicism led him to the church's Militia Christi, a part of the Holy Office of the Inquisition that takes care of church business by any means necessary.   And a guy named Sully, a former priest who collaborated with the Nazis, is now threatening the church and the entire French government.  He's pretty much forsaken Christ to worship Napoleon and has been using Action, the assassination squad of the French Intelligence services, to gather info on their own citizens and plan a coup on the French president.   Killy is dispatched after him... but Action is after Killy, too.   A girl he slept with (vows of celibacy would make for a boring book, so Killy's not burdened with those) almost shoots him with a gun disguised as a pen, they put a bomb in his car, and even blow up half a hotel where he's staying.  There's also a car chase and a shoot-out, all of which are well-written action scenes that make you wish there were more of them, but the book is mostly complicated (but intelligent) espionage and intrigue instead, which is nicely done but a bit slow.  

Killy is tough but not bloodthirsty at all;  in fact, he has to do fifteen days of penance for any man he kills, so he doesn't even carry a gun since that'd only make him more quick to cause deaths.   And that also makes the final confrontation with Sully pretty inventive (and a bit far-fetched) as Killy tries to take him to Hell... as literally as he can arrange.   It's good but not the holy grail or anything;  they should re-publish these in collections and drop the price.

 Yeah, my cover has a price sticker on it, but considering that yeah-who-gives-a-shit cover art I figured it wasn't worth trying to peel off...



Hardball #1  - William Sanders  (Diamond Books, 1992)

As the book opens, agent Dane is locked up and tortured in an African prison, awaiting execution.  He'd been caught while looking for a friend of his to help him on a mission.  Dane  (who's also your first person narrator) is former CIA, now free-lance (or trying to be -- the CIA has a way of pulling him back in) and he's getting a little burned out at 40 years old, weary from years of killing and in rough shape from getting shot, beaten, and diseased in trouble spots all over the world.   The CIA gets him out of his predicament and sends him to an island for rest and recovery, and to keep an eye on a congressman who'll be shacking up there with his mistress.  Dane gets back in shape quickly and has to fend off some partying jerks with a skeet gun.  When the jerks come back and shoot up his trailer in a speedboat-drive-by, he tries to buy a gun but can't get around the gun laws and ends up with shotgun slugs and an old cap-and-ball .44 Dragoon pistol that kills fine but is slow and tedious to load.   He pals around with an 80-year-old Indian and screws the congressman's mistress, and it's a pretty nice vacation... until an Arab hit team lands on the island and Dane has to fend them off with the few weapons he has.  Capturing AK-47s helps, and at one point he improvises a single-use shotgun out of an old bicycle pump.  

It takes a while to get violent (which I didn't mind because the day-to-day life won the island was interesting even if no one was getting killed), but when it kicks into gear it stays there a long time, and Dan racks up quite a body count and gets out of some tough scrapes.   The writing is better than usual for an action series (Sanders was supposedly in Army Security in Turkey and Laos, so he knows his stuff) and it keeps you engaged, giving Dane plenty of personality and making him tough but not superhuman.  He's definitely in the Matt Helm school of badass.  Why they gave the series a dumb name like "Hardball" is beyond me, and all three books had the blandest covers in the genre, with those featureless, modified silhouettes.   That can’t have helped sales, which is too bad because this was pretty good stuff. 

 Attention absurdly-huge clams!  Mike Nelson has had enough of your shit!


Sea Trap - Nick Carter (Jon Messman)   (Award, 1969)

Judas, an evil mastermind with a metal hand (and a gun built into one of the fingers) and a horribly-scarred face, is an old enemy of Nick’s, having appeared in a couple of previous volumes.  In this one he’s come up with a bizarre giant man-made clam to trap submarines (stop laughing!  it could happen!), and he’s holding one of them hostage and threatening to sell it, with all its tech secrets, to an enemy country if the U.S. doesn’t pay him a hundred million dollars.   The “hundred million dollars” makes this sound even more like a plot dreamed up by an eight-year-old than the giant clam does.  Helping him design the clam is a demented marine biologist who’s pathologically attracted to women, but he’s impotent so his frustration leads him torture and mutilate them and have them raped by a huge Mongolian.  

All these bad guys are so monstrous I pictured them drawn by Jack Kirby, and the things they do to women are horror novel stuff, torturing them ‘til they’re insane freaks, sticking sea lampreys and leeches on them, etc.   Nick goes undercover with an oceanographer who thinks he’s working for the Navy.  The oceanographer turns out to be a beautiful, intelligent, self-assured woman, so Nick decides it’ll be fun to “tame” her, which he’s sure he can do by acting like a chauvinist pig asshole.  He arrogantly bets her she’ll fall in love with him, then tries to flirt by rubbing his knee in her crotch!   On the side, Nick lays two other girls almost as soon as he meets them;  as luck would have it, they both end up as victims of the mad professor, giving Nick a revenge motive on top of the rest of his assignment.  Don’t worry, there’s plenty of mayhem, too, with Nick getting in gunfights, a battle to the death with the Mongol, and stuck in one hell of a fix when he calls an airstrike on the island while Judas pumps a couple tons of chum into the surrounding water to attract sharks in a huge feeding frenzy!  Pretty crazy written-in-third-person actionfest that never stops moving and keeps Nick in constant trouble while letting him be a more diabolical asshole than usual; the way he treats the feminist oceanographer (and the fact that he gets away with it -- I don’t think I’m really spoiling anything to tell you he wins his bet) had to be pretty Neanderthal even for the swinging ‘60’s.  A scene with the two of them stuck in a malfunctioning submarine had me laughing pretty hard;  Nick has to repair something under her seat and keeps smiling up at her from between her legs.  The gore and depravity level is pretty high here, with one guy even getting eaten alive by a mob of psychotics.  Kinda loonie but it’s a good one, even if it’s less plausible than some.  Then again, who doesn't love a good hey-let's-get-in-the-sandbox-and-play-armymen wheeee! plot once in a while?  I don't mind clams big enough to swallow nuclear subs as long as they don't abuse it by having them show up in every book.

Pale Horse Coming - Stephen Hunter (Pocket Star Books, 2001)


This extremely kick-ass book belongs with these action-series reviews even though it trods mainstream bestseller turf and has an elevated (more literary than pulp) level of writing, because you can put chrome on something and shine it up and give it a leather interior and full options package, but when you step on the gas and it rumbles and bitches rubber there's no mistaking a hot-rod.  And though it does it in style and goes a little smoother and a little farther, it's taking you to the same place as any Executioner or Death Merchant type of book. 

When a lawyer is sent to investigate the disappearance of a black man on an isolated all-black prison farm in Thebes, Mississippi, he tells his double-tough friend Earl Swagger (father of super-sniper Bob Lee Swagger, who stars in most of Hunter's other books) to come get him if he doesn't return soon.  Good move on his part, because it's 1951, Thebes is accessible only by the river, and in its isolation there are things going on that make Parchman look like Six Flags... and its minders aren't going to want a white lawyer with liberal leanings get back to tell anybody what he's seen.  

Earl goes in and rescues him but gets caught in the attempt, and since the prison guards (led by a huge, musclebound albino sadist named Bigboy, who considers himself an artist with a bullwhip) don't believe who he is, they subject Earl to the torments of the damned.   Hunter really makes Thebes sound like a circle of the Inferno and it's a miracle that even Earl is able to withstand the level of constant punishment he has to endure, working hard labor in incredible heat with little food or water, injured and lacking sleep from brawling with his fellow prisoners, who hate him because he's white.  Eventually -- though it seems impossible -- Earl escapes... but he's going back to settle things, bringing with him five old men (and one young one who's so blatantly supposed to be Audie Murphy that I don't know why Hunter even bothered changing his last name to "Ryan") who are the top gunfighters alive;  they're all based on real-life gunmen.   Rather strangely for a big gun advocate like Hunter, he portrays them all as mainly being motivated by a chance to kill people; even more than seeing justice done, these dudes just want to use their guns to kill people for the thrill of it.  They're damn near supernatural in their shooting abilities but they'll still have quite a fight on their hands.  

The dialogue is a wee bit stiff and treads (and sometimes crosses) a line between archaically poetic and hoo-rah fucking cornball;  if you can, imagine the dialogue from Deadwood, but without all the cussing.   But it gets the job done, and with style, and this book is all kinds of epic badass.  It'll blow you away, guaranteed.   Recommended and damn-near required. 

 That's the last time you'll criticize my taste in neckties, fucker!


Agent For COMINSEC #1:  The Bloody Monday Conspiracy - Ralph Hayes (Belmont Tower, 1974)

A group of Arab terrorists known as Bloody Monday kidnap a chairman of China.  They hope to provoke nuclear war between China and the United States, if not from the act itself then because his successor would be more of a radical.   Top secret agency COMINSEC (Committee for International Security) gets wind of the plot and send in their top agent, Taggart, to stop it.   Taggart is a violent asshole who used to be a Mafia hit man, and he works not out of patriotism (he doesn't really give a damn about national security or world peace) but for the money, and because he flat-out loves killing and working for COMINSEC gives him the chance to do a lot of it.   Violence is his first solution to any situation -- if he wants info he finds out who has it and then beats it out of them.  

He tries joining Bloody Monday to infiltrate it;  the pretty much beats his way into that, too, but takes a whole lot of pounding himself along the way, since he ends up captured, tied up, and nibbled by rats.   But he doesn't mind all that so much since it gives him a chance to drown a guy in a kettle of boiling sheep fat after a knife-and-hammer fight.   Another guy even ends up killed with a steam shovel, and I don't even know how many he shoots or blows up.  Then, when a pretty bizarre setback happens, his mission takes an extreme turn... right into more violence.  

The book still manages to have a complex (but far-fetched) plot even though it's throwing nonstop fights in your face as hard as it can.  They get numbing after a while;  Hayes' writing isn't bad at all but it's very meat-and-potatoes, without a lot of flash.   He's not afraid to make the hero not particularly likeable (Taggart is basically a shark -- he finds something to kill and then tears through it while feeling nothing) or to give him a good whacking (I don't know how he's in good enough shape to finish the mission after all the abuse he endures), and his main motivation seems to be body count... and isn't that what you read this stuff for?   Pretty plain but it moves and it doesn't take a lot of your reading time, so if it doesn't offer major rewards that's fair enough.

 Attention, Muppies!  The Punisher, oops, I mean Jake, has had enough of your shit!



Jake Strait #2:  The Devil Knocks -- Frank Rich  (Gold Eagle, 1993)
Jake Strait, a "boogeyman" or private enforcer of the very Blade Runnerish year 2031 is contacted to cause  revolution in the police state of Denver.  Political coups are not his kind of gig, but then a pimp pisses him off enough for Jake to blow his head off, and he suddenly needs a ticket out of town before the pimp-protection-agency's hired guns overwhelm him.  So, with his bank account tapped of credits and few other options, Jake takes the job, recruiting an old skimmer-pilot who's become a "squeeze" junkie to get him to Denver, because he (wisely) doesn't fully trust his employers. 


Then the book makes a misstep into some doggie doo and turns the road trip into kind of a comic saga, where characters get a bit goofy and broad, and things lose their focus.  I'm okay with Jake being a smartass, but there's a thing I have about books or movies: when situations get too absurd I feel like the book's not taking things seriously so neither do I.  That's why I just get pissed off at "horror comedy" movies like Sean of the Dead or whacky horror-goof books like John Dies At The End.   I know that's a "me" thing and some people (*coughgeekscough*) love that shit... but I just can't deal with that, it makes me feel stupid. 

So, I got mad at the book at that point, even though I admit the parody is kind of clever, with rebels fighting "muppies" (Militant Urban Professionals) in designer armor, and they aren't allowed to use armor-piercing bullets or they'll get sued.  And the Muppies fight back with rubber bullets so they won't damage buildings, since what they're fighting for is better apartments.  And it is funny to see Jake's reaction to the absurdity;  they've sent in a cynic to do an idealist's job. 

There's a ton of action but since I'd already decided I was dealing with satire it didn't have much impact for me, and in the final stretch it tires to pull heavy drama out of characters previously established as buffoons, and that doesn't work for me, either.  I still think it's a smart, badass series with writing that's far better than the usual, and there are some great hard-boiled badass lines in this thing, but I just hope the remaining two are more like the first one, or, preferably, even darker and grimmer.  Recommended for some, but with a caveat for guys like me.

Hawker #2: L.A. Wars -- Carl Ramm (Randy Wayne White)   (Dell, 1984)

Frustrated-cop-turned-vigilante Hawker goes to tinseltown to take on the Bloods and Crips... or, as they're known here (because gangs can sue you for copyright infringement for all I know) the Satanas and the Panthers, respectively.  The Satanas are Hispanic and the Panthers are Black, but they're all violent degenerates and superstitious, so Hawker plays a Batman card and does things to scare them, like painting hawk pictures (sometimes in flammable explosive that makes them think he can piss fire), disappearing in smoke bombs, and calling himself the devil.   He gets in numerous gunfights with each gang, killing many and, in one case, blasting a rapist's dick off.  

Meanwhile, he sports with a famous actress, Melanie St. John, who he meets on the beach when he helps her with a sting from a stingray.   She's captivated by Hawker's lack of interest (he's another of those complicated men, and no one can understand him but his woman) and invites him to a party.  There he learns that she's not shallow and drug-addled like the rest of her friends.   Hawker passes up a chance for sex with a thinly-veiled version of Suzanne Sommers and gets in a brawl with a thinly-veiled version of John Travolta ("Johnny Barberino," who "started out a teenager in television dramas and then gone on to become America's heartthrob by doing a series of discoteque rock operas").   Randy Wayne White must've really been fed up with Travolta at the time 'cuz "Johnny Barberino" gets plastered with just about every type of villainy you can think of.  

Anyway, Hawker is so badass he even gets into gunfights while bedding the actress, and even though the cops figure out almost instantly that he's a vigilante (turns out painting a hawk on crime scenes when your name is Hawker isn't just unimaginative, it's the least-neato way to be incog), but they're so frustrated by the legal system's inability to solve the gang problem that they give him a wink-wink nod-nod say-no-more.   As you'd expect, Hawker takes on the leaders of both gangs, reveals a surprise bad guy, AND eventually gets to lay the Suzanne Sommers figure as the end credits roll.  

It's a little pat (okay, a LOT pat) but ya gotta love it because it just delivers and delivers -- if most action novels try to fit in a fight every twenty pages, Hawker goes for more like eight, and still has enough of a plot to keep it from being a cartoon.  There's a wee bit of cornball moralizing here and there, but when the guy cuts loose with a MAC-10 several times in a book, you can forgive him.  Writing's simple, clean, and works well for this kind of mayhem-tale. 

 If only this book were actually about this girl...


Room 59 #3:  Aim And Fire -- Cliff Ryder   (Gold Eagle, 2008)

A big-shot terrorist everyone had believed dead smuggles a suitcase nuke over the Mexican border, massacring a couple dozen illegal immigrants to keep the secret safe.   Another Al-Queda operative working very deep cover has gotten into a government position where they build rockets, and the two plan to work together to send up the bomb on a rocket and cause an EMP that'll destroy electronics across half the U.S., and millions will die in the resulting riots, and if you're reading this on a Kindle you'll never find out how it ends.  

Clandestine anti-terror group Room 59 gets wind of the plot from the suspicions of Nate Spencer, a border security guard who's notorious for not sticking to the book and being a loose cannon.  They pair him up with Tracy Wentworth, a Homeland Security analyst who also bucks the system and has been longing for field work.  They send the two into Mexico to trace the trail of the nuke and find out where it's going.  ON the way they get in a good car chase/ gunfight with some zetas and snatch a gang leader for info, before pulling a full-scale assault on the rocket compound at the last minute.  

This is well-written and very cinematic (I'm wondering if the "59" isn't supposed to make you think "24"), and stays on a realistic scale even if that hampers the action a little bit.   One annoying thing is the need to make the "Room 59" part relevant; to do so they have to stay in contact with the home base a lot, which results in people yammering a lot of jargon on cell phones during fire fights (I lost count of how many times people said something, then said "I repeat" and said it again), and one car chase is even watched on some remote Skype-type program on a Room 59 director's laptop instead of putting the reader with the agents in the truck.  And maybe it's just because I hate technology, but I think it's impossible to write or film computer hacking so it looks like "action"  -- it's always just going to be some nerd typing fast.  I know people are in love with the little gadgets that have taken the place of their brains -- and, for the most part, their lives -- but can we minimize their presence in an action novel for fucksake?   I want to watch the agents dealing death in a firefight, not watch them live-Tweet it. 

Also, the people giving the orders are never as interesting as the people carrying them out, so less focus on Kate, the director of Room 59, would also be welcome.   Also, I wanted the leather-clad badass chick on the cover to show up in the book;  Tracy kicks a fair amount of ass but the closest she gets is black sweatpants, and kinky as I am, that's not eeeeeeeeven on my fetish-radar.  Minor quibble, and a personal one, but hey, it's what sold me the book.   Overall it's a good read and the writing is smart,  I'd just shift more focus away from the control center.  Fuck the brass, the grunts are the interesting ones.

The Liquidator #1 -- R. L. Brent (Award, 1974)

Jake Brand's father was a cop who got murdered by a junkie.  Jake's brother Roy decided the best way to avenge him was to shut down the Mafia that supplied the junkie, so he passed up a football career to become a prosecutor.   He caused such trouble for the mob that they had a hit man with a sawed-off shotgun take him out.  Jake became a cop to carry on the war, and was using his contacts to pin down a mob boss named Hester.  Jake's efforts get the mob so rattled they cease operations for a few days and bring in a hit man.  Brand thinks the torpedo is after him, but instead the guy disguises himself as Brand and guns someone down in front of witnesses.  A betrayal by Brand's girlfriend completes the frame, and Brand spends five years in prison.   He's pardoned for saving the lives of guards on two separate occasions and once he gets out he immediately resumes his war on the mob, even though he's no longer a cop.   He icepicks one guy, clogs another's shotgun, and gets in car chases and gunfights, keeping the novel moving at a fast clip.   The writing is very good and elevates this above the standard Executioner variation.

The Black Berets #2: Cold Vengeance -- Mike McCray  (Dell, 1984)

Picking up where the first volume left off, a hit team hired by Parkes, the CIA agent who tried to backstab the team on their first mission, gets sent to the Black Berets' compound.   They burn it down but are killed by Tsali, the orphan kid the Black Berets rescued and are raising.  They rebuild the compound better than before, adding a lot of computer surveillance stuff.  Then they start answering ads in mercenary magazines as a way to get a line on Parkes so they can give him the payback he's got coming.  Rosie, Harry, and Applebaum get hired by one of Parkes' groups to do some work for Quadaffi... which, of course, they don't do.   Instead they turn on the troops they've infiltrated and manage to take out a large number of them by attacking their helicopters with LAW rockets, making it look like an enemy attack that they alone survived.   While those three try to figure out a way to take down the rest of the army, Beeker, Cowboy, and Tsali fight off more attacks on the compound and try to track down Parkes.   There's a pretty harrowing scene where, to keep from blowing their cover, Rosie has to torture a good guy to death -- including ripping nipples off with pliers.  So far these books all seem to include at least one scene that will make you squirm. There are still plenty of well-done action scenes and the characterization is top-notch, but the slam-bang stuff takes a bit of a backseat to the intrigue here, slowing things down just a little.  Not enough where it's a problem, though, and McCray's writing is still a standout for action series books.

This series turns out to have an interesting history to it, as Glorious Trash's Joe Kenney (for my money, THE authority on adventure-series books) told me last time I reviewed one of these.  Turns out Mike McCray was actually John Preston, a gay writer who wrote a lot of gay fiction.  The Black Berets are all straight, but once you have this knowledge it's almost impossible not to look for subtext.  And you can kind of find it, just in the camaraderie the team feel for each other, but honestly, it’s no more than you’d find from a military-team book you’d get from a hetero author, so it shouldn‘t distract you.  Preston also wrote an action series that was gay-oriented, The Mission of Alex Kane.  Haven’t seen any of those and won’t likely be seeking them out because I’m not the target audience, but if I’m no phobe, either, so if I ran across any in a used bookstore I’d probably give one a try, anyway, just on the strength of writing he shows in the Black Berets books. According to Wikipedia (which is not a source I take as gospel at all), several Black Berets novels were written by Michael McDowell, who was a frickin’ genius in the horror field.  He apparently collaborated with Preston on some things.  And then things get confusing... because McDowell is also credited with writing books by “Preston MacAdam” (such as the Michael Sheriff: The Shield series).  But, John Preston is also credited on the web as being “Preston MacAdam,” and is also rumored to have written some of the S.O.B.s (Soldiers of Barrabas) series.  So, I don’t know if Michael McDowell actually wrote any Black Berets books, or who wrote the Michael Sheriff books.   But, if you’re interested,  that may be a pseudonym plot worth investigating.  Unfortunately it’s a cold trail, since both John Preston and Michael McDowell died of AIDs in the ‘90’s.  Anyway, if there are other Michael McDowell works out there, I’d be doubly interested because I’m a huge fan of that guy; you can look for a review of The Elementals by him next time I do a horror-novel-review post.  Or you can find a copy and read it yourself, because I promise you that's what I'm going to tell you to do, anyway.

 This is one of those fancypants books that you open up and there's a double-page picture..

 ...which I find oddly hilarious.  Attention, Viet Cong!  Kappa Delta Sig has had enough of your shit, bro!


The Hard Corps #1 - Chuck Bainbridge  (Jove, 1986)

This reads like Jove wanted their own version of Dell’s Black Berets or Gold Eagle’s Phoenix Force team, but a variation on those isn’t a bad thing.   Five guys with unique talents for killing meet in Vietnam and once the war’s over they don’t feel suited for much else, so they reform their team and become mercenaries known as The Hard Corps (which is a silly-as-a-fish-with-titties name to me, but luckily the book ended up being a lot better than the title). 

The five guys include an Italian hood turned explosives expert, a ninja-type (‘cept white) guy who kills with a Rambo-type survival knife, bow and arrow, and other silent-death methods.  Another favors Japanese swords, one’s a Green Beret captain, and an older dude serves as a mechanic, cook, doctor, and gunsmith.   They have a big compound in Washington state, complete with helicopters, bunkers, and all kinds of military gear.  

After a first chapter where they rescue some kidnapped kids from Mexican terrorists (their fee:  a million dollars -- so that’s how they afford the helicopters and other goodies), they come home and a chopper full of Vietnamese resistance fighters lands on their base.  Among them is Trang Nih, a rebel leader who’s being sought by Viet Cong Communists.   Rather improbably (but essential for the action) a small army led by Vietcong commander Captain Vinh promptly invades the Hard Corps compound, trying to kill Trang Nih and his men.   Of course, our heroes can’t be allowing that and soon the Vietnam war is on again, on a smaller scale and without government interference (which means the good guys win). 

It’s a pretty ridiculous premise, with around a hundred Vietcong soldiers showing up in Washington to get taken out by a five man team, but what the hell, right?  That’s why we read these things, and when it comes to action, this thing delivers -- without much plot to get in the way there’s almost constant gunfights, mortar attacks, ninja sneakin’ ‘n’ stabbin’, all that good stuff.  And for characterization purposes (which aren’t bad -- they don’t seem quite real, but they’re far from cardboard characters, either) each guy on the team gets his own flashback chapter... which are also geared toward action sequences from back in ‘Nam or during their rough childhoods.   I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting much out of this but ended up pleasantly surprised; there’s more premise than plot, but that’s enough for the purpose, and Bainbridge does a good job giving them individual identities so they don’t blur together, and his action scenes are solid and keep the book moving without getting too ridiculous.  Not bad a’tall, I’m glad there are seven more. 

 Yeah, it's got housepaint on it, but it saved me thirty bucks, so viva le housepaint.



Operation Hang Ten #4: Cute And Deadly Surf Twins - Patrick Morgan  (Macfadden-Bartell, 1970)

Considering this series tried to combine spying and surfing, and had a title like Cute And Deadly Surf Twins, I was expecting it to be pretty light and goofy, so I was pretty surprised when it started with such a bang.  After a brief surfing interlude, beach bum turned beach-Bond Bill Cartwright gets the shit kicked out of him by the Diablos motorcycle gang.  He gives a good account of himself in the brawl and even bites a dude’s finger off, but one badass versus a dozen just isn’t good math and he ends up stomped, pissed on, and thrown off a cliff... all because he was looking for a guy named Moon.  

After two months in the hospital, Cartwright gets out and keeps trying to track down Moon, who’s working with Chinese commies who are counterfeiting money and smuggling it in surfboards with secret compartments.   Thanks to some fancy driving and good ol’ fashioned brutality, he gets some payback on the Diablos and kidnaps one of their women, who he hangs naked by her wrists and terrorizes until she gives him information. 

Then he goes after a biker (the resulting fight is so brutal the guy’s upper lip gets chopped off by the edge of a board) and rescues a girl who’s been starved and almost raped to death by Moon.  Closing in on him leads to more brawls with the gang, and Cartwright takes another beating with a bike chain, but dishes out more mayhem with a surfboard and a rotary sander.  He still ends up caught, but escapes even though he has to swim five miles with his hands tied and a bullet in his shoulder.  

This is surprisingly gritty and violent stuff, and the only goofiness is the strange choice of having Cartwright’s trailer run by a computer that makes all his food and mixes drinks; that’s weird, unnecessary, and I’m not sure why it’s in the book.   Also superfluous is a novice female agent named Pat Parrot who he reluctantly has to work with;  he’s a little put out with her at first because when she shows up she’s disguised as a hippie!   At times the book seems to be trying a little too hard to maintain its “surfing” connections, since espionage doesn’t really fit in well with goofing around on the beach, but it’s still a lot better book thatn just a novelty piece.  The writing’s pretty solid.   And that’s kind of unfortunate for me, since this series is price-prohibitive; used copies are going for around twenty bucks each, minimum, and I’m just not paying that.  I got lucky and found two of them at a used bookstore that didn’t know what they had, and they were thirty-eight cents each.   They’re worth way more than that, but thirty-eight dollars... not so much.

 Attention, fertility drug companies!   Mitt Romney has had enough of your shit!  (Just kidding!  He's all for unregulated capitalism!  This Yard madman must be stopped!)

The Hunter #1: Scavenger Kill - Ralph Hayes  (Leisure Books, 1975)

It’s our ol’ buddy Ralph again.  I was tempted to read a Stoner book for this batch, too, and go for the trifecta, but, good as he is, I was worried about getting Ralphed out.  After Vietnam, Col. John Yard tried finding peace by hunting big game in Africa, but finds it hard to put up with the obnoxious tourists he has to take on safaris.  Into this discontent comes an old war buddy whose wife has killed herself and their deformed, brainless baby because a bad fertility drug caused her to give birth to the monster.  Yard decides that Marice Lavelle, who owns the pharmaceutical company than markets the drug, needs to pay for his crimes.  Lavelle doesn’t care if his products cause abominations as long as they remain profitable, and he wants to start selling the drug in Africa and Asia.   Since he can’t talk yard out of this vengeance quest (even after a brawl), Yard’s friend Moses Ngala decides to join him on it.  Moses is Black and Hayes is preoccupied with never letting you forget that, awkwardly referring to Moses “shaking his black head” or “putting a black hand on Yard’s shoulder,” and also getting him in brutal bar fights with racists.   Yard also tangles with thugs as they try to track down the elusive Lavelle, who usually stays hidden on the top floor of a hotel surrounded by bodyguards (including one with a metal hand).  The action scenes are pretty workmanlike but Yard takes his share of punishment.  He also gets away with putting a silencer on a revolver;  you’d think a gun expert would know that doesn’t work.  Anyway, not bad but not outstanding.

 Attention, Brian Dennehy!  Sylvester Stallone is tired of your shit!
(What, you didn't think I wasn't gonna do that, did you?) 


First Blood - David Morrell  (Fawcett Crest, 1972)
Of course this is the basis for Sylvester Stallone’s action franchise classic, but it differs from the movie adaptation quite a bit.  Rambo is more of a “kid” and he’s a bit more disturbed and not quite as reasonable;  he’s perfectly willing to kill the deputies who chase him into the woods when he gets fed up by being pushed around by Sheriff Teasle.  Also, he spends more time just trying to hide and survive than he does being the super-powered aggressor that Stallone’s version was; early on he’s hampered by badly broken ribs that keep him from doing a lot of fighting.   And, most importantly, the outcome is very different.  Morrell’s writing is simple without a lot of flash, but he handles outdoor things well and maintains an interesting, convoluted conflict between Rambo and Teasle;  both know the whole thing’s a big, stupid mistake that’s causing great harm, but after a point they’re committed to it and have to ride it out even if it’s going to end badly.   Good stuff.  For a better, more in-depth review of this book, check out Glorious Trash, where all three of the trilogy (and the circumstances under which the last two were written) are discussed.


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Butcher's Dozen

Yep, it's been a while since I did one of these, but I'm about to make it up to ya in sheer volume.  If a baker's dozen is thirteen, then a butcher's dozen is fifteen.  And if that's too goofy for you (and if it ain't you're no son o' mine), there's a Butcher book in here to use as an excuse.  Basically, I had to call the post something, alright?  Anyway, I take on some heavyweights here.  Wanna see me swing on James Bond?  How 'bout Jack Reacher (just a lil' 'cuz I really do like the dude)?  And you can just call me the Death-Merchant-Death-Merchant!  Read on...

Swampmaster #1 - Jake Spencer  (Diamond, 1992)
First a three-book series has a Seminole Indian named Johnny Firecloud (as far as I can tell he’s no relation to the 70’s exploitation movie character of the same name) trying to survive a post-nuke future and lead a resistance against the National Front, which is occupying twenty states.  The National Front started when a bunch of right-wing hate groups (the KKK, Neo-Nazis, etc.) banded together and seceded from the union (now known as the Free States).  In the ensuing civil war nukes were exchanged, so there are lots of mutants running around, and the National Front are a bunch of crazy perverts running torture camps.  For some reason that’ll be inexplicable to anyone in the South, Georgia is a free state and Atlanta is the capital of all the Free States (Texas also didn’t go with the Neo-Nazis -- I’d’ve thought they’d be the first to secede).  Anyway, a meeting to unite all Free territories against the National Front is supposed to take place in Atlanta, so the National Front sends in spies to plant “bio-nukes” in the city.   Firecloud and his wacky crew of freedom fighters (including an Asian woman and her acrobatic twin midget sidekicks, Marcus One and Marcus Two) have to try to stop it, but Firecloud gets caught up in fighting some “White Trash” mutants who are covered in tumors and fungus; he almost ends up the sex slave of an eczema-covered White Trash woman named Itchin’ Peg.  Then, to get a pilot for a helicopter Firecloud’s captured, they have to attack a circus train full of freaks and slaves who are forced to work in a traveling carnival.  (The National Front apparently loves carnivals as much as it does Hitler -- one of their leaders, who’s known as “Clam Mouth” because he has overactive salivary glands and drools all the time, is obsessed with a carnival he’s building on his desk).  The book is too long at 232 small-print pages, and there aren’t enough fight scenes.  What are there aren’t bad, but they’re so bogged down in detail that they move too slowly.  Firecloud’s an expert with a compound bow but ends up not using it very much, and, despite the title, not much happens in the swampland, either.  He does use his bow and arrows to fight off some sharks, though, which is a little crazy.  It’s not badly-written at all but the characters aren’t all that interesting and my interest in what they were doing tended to lag, especially when things got too wacky to maintain much sense of realism.  Still, not the worst you could find or anything.

(The weapon Justin Perry uses most often is not pictured)





Justin Perry: The Assassin #1 - John D. Revere (Pinnacle, 1983)
What a weird, perverse book.  Roger Johnson, a Colonel in the USAF, signs on to be a killer for the CIA when is wife is killed because she uncovered a Communist plot.  In his new identity as Justin Perry, he’s a murderous pervert who’s so obsessed with sex that he can barely pay attention while being briefed on his missions if there’s a woman in the room.   He’s sent to kill a German who was supposedly killed in Belsen, but that was apparently faked because he’s reappeared.  While following up on this (pretty incidentally, since a woman he picked up in a bar coincidentally is in on it) he gets attacked during sex and has to kill a knifeman while ejaculating all over the poor woman’s couch.  That doesn’t matter for long, though, because the knifeman kills the girl instead, but she enjoys it because she’s a masochist and being murdered heightens her orgasm.  Justin ends up being captured by the German (who’s gay and has a slave-boy for a chauffer) and Justin and his friend Bob Dante are tied down, given bull-breeding drugs, and are going to be sexed to death by a bunch of gross old women and the gay chauffer.   Perry escapes and learns that it’s all a plot by a right-wing secret society called SADIF (Sons And Daughters In Freedom), which has infiltrated the Catholic church (Joseph Mengele is the Pope’s gardener!) and Perry’s own parents belong to it.  The SADIF agents kidnap Justin’s son as a bargaining chip (and he almost becomes the German’s catamite) to make Justin deliver a secret list.  It’s not badly written, style-wise, but it’s light on action and preoccupied with sex to a degree that it doesn’t even feel healthy anymore; it’s not even a turn-on, it’s just disturbing and has a dark, queasy sleaze to it.  Justin seems to be sleeping with women mostly to combat some latent homosexuality that comes out when he gets aroused by killing men at close quarters.  One gay guy he kills by stabbing him up the ass with a bayonet.  And almost every woman he finds is a masochist who want to be beaten up during sex.  Perry’s so preoccupied with it it’s almost pathological, and his mentality is so unbalanced that the book feels surreal (for a while I wondered if Bob Dante might be some other personality of Justin’s or something, because they’re both described as looking kind of demonic and satyr-like; Justin Perry’s the only action hero I know of with a unibrow).   It’s overlong and the action scenes are pretty scant, and just seem to be something the author wanted to dispense with so Justin could have more sex.  Kinda disturbing one-fisted action.

Death of a Citizen - Donald Hamilton  (Titan Books, originally 1960)
In the first novel of the Matt Helm series, Matt is retired from doing secret government wet work and has been a husband, father, and writer of Western novels for fifteen years (from which you could make a good case that Hamilton may have viewed him as an idealized alter-ego).  But then he runs into Tina, a girl he used to work with back in the day, at a party.  She’s apparently still an agent and wants his help to stop an assassination; a top scientist has been targeted by Commies because his death would cause a big setback in technological research.   After finding a dead woman in his bathtub, Matt’s back in the game and quickly reverts to his old ways, spotting people dogging their train and, when necessary, neutralizing them.  But Matt -- or Eric, as he’s known in secret service mode -- figures out that this web is a whole hell of a lot more tangled than it appeared.  They take his daughter hostage to try to force him to kill for them.  Oh yeah, he’ll kill all right...   Tough, gritty, but always realistic and believable.  It’s amazing that they could ever make anything as silly and stupid as those Dean Martin movies out of a character as hard-as-nails as this badass.  It’s like somebody tried to turn Dirty Harry into Maxwell Smart.  Pretend those movies don’t even exist and check out these books, there’s no way you’ll regret it.

 Wulff's so badass his point-thirty-eight can blow up entire ships!

The Lone Wolf #2:  Bay Prowler - Mike Barry (Berkley Medallion, 1973)
Second in the strange series by sci-fi author Barry Malzberg has Burt Wulff (he’s still Burt at this stage, although - oddly - he gets called “Conlan” on page 170)  is in San Francisco, carrying out his war against the international drug trade.  While attacking a drug den Wulff finds an overdosed meth-head named tamara and, after killing her drug-dealer boyfriend, he takes her along, trying to help her.  She doesn’t know who he is or what he’s doing (she’s pretty much an imbecile) but calls him “Avenger.”   They have sex, which makes Wulff feel “alive” again and gives him a new reason to try to survive.  He’s still a psycho, though, so after getting Tamara to safety (it’s a strange move in an action-series book, but this time the hero’s love-interest doesn’t die) Wulff goes after a half-million dollar drug shipment that’s coming in on a boat (originally it was a million dollar shipment but Barry apparently forgot the original figure by the time he got to writing about it).  The mob’s frustrated by Wulff so they keep sending hitters after him, but he gets them first (partially by luck, because he’s not much of a tactician) and when he has to go through their 100-man army it’s so easy for him that he literally worries more about catching bronchitis from the cold air than getting shot.  It moves fast enough but the writing is strange, a semi-poetic stream of consciousness, and it’s the opposite of gun-porn; Malzberg apparently has no knowledge of weapons at all, referring to guns as “point-thirty-eights” and “point-forty-fives” and thinking grenades are a whole lot more powerful than they are.  It’s obviously fast, sloppy, and not a labor of love, but you could do worse.

 This cover photo is an important part of two people’s resumes.


Butcher #3: Keepers of Death -- Stuart Jason  (Pinnacle, 1972)
Ex-mafioso-turned-agent-for-White-Hat Bucher is sent to Memphis for a “Cone Pone Hoedown Festival” (I am not making that up and god only knows why anybody else thought they should) to infiltrate a hippie commune and learn what they know about the disappearance of an East German scientist who defected to the U.S. with plans for a gravity-drive spaceship.  Bucher poses as a hit man (who he killed in the traditional opening chapter scene where Bucher always takes out a hit team trying for the $100,000 bounty on his head).  He’s suspicious of the hippies, though; even though they grow pot and have nonstop random sex, they don’t have long hair or weird clothes (except for one girl who wears a gunny sack).  Bucher follows the trail to Sweden, then Rome.  Along the way he brings a few more colorful hit-men’s careers to an end; they’re always weirdoes in these books, like the goon who’s constantly doing a gorilla imitation because he thinks it’s more intimidating than hilarious.  Not all of them get “kooshed” with Bucher’s silenced P-38; he also gets to showcase his brass knuckles in a fist-fight with a giant, and he uses his switchblade to knife-fight a guy covered with warts (seems like somebody in these books always has warts).    During all this killing Bucher learns that the whole thing’s a wild goose chase and the real problem is a revolution’s about to be triggered by a nuclear  strike on Washington, D.C.  It feels strangely like the writer (James Dockery in this case, using the Stuart Jason psuedo) decided his original plot lacked some oomph and decided, screw it, let’s scrap it mid-book and substitute something bigger.  Bucher’s quest to save America is made all the more difficult when the syndicate ups the “dead only” bounty on his head to a quarter million.  For an ex-Mafia thug, Bucher’s pretty puritanical about all the rampant sex going on (he seems to find it distasteful even when he engages in it) and though he kills a lot of people, he feels bad about it and is disgusted that the world has to be so violent and evil.  Good thing it is, though, or there wouldn’t be another thirty-some of these books.  Pretty average but the average for a Butcher book ain’t bad.

Coolest cover you've ever seen in your life?  Probably!  I want a van with that painted on the side of it!

Chopper Cop #2:  The Hitchhike Killer - Paul Ross  (Popular Library, 1972)
Motorcycle-riding hipster cop Terry Bunker is called in to track down a serial killer on a motorcycle who's picking up hitchhiking hippie girls, driving them out to the desert, then running them over on his bike.  The brass hate to put Terry on a case because he bends the rules a lot, rides a Harley chopper, has longish hair and sideburns instead of the regulation crew-cut, and says "Peace!" a lot, but he's the best when it comes to dealing with younger people who usually hate cops.   Terry's not crazy about other cops, either; he terrorizes them and leads them on a high-speed chase just for the hell of it as he's going in to get his assignment.  And all the kids aren't always crazy about Terry, either; a gang of them beat him up when they find out he's a "pig."  Terry has smarts, though, and he deduces from the time-frame and the distance between a couple of the killings that the psycho's making trips on a small airline.  (Did you know airlines in the early 70's handed out small packs of cigarettes along with the tiny bottles of booze?  Apparently so.)  Checking this out mixes Terry up with a couple of pretty stewardesses and a co-pilot he suspects of being the killer.  While smoking grass with them Terry makes some mistakes and another girl ends up dead while Terry sends the cops chasing a wrong lead.  There are a few other slip-ups before he closes in on the truth.  Good, fast-moving plot with only a few action scenes, but they're well-timed and punchy.  Terry's smart but not infallible, which keeps things realistic and interesting.   I could easily picture this as an old grindhouse movie... sometimes I even saw film-scratches in my head.  A quick read, well worth checking out.

Yes, the headband does appear in the book.

Traveler #1: First, You Fight - D. B. Drumm  (Dell, 1984)
A nuclear holocaust happens in 1989 (they must not have expected this to be a long-running series:  the 13th and final volume came out in 1987, just in time) during the presidency of an ex-cowboy-movie-star named Andrew Frayling (middle name probably Ronaldwilsonreagan).  Special forces soldier Kiel Paxton loses his wife and infant son to the bombs, and he's also suffering from a dose of nerve gas he picked up on a mission in Central America.  It's left him with heightened senses (and a sixth kind of "spidey sense" that helps warn him of trouble), but it makes it difficult for him to be around people because their energy keys him up.  He has a minivan called the "Meat Wagon" (with a Wankel engine that'll run on most any combustible fluid) and a bunch of weapons, so he drives around taking mercenary jobs for gas, food, and ammo.   While escaping an army of roadrats he goes into a city in Utah and finds himself in the middle of a Fistful of Dollars situation, with two competing warlords both wanting to hire him... or kill him to stop him from working for the other.   Both of them want him to capture a weapons shipment from an army of vicious "Glory Boys" - former military types gone bandit - and they send him to scout that out... but Traveler decides the townspeople would be better off if all three warring factions were laid to rest.  But while doing that he also has to battle his own seizures and freak-outs from all the stress being put on his wrecked nerves.  This Road Warrior-inspired series grew more sci-fi-ish (and silly) as it went along... if I remember correctly by the third or fourth book a guy riding a giant mutant housecat shows up. I know sci-fi (and Specialist series) author John Shirley was "D. B. Drumm" for at least a few of these books, but I don't think this was one of them; he's probably responsible for the sci-fi element being upped. But this one's pretty straightforward and the writing's good and the story keeps moving at a fast clip.

ATTENTION, TERRORISTS:  Jeff Foxworthy has had enough of your shit!

The Peacemaker #1:  The Zaharan Pursuit - Adam Hamilton (Berkley Medallion, 1974)
Barrington Hewes-Bradford (don’tcha just hate him already?) - or Barry to his friends and people who don’t have time for all that shit -- is a wealthy corporate magnate who, in addition to running oil, shipping, and airline businesses is also devoted to stamping out any evil forces that threaten world peace.  While partying on his yacht a crewman is bludgeoned with a flashlight and dumped overboard by someone who he caught sending signals.  Soon afterward a bigger boat does a hit-and-run with the yacht.  It all strikes Barry as strange so he has his helper, Lobo, investigate.  They find the boat that hit them had been smuggling military ordinance and has a connection to a supposed Latin American revolutionary named Zaharan.  One of Barry’s invesitgators ends up with a couple of bullets in the head and a Z carved in him -- a sure sign they’re tangling with Zaharan (unless it’s Zorro - I think he’s got copyright on that).  While attending frou-frou cocktail parties with his silly twit friends (people call each other “darling” a lot -- they’re that kind of assholes) , Barry learns of more cover-ups; the guy who owns the boat that hit his yacht is hiding something, and one of the jet-setters is killed with a shotgun, then his girlfriend is sniped at in her hospital bed.  Going after the shooter requires a car and boat chase, and Barry also scuba-dives for reconnaissance and has one of his men try to blow up a plane carrying an arms shipment bound for Zaharan’s revolutionaries.  There’s a twist at the end that’s pretty implausible but I cut it some slack for trying.   This is kind of like an attempt to combine Dynasty with The A Team before either was on the air, and while rather-cardboard Barry is fairly rough-and-tumble for a rich boy, it still made me want to go read a Gannon novel for an antidote.  Even the cover gets things out of whack; who thought putting a picture of our hero talking on the phone would be badass?  Look out, troublemakers, or Barry will make a few calls!  “Peacemaker” is also an odd choice of monikers for a vigilante hero series to be built around.  Not terrible, but no great shakes.  There were three more.

The Katmandu Contract - Nick Carter (Award 1975) 
Revolutionaries kidnap a senator’s kids and take them to Nepal, demanding a billion (or a million - the book flubs a little at keeping the number straight) dollars in diamonds.  Nick Carter is sent to deliver the diamonds... and ensure they don’t get to keep them after he gets the kids back, since governments could topple if the revolution is that well-funded.  Sent to stop Nick is Kunwar, a top assassin who’s filed his teeth to vampire fangs.  Kunwar first puts a bullet in Nick’s Eurasian girlfriend, which adds a vengeance-hunt dimension to the espionage.  This one’s really well-done and heavy on the action scenes, with Nick surviving being pushed in front of a train, going through a big car chase, and having numerous karate fights which get really brutal; the author (James Fritzhand in this case) seems to have knowledge of (or at least a fascination for) the martial arts, because Nick’s like Sonny Chiba in this book, destroying people with his hands.  He also makes use of all his other weapons, too (you get the infamous gas grenade twice!), and this book lets Nick truly live up to his “Killmaster” title.  There’s an unusual bit of added intrigue where Nick has to smuggle the diamonds in his stomach (tied to a tooth with fishing line!) and has a problem eating enough to hold back the nausea.   Smart, fast-paced, and not too far-fetched to stay plausible.  This is a good one.

ATTENTION TERRORISTS!  John Kerry has had enough of your shit!

Death Merchant #54: Apocalypse U.S.A.! - Joseph Rosenberger (Pinnacle, 1982)
Quadafi is plotting to have a deadly nerve gas sprayed over the east coast, which would kill around 20 million Americans.  Richard Camellion - the Death Merchant - isn’t really all that concerned about that ‘cuz he’s full of wacky beliefs that the U.S. will be destroyed by nukes within the next seventeen years and that Nostradamus is right that the Earth and moon would switch orbits and people would evolve into energy-beings, etc.  But, it’s an excuse to kill a bunch of people so he and his team (who seem as skilled as he is and just as full of horseshit conspiracy theories) stage big firefights in an ice-cream factory, a junkyard, a brick factory, and a ship... all explained in excruciating detail but none of which have much point, because there’s not really a plot so much as a premise.  The fights get very dull because every character -- including our “heroes” -- are total cardboard.  I only kept reading because Rosenberger is so obviously an insane idiot, and his prose is like a cut on your lip; it’s irritating, it’s painful, but the masochist in you can’t resist picking away at it.  Usually action-series books are short but this is 200 pages of small, dense print because highly-self-indulgent educated-idiot Rosenberger can’t oh-my-god-PLEASE-shut-the-fuck-up about all the trivia he knows and tell the freakin' story.  There’s at least a season’s worth of In Search of... episodes about conspiracy theories involving Israel, the Mafia, the Kennedy assassination, the arms race, what the government spends money on, etc., and all if it alarmingly simpleminded; Rosenberger has a tiresome trove of facts he likes to show off (hey, wanna learn how bricks are made in the middle of a gunfight?) but he puts them together like a moron.  And I don’t think I’ve ever read a writer who had NO evidence of understanding humor, at all;  Camellion is utterly witless, yet tries to make pained jokes that actually made me feel embarrassed for Rosenberger.  And the footnotes about everything reminded me of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where the notes are a separate, unaware story of fantasies of madness.  There’s also a lot of prognostication clumsily forced into the story, every bit of which has since been proven wrong.  This is lousy as an action novel (despite the ridiculous body count and fashion-show of firearms), but it’s kind of perversely fascinating as an artifact of idiotic insanity.  Really, it’s like listening to somebody tripping on ‘shrooms try to tell you what happened in a Chuck Norris movie they saw.  You can almost feel Rosenberger gripping your sleeve and babbling this stuff at you. Awful, awful stuff, but entertaining in a way for all the wrong reasons.  And, for our sins, there were seventy-one of these goddamn things.

Jack Reacher #1: The Killing Floor - Lee Child  (Jove, 1997)
Please don't misunderstand the bulk of the criticism that will follow:  I very much liked this book and plan to buy the rest of them (already ordered the next ten)... but hooboy are there some flaws!  The story's compelling enough to make forgiving them a pretty easy thing to do, but you should start reading these with some idea of what you're getting into.  This is pretty much the written equivalent of a BDAM (Big Dumb Action Movie) and it's got all the lovable boneheadedness of any one of them.  Child is just good at throwing enough cleverness and convincing-sounding horseshit into the narrative to distract you and make this wackiness seem in some way viable. 

First off, much has been made of how original a character Jack Reacher is.  He's a former military policeman who got out of the army and now just drifts around the U.S. like a hobo.   He's bigger, stronger, smarter, tougher, and more resourceful than anyone he comes into contact with.  My main question is... does no one remember John Rambo and Mike Hammer?   Because that's essentially what Reacher is -- a blend of these two action icons.  He's got Rambo's background and lifestyle and Hammer's giant-among-dwarfs toughness/smartness/size.  Throw in a bit of Sherlock Holmes intuition, maybe a little MacGuyver resourcefulness, and a hint of The Punisher for attitude, and that's Reacher.  And this isn't a complaint -- I love Mike Hammer and Rambo and the rest so making a combo of them all gets a big hell-yeah-buddy from me -- I'm just not going to say it's original when it's clearly derivative.  But since the sources are so well-chosen, who cares, right?  More power to 'im!

Reacher's name is well-chosen because when it comes to suspension of disbelief, he's really reaching.  Okay, see if you can buy this:  while riding a bus to nowhere in particular, he makes an impulsive, unscheduled stop in an obscure small town in Georgia for no reason other than a blues guitarist he likes was killed there some sixty-odd years ago, so it seems as good a place to sight-see as any.  He's promptly arrested because he's seen walking away from the site of a murder that happened a couple of hours before he got off the bus.   So far, okay, but here's the Jesus-rose-from-the-dead part: the guy who got murdered turns out to be Reacher's brother, who he hasn't heard from in seven years!   You buyin' this?  I hope so, because your powers of accepting coincidences are going to be called on again and again and again;  you won't only have to suspend your disbelief, you're going to have to levitate it.   Seriously, this is one of the craziest plot points I've ever been asked to swallow since Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Return of Tarzan, where Tarzan is sailing around the entire coast of Africa and gets very-luckily shipwrecked a mile from his childhood cabin... and then Jane, while making a separate voyage to search for him, ends up shipwrecked a mile from that!   (Note: I also enjoyed The Return of Tarzan despite that - I'm just tellin' ya what's involved here).

Anyway, Reacher's brother was working for the Treasury Department to track down the-most-evil-counterfeiters-ever.  They have an incredibly ingenious (although utterly preposterous to anyone knowing the basics of the process described) method of faking money, and they're utterly ruthless about protecting it: anyone who gets in their way is torture-murdered along with their whole family.  Reacher and a few allies (a spunky female cop, a black police detective everybody underestimates, etc.) set out to finish what Reacher's brother started, and then some.  Along the way Reacher has to kill maybe a dozen people, and never so much as faces any charges for it -- the only killing he ever gets in any trouble for is the one he had nothing to do with.  He's extremely tough and highly skilled... maybe a little TOO highly skilled, because he makes some wild educated guesses and they ALWAYS work out.   Fer instance, the bad guys are after some info in his late brother's things, so they steal them.  Reacher bets they'd only save his brother's briefcase and throw the rest away, and he bets a guy like his brother would be tricky and have hidden the info in some less-obvious luggage.   And lo and behold, this is so, and Reacher even guesses exactly which dumpster on the interstate the luggage was thrown into!  It's a small world after all!

Or, when a deceased cop hides a key they need, Reacher deduces (A) that there is some kind of key hidden, (B) exactly where the key is (even though it was crazy well-hidden), AND (C) figures out exactly where the thing it unlocks will be hidden, too!   I want this mofo pickin' my lottery numbers for me!  This kind of thing happens over and over again.  Reacher guesses on the first try what fake name a guy will be using to hide out at motels.   A woman is torture-killed in an airport Reacher's running through like O. J. Simpson in a Hertz commercial -- how'd the killer have time to do it and hide the body when Reacher was in such hot pursuit?  Magic!   Every trick works out.

    But even though it sounds like I'm complaining, I'm not, really -- I'm just trying to give it some perspective because these books are so highly-praised;  I'm just telling you they're really the modern equivalent of the Penetrator/Executioner/Death Merchant style action-fest rather than any kind of high-brow-at-all lit;  don't let the high-end design (it really is nice) and thickness of the books fool you.  But, also, don't be fooled into thinking there's anything wrong with reading those old-school-style action-fests, either; of course there's not, which is why a good chunk of this blog is devoted to them. 

    I would say that at 524 pages this was overlong for an action novel, but since it never really got boring I can't complain about that much.  The action scenes are really well done (about as good as any I've ever read, and I've read a lot) and there's some snappy dialogue.  And Reacher (who's in first person here but that changes to third in most of the other books)  is interesting and well-suited for the conflicts he gets into.  And even though he's a super-tough guy, the bad guys are scary enough that there's still a real sense of menace in the situations he gets into.  So, like I said, even though there's a lot about the plotting of this book that's so preposterous you've got to marvel at Child's panache for thinking he can get away with it (even while you’re happily letting him do exactly that), it’s a fast-moving and engaging read and I’ll gladly go again, even if the other books turn out to be just as ridiculous.  So, I say check it out, most definitely.  Be prepared to give what’s going to be asked of you and you’ll probably enjoy it.

By the way, I haven't seen the movie yet, but Reacher's nothing like Tom Cruise.  They should've cast Dolph Lundgren.  That would've been perfect.   For some high-praise for Reacher, check out the always-excellent Spy Guys & Gals, which inspired me to check him out.

Thick-witted git doesn’t even know how to hold a gun!  Whatcha gonna do, knit us a sweater with that thing?  Nice bow-tie, Skippy!


Casino Royale - Ian Fleming  (Signet, 1953)
Here's where I make me a Big Mac out of a sacred cow.

I don’t know how the movies made a badass out of this simpering, self-pampering daffodil.  I had heard that Fleming started writing these books because he wanted Britain to have a bad mamajama like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.  I dunno, maybe that guy shows up in later books, but the James Bond here is a huge wimp who does very little and all of it badly.  Sent to Royale to out-gamble an enemy agent at baccarat and break his bank, Bond fails and is saved only when someone gives him another stake so he can try again.  While trying to stop him a bomb goes off and almost kills him -- he’s so shaken that he calls for a massage (even though he knows people are trying to kill him).   Then there’s a car chase and he promptly wrecks and is knocked out (his car is 25 horsepower!  I kept picturing him tear-assing around on a riding lawnmower) and is captured.  His defense is to try kicking a guy in the shins and run away, but they push him down and he’s helpless again.  Then the enemy hits him in the balls a bunch of times with a rug-beater until Bond is rescued by an enemy agent who only doesn’t kill him because he hasn’t been ordered to.  And that’s really about it; Bond is basically an ineffectual victim who only survives by the kindness of his enemies and gets fooled by double agents.  There’s no real action and Fleming’s writing is prim and prissy, all manners and no grit.  This was the first Bond novel and I hope the others get better, because a hero that does nothing but get his balls paddled isn’t very awe-inspiring.

That's not a perspective shot, people... after reading this book I'm pretty sure Brett Wallace's fist really is three times the size of his head!

Ninja Master#2 : Mountain of Fear - Wade Barker  (Warner Books, 1981)
Ric Meyers steps in and turns the series into hyper-violent lunacy as ninja master Brett Wallace shows up in the backwoods burg of Tylertown, where everybody’s incredibly, cartoonishly evil.  First he deals with the racist cops who gang-raped a couple of black girls who were passing through, and then he takes on the henchmen of a Nazi doing medical experiments on orphans.  There’s not much of a plot, just a set-up for action scenes which are damn near constant, and they’re great even though they’re completely impossible.  Brett’s more of a superhero than just a highly trained fighter, and he’s even able to throw playing cards through people or fling throwing stars through the crack under a door.  He’s never in a whole lot of danger because he’s Superman fighting mere mortals, but there’s tons of entertaining mayhem, with guys getting their testicles kicked through their intestines and such.  Meyers does have a disturbing tendency to like writing sick scenes where women get raped and brutalized, so you will have that to contend with before the cartoon starts.  Pretty ridiculous but you’re not gonna be bored, guaranteed.   For more info, Glorious Trash did a great review (which inspired me to take my copy out and read it)

Secret Mission: Prague - Don Smith  (Award, 1968)
Spy Phil Sherman is sent to Czechoslovakia to trace shipments of machine guns to rioting Black militants in American cities, which could erupt in a war within America.  (This loses a little bite since there are now well-armed Black gangs in most cities and what they mostly do is shoot each other, but in 1968 this must have seemed nightmarish).  Phil’s contact promptly ends up dead in his hotel room with a knife in his back, and Phil has to dispose of the body without getting the attention of the authorities.  Then, investigating the flight on which the guns were being carried, his car gets blown up and he luckily avoids going with it.  He teams up with a girl named Zanya who survived the Hungarian revolution and was left a bit skittish by it.  Phil doesn’t even carry a gun until he takes one off a dead agent, who he’s almost killed with in a car wreck.  He plants his ID on the dead man (whose face was torn off in the wreck) and tries passing himself off as dead to take the heat off of him.  There’s a lot of chasing around as Phil and Zanya try to get out of the country, but it’s more intrigue than action, so much so that it becomes a little tedious.  The writing is good but the story’s a bit dry and could stand a few more fights and shoot-outs.  Phil’s the kind of guy who tries to avoid trouble as much as he can while accomplishing his mission, and that’s wise in real life, but this is a book so it creates a bit of a drag in the pacing and makes me wish Phil were more of a troublemaker like Nick Carter.  It’s realistic, though, and even if it’s not the most slam-bang book out there, it’s far from dumb.

Raker #1 - Don Scott   (Pinnacle, 1982)
The ad copy for this series (reproduced above so you can marvel at it) had me expecting something hilarious, or possibly infuriating.  I was expecting some bonehead right-wing Archie Bunker-with-a-gun kind of deal... and that's more or less what this is, but it doesn't go far enough with it to be fun, and since the story itself is too much of a bore to make up for that, the whole thing's a fizzle.  Raker is an agent for a "company" (apparently with the government?) which sends him out to see what's up with some cop-killings in Black neighborhoods.  The same incidents are happening in city after city, always with the same m.o. -- pairs of white cops get called to check on false domestic disturbances and get ambushed with shotguns.  Raker thinks the B.L.A.  (Black Liberation Army) is trying to kick off a nationwide race war.  Most of the book is spent with Raker trying to talk to contacts and find leads to trace the thing, and there's not a lot of action.  What action there is seems incidental and briefly inserted in hopes of shutting up guys like me who'd complain that there were no fights.  Sorry that didn't work!  A few people get splattered with shotguns, but there's not much impact in the way these scenes are written, and all the characters are so cardboard that you just can't care about it much.  And that's one of the problems -- even Raker himself is very cardboard and boring.  There's only one half-hearted attempt to give him any background at all, a flashback scene where he's infiltrating a group of protesting hippies while his brother's being killed in 'Nam.  Raker tends to think every guy he meets is a "fruit," and while he's not blatantly racist he does do a stereotypical "Black accent" on the phone that Stepin Fetchit would find over the top.   A big point is made that the Black guy on Raker's team "acts white."  More of that kind of assholish stuff could have made Raker an antihero to laugh at, at least, but the dude's not really well-drawn or interesting enough to feel anything about one way or the other.  I can see why this series stopped at two volumes.



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