Donovan’s Devils #2: Blueprint For Execution

Donovan's Devils #2: Blueprint For Execution, by Lee Parker

No month stated, 1974  Award Books

It’s been some years since I read the first volume of Donovan’s Devils, and fair to say I didn’t enjoy it much at the time. Judging from my review, I found it dull and too focused on scene-setting and character-building. So, I’m happy to report that this second volume is much better – though still nowhere in the leagues of the author’s other series, The Liquidator. 

As I mentioned in my review of The Liquidator #1, an author named Larry Powell was responsible for both The Liquidator (as “R.L. Brent”) and Donovan’s Devils (as “Lee Parker,” and again, thanks to James Reasoner for figuring that out, years ago). He also wrote two volumes of Nick Carter: Killmaster. All of these books were published by Award, so fair to say someone there liked Powell’s work. And it’s not hard to see why, as he’s a very talented pulp writer, with a strong prose style that gives just enough information to keep the story moving, and doesn’t get bogged down. I have been continuously impressed with his work on The Liquidator, of which I only have one more volume to read. 

But, having read Blueprint For Execution, I can see what Larry Powell’s kryptonite is: he’s not as good when he’s writing a “team” book, particularly one with a military focus. Judging from the hardboiled, lone wolf tone of The Liquidator, Powell is much more confident when he’s writing about one guy up against a handful of enemies, with more of a focus on tension and suspense than all-out action. Handling a cast of seven characters on a global stage, he seems very much out of his element. I understand now why the first volume of Donovan’s Devils was so focused on setting up the storyline; it afforded Powell the opportunity to handle one character at a time. 

Because as it is, he does the same sort of thing in this second volume: whereas The Assasination Is Set For July 4… spent most of its narrative introducing the cast of characters and bringing them together, Blueprint For Execution spends most of its narrative with the team split up, with Powell alternately dealing with each separate group. As with the first book, only in the very final pages does Donovan’s Devils actually work together as a unit. 

It’s the same cast, this time; at least Powell doesn’t have Donovan setting up a new team each book. Powell clearly likes some characters more than others; Bogan, aka “the black guy on the team,” is so barely-featured that the poor guy’s name is misspelled as “Bogon” in the pseudo-report from Donovan that opens the book. I mean the boss himself doesn’t even know the guy’s name. There’s also a big biker named Randolph who doesn’t do much at all, until the very end – where, despite being in a warzone in Jerusalem, manages to get hold of a motorcycle. I suspect that Powell was catering to editorial and/or publisher demands with this cast: “We need a black guy in there. Oh, and make sure there’s a biker in there, too. Bikers are big now!” 

Even Donovan himself isn’t in the book much; despite being the protagonist, there’s a large portion of the narrative where he’s unconscious from a head wound. Rather, Powell’s favored character is clearly Quinn, a cipher-like living weapon who acts as Donovan’s right-hand man…and who is very much like Jake Brand, the Liquidator. Quinn’s background is a mystery to the others – Quinn isn’t even his real name – and he’s essentially Bucher in all but name. With his penchant for carrying two guns and staying cool in the heat of battle – not to mention his occasional smart-ass quip – Quinn is clearly the sort of character Larry Powell is more comfortable writing about, a guy who fights mobsters instead of terrorists. He’s actually more of the star of Blueprint For Execution than Donovan is, as when the teams split up Quinn is put in charge of one group and has to make all the decisions. 

There’s also Houdini, the master thief, and Carey, a cardshark (or something) that the others don’t like because he’s a coward (or something). These two vie with Quinn as the main characters, with Carey in particular taking up the spotlight midway through. There’s a long but involving scene where Donovan and Carey get in a firefight in the desert, and Carey gets behind a machine gun that’s mounted on the back of a jeep and, Rambo 2008 style, blasts everyone to smithereens. After which he engages some “desert flower” babe in fairly explicit sex. 

Yes, that’s another thing that’s better about this second volume: Larry Powell ups both the action and the sex quotients. While the novel is never outright gory – just as The Liquidator books aren’t – the surprisingly-frequent sex scenes are quite graphic. Carey gets busy with a “full-bossomed” terrorist chic in the desert (she offers her body in exchange for her life), Joe Dean (the expert driver who is the last member of the Devil’s I haven’t yet mentioned) bangs two native babes in the short course of the novel, and Donovan himself gets it on with a “full breasted” Israeli spy-babe in the very final pages…like I’m talking six pages before the end of the book, Powell clearly catering to another publisher mandate. I mean folks, what an incredible world to have lived in, where publishers required authors to insert a certain number of sex scenes in their manuscripts. Those days are long gone, and it’s no wonder our world has gone to shit. (Though fortunately we do have Tocsin Press, at least…) 

The novel features an effective opening – another Powell specialty – in which Houdini discovers that the Devils contact in Jerusalem has just had his throat slit…and soon enough Houdini himself is captured by the Arabic bastards who did it. This sets up the “split up the team” dynamic that runs through the entire novel: Donovan and Carey go look for Houdini, while Quinn, Bogan, Randolph, and Joe Dean hold down the fort…and get in firefights of their own. Powell fills the pages with a few big setpieces that sort of go on and on…and it becomes clear, at least to me, that he does so because he’s uncomfortable writing about a group of six fighting men all together at the same time. 

To confirm this, Powell excels in the scenes where he’s just featuring one character: the bit with a blood-crazed Carey behind the machine gun is the highlight of the novel, as is his conquest of the “desert flower” (in true men’s adventure fashion, Carey has the girl panting and screaming, breaking through her icy “I’m just doing this to live, not because I want to” façade). Quinn seems to be the hero of another men’s adventure series who has somehow wandered into the book; the scenes from his perspective are terse and taut, and have him reflecting on the mobsters he killed. One suspects Powell would have turned in an even better series if all the characters, including Donovan himself, were jettisoned, and Quinn was featured as a globe-trotting lone wolf commando. But then, that’s essentially what The Butcher gave us, and again I find it very curious how similar Quinn and Bucher’s backgrounds are. 

I’m not sure what the title has to do with the story; again, I get the suspicion Award Books ran the show and gave Powell the title and the gist of the storyline, and he filled in the details. There’s no “execution blueprint” per se, and Donovan and team spend most of the novel hunting down a terrorist named Karem. He’s part of a group called ALF...which of course made me chuckle, imagining Donovan’s Devils up against furry little Gordon Shumway: “Hey, Willie! They’re tryin’ to kill me! HA!” 

This ALF is the Arabic Liberation Front, and overall it’s another sad reminder of how ‘70s Muslim terrorists were of an altogether tamer breed. These Muslim terrorists fear for their own lives – as mentioned, the “full-bossomed” terrorist babe gives herself to Carey precisely so he won’t kill her – and there’s a sad bit (sad because it’s a reminder of much saner times) where it’s explained how the ALF terrorists will blow up airliners…but parachute out of them before they go down, and etc. In other words, even in the violent world of mid-‘70s men’s adventure, the idea of a fanatical and suicidal terrorist was too much of a stretch. 

More evidence of Powell’s true forte is Donovan’s intro, which has him meeting with his boss, cigar-chomping and lame-legged General Brick Blaine. They sit by the poolside, the two men appreciating the “full-breasted” young beauty who is swimming in the general’s pool while they discuss the assignment. It all just has the same ring as the stuff in The Liquidator, just that cool, hardboiled ‘70s pulp that Larry Powell was so good at, that you wonder why the guy is such a mystery. 

Where he sort of fails, though, is in the action scenes. When it’s just one guy, like in The Liquidator, it’s fine. But Powell cannot seem to handle big action setpieces, and thus resorts to almost “See Spot Run” type of description, giving flat, declarative description of what happens: 

This sort of thing comes off as almost outline-esque to me, and lacks the immediacy of an action scene that is more relayed from the point of view of the person doing the fighting. What I mean to say is, it just comes off like bald description of what happens; you don’t feel the impact of the bullets, or the tension of the battle. Again, I’d say this is because Powell is outside of his element, trying to relay a battle from the perspective of seven characters – and, also, he does not have this problem in The Liquidator, where it’s only Jake Brand who does the fighting. 

That said, Powell keeps the action moving, though some of the middle sequences do get bogged down. There’s an interminable part where Quinn and the others, wondering what happened to Donovan, try to strong-arm their way into an Israeli army encampment, and it comes off as padding…indeed, it comes off as Powell trying to figure out how to cater to the “team” dynamic of the series and show the other characters doing something. And this “large team” setup also robs other characters; early in the book, Donovan and Carey run into a hotstuff Israeli babe (whose boobs are so nice that multiple characters refer to them), and Donovan develops a simmering, bantering relationship with her – capped off by him knocking her out. 

The lady, Reva, is a spy, sent along to shadow Donovan and team, but she essentially disappears from the text because Powell is busy catering to the other members of the team. Humorously, she casually gives herself to Donovan in the final pages – right before the climactic battle – so that Powell can check off another publisher mandate: ensuring the protagonist himself gets laid. But then, this too is a fairly explicit sequence, and Powell furthers the “bantering after sex” vibe that he had with Jake Brand and his latest girl in The Liquidator #4. 

As for the climactic battle, it’s so, uh, anticlimactic that it, too, is humorous. Powell has so page-filled with all the character-jumping that he rushes through the final battle in a few harried pages…and, again, it’s more on the “military fiction” tip, with Donovan’s crew leading a paratrooper assault on an ancient Crusader castle. It’s over and done with in a few pages…Powell just as humorously giving us another brief Donovan-Reva conjugation on the very last page. 

I’m only nitpicking because Larry Powell is a damn fine writer, and it’s a shame he was given a series with a setup outside of his comfort zone. He was clearly better at a lone wolf sort of hardboiled setup, as evidenced by the much superior Liquidator series. But even here in diluted form, his writing is a cut above the genre norm, and I also appreciated how he’d take characters and situations in unexpected directions. 

There was one more volume of Donovan’s Devils to go, and I’ll check that out, as well as the two Killmaster novels Powell wrote for Award around the same time: The Butcher Of Belgrade (apparently co-written with the lackluster Ralph Hayes) and The Code.

Seven Against Greece (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #25)

Seven Against Greece, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1967  Award Books

(Edition shown here circa 1974)

Nicholas Browne wrote four volumes of Nick Carter: Killmaster, and Seven Against Greece was his third one. It’s mainly interesting in how standard it is. This is basically a no-frills Killmaster yarn, Browne hitting just the exact bases that are expected of a series ghostwriter and not offering much in the way of innovation. I only hold him to a higher standard given that he featured an ancient Viking warrior in the last volume he wrote for the series. 

But there’s nothing crazy or outrageous aboutSeven Against Greece, other than my suspicion that the title was originally “Seven Against Thebes.” I say this because the published title has nothing to do with the story – if there are indeed “Seven against Greece” in the course of the book, I couldn’t name them – but Nick Carter makes frequent visits to a bar in Athens called Seven Against Thebes, a notorious hangout for a group of native terrorists. Well, who knows. 

Regardless of the title, Browne does indeed keep the action centered in Greece for the entirety of the novel’s 158 pages – 158 pages of incredibly small print, to the extent that I figure Seven Against Greece would at least be 250 pages if the print was a little bigger. Maybe longer. And the helluva it is, a lot of the narrative is listless, and given over to padding, so the book seems even longer. 

According to Will Murray’s incredible Killmaster research in The Armchair Detective V15 #4 (1982), Nicholas Browne was a merchant seaman who turned in a few Killmaster installments in the mid-late 1960s and then “sailed for parts unknown,” essentially disappearing from the face of the Earth. Maybe he sailed into the Bermuda Triangle. 

Murray appropriately makes it all sound eerie, but it’s only now occurred to me that the whole thing might have been a tall tale Murray was fed by series editor Lyle Kenyon Engel. Maybe there was no “Nicholas Browne.” Maybe these books were really written by Engel – who, per Murray’s article, claimed to have done extensive rewriting to “Browne’s” manuscripts. Looking at my 2015 review of The Bright Blue Death, the last of Browne’s four Killmaster novels but the first one of his I read, I see that commenter “halojones-fan” was a decade ahead of me, with his comment: “Was Nicholas Browne an actual person, or just a pseudonym for the Engels?” Good question, halojones-fan! 

At any rate, going into the book with an awareness of who Browne supposedly was, there is quite a bit of realistic detail on ports and sailing; Nick Carter hitches a few rides and there’s a lot of word painting about grungy seaside ports and whatnot, conveying a “been there, done that” verisimilitude to the narrative. So who knows, maybe there really was a Nicholas Browne who was a merchant seaman who wrote a handful of Nick Carter: Killmaster novels while sailing the seas, before vanishing. If Robert Stack was still alive, I’d beg him to do a segment on Unsolved Mysteries. While he was at it, maybe he could’ve also clreared up the mystery on who another series ghostwriter, “William Rohde,” really was. 

Another note is that Nick’s undercover pose this time is as an “able-bodied seaman,” so maybe there really was something to Nicholas Browne being a real person. But then, Nick has two guises in this one: he also pretends to be an archeologist, and even receives AXE training in the field. This dual-cover setup is not well executed in the narrative, and really just added more bloat to an already-bloated story. Nick has the archeologist guise because AXE suspects an Athens traveling agency of hooking visiting Americans up with young natives, in the hopes that marriage will ensue, and the natives will go to America with their new spouse. There seems to be something nefarious in the works, and an agent working this case is murdered at the beginning of the novel – now it’s Nick’s turn to figure out what is happening. 

Parts of Seven Against Greece are similar to the popular fiction of the era, with Nick hobknobbing with jet-setting elite in exotic locales. There’s also Princess Electra, “the most beautiful woman in the world,” with her “luxurious figure,” a former model who plays the field and sets her sights on “archeologist” Nick. Browne is not one of the more explicit writers in the field, but we do get copious mentions of the gal’s breasts. For the most part, though, Browne goes for more of a pseudo-literary style for the naughty stuff; for example, when Nick and Electra have their inevitable fun, Browne leaves it as, “[Nick] felt as if he had crashed through a boundary of the universe.” Well, sure. Okay. 

Then again, Nick’s already had his off-page way with another European beauty: Xenia, a portside whore in Athens, with her “perfect and vital young body.” She will turn out to be the main female character in the novel; Browne goes against the series mandate and “only” has Nick conquering two women in the novel, instead of the customary three. But even with Xenia our author keeps all the juicy details off page; what’s worse, Xenia starts to fall in love with Nick, even trying to get him to stay with her. 

Browne does have a gift for scene-setting. The port-side material in particular is vivid with description, and when it comes to the maritime stuff you can tell that this is an author who knows of what he writes. But still, it’s rather slow-going. Nick gets in a few fistfights here and there, but he stymies himself due to “keeping cover.” Meaning, when some hoods jump him outside of Xenia’s apartment, Nick can’t become full-on Killmaster and waste the guys, as he’s supposed to be a merchant seaman. 

There’s also a lot of suspense material. Browne has a lot of characters in the works, and there are frequent cutovers to their perspectives to fill up the runtime. I found a bit of prescience in the Obama Bin Laden-esque Gorgas, elderly leader of a Greek terrorist army. It’s his men Nick tangles with outside of Xenia’s apartment, and eventually Nick will learn that Gorgas and Princes Electra are in cahoots, working with an Onassis pastiche and a Chinese spymaster. Still, unless my math fails me, that’s only four against Greece. 

This early in the series, we are still apparently under the pretensions that Nick Carter is old enough to have fought in World War II, as established in the first volume. But even by 1967 it’s getting hard to buy. For example, Nick hooks up with an old Greek colleague he fought with during the war, a hardy old warrior who seems to have walked out of Homer, but the dude is old, and he and Nick keep talking about “the old days” and whatnot. But Nick is still young enough that he picks up young chicks like Xenia and has gobsmacking international jet-set beauties like Electra chomping at the bit to bed him. So it almost gives the impression that Nick Carter is a Highlander or something, an ageless immortal. It was a wise decision to gradually drop the whole “WWII vet” setup. 

We do still have the unintentionally goofy stuff from early volumes, though, like an axe tattoo on Nick’s arm…which designates him as a high-ranking agent of the top-secret outfit AXE, of course. I mean there’s nothing like just advertising who you are when you’re going undercover. One wonders why they even bother with giving Nick cover guises. 

When Nick does cut loose, though, Browne doesn’t disappoint. There’s a brutal fight with a couple thugs in his hotel room, which leads to some dark humor where Nick stashes their corpses in a closet…and then goes out for lunch. Browne also caters to the theme of Nick being captured and tortured; late in the tale he is tied, naked, to a pole in a grotto, one that fills with the tide, and all these fish and crabs and whatnot start nibbling on him. Things take a turn into horror when a giant octopus comes in and wraps itself around Nick, biting his chest – the finale here is particularly grisly, with Nick recalling how an old seaman once told him of being in a similar situation, and the way out was to bite the octopus in the brain. 

There’s also another good sequence where Nick and his old comrade are cornered like rats in some underground tunnels, and a guy with a flamethrower comes after them. But the finale is a bit too much like a mystery, along the lines of Browne’s previous The Chinese Paymaster, with Nick uncovering who exactly is behind the plot. Browne does have a good way of incorporating Nick’s trademark weapons, though; little gas-bomb Pierre is used twice in the novel, once when Nick throws it into the open bed of a truckful of soldiers, and in another crazy part where he uses it while he’s tied up in a plane that’s in mid-air(!). 

Overall though, the biggest takeaway from Seven Against Greece is the mystery of who Nicholas Browne was, what happened to him, and why he didn’t write any more Killmaster novels, as he did write some good ones, like Operation Starvation.

The Liquidator #4: Invitation To A Strangling

The Liquidator #4: Invitation To A Strangling, by R.L. Brent

No month stated, 1975  Award Books

The penultimate volume of The Liquidator is another good one, the mysterious R.L. Brent turning in another fast-moving pulp thriller that has the vibe of a ‘50s Gold Medal paperback, only brought into the ‘70s. Brent also gets back to the continuity of the first two volumes; whereas the previous volume was sort of a one-off affair, Invitation To A Strangling continues with the storyline initiated with the first volume: Jake Brand’s war against the Mob in general and mob honcho Vincent Orsini in particular. 

Once again we have a cover blurb from King Features, but what I’ve failed to mention all this time is that the blurb refers to this as a “tough cop series.” Jake Brand is not a cop! Sure, he originally was, but The Liquidator is no more a “tough cop series” than The Lone Wolf is. Indeed, the two series are pretty similar, what with the setup of a tough former cop going out for justice on his own, but of course Lone Wolf is a bit more shall we say “surreal” in its treatment of the subject.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Liquidator was also one of the very few men’s adventure series to attain any sort of critical attention – at least judging from the cover blurbs – which makes it odd that the series disappeared for three years after this volume. After Invitation To A Strangling, The Liquidator did not return until 1978’s The Exchange, which dropped the cover design of the first four books and also dropped the volume numbers entirely. It was also published by Charter, not Award, so perhaps the Award-Charter transition played some factor in the delay of the fourth volume. 

As usual I’m getting ahead of myself. Invitation To A Strangling picks up on threads from the second volume; Gwen, the hotstuff babe who was a mobster’s girl in the first volume before becoming Jake Brand’s girl, returns to the series – for a brief time, at least. I’m not giving away any spoilers, as the title of this fourth volume refers to Gwen’s fate, and also the back cover tells us exactly what happens to her. Long story short, Gwen has been living in hiding in the (apparently short) time since the second volume; she’s staying in Raleigh, North Carolina, boarding with an older married couple who were acquaintances of Brand’s. 

Meanwhile the Mob has figured out where Gwen is. Orsini tasks a scar-necked thug named Monk Simon with fronting a team of Syndicate assassins to do the job; in R.L. Brent’s typical gift for hardboiled prose, we are told that “[Monk] wanted the job almost as much as Robinson Crusoe must have wanted a piece of ass.” Monk has a personal score to settle with Brand, as Monk was arrested by the man himself once upon a time. Monk puts together a team of misfits who seem to have come out of The Butcher; ironic, then, that one of the misfits is even nicknamed “Butcher,” which makes me wonder if R.L. Brent was intentionally referencing that other men’s adventure series. 

Orsini further instructs Monk that he is to kill Gwen and the couple she is staying with, and make it such a gory scene that the story will be picked up nationally, so as to ensure Jake Brand will hear about it and come running to Raleigh, where Monk and team are further instructed to kill Brand when he shows. Finally, Orsini – who by the way looks more like a kindly grandfather than a mob boss, we’re told – tells Monk that the women should be raped before being killed. “Fringe benefits,” as Monk thinks to himself. 

As I read Invitation To A Strangling, I couldn’t help but think that this was a plot tailor-made for Manning Lee Stokes. I could only imagine the lurid novel he would’ve turned in; Stokes worked a rape-strangling scene into practically every novel he wrote, and that’s the entirety of Monk Simon’s plan in this one. But whereas Brent covers the grisly topic in a taut, gripping chapter, Stokes probably would’ve spent at least a quarter of the novel on it, if not more. But, as evidenced by the title and spoiled by the back cover, Monk and team are successful – and, by the way, Brent is not too exploitative in the rape-murder sequence, which would be another difference from how Stokes would’ve handled it. 

Indeed, Gwen’s fate is left off-page, and Monk isn’t even the one who does her in; he enjoys his “fringe benefits,” having lusted after the sexy and well-built Gwen for a long time. After he’s had his fill, Monk turns Gwen over to one of the “Creech brother,” simian misfits (one of ‘em being the “Butcher” guy), and it’s one of them who strangles Gwen during the act. Brent is sure to dig the knife in us readers, though, having opened the book with Gwen pining for Jake and hoping she’ll see him again – even having refrained from sex in the time she’s been in Raleigh, as she’s so hung up on Brand. 

As for Brand himself, he’s busy getting laid. There’s no pickup from the previous volume; Jake (as Brent most often refers to him in the narrative) is just laying low as usual from the mob and he’s been thinking about Gwen lately. After knocking off a hippie-type pimp who thinks he might collect on the mob’s bounty on the Liquidator’s head, Jake heads to Raleigh to see Gwen again – and meanwhile, we readers already know that Monk and crew are going there that very night to kill her. 

Brent avoids what otherwise would have been a hard-to-buy coincidence; Jake’s car breaks down in some no-name town, and the local mechanic takes a couple days to fix it. And meanwhile the guy’s hotstuff daughter-in-law, a busty blonde former cheerleader, makes her interest in Jake clearly known; her husband was killed in ‘Nam, and she’s lonesome and horny as hell. As with previous books, Brent delivers a sex scene that’s somewhat explicit but not full-bore sleazy, with lines like, “The sound she made when he entered her resembled a growl.” Brent as I’ve said many times before is a pulp writer who knows his stuff; I particularly appreciate how he always finds the opportunity to mention the breasts of female characters. 

So as we know from the back cover, Jake arrives too late to save Gwen. And he doesn’t go on as big of a warpath as one might expect; indeed, Jake takes the loss with a sort of nonchalance at first, though Brent gradually builds up Jake’s true feelings as the narrative progresses. Not that this stops Jake from picking up another chick; Leila, another hotstuff babe (in true lone wolf fashion, Jake Brand always picks up hotstuff babes), this one a redhead who works as a reporter for a Raleigh newspaper. 

Jake’s seen the media coverage of Gwen’s murder, of course, and knows it’s a mob setup. He also knows Orsini is behind it. There’s a cool bit where Jake deals with two of Orsini’s backup assassins, who are staying in the house across the street from Gwen’s. The female assassin in particular is set up very nicely, but there’s no hanky-panky between her and Jake; she’s just out to kill him for the Organization. These are the types of action setpieces Brent delivers throughout, by the way; The Liquidator does not go for big action affairs a la The Executioner, and instead it’s usually just Jake with a .45 (his favored gun) or a .38, taking on one or two opponents. 

And meanwhile Jake gets laid again – courtesy Leila. Jake sees her on the news, comments on how hot she is, and seeks her out. I’m not sure why Brent didn’t just make the character of Leila a TV reporter; Jake sees her on TV because Leila is being interviewed. At any rate, she writes for the local paper, and has researched the murder, so Jake hunts her down for info. Leila will prove to be the main female protagonist in the novel; Brent delivers a few somewhat-explicit sex scenes between the two (ie, “[Jake] slid deeply into her welcoming warmth,” etc). 

Leila also makes possible an injection of Blaxploitation into the world of The Liquidator. As ever R.L. Brent cuts across a broad group of characters, from Jake Brand to the mobsters who are out to kill him, and from sequences with the latter group Brent has cagily dropped mention of a superfly black pimp waltzing around the streets of Raleigh. Monk Simon sees the guy, notices him doing un-pimp things like buying milk at a convenience store. Gradually we learn this is Sugar Boy Hollis, “one of the ten best-dressed macks in the southeastern United States,” as Leila puts it; she often pays the pimp for underworld info. And also, we learn Sugar Boy bought the milk due to a stomach ulcer! Unfortunately though, he’s only in one brief scene, providing Jake with the very useful info of where Monk and his crew are staying. 

Brent keeps the action moving, and there are no slow parts in Invitation To A Strangling. Even the sequences from the perspectives of Monk and his crew are entertaining, given the author’s skill. Which makes it all the more of a mystery why R.L. Brent – supposedly Larry Powell – did not go on to write more books. There’s a fight in an alleyway in which Jake is nearly run over, and also Jake’s takedown of the sadists who killed Gwen is effectively handled. Also these scenes again remind me of something I’ve mentioned before: Jake Brand is not the best strategist. Often he just storms into a situation with no consideration of how he’ll get out of it, but of course he manages to win due to his stubborn resolve. 

There’s a third girl in the story, a college co-ed who is the daughter of the couple Gwen was living with, but Brent doesn’t do much with her; she only factors into the finale, when Jake is taken to a cabin in the woods where Monk thinks he’s going to take out the Liquidator. Even here Brent goes for a realistic approach, and in fact Monk’s sendoff is somewhat of a surprise, but still effectively handled. Otherwise the takeaway from this finale is that Jake Brand is willing to put his life on the line to save an innocent person – as mentioned, Brent also effectively conveys how Jake’s sense of loss over Gwen’s murder gradually affects him more and more, to the point that he makes selfless decisions to prevent more innocent lives being taken. 

Other stuff I appreciate was how Leila, the newspaper reporter, intended to do a feature story on the Liquidator – and by the way, it’s official that this is Jake’s name, now, as both he and Orsini refer to it. There’s also an appearance by Jake’s mentor, a retired old cop named Nate, who tries to work with Leila to convince Jake to give himself up before the Mafia can kill him. 

Invitation To A Strangling ends with Jake Brand deciding to lay low for a while; “he knew how to disappear,” Brent informs us in the closing pages. The last we see of him, Jake is boarding a bus to Virginia, and he’s considering growing a mustache to change his appearance. It would appear he was very successful in disappearing; as mentioned, it would not be until 1978 that Jake Brand resurfaced, in The Exchange. With a plot concerning mob involvement in the porn industry, this is one I might check out sooner rather than later. 

Summing up, The Liquidator is one of the better men’s adventure series from the ‘70s – it’s better even than the majority of the bestselling crime novels of the day that I’ve read – and Invitation To A Strangling is another strong entry.

The Peking Dossier (Nick Carter: Killmaster #84)

The Peking Dossier, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1973  Award Books

The first of two Nick Carter: Killmaster by an author named Linda Stewart, The Peking Dossier is from the unfortunate era in which series packager Lyle Kenyon Engel had let go of the reins and Award Books was fully in control, turning the series over to an army of ghostwriters with none of the unity or continuity that Engel had maintained for the series. Even worse, the series is now in first-person, with “Nick himself” relaying his adventures to us. 

This is problematic enough for me; I mean Nick Carter is this super-agent who is always “on the job,” so how the hell does he have time to write books? And indeed, The Peking Dossier is a slow-as-molasses read, another of those deceptively-slim ‘70s paperbacks. This sucker has some seriously small print and, despite “only” being 188 pages, it took me forever to finish the book. This is because Linda Stewart has a tendency to draw things out a little too much at times…and also, she makes the even worse mistake of putting her tongue a little too far into her cheek. 

It's the sort of thing Engel never would have allowed: Nick will often refer to himself as a “hero” when telling us his story in The Peking Dossier, usually in a “taking the piss” sort of vibe. Like a part where he scales a wall, and Stewart has an exhausted Nick tell us, “Sorry, I know heroes aren’t supposed to get tired.” There’s other stuff, like later on where Nick knows someone’s broken into his hotel room, and Nick informs us he has his own special way of monitoring this – and it isn’t the “hair on the doorway” trick Ian Fleming wrote about in James Bond. Nick further complains that Fleming gave too much away, and Nick himself isn’t going to give away his secrets “for ninety-five cents.” Ie, the cost of a Nick Carter: Killmaster paperback in 1973. 

This breaking of the fourth wall (or whatever the literary term for it is) might be fine in something like The Destroyer, but Killmaster is supposed to be more of a “straight, no chaser” affair…or at least it was when Lyle Kenyon Engel ran it. As Engel himself noted, he did not like the first-person narrative for the series, but it was insisted on by Award Books. One can see Engel’s point, as ultimately first-person narrative will lead to this…a writer thinking himself (or herself) too clever for the material, and poking fun at it in the narrative. Also the entire “Nick Carter is also the author” conceit is ridiculous, as one must imagine super-hero Nick Carter traveling the globe as he stops villains and beds exotic babes…and yet somehow finding the time to write a 188 page book of teeny-tiny print. A book that is then published under his own name! 

Another issue is the first-person narrative makes Nick seem altogether too gabby, as Manning Lee Stokes frequently demonstrated in his own first-person offerings for the series, a la The Red Rays. Since Nick narrates the entire story for us, he comes off like a neurotic fusspot, and it’s hard to square with the image of a virile man of action. But then, it all depends on the narrative voice, and again given the army of solo ghostwriters working on the series at this point, “Nick” comes off as a different narrator every time. In the hands of Linda Stewart he suddenly sounds more like a private eye in a bad ‘50s film noir, as Nick’s “voice” is decidely hardboiled in The Peking Dossier. 

That said, Linda Stewart wins the Leigh Brackett award for “female author who can write almost exactly like a male author.” Folks, if I hadn’t known going in that a woman wrote this one, I never would’ve guessed it. Speaking of Stokes, Stewart makes her version of Nick just as aggressively macho, and there’s none of the pussyfooting around certain subjects that one gets from other female authors invading the world of men’s adventure, like for example Blood or The Peacemaker. Unlike the few other female authors in the men’s adventure genre I’ve read, Linda Stewart knows to keep things moving, with a focus on action – of the violent and sexual variety. Even more so than the previous female author on the series, Valerie Moolman. 

That said (again), Nick does fall in love in The Peking Dossier, and indeed only has sex with one girl in the book (the one he falls in love with, naturally), so there is that giveaway that our author is a woman. Otherwise, Stewart knows enough to not emasculate her Nick Carter too much; we still get the topical description of women and there’s a fair bit of action…though, again, the sex is for the most part off-page or relayed in metaphors, and the violence is not gory it all. This is one of those books where Nick tells us he “shot” someone and leaves it at that. Or even, “In ten seconds they were all dead.” 

Again like Stokes, Linda Stewart has a little fun with some in-jokery; just as Stokes would often refer to himself, his pseudonyms, or etc in his own work for the series, so too does Linda Stewart. Indeed, she does Stokes one better, introducing herself into the book. The Peking Dossier ultimately concerns Nick Carter facing off against a master assassin with a clone army who is looking to kill every US senator and ultimately the President, and early in the book Nick is told to meet with the AXE agent who will be working the assignment with him…a lovely redhead with an incredible body who gives her name as Linda Stewart. 

Nick will soon learn it’s a lie: the redhead’s name is really Tara Bennett, and she’s a scientist for AXE. But it’s interesting that Linda Stewart slipped her real name into the book…doubtless unaware that fifty years later some random reviewer would be writing about it on his blog. It’s also interesting that she made herself Nick’s dream girl, in a way; later Nick will tell us that Linda/Tara not only has the best body he’s ever seen, but she’s the best lay he’s ever had – and, as Nick himself reminds us, he’s been with more than a few women. But Stewart doesn’t dwell much on the juicy goods. In fact, the most we get is stuff like, “Tara was something else.” The reluctance to dwell on all the juicy material also comes off as humorous, given how gabby our narrator is about vitually every other subject. 

Another interesting thing, given that The Peking Dossier was written by a woman, is Nick’s insistence on asserting his dominance over Tara. Moments after meeting her, and learning that she’s an AXE scientist who will be working with him, Nick ensures that Tara is under no question of who is in charge. Again, Stewart’s Nick Carter has the same aggressive macho tendencies as Manning Lee Stokes’s, but then it could because Stewart’s goal is to show how Nick goes from being a macho boss to a guy who falls in love with Tara. 

And for an author who is brand new to the series, Linda Stewart really goes to bat to have Nick Carter explain himself and his philosophy to us. We are also told without condition that he’s not wealthy: “If you were out of work for six months last year, you probably earned more than I did.” Frequently Nick will confide such thoughts in us readers, and I have to admit I kind of appreciated Stewart’s self-confidence in such things…I mean here she was, the first female author on the series since Valerie Moolman, ten years before, and she dove right into it without any hesitancies. One could easily believe “Nick himself” really is telling the tale of The Peking Dossier, Linda Stewart’s narratorial voice is so confident. 

The only problem is, the novel is incredibly sluggish. It just seemed to take forever for me to finish it, and my assumption is Stewart’s word count came in higher than expected and Award just shrank the print instead of cutting the fat. The helluva it is, the main idea is kind of cool: there’s this group of assassins from Red China that calls itself “KAN,” and Nick tells us that no one’s ever figured out what the name means, so AXE just refers to it as “Kill Americans Now,” which is what the assassin group specializes in. As if a cabal of “A1” assassins wasn’t enough, Stewart also throws in a cloning subplot; one of the chief KAN agents has apparently cloned himself, and is sending out his duplicates to kill United States senators. 

This is how Tara Bennett comes into the picture; Hawk sends her to meet up with Nick, and it turns out she is a scientist who has guessed clones are behind the plot…given that the killers have all been Chinese men who look identical, even to the same mole in the center of their forehead. Stewart’s footing is a little off with her presentation of Hawk; she has the AXE boss withholding info from Nick, for reasons that make little sense other than plot convenience. For example, why exactly Tara goes through with the “Linda Stewart” charade is not properly explained, nor is how she is under orders – from Hawk – to not tell Nick certain things about the assignment. Regardless, Tara as mentioned will be Nick’s sole bedmate and ally throughout The Peking Dossier, first going with him to Nassau to get a lead on the KAN plot, and then later to England, and then finally to Hanoi. 

One thing Linda Stewart shares with other female authors in the men’s adventure genre is her reliance on knocking Nick out for the convenience of the plot; Nick Carter is knocked out or drugged into unconsciousness at least five times over the course of The Peking Dossier. It gets to be comical after a while, and it’s clear it’s because Stewart has painted her hero into a corner and has to resort to the easy way out and knocking Nick senseless. The funny thing is, Nick’s opponents just conveniently don’t kill him when he’s out cold! But anyway, poor Nick certainly picks up at least a few concussions in this one. 

At any rate, Stewart does pack in a bit of action throughout, but as mentioned it is spectacularly bloodless. Nick uses his three mainstay weapons – the Luger, the stiletto, the gas bomb – and even here Stewart, again brand-new to the series, has Nick explain to us the usefulness of Pierre, the gas bomb. You know, the one he hides by his balls. Stewart, with her tongue again in her cheek, has Nick tell us how men never search there, adding to the benefit of the bomb, yet at the same time he humorously tells us how hiding something behind your balls can be a little embarrassing if the wrong person sees it. Otherwise Nick doles out quick, clean kills in The Peking Dossier, but he does gas-bomb a group of KAN killers at one point. 

The plotting is pretty busy, and overly so, to the extent that fun stuff is unexplored. Like there’s a part where Nick is cornered by some KAN killers, and they end up fighting with each other over who gets to kill the infamous Killmaster, as apparently there’s a points reward system in the KAN organization. Nick wonders how many points he’d be worth, but Stewart doesn’t do much with the setup. Same goes with the clone stuff, which isn’t really dwelt on until the final pages. Essentially, a top KAN killer hopes to create a clone army to topple the west, and he also plans to clone Nick and Tara! Nick because he could have an army of Killmasters (we are told clones inherit the exact abilities of the source), and Tara because he would have a super-smart genetic scientist at his disposal. 

The finale plays out in a temple in which the KAN villain manufactures heroin (another subplot), using a group of naïve monks to do the work. We have some B-movie sci-fi stuff, like Nick and Tara seeing little jars with growing embryos in them, knowing that they are looking at clones of themselves. But a lot of it is ruined by Nick constantly getting knocked out, or dosed by drugs into oblivion. Oh, and also falling in love with Tara. After a lot of off-page lovin,’ Tara admits to Nick that she’s fallen in love with him…and Nick, after telling us that under normal circumstances he’d come up with something to tell a girl who’d fallen in love with him – basically, to get lost – tells us that instead he tells Tara he feels the same. Now, one would expect this will mean that only one thing could possibly happen to Tara, but Linda Stewart goes in an unexpected direction. 

SPOILER ALERT: Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know. But for posterity, here’s what happens with Tara. Stewart as metioned puts a lot of subplots and extranneous background detail into the book, with Nick often referring to people he knew in the past (who of course have never before been mentioned in the series). Well anyway, one such reference, which Tara randomly throws out, is to an elite AXE agent who was killed in action or lost or something (I forget). Well, despite telling Nick she’s in love with him and even that she wants to have his child…in a hasty final chapter Nick informs us that Tara, who does survive the events of the novel, is already married – indeed, to that very elite AXE agent! Turns out he's been crippled or somesuch, and Hawk at AXE is paying for his care, and Tara used the opportunity to go out in the field and briefly fall in love with Nick and let herself imagine what it would be like to be with him. But she’s staying with her crippled husband. Or something. Nick for his part doesn’t seem much fazed, telling us a married life isn’t one he thinks he’d even want. 

Overall The Peking Dossier is entertaining, though a bit ponderous at times and certainly bloated. That said, Linda Stewart proves herself a better series writer than many who worked on Nick Carter: Killmaster, and perhaps one of these days I’ll seek out her other installment, 1975’s The Jerusalem File.

Assault #1: The Raid On Reichswald Fortress

Assault #1: The Raid On Reichswald Fortress, by J.M. Flynn

No month stated, 1974  Award Books

A short-lived attempt at a Dirty Dozen-styled action series, Assault only ran three volumes, and might have caused some reader confusion because it was credited to two different authors. Veteran writer J.M. Flynn handled this first volume, and the other two were credited to C.J. Floyd. I’m assuming then that Award Books didn’t consider this series along the lines of Nick Carter: Killmaster, as only one volume was published a year and the series was not credited to a house name. Speaking of which, Flynn gets some imprint in-jokery in, with the mention late in the novel of a character reading “a dog-eared French translation of a Nick Carter book,” though given that this novel occurs in the early 1940s, it must be one of those early 20th century Detective Nick Carter pulps. 

Whatever the story behind the series’ origin, Assault #1 proudly boasts its “in the tradition of” heritage, namechecking both The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare on the back cover. At only 172 pages, The Raid On Reichswald Fortress is a fraction of the length of E.M. Nathanson’s The Dirty Dozen, but like Nathanson, J.M. Flynn spends a goodly portion of the narrative focused on training, with the climactic “raid” almost an afterthought. Hey, it just occurred to me: E.M Nathanson, J.M. Flynn, C.J. Floyd…gee, do you think Award was trying to establish a trend? “Don’t just rip off the plot – rip off the author’s name, too!” 

J.M. Flynn was quite prolific, but in all the years of the blog I’ve so far only read and reviewed his Joe Rigg books, which were published by Leisure after this Award series and were credited to “Jay Flynn.” It’s been so long since I read the Rigg books that I can’t tell how Flynn’s narrative style here in the first Assault compares. He does have a gift for memorable opening lines, and tries to bring realism into his tale. He doesn’t deliver much on the action front, but he does cater to the genre demand for sex, with hero Sgt. Brendan Deasy Jackorowsky (aka “Mister Jack”) scoring with two ladies in the short course of the novel. However, given that Award was a slightly more upscale imprint than Leisure, there’s none of the “I want you in my ass!” raunch of the Joe Rigg books. The sex scenes here are more along what one might find in the Nick Carter: Killmaster books, if only a little more explicit. 

Flynn does bring a little more evocative scene setting to the opening than the typical men’s adventure novel, opening the tale with a young Mister Jack (I refuse to type out his long last name!) as a young man just out of the States, starting his life as a mercenary in the Spanish Civil War. From there he goes to a tenure as the overseer at a plantation in South America, then finally into a six-year hitch in the Marines to avoid prison time. We’re told in almost off-hand fashion of the “dirty tricks” Mister Jack pulls on the Germans as the action starts up on the European front, but again he rubs officials the wrong way and is sent back Stateside, where he becomes a drill sergeant – which is where he picks up the “Mister Jack” title. 

Luckily Flynn doesn’t spend the entire novel on this origin material. We get to the meat of the plot pretty quickly. It’s before the Normady invasion and Mister Jack is called in by an Army general to head up a special project that was dreamed up by the “Psych Warfare Department.” These guys claim that “suicide squads” are all the rage, and that condemned men might fight better and harder than normal soldiers. Given his past, with dirty tricks on the Nazis and his general run-ins with authority, Mister Jack is picked as the man to helm this project, even though he’s a Marine and it’s officially an Army deal, one that’s being run by the OSS. 

All this seems rather heavy-handed so far as setup goes, made even more strange given that Flynn makes a big deal out of the “instant hate” Mister Jack has for his commanding officer, portly old deskbound General Mose Barnum, who misses the days back in the Great War when he ran his own dirty tricks on the Germans. But here’s the thing – despite what Flynn tells us, Barnum and Mister Jack get along pretty much without any trouble. In fact, General Barnum even sneaks his way into the climactic raid, proving his own despite being over the hill. What I mean to say is, it seems Flynn was given this inordinate setup – have a Marine head up an Army job with a commanding officer he hates – but he only sort of catered to it. I mean General Barnum spends the first part of the narrative huffing and puffing at Mister Jack’s various “derelictions,” but then just looks the other way. There’s no tension or confrontation or anything. 

Anyway, as for the project Mister Jack will head up – of course, it’s the Dirty Dozen deal. Flynn’s given various dossiers of imprisoned soldiers and puts together a group of thirty who will ultimately become his “Assault Team.” Flynn only focuses on a few of them – the ones, of course, who will be chosen for this novel’s assignment. There’s Truman Belcher, a black guy who speaks perfect French. And Calvin Justice, a “non-gay” drag queen who was thrown in the brig and has been “raped more times” than he can count by his fellow soldiers because he looks so much like a woman when he’s in drag (a drag queen soldier – how prescient! In today’s Army he’d make general!). There are also a pair of “forage masters” from the South named Eastwood and Dixon who “forage” by stealing things. 

Flynn rather clumsily wields together two subplots: while first coming onto the job Mister Jack goes into the city one night and picks up a hotstuff brunette named Elaine. She claims to be engaged to a soldier who is overseas, but she hasn’t heard from in a while. Mister Jack rather easily breaks down her “I’m engaged” defenses and…she gives him a bj, folks, one of the stranger “first date sex scenes” I’ve yet read, particularly given that Flynn doesn’t go for full-bore sleaze in the details and leaves much to the reader’s fevered imagination. Humorously, Elaine will be there to fulfill the narrative’s need for random sex, as Mister Jack will occasionally head off-base to get some nookie, also successfully breaking down Elaine’s “I’m engaged so I’ll just give you a b.j.” defenses so that they engage in full hardcore shenanigans. As mentioned though the sexual material in the novel isn’t too raunchy, along the lines of “She made love fiercely” and the like. Hey, wasn’t that the title of a Monkees song?

Anyway, here’s the messy subplot-tying: one day Mister Jack is receiving a new batch of GI prisoners from overseas, guys who have ran afoul of the brass while stationed in Europe, and wouldn’t you know it but one of them’s Elaine’s fiance!! Indeed, he’s been arrested for murder. But man, Flynn does zilch with this setup…no spoilers intended, but Elaine’s fiance is out of the novel posthaste and Elaine never even finds out about any of it. In fact, Elaine herself is soon gone from the narrative, but (again apologies for the spoilers) she shows up at the end without much fanfare. The entire “fiance” subplot has no bearing on the plot, and to tell the truth it offended me on a personal level. 

Once his thirty men are chosen, Mister Jack and his second in command Charlie Bates head out to a base in the Nevada desert for even more training! This entails the forage masters rustling up game to eat, others on the team working on the buildings they’ll live in, and in general more training for their eventual dirty tricks missions on the damn Nazis. Finally the job comes up – did you guess it was going to be a raid on someplace called Reichswald Fortress? Some British OSS guys give Mister Jack the mission: it’s in the South of France, and the job entails springing a double agent named Annabelle who has gone missing and likely is being held in the fortress. Mister Jack and a select few of his team are to go in there and rescue her – or kill her if they can’t. They show Mister Jack her file photo and he sees that she is “all woman, with out-thrust breasts.” Ah, the days when you didn’t need to be a biologist to know what a woman is! Simpler times. 

Even here we are denied much action. The team heads over to London – where, coincidence be damned, Mister Jack bumps into Elaine again, for a little more hanky-panky – and then they move to France, where they split off in various undercover roles. The feeling is more of a caper as the crew, even old General Barnum, pose as locals and try to get the scoop on the fortress. The heavy lifting is done, unexpectedly, by the transvestite, as Calvin Justice poses as a local floozie and gets cozy with a Nazi official who is stationed in the fortress – including such memorable stuff as Justice getting the guy too drunk before he can successfully feel up Justice and realize “she” is really a he. 

More heavy lifting is done by Belcher, who poses as “a pimp from Marseilles” and gets intel on Reichswald thanks to the hookers he assembles for his stable. We get our first action scene when Eastwood and Dixon take on a German squad; this happens fairly late in the novel, which should give you an idea of how “action packed” The Raid On Reichswald Fortress is. In fact, the titular raid is over and done with in a page or two, Mister Jack and team wearing hoods with googles and “spraying” Nazis with submachine guns as they swoop in and rescue Annabelle. Of course, she will turn out to be Mister Jack’s second conquest, Flynn so casually dropping the sex scene into the narrative that you suspect he’s meeting an editorial quota. Even more humorous is that we have another vague-ish sex scene immediately thereafter, once Mister Jack has returned to the US and reconnected with Elaine. 

This was it for Flynn’s involvement with Assault, but by novel’s end we learn that Mister Jack’s team is now a “unified assault team” and is ready to go on missions across Europe at the behest of the OSS. We’ll see if C.J. Floyd retains the same setup and uses the same characters for the team members, or if he introduces new ones for each new assignment. I’ll also be curious to see if Elaine is established as Mister Jack’s main squeeze, which definitely is implied at the finale of The Raid On Reichswald Fortress.

The Terrible Ones (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #13)

The Terrible Ones, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1966  Award Books

I hereby take back my sexist comment that female authors can’t write men’s adventure novels – or at least I’ll amend it to that some female authors can write men’s adventure novels, and Valerie Moolman proves that she is one of those very few with this installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster. Which is ironic, because Moolman is the Killmaster author who inspired my sexist comment in the first place. 

But man, Moolman really delivers this time, with plentiful (and at times quite violent) action scenes and even a sex scene that goes on for pages in fairly explicit fashion. And sure, Nick Carter friggin’ falls in love this time around, but we’ll pass that off as maybe Valerie Moolman having her tongue in cheek, because I think practically anyone who has read a men’s adventure novel can figure out what happens to the girl Nick falls in love with. Otherwise The Terrible Ones indicates that Moolman, who wrote the initial volumes of the series, might have around this time become acquainted with the work of series newcomer Manning Lee Stokes, who delivered a much more brutal version of Nick “Killmaster” Carter than the one depicted in the first volume. 

What I mean to say is, the “Nick” (as he’s referred to in these early volumes) seen here is not much at all like the Nick in the other Moolman installments I’ve written, and seems more like a prefigure of the arrogant, sexually-baiting Nick of the later Jon Messmann installments. The latter comes to play with his acidic banter with a female guerrilla he hooks up with during the book; their venomous spatting, with Nick heavily laying on the sexual innuendo, reminded me a lot of the stuff in the almighty Sea Trap (still one of my all-time favorite men’s adventure novels ever). And Nick is more quick to fight and kill this time around…though, now that I think of it, Moolman’s Nick was always fairly brutal, like when he “jokingly” gassed to death legions of men in Hanoi. 

Well anyway, we get into it pretty quick, with Nick when we meet him scaling a cliff on a dark night in Haiti, and he’s just gotten here on a new mission with very vague explanation from boss Hawk, the briefing only shown in flashback. The more important thing here is that Nick’s scaling the cliff with “metal claws” on his hands and feet, and turns into a proto-Wolverine when he gets up top and is discovered by a Cuban. Here’s where I realized this wasn’t the typical Valerie Moolman installment, as Nick hacks the dude up good and proper (“The fellow’s guts were dribbling out”), not to mention a guard dog he later encounters. In fact these metal claws are so focused on in the book that the copywriters at Award even noted them in the first-page preview, “the man with the claws.” 

There’s a definite fun factor throughout as Nick is chagrined to learn that his local contact isn’t “Paolo;” due to a communications snafu it’s actually Paula, a hotblooded (and, naturally, hotstuff) blonde who takes an immediate dislike to Nick. This is where the acidic banter comes into play, as the two constantly try to one-up each other in the putdown stakes, or match their fighting skills. Paula is a member of the titular “Terrible Ones;” the title has you expecting some legion of cruel Chicom sadists (ie the mandatory villains in the eary Killmaster years), but in reality the name is more of an intentionally misleading one, as the Terrible Ones are all…beautiful young women from the Dominican Republic. Or, rather, beautiful young widows, their husbands having been executed for plotting against former Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo. The novel is very much of its time here, as Trujillo is constantly mentioned with no explanation or setup; his name likely resonated much better with readers in 1966 than it does in 2023. 

To clarify, the Chicoms do factor into this one, too; a subplot concerns Dr. Tsing-fu Shu, here in Haiti for something called “Operation Blast,” and also leading a secret operation to find a cache of $100 million in gold that Trujillo supposedly hid here in Haiti – the same thing the Terrible Ones have come to Haiti to find. Indeed, the plot is rather busy, and given that Nick is thrown into it with little preparation or setup, discovering things as he goes along, one can almost figure this is a sign of Valerie Moolman herself winging her way through the plot. I have to admit, though, that the sections with Dr. Shu and his minion Tom Kee were a bit trying, mostly because they took away from the Nick-Paula sequences. 

And these, as mentioned, are pretty great. Moolman does a great job developing the relationship; it is clear as day to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the series that Nick will have sex with Paula. I mean given that we are informed how pretty and busty she is in her intro, it’s really only a matter of when the Killmaster will have her. The fun of it is how it develops. As mentioned there are a lot of fireworks between the two, and Moolman delivers some humorous banter. But when Paula sees the Killmaster in action, her feelings start to change – indeed, to the point of “love!” Yes, folks, the blonde beauty (she explains why she’s blonde even though she’s from the DR, by the way) tells Nick she loves him when she gives herself to him…and, crazily enough, Nick starts to feel the same way about her during the several-page boink that ensues! 

Like I said, you don’t need a master’s degree in men’s adventure to see where all this is going. The important note here is that Moolman ignores the series requirement that Nick enjoy the company of three different women per volume; Paula is his only conquest in the book, but boy does Moolman make it count. It does go on and on, and as mentioned it’s fairly explicit. Nothing to the outrageous levels as seen on later Lyle Kenyon Engel productions like The Baroness, but still more risque than any of the sex scenes I’ve yet read in a contemporary Killmaster. 

Nick, by the way, loves Paula because she is so much like himself – a resourceful, hardy individual who is caring for others but who can kill when necessary. Moolman does strive to make Paula Nick’s soul mate, but the veteran series reader can’t help but remember Julie Baron, a recurring character in the earliest volumes who was also put across as Nick’s equal, soul mate, star-crossed lover, or what have you. Given that she’s only just been introduced with this volume, and Julie (sometimes “Julia”) Baron had already been in a few volumes at this point – and would be in several more – Paula doesn’t really match up. But man, Nick even talks about being with her “after” the mission and whatnot…it’s like the dude is basically declaring her death sentence. 

Yet at the same time, it’s absolutely without sentiment. This book is such a harbinger of a lost time that Paula is multiple times referred to as a “bitch,” ie “This bitch of a girl,” and at the end of the book (after they’ve declared their love for one another, btw), when Paula taunts Nick that he’ll have to take her and the other Terrible Ones along with him on his climactic assault, we’re informed, “The bitch was smiling at him.” It’s humorous that a female author is able to dole out such misogyny, so again I can only congratulate Ms. Moolman – I was thoroughly impressed. Stuff like this is almost like a slap to the face in our thoroughly domesticated and emasculated era of “strong empowered women” who must never, ever, but ever be questioned or criticized.  Not to mention once-masculine heroes who have been neutered by the adherents of a runaway ideology. 

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention something interesting. The cover art for The Terrible Ones was later recycled for The Black Death, a Manning Lee Stokes installment that also took place in Haiti…and included a part where Nick pretended to be a zombie so as to scare some superstitious native soldiers. Early in The Terrible Ones Nick, still with those claws, pretends to be some sort of mountain demon or something, lurking in the shadows and emitting all these unearthly howls and growls to the increasing dismay of the native soldiers who are hunting for him. It’s all pretty goofy but at the same time another harbinger of an early time, as Nick hacks to friggin’ pieces the guard dog the soldiers send into the cave after him. So we have here a “hero” who calls his “one true love” a “bitch” and kills dogs…this is clearly not a hero who would much resonate in 2023, but as mentioned I loved it just because it was so different. 

Action wise the novel’s good but it operates on more of a suspense and tension tip. There’s a great part where Nick and Paula are captured by a trio of Cuban soldiers and Nick undergoes the torture that was mandatory in the earliest volumes; this part sees yet another memorable appearance of Pierre, the tiny gas bomb Nick keeps hidden by his balls. The finale is also pretty cool, with Nick and some of the Terrible Ones congregating on “the temple of the blacks,” which is an old monastery populated by monks in face-covering black cowls. Again Moolman here delivers a bit more violence than in the previous installments of hers I’ve read – and also she attempts (and mostly succeeds) in giving the end of the book much more of an emotional impact than the series norm. 

Overall I really enjoyed The Terrible Ones, and I was happy to be reminded that a series ghostwriter can throw a curveball and turn in something not at all like what you expected.

Hawkshaw

Hawkshaw, by Ron Goulart

No month stated, 1974  Award Books

(Original hardcover edition 1972)

Around twenty years ago I picked up a handful of Ron Goulart sci-fi paperbacks from the ‘60s and ‘70s and eagerly looked forward to reading them, given that they seemed to be along the lines of the funky freaky post-psychedelic sci-fi I have always loved. Then I tried reading one! I think it was Gadget Man. And I realized that Goulart’s schtick is more of sci-fi satire comedy, and that just wasn’t what I was after at the time. 

Flash forward twenty years and I figured I’d give it another go. Hawkshaw was one of the paperbacks I got back then (of course I kept them all, even though I had no plans to read them!), so for no particular reason it became the one I’d try to read. And it seems to be along the same lines as Gadget Man, perhaps even set in the same world – a dissolved United States of (what was then) the near future. In this case it’s 1997, but it’s essentially the 1970s taken to absurd proportions…sort of what Lawrence Sanders did in The Tomorrow File, but much more “comedic” in nature. 

At 156 pages of big print, Hawkshaw is essentially a fast-moving spoof that doesn’t have the time for any elaborate world building. It’s mostly formatted like a mystery, with cipher-like hero Noah Kraft, a reporter, venturing to the “colony” of Connecticut to investigate some supposed werewolf sightings. The werewolf stuff turns out to just be a distraction, as ultimately the plot revolves around Noah chasing a Maguffin: a document with the locations of concentration camps a right-wing group called The Robin Hood Foundation is supposedly running on the east coast. 

If I’m not mistaken this “Fragmented America” was the setting for several Ron Goulart novels; in fact I think most of the ones I have are set in this world. He doesn’t much explore the setting here in Hawkshaw, it must be said – the novel is basically a fast-moving slice of pulp with a definite comedy vibe. And spoiler alert, but there’s hardly anything in the way of sex or violence. All such risque material occurs entirely off-page, and for that matter Goulart isn’t much for the exploitation of the female characters: Noah hooks up with a sort-of agent named Donna, and about the most we get is that she’s “slim” and “pretty.” 

But for that matter, Noah Kraft is himself a cipher. He’s a reporter of the old school, looking to track leads and get the scoop. There isn’t much in the way of technology in his line of work, other than a “pix phone” he uses to call his boss. I also loved the tidbit that he sits on an “air-cushioned seat” while talking on the pix phone with his boss; very 1960s Haus-Rucker Co. space age. Otherwise Ron Goulart is not one for word-painting, and the reader must do some heavy lifting throughout, because Goulart doesn’t much describe anything. He doesn’t even really provide much backdrop for this fractured America, other than errant notes like the fact that the country split up in 1989. 

Instead, Hawkshaw essentially exists so Goulart can lampoon the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. This extends to even underground comix, with the appearance of Bud Tubb, a heavyset “comix” artist known for drawing risque material. I got the impression he was inspired by Vaughn Bode. Upon arrival in Westport to look into the supposed werewolf, Noah soon meets Bud Tubb, who tells Noah of both the mysterious Hawkshaw, leader of the liberal movement, and also the equally-mysterious Robin Hood Foundation, which is based here in Westport and is right-wing in its composition. It’s also led by a colorfully-named mystery man: George Washington II. 

The werewolf is just window dressing, and is quickly found and explained: some guy who was the victim of some Robin Hood Foundation chemicals. More time is spent on oddball shit like a practicing group of cannibals who capture Noah and Donna while they are out driving around. Goulart tries to get a lot of comedy mileage out of this group who come off ultra polite but proud of their newfound taste for human flesh, courtesy a popular TV show: “I might not have turned to cannibalism if the United States had held together,” explains one of them. 

There’s also weird nonsense like Uncle Kidnapper, a guy who employs clowns and works as a contractor for the government; his speciality is saving kidnapped people for a fee. Then there’s the part where Noah goes to New Jersey, which is entirely run by the mob, with more “funny” stuff like the border patrol guards – Mafia wiseguys – handing out “The Mafia does not exist” pamphlets to tourists entering the former state. My favorite of all the random crap though is the actor who goes around in a one-man show as Norman Mailer, reading from Mailer’s work and getting in fistfights with a planted audience member he’s paid to call him a “liberal son of a bitch.” 

All the comedy of course takes away from any tension or suspense; there are a few times where Noah’s in danger, or Donna has been adbucted, but none of it has any bite. Nor does the revelation of who Hawkshaw is; indeed, more time is spent figuring out who the mysterious George Washington II is. At no point does Noah Kraft fight or shoot anyone or do any other sort of action-hero stuff. In fact, the fate of a somewhat important character is left unexplained by novel’s end, which sees Noah returning back to his home base for another story. I’m too lazy to see if this character appeared in any other Goulart novels. 

Well, as mentioned it’s taken me a long time to get around to Ron Goulart. In fact, I’ve put off reading William Shatner’s Tekwar series precisely due to the reason that it was ghostwritten by Ron Goulart, even down to the “funny androids” Goulart was known to populate his own novels with. And I have to say, now that I’ve finally read one of Ron Goulart’s novels, it will likely be quite some time until I read another.

The Liquidator #3: The Cocaine Connection

The Liquidator #3: The Cocaine Connection, by R.L. Brent

No month stated, 1974  Award Books

The third volume of The Liquidator dispenses with the continuity that linked the first two volumes and comes off more like a standalone piece, the mysterious “R.L. Brent” (supposedly Larry Powell) dropping a lot of the earlier subplots and focusing solely on hero Jake “The Liquidator” Brand’s attempt to bust a Syndicate drug pipeline in Florida. That said, the book still retains the “hardboiled ‘70s” vibe of the previous books. 

Brent pulls a trick from the template of contemporary men’s adventure magazine yarns: The Cocaine Connection opens toward the end of the story, with an unarmed and injured Brand being chased through darkened woods by rifle-toting goons. We are quickly told that Brand’s cover has been blown, they’re onto him, and if they catch him he’s dead. Then they catch him, and the story flashes back about a week. It won’t be until page 160 that we get back to this opening incident, but the main effect is that we know from the start that Brand’s cover is going to be blown, which makes pretty much the entirety of the ensuing narrative moot! 

But as usual R.L. Brent is too gifted a writer to make it all seem like a waste of time. The taut, effective prose of the earlier books is still present, as is the tough vibe. I just had a problem with the overall story of this one. So as we know, Jake Brand was once a top cop and was put in prison on fake charges, all of which was recounted in the first volume. Brand’s out now and has been exacting vengeance on the Syndicate bastards who put the frame on him, but the mastermind of the plot, Crosetti, has thus far escaped Brand. 

Rather than follow through on this revenge angle, R.L. Brent instead gussies up the plot with Brant venturing down to Florida to impersonate a Syndicate rep in the hopes of undoing a cocaine line that’s been put together, supposedly, by Crosetti. The reasoning here is that Brand’s trying to find Crosetti, so I guess he figures that if he busts up his coke ring the man himself will show up. Or something. As stated, The Cocaine Connection is mostly a standalone, and could just as easily be an installment of Narc, with Brand almost acting as an undercover Federal agent. Indeed, people even believe he is an undercover Fedearl agent in this one. 

You know, back in the first volume I speculated that this was a sort-of “near future” series, in that the events of the first volume seemed to take place in 1973, and in that same book Brand was sent to prison for five years. Meaning, it was 1978 when he got out, a few years after the publication date. But in The Cocaine Connection we’re informed a rich guy is driving a 1974 model car, with the implication that it’s brand new, so maybe Brent just dropped the idea, or maybe even more preposterously I was just wrong. Otherwise this volume does refer back to the first volume quite often, mostly because Brand ventures to Miami in this one for the first time since he was a cop. 

There’s still a bit of a Parker vibe with Brand using his underworld connections to find Crosetti. It’s in this way that Brand learns of the cocaine pipeline; long story short, a remote island off Florida called Reese’s Bluff seems to be the location where a Syndicate courier makes the payoff for the cocaine, the importation of which is handled by a non-Syndicate organization. In order to finally get Crosetti, Brand decides to go down there and bust up the pipeline. He manages to find the guy who handles the payoff, getting in a long car chase with him in the process. 

From there it’s into the “undercover agent” scenario…but again, we know from page one that Brand’s cover is fated to be blown. Reese’s Bluff is essentially a small town blocked off from the rest of society, and Brand is immediately treated with suspicion when he shows up there – posing as “Luther Martin,” new Syndicate money man. Like a regular Mack Bolan, Jake Brand is such a natural at pretending to be a mobster that he manages to fool the people he hands the coke payoff money to. It doesn’t hurt matters that the wife of the head honcho happens to be a busty redhead in her 30s who immediately has an eye for Brand – and eagerly thinks about getting him into bed. 

This leads to one of the more humorous lines I’ve recently read; the horny redhead is named Liz and Brand is certain she was doing the previous Syndicate money man. So Brand starts pushing her buttons and, when she shows him to a spare room he can sleep in that night, he basically invites her to slide into bed with him for some sex that night, capping it off with the unforgettable line: “I like to be awakened by a pair of naked tits in my back.” Well who doesn’t?? Of course this only serves to make Liz even more horny and she does this very thing to awaken Brand shortly thereafter, leading to a somewhat explicit conjugation between the two. 

Another memorable bit follows, when Brand’s jumped by a trio of goons who work for the lady’s wife. This is a brutal sequence of hand-to-hand combat that could almost come out of Gannon, only without the spiked knuckles ripping out eyeballs or anything. Otherwise Brent again displays his ability to write “realistic” crime pulp with a woozy, hurt Brand managing to defend himself against three opponents – and get the upper hand, thanks to a tire iron that he puts to violent work. A super cool sequence that is probably one of the more tense action scenes I’ve read in a while. 

But regardless I feel the plot of The Cocaine Connection just doesn’t make much sense. For reasons I couldn’t understand, Brand stays in Reese’s Bluff and, uh, “bluffs” his way into the upper echelons of the non-Syndicate coke ring. Why? He tells them he’s an upwardly-mobile goon who wants a bigger piece of the pie, or whatever, but what makes no sense is that it is of course all bullshit and one phone call could undo Brand’s entire disguise. It gets even goofier when he meets the brains of the non-Syndicate cocaine ring, Hamilton Reese, Brand doesn’t just kill him – even though he knows he should – and just continues with his charade. 

Meanwhile, he gets laid again: this courtesy Hamilton Reese’s “small breasted” hotstuff daughter, Valerie, who like Liz immediately lets Brand know of her interests. He must certainly be virile, given that per the plot he’s been banged out of shape and has various stitches on him, thanks to the aforementioned fight with the three thugs. But Valerie still lets her interests clearly be known. The payoff of this subplot will upset the sensitive readers of today: when Valerie catches Brand snooping around the house that night, he pushes her into her room and forces himself on her. But given that she’s just as much a nympho as Liz, she’s all for it, even if it’s “the next thing to rape,” leading to another somewhat-explicit sex scene. 

It's to Brent’s credit that the lead-up to Brand’s cover being blown is filled with tension, even though we already know it’s bound to happen. He’s guilty of a little revisionism, though; I got a chuckle out of how, in the opening pages, Brent states several times that Brand is unarmed…then, later in the book, we’re told that Brand straps a sharp letter opener to his calf, hidden under his pants. When he finally uses it, once the narrative picks up from those opening pages, we’re informed “he almost forgot about” the knife that he’d hidden on himself! The cynic in me could almost think that R.L. Brent was just coming up with all this on the fly. 

The finale is pretty cool. After being “the hunted,” Brand decides to “go hunting” and tracks down the coke pipeline runners one by one. Memorable stuff follows, like one guy impaling himself on the spike that’s used for copy sheets in a printing office. But it’s a little rushed at times, with some of Brand’s vengeance-sating not being exploited to the full extent. Brent does wrap up one of the major revenge angles of the series, but by novel’s end The Liquidator is prepared to keep on liquidating; and we get a hint that he might finally start hunting down that lookalike who framed him the first volume. 

Overall The Cocaine Connection was another fun entry in The Liquidator, with the same tough, terse vibe as the previous two books. It just felt a bit disconnected, given the entire “undercover” angle of the plot. Otherwise I’d certainly agree with no less than King Features and their cover blurb – and I’m starting to suspect that The Liquidator was one of the very few (only?) men’s adventure series that got any industry cred because publisher Award-Universal was probably affiliated with King Features, but who knows. I’m sure a simple Google search would explain it all, but I’m quite lazy.