Chameleon #3: Garde Save The World!

Chameleon #3: Garde Save The World!, by Jerry LaPlante
No month stated, 1979  Zebra Books

The third volume of the short-lived Chameleon series was also the last – and it appears to be the most scarce, these days. But when I read that narrating hero Vance Garde took on an army of female villains in this one, I knew I had to get a copy. Unfortunately, author Jerry LaPlante doesn’t turn in the story I was expecting.

For one, whereas the previous volume was goofy fun, if a bit overlong, this one’s just plain overlong, and the fun element seems forced. Even with a more promising foe and a broader canvas of action, Garde Save The World! is just sort of bland, a feeling not helped by Garde himself, who is particularly ineffectual this time out. Seriously, he spends the entire novel either getting knocked out or finding himself several steps behind his enemy, a militant feminist group calling itself DELILAH.

These evil women are another of the novel’s many failings. Instead of the rapacious, lustfully cruel pulp-style female villains I wanted, they’re more of a cold and monstrous sort, without even the flair of the villains in The Savage Women. They are, basically, Rush Limbaugh’s worst fears come to life, a legion of liberal feminists who studied engineering at Columbia and have now banded together to kill men so that women can control the world. But there is nothing fun about them, LaPlante apparently unwilling to capture the pulpish vibe he’s created; none of the “We’ll kill you, Garde, but first we’ll enjoy you,” sort of thing you’d expect, given the genre.

But then, Garde spends the majority of the novel not even knowing what DELILAH is; a recurring but unfunny joke is him saying “Who’s Delilah?,” as he thinks it’s just some woman. Meanwhile the back cover has clearly stated it’s a group of women, thus ruining this endless joke. This is just one of Garde’s many problems in this volume, as overall he’s on a higher buffoonery level than he was in In Garde We Trust, and spends practically the entire novel wandering around the globe in confusion. And getting knocked out.

LaPlante does open the novel with an interesting fake-out, though. Actually, he opens the novel with a flashforward toward the end, same as he did last time, with Garde about to buy it while scuba diving somewhere. But when LaPlante jumps back in time and starts the story proper, Garde is happily informing us of how he’s just gotten laid, and by one of his employees no less. Readers of the series will instantly assume he’s referring to Ballou Annis, Garde’s “assistant” whom he’s been trying to screw since the first volume. Instead, LaPlante pulls the rug out and informs us that it’s some recently-hired scientist-type lady; Garde and Ballou have still failed to fully consumate their mutual attraction.

Once again we get little understanding of how long after the previous volume this one occurs, and also once again Garde is pondering if he should disband his secretive VIBES initiative. I wonder if this would’ve been a recurring theme, had the series continued. If so, it would’ve become very annoying, as it’s already frustrating a mere three volumes in. Anyway, Garde is more concerned with his main venture, GSA, especially a project he’s working on with another recent employee, a gorgeous Iranian lady named Petrolea(!) who is helping the company with a new pultonium initiative.

Anyone who has read the back cover will of course realize Petrolea is a villain – we’re immediately informed she graduated from Columbia – but of course Garde doesn’t know this. To his credit, when the plutonium is later stolen from the GSA vaults (Garde and Ballou in the middle of a little sixty-nining when they’re interrupted by the phone call informing them of the theft), Garde soon deduces that Petrolea was behind it. Now begins the major thrust of the novel, which sees Garde chasing her and her DELILAH comrades around the world. He doesn’t go to the authorities due to the muddled reasoning that he could get in trouble for his plutonium being stolen, or something.

There are a lot of missed opportunities here. For one, Ballou Annis. While a vivacious personality in the previous book, this time she’s shoehorned out of the novel quite often. There’s a grating recurring bit where she keeps disappearing, and you miss her when she’s gone, as she’s more interesting than Garde. But then, LaPlante does provide a good running gag for Ballou; in her continuous war against injustice, this time she’s launched a campaign against pay toilets in women’s restrooms. In her pursuit of vengeance she’s arrested twice in the novel, which is the cause of a few of her disappearances from the text.

But as for the missed opportunities mentioned above, Ballou states early on that she knew Petrolea years before, as they both went to Columbia and were part of a women’s liberation group. I instantly assumed this was foreshadowing that Ballou herself might be in DELILAH – an assumption furthered by the fact that she soon thereafter disappears from the novel, during a flight with Garde to Mexico, which is where Garde has traced the stolen plutonium. But nothing comes of this. That Ballou was involved with an early version of DELILAH at Columbia is something that LaPlante does precious little to exploit.

Anyway, Garde, who thought Ballou was on the flight with him, somehow is so tired that he falls asleep before takeoff, doesn’t wake up until landing, and only then realizes his assistant isn’t with him. Now we have more buffoonery as super-intelligent Garde bumbles around Mexico, not understanding the language, and trying to figure out what he should do next. Have no fear, though, as this time Garde has brought along a weapon, one he hasn’t used since the first volume – a studded leather belt.

Yes, friends, Vance Garde’s weapon of choice is a belt.

Immediately hoodwinked by an undercover DELILAH agent, Vance is almost killed by the group’s hulking henchwoman, High Tess, who murders a hapless cab driver for fun. Garde is taken to DELILAH headquarters, which is located in one of those ancient Mayan temples that are hidden within a hill, but apropros of nothing the entire place is attacked by primitive “troglodytes” who attack the women. When these cavemen are later tainted by the plutonium, which they think is a god, Garde is sickened as he watches the DELILAH women use their incredible karate skills to sadistically murder off all of the men.

Garde manages to make off with some of the plutonium without being contaminated, and he hooks up with Ballou only to learn that she’d been chloroformed by a DELILAH agent back at JFK airport. They return to the States to figure out where DELILAH might strike next, and of course Vance and Ballou soon attempt to have sex in Garde’s office, on a couch that has a folding matress inside it. Instead, after much oral chicanery, they both get stuck inside the couch. Here we learn that Ballou has very long and thin nipples and also an “expanse” of thick pubic hair; this being the ‘70s, it must’ve really been something, as Garde several times refers to it as a “forest!”

Anyway, as you can guess, the tricky couch again prevents Garde and Ballou from fully screwin,’ and yeah the joke’s really gotten old by this point. Garde’s always going on about his “anger” and “rage,” which he claims is caused by injustice, but you’ve gotta figure his permanent case of blue balls must have something to do with it. Anyway, he and Ballou next head for Marrakech, where DELILAH has apprently fled to.

This entire sequence comes off like page-filling – per Zebra Books norm, Garde Save The World! is much too long – but it is salvaged by the too-brief appearance of an Arabic Jew who haggles with Garde. And once again Ballou disappears, and once again Garde’s clueless where she went. Of course it turns out DELILAH has her, and the Marrakech sequence culminates in an over-the-top bit where Garde chases Petrolea and her cronies on a plane, and they have Ballou, and they toss her out of the plane, and Garde jumps out of his plane and sky-dives to the rescue!

Finally, we’re in the homestretch. Now Garde has tracked DELILAH down to Florida. He knows he’s crippled their organization, and he’s also taken back most of the plutonium from them, but they still have enough to create a bomb that will achieve their goal to ransom the world (if all corporations and etc aren’t turned over to women, DELILAH will unleash their nuclear bomb). Speaking of DELILAH’s goals, it was interesting to read this book so many years after publication, where the vast majority of the things Petrolea complains about (ie women not in any positions of power in coproprations or entertainment or etc) are no longer a reality. In fact, one could argue it’s now reversed.

The finale features Garde suiting up in scuba gear and taking an underwater channel that leads to the cave DELILAH operates from, which finally takes us back to that very opening scene. But it’s all anticlimactic, with Garde never once in the entire novel actually fighting these women; instead he throws “sonic disruptors” created in the VIBES labs into the cave, and it fucks up the women’s senses good and proper, and as Garde absconds with the plutonium the cave collapses, apparently killing off all of the remaining members of DELILAH. (Oh, and we learn what their acronym stands for: Destroy Entirely the Labia Invading Lordly Ass Holes. Seriously, that’s what it stands for. But don’t you think there should be a hyphen between “labia” and “invading?”)

All that taken care of, Garde and Ballou think they finally have a chance to screw; I mean come on, people, at least they have their priorities in order. So they drive to a nearby hotel and proceed to get busy, LaPlante again serving up all of the juicily explicit details. I thought he might at last just be done with it, have them screw and actually climax together and be done with it, like Charlie Brown finally kicking the football, and the unfunny recurring bit could go away. But nope; after lots of description of mutual noodling and fondling and almost screwing, the roof of their hotel is blown off, Florida being hit by a freak tornado. The end.

While I never applaud the abrupt ending of a series, I can’t say I’m sad there were no more volumes of Chameleon. I’ve only read two installments, and I’ve already grown annoyed with Garde’s constant questioning if he should continue fighting crime, not to mention the dude’s inability to screw a nubile woman who constantly throws herself at him. I mean seriously, what the hell kind of a men’s adventure protagonist is that? No wonder his adventures only lasted three volumes.

Chameleon #2: In Garde We Trust

Chameleon #2: In Garde We Trust, by Jerry LaPlante
No month stated, 1979  Zebra Books

A rare example of a late ‘70s men’s adventure series,* Chameleon ran for three volumes and was unusual for a few reasons. For one, like Decoy we have here a series where the title has nothing to do with the actual book – our hero does not refer to himself as “Chameleon,” and he doesn’t have any chameleon-like talents for disguise or anything.

Also like Decoy, this series is told in first-person. Personally I don’t think this style is suited to the men’s adventure genre, but at any rate Jerry LaPlante (a real person, not a house name; here’s his website) does a good enough job with it. Also the book is very much in a goofy or at least comic spirit; nothing too spoofy or outrageous, but enough so that you know it’s all intended in fun. Actually, sort of like Roger Moore’s ‘70s James Bond movies, now that I think of it, where there’s violence and danger and people get killed, but it’s all done with a knowing wink. (This is why I’ll always prefer Moore’s films to today’s dour, oh-so-serious James Bond movies, which to tell the truth I despise.)

Garde is similar to another obscure men’s adventure protagonist – Colin “Big Brain” Garrett. Unlike Gary Brandner’s creation, though, Vance Garde is actually fun. He’s super smart, somewhere in his 30s, and has gotten rich from GSA: Garde’s Scientific Associates. But in the previous volume Garde’s sister died of a heroin overdose or something, and an incensed Garde created a secret subsection of GSA, called VIBES (Vindication against Injustice, Bureaucracy, and Ensconced Stupidity).

The words that make up the acroynm “VIBES” not only sound like something out of Pynchon, but also further display the goofy tendencies of this series. At any rate, in the previous volume Garde gained his vengeance upon the Anaconda, some sort of drug dealer. In Garde We Trust opens some indeterminate time later, though not too long; Garde’s uncertain what to do with VIBES, now that his vengeance has been achieved, and he doesn’t know if he should go after other bad guys or just dissolve the entity.

Causing Garde’s indecision is the lovely Ballou Annis, Garde’s super-sexy assistant whom Garde apparently met in the previous volume. Only a handful of people even know VIBES exists, Ballou being one of them, and she and Garde have a friendly, pre-PC sexual infatuation thing going, with both openly admitting they want to have sex with each other but something always getting in the way, literally. Seems like this was a recurring joke in the previous book, and it is here, too, with for example one overlong sequence having them about to get at it, but their belt buckles getting locked together.

Ballou sounds like my dream girl – she’s a svelte brunette who’s just as smart as she is sexy, and, like Garde, she enjoys getting “revenge” on people for the slightest of infractions. This is a running theme in the novel; Garde is dedicated to “vindication” against “injustice,” but his definition of such things is pretty liberal. One of the things about the book that made me laugh out loud is that Garde gets pissed at everything, and we see him ranting about matters as irrelevant as horseradish scoops to how some cities charge you for parking outside of restaurants.

But Ballou’s the same, and maybe even more easily-incensed; another running gag has her using Pavlovian tricks (yet another Pynchon reference, perhaps, from Gravity's Rainbow) in vengeance against a neighbor who likes to have his dog shit in Ballou’s yard. Over the past few weeks Ballou’s been ringing a bell every time the dog squats to crap; now it squats anytime she rings the bell, and her plan is to call her neigbor in the middle of the night, so the dog will shit in his house. It’s all pretty elaborate, but personally I’d find a smart and sexy girl who went to such lengths for petty revenge damn irresistible.

Whereas the first volume saw Garde getting revenge for his sister, the plot of this second volume has Ballou getting vengeance for her brother. We eventually learn that he’s gotten hooked up with “the Lunies,” ie green robe-wearing followers of a cult started by Father Sol Luna, a Vietnamese guy who now reclusively lives somewhere in Montana and has absolutely no relation to the Reverend Sun Moon. The Lunies stumble around, unwashed and dazed, warning against the evils of Satan, and as if to again prove how goofy the book is intended to be, LaPlante baldly introduces them apropos of nothing and then, a chapter or two later, “stuns” us with the revelation that Ballou’s brother is also in the cult.

Meanwhile Garde and Ballou have had an encounter with a young female Lunie, who has died in the hospital; the puzzled doctor informs them that the girl had a cyanide pill in her tooth, which she bit when the doctor tried to remove her robes. They’re further stunned to discover an electrical chastity belt wired to her, something which apparently all members of the cult are forced to wear. If they become sexually aroused, they get zapped. This riles up Vance Garde good and proper, and when Ballou learns that her brother is in the cult – and is trying to get his inheritance from her, the boy being younger than the 21 demanded by their parents’ will – the two decide that VIBES shall indeed continue on, and that its resources will be channeled against Father Luna.

In Garde We Trust is not the most action-centered men’s adventure novel you could read. In fact it’s more in the cerebral realm (well, sort of), with Garde more often using his intelligence to gain vengeance. This entails lots of stuff that other readers might find more interesting than I did. Like for example how Garde infiltrates Father Luna’s cover plant of Montana Nuclear Energy; Garde approaches them representing GSA and telling them he’s interested in creating a radiation-detecting device they might find useful. Cue lots of info on how this gizmo is created.

The “action” stuff is usually relegated to Garde getting knocked out or held at gunpoint. Garde uses his fancy book learnin’ to take on the bad guys, which despite being sort of unusual considering the genre, kind of robs the novel of much dramatic thrust. Like when Luna’s men kidnap Ballou and tell Garde she’s dead if Garde doesn’t hand over the radiation detector (which it turns out Luna wants so as to locate the army’s hidden stockpile of nukes in Montana). But first Garde must create the device…and it takes him two weeks. Not much of a “ticking time bomb” suspense factor, there. In fact time really moves in In Garde We Trust, with the narrative occuring over a few months or so.

The back cover hypes Garde as this tough s.o.b. who doesn’t take shit, and truth to tell he is pretty brutal. He kills his victims in unsettling ways, like Dr. Athol, an Asian dentist who works for Luna. It turns out the Lunies are brainwashed by high-tech dental implants Athol puts in them, and dumbass Garde gets one implanted in his own tooth midway through the novel. When he gets payback on Athol (whom he calls “Asshole”), Garde ties the bastard into his dental chair and tortures him with dental equipment like drills and whatnot, and then numbs his throat muscles and watches happily as Athol chokes to death!

Garde spends most of the novel flying back and forth to Montana, and it all plays out more on a suspense angle than slam-bang action. In fact I don’t believe there’s even a single scene where Garde picks up a gun. He also flies a lot, and we get copious description of flying small planes, as well as hiking material…Garde is an expert hiker and mountain climber, so cue lots of egregious detail about this, including an endless sequence where he’s chased by a bear. In fact this sequence opens the novel; like the Enforcer books, the Chameleon novels open toward the end of the current caper, in a life-or-death moment for the protagonist, and then move backwards to the beginning.

The finale as well plays out more on the “brainy” angle; rather than grabbing a gun and storming Luna’s headquarters, Garde instead spends another few weeks researching Athol’s brain-controlling device and figuring out how he can tune it to Luna’s brainwaves. This results in an overlong climax in which, during a live televised sermon in Madison Square Gardens, Luna’s id is freed thanks to the mind-control waves Garde sends into Luna’s brain from a hidden transmitter, with the end result the cult leader ranting about his “slaves” and how much more money he wants from them. This leads to mass chaos, as well as the bloody end of the cult. Here too we have the final appearance of Handjob, Luna’s monstrous henchman who also appeared in the previous volume (working for the Anaconda).

The writing is good, if a bit flabby; I felt there were too many instances in which Garde would go on for several pages about whatever device he was currently devising. LaPlante is very skilled at dialog, though, particularly with comedic banter. Garde and Ballou trade one-liners throughout the novel, most of them being of a punning nature. Sometimes this gets to be a bit too much, but LaPlante has a definite gift for it, with some of the verbal gags running for a few pages and being laugh-out-loud funny.

And while the novel’s pretty high-brow, at least so far as its protagonist goes, LaPlante gets very lowbrow at times, like when Ballou’s trapped in one of those chastity belts, but one that’s wired to blow if Garde’s plane drops below a certain altitude. (This scene definitely has a “ticking time bomb” suspense factor, by the way.) And on an even lower-brow note, the novel ends with one of the most distasteful scenes I’ve ever read, when Ballou’s dog-owning neighbor, driven insane, breaks into Ballou’s house, drops his pants, and takes a shit on her coffee table!

The “will they/won’t they” deal with Garde and Ballou goes from funny to annoying and back to funny again. After the overlong bit with their interlocked belt buckles, a later scene has them caught up in a particularly vigorous bit of sixty-nining that inadvertently causes Garde’s water bed to burst. Also their sexual shenanigans extend beyond foreplay, with the two of them engaged at one point in what a friend of mine once memorably described as “full-blown sex,” though here too they are distracted before achieving the, uh, climactic moment. I should note that these sex scenes are the only sex scenes in the novel; Garde is pretty committed to Ballou, and never puts the moves on other women, like your regular men’s adventure protagonist would.

Anyway, despite being a bit too long (a Zebra Books speciality) and maybe a little too goofy for its own good, In Garde We Trust was actually enjoyable enough that I sought out the third and final volume, the apparently-scarce Garde Save The World!, and immediately started reading it.

*According to Michael Newton’s How To Write Action Adventure Novels, the reason men’s adventure series disappeared from bookstore shelves around 1976 was due to the energy crisis. Other than those from mainstays Pinnacle, there really were no new series started from about ’76 to ’79, and even those were short-lived. It wasn’t until Gold Eagle came on the scene in the early ‘80s that the genre was revitalized.