The Penetrator #46: Terrorist Torment

The Penetrator #46: Terrorist Torment, by Lionel Derrick

June, 1982  Pinnacle Books

This altogether timely installment of The Penetrator concerns the fight for a Palestinian homeland, which of course entails terrorism, the loss of innocent life, and the violent abduction of western politicians to be used as hostages. Fortunately Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin exists in this fictional world and can bust up these Palestinian terrorist scumbags. 

I almost get the impression that this volume was written in reaction to the then-new Gold Eagle imprint, which took former Pinnacle stalwart The Executioner and turned him into a superhuman counter-terrorist, which is exactly what Chet Cunningham does to Mark Hardin in this one. I’m going to run with my theory, especially given that Cunningham even wrote a few volumes of The Executioner for Gold Eagle…though, curiously, fellow Penetrator series writer Mark Roberts did not. Maybe he just never got the invite. 

But regardless, I really had to drum up the enthusiasm to keep reading Terrorist Torment; it could almost be seen as a take on another Pinnacle series, Death Merchant, in how it’s essentially just one long action scene. The only problem is, Chet Cunningham has long ago toned down the spectacular gore he brought to the earliest volumes of this series, and is very much a “get shot and fall down” sort of writer at this point, meaning that the novel comes off more as a bore than a thrill. 

Cunningham is to be congratulated for perhaps the most convenient plotting in men’s adventure history; Mark becomes aware of the PLO threat simply because some terrorists happen to be performing target practice near the Penetrator’s desert stronghold, and Mark goes out to investigate, gets in a firefight with them, and then follows along after them in “The Brown Beast” (ie his augmented camper), eventually running into a PLO plot to capture several western politicians and hold them as hostages! As the Church Lady would say, “How convenient!” 

But man, it’s more tiresome than anything. On the positive side, there’s at least some action, and Mark does kill again – but we get another reminder that this isn’t like the books of the decade before, as the Penetrator waits until the PLO thugs shoot at him in the desert before he shoots to kill. He takes out a few of them, then radios the Professor back at the Stronghold to tell him he’s off in pursuit; and as I read this, it occurred to me only now, all these years later, how unimportant Professor Haskins is to the series. Given the setup of the series, you’d think the guy was the M to Mark’s Bond, but that’s not the case at all; I’m going to assume that Professor Haskins was something Pinnacle came up with for the series, back when they conceived it, but the two series writers did nothing to flesh out the character. 

I developed an almost compulsive need to see Terrorist Torment as a spoof of the Gold Eagle books; otherwise there was nothing to keep me reading the book. But still, Mark is very much in superhero mode this time; he just follows after the terrorists, figures out that they have a camp deep in the Nevada woods, and goes about the “simple task” of infiltrating their base and setting off C4 explosives. I mean, there’s nothing to it! 

The Brown Beast hasn’t factored in the series for many a volume, but Mark uses it this time throughout, taking guns from the vast arsenal he has hidden within it. But he does make tracking and taking down terrorists seem very easy; all it requires is trekking through the woods, knifing one of the terrorists in the back and taking his uniform, and then approaching the terrorist base and saying “Speak the English!” when you come across any other terrorists. I was reminded of that great scene in Team America where the main puppet went undercover as a terrorist. 

That said, Mark does get captured at one point, and is put in the most grim situation I think he’s ever faced in the series; they cut off his pants and tie a string around his scrotum, which a PLO thug uses to lead Mark around. Cunningham really lays it on with the misery Mark endures, often puking due to the intense pain. And yet he still manages to escape, courtesy a Jean Claude Van Damme-esque spinning back kick to the thug’s head – quite a feat for a guy with a rope tied around his balls. 

Things get even goofier when the PLO launches its assault and, off-page, captures a bunch of politicians. I forgot to mention, but the whole deal is that various western leaders are meeting in secret in Nevada to discuss alternatives to Middle East oil, and the PLO plans to capture them and hold them hostage, killing one leader per hour until their demands are met and Palestine is given to them. Among the captive world leaders is none other than Margaret Thatcher, who gets shot in the arm, no less (she doesn’t seem to mind much); she features in a short scene where Mark frees her and together they escape through the woods, Thatcher even taking up a .45 to help out the Penetrator. I should also mention that the US President is not at the meeting – and, given the few chapters in which he appears, he seems to be Ronald Reagan, though is never mentioned by name. 

Cunningham really tries the reader’s gullibility when Mark goes back to the secret PLO base to free the other captured leaders, and again goes undercover as an Arabic terrorist (“Speak the English, fool!”)…and somehow, apropos of nothing, deduces that the PLO will use two-man teams in the firing squad, so he comes up with the plan of putting blanks in the carbines that will be used for the executions! He even slips up to the captured leaders and whispers to them that he’s a friend and that they need to play dead when they’re shot by the firing squad! 

In this capacity Mark liberates the Canadian prime minister (who at the end of the novel asks the Penetrator to come up to Canada, to help out with a “big job,” presumably setting up a future Cunningham installment), and then things come to a head with another big attack on the place. But it’s all kind of listless, lacking the craziness one might wish for – the only memorable bit comes at the end, when Mark follows the escaping PLO “shariff,” who has a violent encounter with a mama Grizzly bear. After which the PLO boss clearly wants to die his own way, and one suspects this is foreshadowing of how The Penetrator series itself will end: 

One might notice that there are no women featured on the cover. But there are two hippie-type girls in the book, who appear for a total of five or six pages…long enough to enjoy some shenanigans with “the Penetrator!” Sure, it’s left off page, and it happens on the final page at that, but Mark midway through the book encounters a pair of twenty year-old gals in a “Volkswagen convertible” who give him a lift…and, after leaving a casino in Nevada at the very end of the book, Mark runs into them again! 

Sure, it’s ridiculous – as if the entire novel itself hasn’t been – but it is nice to see a little sleaze return to the series; the girls don’t have money to stay anywhere that night, so Mark takes them in, and soon enough he can tell they’re nervous about the sole little bed in the camper, and before you know it the girls are talking about a “three way” and pulling off their tops, revealing their “full breasts” for the Penetrator’s viewing pleasure. But then there’s a two line break of white space, after which Cunningham picks up the narrative a week later, letting us know how satisfied the Penetrator is after a week in the camper along Lake Tahoe with the two girls! 

Overall, Terrorist Torment was not a very good installment of The Penetrator, notable only for the “balls on a rope” bit and the “bonkers” finale with the two girls (lame pun alert). Oh, and we also got a return of AVA, Mark’s dart gun – which, for the first time in forever, is used to kill people in this one, instead of just knocking them out.

The Penetrator #45: Quaking Terror

The Penetrator #45: Quaking Terror, by Lionel Derrick

February, 1982  Pinnacle Books

Boy, we’re getting into the homestretch of The Penetrator, aren’t we? At this point there are only a few instalments left until #53, the series finale. And I’m happy to say that Mark Roberts continues to show a new investment in the series, as Quaking Terror is for the most part a bunch of goofy fun, Roberts doling out juicy gore and explicit sex with aplomb – meaning there is none of the half-assedry of the past twenty-some (or more!) volumes. 

I kind of hoped it would be the case when I saw the cover (credited to George Wilson on the copyright page), and I’m happy to report that Quaking Terror is indeed Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin versus a vampire! Not just any vampire, either, but Count Dracula! Granted, Roberts doesn’t go all the way with the setup, but it’s evident that he wanted to. Throughout the book he walks a thin line that the novel’s villain is either Dracula or just some nutjob Eastern European named Magarac who merely thinks he’s Dracula. Otherwise the horror-action hybrid you might be hoping for doesn’t really exist in the actual novel, as Mark Hardin spends the majority of the 200 pages gunning down technicians and guards who work for the would-be vampire. That said, Quaking Terror does at least end with a chainsaw-vs-chainsaw showdown between the Penetrator and Count Dracula! 

There’s also some of Roberts’s typical continuity, as one of Magarac’s men worked on the vibrating “super gun” that Mark destroyed way back in #21: The Supergun Mission. This is what Magarac-Dracula is using to set off volcanoes around the United States, in order to get a ransom from the government. Roberts ties into the then-recent Mount St. Helens eruption, implying that Magarac was behind it, and is now looking to set off more volcanoes. Given that there are limited areas where Magarac can carry out this plan, the entirety of Quaking Terror occurs in Washington state. 

Speaking of topical references, Mark Roberts even finds the opportunity to mention Mork & Mindy; Magarac breaks over the airwaves of the United States just as “Mork had climbed into his Orkan egg.” This line actually took me back; for no reason whatsoever, it made me remember a Mork & Mindy toy some kid in elementary school had at the time (I would’ve been seven years old when this book was published), and I really wanted one of my own, but I never got one. It was this cool little Mork action figure that came with an egg, and I’d completely forgotten about it over the past four friggin’ decades, until I read this line in Quaking Terror. I guess I must’ve really wanted the damn thing, as here I am 50 years old and I still remember it – well anyway, here is the toy. 

Continuing on, Magarac breaks over the TV airwaves to make his threat – sort of how Max Headroom hijacked signals a few years later – and this causes panic across the US. In particular the Mafia gets involved, putting together a hit squad to take out Magarac, becase he’s infringing on their territory. Or something. It’s reasons like this that leads me to conclude that Roberts wanted to do a straight horror-action hybrid, but felt straitjacketed by the conventions of the series. So instead of vampires, the Penetrator fights mobsters and henchmen, and Magarac stays off-page for the majority of the text. 

This is unfortunate, as Roberts really builds him up in the opening. For one, he looks more like Nosferatu than Dracula; Wilson’s cover art is great, but Roberts actually describes Magarac as being “egg-bald [with a] long, lobey head and over-large ears, all flour paste white so that the huge, smoke-gray eyes and nearly lipless gash of a mouth made stygian holes in a skeleton mask.” Ten points for the creation of the word “lobey,” by the way. Magarac also has a dwarf “familiar” named Koslov, who prepares Magarac’s victims – usually employees who have failed him in some way – for a “life bath.” Meaning, their veins are opened and Magarac does something with the blood, though it’s never outright stated if he drinks it. But boy, Mark Roberts ultimately drops all of this in the course of the novel; hell, the dwarf doesn’t even appear again, and there’s no part where Mark Hardin kicks him or anything. I mean, and spoiler alert, but Koslov the dwarf familiar is dead when the Penetrator comes upon him, at the very end of the novel! 

Mark Hardin doesn’t appear in the book until page 28. Roberts spends the preceding pages in exposition overload; we have an overlong bit where a scientist goes on and on about volcanoes and what sets them off and etc…and then, humorously, the scientist is killed off like a page later. But this guy was friends with Professor Haskins, ie the Penetrator’s mentor, or whatever the Professor is to the Penetrator. I mean, it’s not like he’s the M to Mark’s Bond. He doesn’t give Mark orders, or do much else. Well anyway, who cares; the series is almost over, anyway. 

So Mark heads to smalltown, Washington (he does not visit Seattle in the entirety of the book), Roberts of course taking the opportunity to engage in some of his flying fiction as he tells us about Mark’s plane and his flight. One thing to note though is that Mark comes fully stocked this time; in the course of Quaking Terror he uses a riot shotgun, a Mac-10 submachine gun (referred to as an “Ingram M-10”), various pistols, and even once again he uses Ava, his dart gun – with both the knockout pellets and the “instant kill” pellets. So again, the ferocity has somewhat returned to The Penetrator, and Mark avidly kills the majority of his opponents, instead of knocking them out like he was doing for a long, tepid stretch of the seeries. 

This is displayed posthaste, as Mark when he first appears in the text gets in a big gunfight with some of Magarac’s men around the base of a volcano in Washington. Mark guns them down and then heads into a small town on his plane, where he soon hooks up with a small-breasted, “raven-haired” beauty named Carrie who waitresses at a local bar…but is also a college student who is studying the psychological aspects of vampires. Magarac has been seen in the vicinity, and Mark looks to Carrie for info on vampires…cue even more page-filling exposition, as Carrie goes on and on about historical “vampire” cases. 

Here is where we learn of all the mysterious disappearances in the area, with blood-drained bodies showing up, and Mark will spend the time wondering if Magarac is really a vampire and if he’s really been drinking the blood of his victims. Meanwhile Mark gets it on with Carrie, though Roberts does not go for the full-bore exploitation as he would in the later Soldier For Hire. Or, for that matter, as he did in some of the earlier volumes of The Penetrator. But we do get a winner of a line when Carrie strokes Mark’s “pendulous, rising maleness…to fullness.” Sadly though Roberts denies us any similarly-goofy sleaze in the actual sex scene, with Mark castely “turning out the light” before he gets busy with the gal. 

Roberts does deliver a fair bit of action throughout. Mark not only blows away scads of technicians and thugs who work for Magarac, but he also takes on the Mafia. This is courtesy Lucky Lou Battaglia, a gunner from Chicago who has been hired to wipe out Magarac, but instead finds himself running afoul of the Penetrator himself. As ever Mark makes short work of these goons, to the point that you figure if the Penetrator swapped places with The Executioner, the Mafia would be finished off in a few volumes. Roberts injects a fair bit of gore into the tale, though as ever he it as if he’s consulted a copy of Grey’s Anatomy: 

For the most part, Mark Hardin spends the majority of the novel going around Washington, from one Magarac location to another, and shooting up his men – or shooting up the mobsters who are supposedly looking for Magarac. There’s a lot of repetition in the narrative, too; Carrie is abduced by the mobsters midway through the novel, and Mark rescues her humorously fast. But then, Carrie is abducted again later in the book! There’s also a page-filling bit where Mark has to quell a rebellion among the American Indians in town, who feel they are getting blamed for the earthquakes or somesuch. Honestly this part seemed grafted on. 

Which again makes it a shame that so little time is spent with Magarac himself. It isn’t until the very end of the novel that Mark launches an assault on the villain and the two come face-to-face…or perhaps that should be chainsaw-to-chainsaw. Apropos of nothing, Magarac grabs one up when Mark is chasing him, and Mark picks up one of his own…it’s pretty wild, even if it’s just a goofy way for Mark Roberts to establish that a tree stump is conveniently chainsawed into a handy stake! 

Overall, Quaking Terror is pretty entertaining, and it’s nice to see the Penetrator acting like his old self. But it’s a shame the “vampire” stuff isn’t more dwelt upon, so either Mark Roberts didn’t think he could make it work, or perhaps he didn’t get buy-in from series editor Andy Ettinger.

The Penetrator #44: Deep Cover Blast-Off

The Penetrator #44: Deep Cover Blast-Off, by Lionel Derrick

December, 1981  Pinnacle Books

Man, how have I gone over a year without reading a volume of The Penetrator? For a while there I was reading a few books a year. Well anyway, at this point we are in the homestretch, with less than ten installments to go in the series. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been reading The Penetrator for 14 years now; it’s like it has become a part of my life at this point. 

Fortunately, the series refresh seen in the previous volume continues with this one; Chet Cunningham seems to come out of the doldrums that he was in for the past, oh, I don’t know, 15 or so volumes. Maybe series editor Andy Ettinger told Cunningham and series co-author Mark Roberts to get their shit together. To be sure, Deep Cover Blast-Off is not a return to the violent form of early Cunningham entries like #4: Hijacking Manhattan and #12: Bloody Boston, but at least Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin kills a bunch of bad guys this time, instead of just knocking them out like some TV detective. He also lives up to his name, uh, “penetrating” not just one but two sexy babes in the short course of the novel, though for the most part Cunningham leaves the sexual material off-page. I’ve often thought of doing the opposite of Bowdlerizing, ie adding explicit sex and violence to books. 

Curiously, Cunningham in this one seems to recreate Joanna Tabler, Mark’s casual girlfriend of earlier volumes (and a character Cunningham introduced to the series). Joanna was a tough but beautiful federal agent…and in Deep Cover Blast-Off, Cunningham introduces another tough but beautiful federal agent who becomes involved with Mark Hardin. This one’s named Malona and she’s an Intelligence officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which we’re informed is Canada’s version of the FBI. Also curiously, Cunningham never once refers to Joanna Tabler in the course of this book – other than vague mentions of “women” who have suffered for becoming involved with Mark – but it’s funny because Malona is pretty much the same character, only she’s Canadian and she’s a brunette. 

But then, Mark suffers another female loss early in the book. Up in Windsor, Ontario to investigate the murder of an old ‘Nam pal who went on to work for the CIA, Mark becomes involved with a hotstuff waitress named Beda. She’s soon caught and suffers the ultimate price for being with Mark, but Mark spends about a hot second mourning her…and then Malona is literally introduced a few pages later. Cunningham clearly has his tongue in cheek, with the bonus that Mark takes the first girl’s death in stride and is promptly checking out Malona. But as I’ve already mentioned Cunningham for the most part ends the scene when the hanky-panky gets started, and in fact doesn’t even dwell much upon the ample charms of either Beda or Malona. 

A funny thing about Deep Cover Blast-Off is that Mark Hardin heads to Canada to research the death of an old ‘Nam pal…but spends more of his time investigating the death of some other guy. It turns out that three CIA agents have been killed while investigating affairs in Canada, Mark’s ‘Nam buddy being the most recent. Humorously, the Agency isn’t much concerned over the deaths, chalking them off as random murders or somesuch, so it’s up to The Penetrator to do his own investigation. 

Curiously, despite this being the 44th volume of the series, we get the usual brief rundown and recap of who Mark Hardin is and some of his past exploits. We even get that recurring note of how his voice lacks a regional accent; this time Cunningham humorously refers to Mark’s accent as “CBS neutral.” Man, if only CBS was neutral! But another curious thing is the stuff Cunningham forgets. For example, there’s a part where Mark uses this new concoction of Professor Haskins to knock someone out without harming them or killing them…which is weird, given that this is what Mark previously used his dart gun “Ava” for. But Ava seems to have been written out of the series, and I’m not sure the last time the Penetrator used it. 

Cunningham delivers some fun stuff this time around, as if he’s finally invested in the series again. Most notably is a bit early on where a lead takes Mark to a gay bar (“There wasn’t a woman in the place”), one that’s filled with “swivel-hipped males.” Raise your hand if you remember when Mark, in an earlier Chet Cunningham offering, once posed as “the Pierre?” But Cunningham doesn’t do much with this scene, other than Mark acting incredily aggressive toward the patrons (“Which of you queers here pulled the trigger?”), and for the most part it’s all just setup for an action scene, as Mark finds out the owner of the place is somehow involved with the murders. That said, the chapter is titled, “Mark Three, Gays Zero.” 

Another returning gimmick from earlier novels is that Mark gets hurt in the ensuing action; he’s shot, but manages to get away, and later hooks up with the busty waittress he literally said only a few words to, earlier in the day. This would be Beda, who gamely takes Mark in and nurses him to health, with the expected shenanigans resulting: “[Mark]…kissed her pulsating breasts.” Man, she must be in the X-Men or something! “I shall unleash my pulsating breasts!” But as mentioned (frequently, now), Cunningham leaves the actual sordid details off-page. Mark’s a slow learner, though, as sure enough Beda is captured by the bad guys the very next morning, suffering fatally for it, but Cunningham spends more time detailing how Mark escapes the police once he has dealt with Beda’s captors. 

And like a few pages later Mark is already salivating over hotstuff Malona Mitchell, RCMP Intelligence. Cunningham has the two get down to it posthaste, with a lot of saucy banter between then but again fading to black during the actual sleaze. Malona becomes Mark’s companion for the rest of the novel, under the impression that he works for the CIA. The RCMP also suspects something is up with these agent murders…and meanwhile we readers know it’s the Russians, in particular a deep-cover agent named Ustinova, who was implanted in Canada back in the 1960s to research germ warfare and was gradually forgotten by his superiors in Russia. Now Ustinova has gone insane and plans to carry out an attack on DC; to this end he sends out his sadistic thug, Turgun, to dispatch anyone who gets in his way. 

Action is more frequent than previous volumes, and again Mark Hardin once again kills most of his opponents, rather than just knocking them out. He’s also picked up a gift for very lame one-liners, like when he tells a guy, “Don’t be a nerd.” This might be the earliest usage of that word I’ve encountered in a book…and no, the guy Mark calls a nerd isn’t a dweeb in Coke-bottle glasses, it’s a dude with a gun, so either “nerd” meant something else in 1981 or Chet Cunningham just didn’t know what it meant. 

Despite being a sadistic thug, not to mention the guy who killed Mark’s pal, Turgun is the victim of Mark’s “kill-free” takedown: a concoction of tear gas and ether made by the Professor. Curiously though, not much is done with this concoction despite much build up. And besides, Mark does eventually deal with Turgun…in a sequence that seems to come out of the Penetrator of old. Vowing to get brutal justice for his slain pal, Mark uses a tractor’s manure spreader to mete out Turgun’s comeuppance, though Cunningham doesn’t get as gory as he could in the sequence. 

The finale of Deep Cover Blast-Off further demonstrates the détente of the early ‘80s, as Mark takes down Ustinova’s missile-firing silo with…a group of KGB agents. There is a friendly rapport between the group and the reader can tell much has changed in the world since the series started in the early ‘70s. And the novel ends on this sequence, with a quick capoff noting that Malona has gone on a fishing trip with Mark…which, curiously, was the same thing the never-mentioned Joanna Tabler used to do. So, one wonders if Malona will return in future Penetrator installments.

The Penetrator #43: Rampage In Rio

The Penetrator #43: Rampage In Rio, by Lionel Derrick

October, 1981  Pinnacle Books

Clearly my criticisms of recent volumes of The Penetrator have caused a blip in the time-space continnuum and gotten back to series co-author Mark Roberts. For there could be no other reason to explain the sudden uptick in quality here in Rampage In Rio. It hasn’t been since the 20s of the series that we’ve seen such violence and even, believe it or not, a little sex – nothing too risque, but we certainly get some of that goofy Roberts purple prose. 

In fact, Rampage In Rio is almost a prefigure of Roberts’s post-Penetrator series Soldier For Hire. In particular it predicts the bonkers finale of that series, Jakarta Coup, complete with bizarre sex talk (below), a lusty babe who turns out to be a jackbooted villainness, random bouts of liberal bashing, and an action vibe that’s more akin to military fiction than the lone wolf vibe more typical of men’s adventure. The only caveat is, while Rampage In Rio has all those elements, they aren’t nearly as exploited as they would be in Jakarta Coup. 

Oh and first of all, the cover art for The Penetrator is now credited to Hector Garrido, aka the guy who a decade earlier did the covers for The Baroness. Somehow Garrido has turned Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin into a South American gangster on the cover, complete with a Panama Jack sort of hat. The only problem is, Mark (as Roberts refers to him) actually dyes his hair blond in the novel, even his eyebrows, given that he goes undercover in Brazil as a German expatriate. Otherwise Garrido gets the other details correct: there are headhunters, for example, and also Nazis, though to be sure they aren’t in full WWII uniforms. 

Oh and another note – as we’ll recall, the previous volume concluded with Mark experiencing a terrible personal loss. (Spoiler alert: It was the death of his sometimes-girlfriend Joanna Tabler.) But given that the preceding book was by series co-author Chet Cunningham, this “terrible personal loss” is barely even a factor in Rampage In Rio, only mentioned twice in the narrative, and in passing at that. It’s my assumption that the series editor might have amended this material into Mark Roberts’s manuscript. In particular, there’s a part where Mark is about to get busy, and here we have the first of the two egregious mentions of the preceding book’s climactic loss…after which Mark gets on with getting it on, and no more is mentioned of the loss until toward the very end of the novel. 

In fact when we meet Mark at novel’s beginning, he’s just sort of puttering around in his airplane (naturally, for a Mark Roberts installment) and “looking for a new mission.” He’s not upset about anything or desolate after his loss or whatever; just the Penetrator looking for a new job to, uh, penetrate. Meanwhile we readers have already underwent a somewhat brutal opening sequence in which people – among them children – have been kidnapped by a group of neo-Nazis. One of the captives is 15 year-old Tina Rock, an “incredibly successful country-rock star from Kansas.” Speaking of children, later in Rampage In Rio Roberts goes into what I consider too dark a tone for a men’s adventure novel, with kids getting gunned down and massacred by the Nazis. 

But initially these kids are captured to be held down in the green hell of Brazil for ransom, the neo-Nazis looking for money to further their movement. They have a base in the middle of the Brazilian jungle, all of them expat Germans or Germans who grew up in Brazil (their parents having gone there after the war). Leading them is Herman Braunn, who claims to be the grandson of none other than Hitler himself. He’s more of a loser than the sadist you might expect; Roberts fills the pages with a lot of internal politicking in the neo-Nazi camp, with one faction aligned against Braunn – and besides, these Nazis are a little more “well behaved” than you might expect. In one of those aforementioned “too dark” sequences a fat Nazi molests one of the captured children (off-page, I should note)…and for this affrontery the other Nazis have him whipped as punishment. 

One notable thing here is that Professor Haskins has a more active role than I can recall in any previous volume. Mark frequently heads back to the Stronghold to discuss the situation with the Professor, and also gets info from him on a frequent basis. Professor Haskins this time helps Mark figure out that these kidnappings seem to all be the work of one group, and ultimately they conclude it’s a bunch of Nazi-types operating out of Brazil. Before that though we have a lot more action, as Mark heads to Los Angeles and manages to prevent a few kidnappings while putting the pieces together. Here also we get the first taste of “bleeding-heart liberal” bashing, as after one firefight Mark looms in the distance and listens to a couple cops complain about liberals. As egregious as it can get, but still pretty funny, and an indication of the sort of thing Roberts would do later in Soldier For Hire. 

But the most notable thing in Rampage In Rio is that Mark Roberts dangles a plot idea I have long wondered about: a potential team-up of the Pinnacle men’s adventure heroes. In the first quarter of the novel Mark, down in Brazil, comes upon a rack of English-language books in a store: 

Unfortunately though, a team-up of The Penetrator and The Death Merchant never happened. In today’s era, with team-up superhero movies and plots that hinge on multiverses with multiple versions of the same character and all that, such a team-up would seem like a natural idea. But for whatever reason it never occurred to the powers at be at Pinnacle. Or maybe it was just a matter of figuring out who would write the books – I mean if The Penetrator and The Death Merchant were together in one book, would Mark Roberts write it? Or would Joseph Rosenberger? This also gets down to a rights issues – Rosenberger owned his character (which is why he was later able to move the series over to Dell), whereas Roberts was a writer for hire. So hell, maybe a team-up did occur to someone at Pinnacle, but the idea was untenable. At any rate it was cool to see Mark even consider the idea here. 

Also Roberts indulges in even more in-jokery with the Six-Gun Samurai mention; that was another series Roberts was writing at the time. I’ve never read this series myself but have been aware of it since I was a kid. I remember my brother picked up a copy of the first volume when it was brand new on the bookstore shelves – he’s 7 years older than me so he would’ve been 14 at the time. Not sure if he ever read it but I do recall flipping through the book myself over the years, but never reading it. Anyway I like this kind of in-jokery Roberts would do in his series books. 

But speaking of how the Death Merchant team-up is dangled but never happens, Roberts also makes unexploited forays into science fiction this time. There’s a part where Mark meets an old Nazi who worked in the camps in human experimentation, and this guy hints that cloning was a real thing that the Nazis figured out. But Roberts doesn’t go more in this sci-fi direction. He also doesn’t, as mentioned, much exploit the sexual material in Rampage In Rio. Per tradition, Mark does manage to pick up a babe while on the job, in this case an expat German blonde named Gretchen who, of course, propositions Mark while he sits alone in a bar. When they hit the inevitable sack, Roberts surprisingly leaves it off page. He has them go at it again shortly after, where Gretchen delivers dialog that’s almost a prefigure of the infamous “toss my cookies” line in Jakarta Coup: 

Speaking of goofy phrases, if I didn’t know any better I’d suspect Rampage In Rio is where David Alexander took a lot of inspiration for his later Phoenix series – not in the content, but in the alliterative put-downs Roberts uses for his Nazi villains. “The Nazi nerd crumpled like a sack of soft turds,” is probably my favorite of the bunch, but there are a lot more besides: “soiled superman,” or a part where Mark “pulp[s]” a Nazi’s “testicles and depriving the world of a horde of Hitlerian horrors.” However as mentioned this fun gory pulp is unfortunately sullied with un-fun gory pulp…like the parts where a couple innocent kids are gunned down by those “soiled supermen.” Actually Roberts writes so quickly he overlooks his own plot threads; there’s a part late in the book where Mark befriends a young American orphan in the jungle, and Mark is reminded of his own orphan childhood, and there’s almost the dangling potential here that Mark himself might take this kid home and raise him. But the kid soon disappears from the narrative, never mentioned again. 

Another element Roberts doesn’t exploit as much is an appearance of that favorite villainness-type of mine: the Nazi She-Devil. In the final pages a female character is outed as a jackboot-wearing Nazi gal, complete with uniform, but Roberts mostly keeps her off-page after this revelation. Indeed, her comeuppance is unsatisfactorily rendered, with Mark sniping at his foes from a distance. Otherwise the potential of this Nazi She-Devil is not much exploited. I mean, she’s no Helga Haas. 

Overall though Rampage In Rio is a fine return to form for The Penetrator. For once Mark Hardin actually kills his opponents instead of just knocking them out with Ava the dart gun (which doesn’t appear this time), and Roberts injects some of the goofy fun that has been missing in the past several volumes. Hopefully this will continue for the remainder of the series.

The Penetrator #42: Inca Gold Hijack

 
The Penetrator #42: Inca Gold Hijack, by Lionel Derrick

June, 1981  Pinnacle Books

Chet Cunningham changes up The Penetrator with a series that might cause repercussions in future volumes, but probably won’t. I mean I’m sure series co-writer Mark Roberts won’t bother playing out on any of the developments. But long story short, Inca Gold Hijack features Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin suffering his greatest loss yet in the series – his greatest loss since his girlfriend’s murder, which happened before the first volume even took place. 

After so many, many lackluster volumes, Cunningham slightly gets back to the lurid vibe of the earliest volumes; this “Mark” (as both authors refer to their hero) is still not the same unhinged lunatic who would torture and kill hapless thugs in the earliest (and best!) volumes of the series, but at least he does blow a few bad guys away this time instead of just knocking them out and handcuffing them. (But then, he does that here, too.) Otherwise Inca Gold Hijack, with its trucking plotline, recalls a previous Cunningham joint, #20: The Radiation Hit (and goofily enough Mark uses this very name, “The Radiation Hit,” when recalling the events). 

The novel opens with what seems to be the promise of earlier, more action-focused installments: Mark is already on the job, hovering in a helicopter near Chicago and waging an assault on some trucking hijackers. Mark kills a few, even blowing one of them up with a grenade; Cunningham notes the “gore” in the cabin, which is probably the most violent instance in this series in I don’t know how long. But after that Inca Gold Hijack settles down into the PG vibe of the past twenty or thirty volumes, with Mark Hardin acting more like a TV protagonist of the day, chasing leads and going out of his way not to kill anyone unless absolutely necessary. 

The nice cover is a bit misleading; while there is an attractive “dusky-skinned” brunette in the novel, she and Mark never actually meet face to face. (Or, uh, face to cheek, as per the cover.) Instead, it is Joanna Tabler, that platinum blonde dish of a Federal agent who has appeared in several previous installments (the majority of them Cunningham’s) who factors into the novel’s steamy situations. And yes, Cunningham does finally sleaze things up just a little; when Mark and Joanna rendevous in Chicago, Joanna being in the city on assignment and calling up Mark’s Stronghold HQ just in case Mark too happens to be in Chicago(!?), things get a bit saucy as Cunningham doles out sleaze unseen since those earliest volumes: “Mark kissed her marvelous mounds,” and the like. Of course, when the actual tomfoolery begins, Cunningham cuts the scene. 

Mark and Joanna have not seen each other in “sixteen months;” this phrase is used so often when Joanna first appears that it gets to be humorous. This would be a reference to the previous Cunningam yarn #34: Death Ray Terror, which is also called by that name by the characters themselves. But whereas the two had a casual affair in those earlier volumes, spending vacation together and whatnot, this time Cunningham lays it on thick. Or, rather, Joanna does; within moments of their first boink Joanna’s getting misty-eyed and talking about her “silly, womanish, 1940s dream” of marrying Mark, living in some cottage somewhere, and raising a bunch of kids. Through the rest of the novel Joanna will stay safely in a hotel room, waiting for Mark to come home that night, so they can hit the sack again and she can start crying with worry over him and dreaming the impossible dream of them being together happily ever after, etc, etc. 

Folks, you don’t need a master’s degree in men’s adventure to guess that something might happen to Joanna Tabler in this installment. 

This “Joanna” subplot turns out to be the most memorable thing about Inca Gold Hijack. The main plot itself is threadbare; some Incan gold, you might guess from the title, has been hijacked…by truckers! So Mark Hardin follows leads and suspects that a trucker by the name of Big Red, who runs his own operation, was probably behind the heist, working with the Mafia. It’s very heavy on the early ‘80s redneck tip with Mark going undercover and getting a job as a trucker in Big Red’s operation and hanging around the pool hall and stuff. Meanwhile Joanna, also undercover, gets a job on the clerical staff. 

Action is sporadic and bloodless. There’s some fun stuff which, again, recalls the unbridled fun of the earliest volumes. Like when Mark gets a lead on someone who was involved with the heist, and it turns out to be a gay guy who was blackmailed into it – thanks to “homosexual intercourse pictures” (as Mark refers to them) which were secretly taken of the guy in action and used as leverage to get him in on the heist. An interesting note here is that Mark shows absolutely no judgment of the guy being gay, which must have seemed been pretty novel in 1981. That said, Mark does push the poor guy’s face into a puddle of his own vomit, but that’s just to put some fear into him so he’ll talk, not because he’s gay or anything. 

Cunningham also ties in to some earlier novels and subplots. A few past capers – ones with Joanna – are mentioned, and also there’s a goofy part where Yolanda, the dusky-skinned babe who is in charge of the Incan gold, requests The Penetrator’s help in the paper, at the behest of reporters. When Mark responds to the note in the newspaper, he has to pass a “screening” test from a long-time “Penetrator fan” who asks Mark all kinds of questions that only the real Penetrator would know. That said, the stuff with Yolanda is really just framework to set the action in motion; I just remembered that she does indeed meet Mark, soon after this, but it’s only to talk – and besides soon leads into an action scene. But after that Yolanda slips out of the narrative. 

There’s also the recurring Cunningham penchant for a torture death-trap; midway through Mark is caught in the bad guys’s headquarters and finds himself in a special room from which there’s no escape, where the place literally turns into an oven. Mark uses C4, handily hidden on his ankle, to bust his way out, rendering himself deaf for twenty-four hours(!?) in the process. This is another recurring Penetrator schtick, with Mark getting badly injured. And guess who nurses him to health (while crying) before heading off to her undercover job at Big Red’s outfit “just one last time?” And who of friggin’ course is captured in the process? 

Cunningham again gets lurid with all this; poor Joanna is raped (off-page) by Big Red and four of his men, and then the real torture begins (off-page as well). But the finale is slow-going and it seems evident Cunningham was spinning his wheels (lame trucker-plot pun alert). First Mark captures Big Red, then the two drive around with Big Red running his mouth, taking Mark to different places where he says he’s stashed Joanna, then finally they get to the real place where Joanna is hidden…and only then does Big Red try to run away so he and Mark can get in an extended chase and fight scene. It’s all muddled and lame, but the impact of what happens to Joanna isn’t lessened – the only thing that does lessen it is the likelihood that it will never be mentioned again, except perhaps in passing. And only in a Chet Cunningham installment. 

The justice dealt to Big Red is also suitable and again a reminder of the hard-hearted Penetrator of the earliest volumes…except that this time he keeps reminding himself to shut out his thoughts while Big Red screams for it all to stop. Last we see Mark Hardin, he’s bereft and just wanting to take a cab ride to nowhere, as “nothing will ever be the same” for him now. But then, in eleven volumes Mark himself will be in for the big finale.

The Penetrator #41: Hell’s Hostages

The Penetrator #41: Hell’s Hostages, by Lionel Derrick

March, 1981  Pinnacle Books

The only notable thing about this volume of The Penetrator is that it seems to be an installment of an entirely different series. In fact it’s almost as if Mark Roberts has used Hell’s Hostages as a trial run for his later series The Liberty Corps. Like the books in that series, this volume of The Penetrator is more a piece of military fiction, with Mark Hardin acting in the role of a field commander instead of a lone wolf crime-buster. 

There are some other changes to the series. For one, we have a slightly revamped cover design, which would last until the series end a few years later. Cover art is credited to George Wilson. The customary “Prologue” which has appeared in the previous volumes, detailing the origins of Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin, is gone. In fact, there are none of the typical Penetrator trappings this time: no opening in the Stronghold, no appearances of Professor Haskins or David Red Eagle. When we meet Mark he’s already on the field in Persis, an “independent sheikhdom” in the Middle East, commanding an assault squad. 

Roberts does tie back to previous volumes with some of the men in Mark’s outfit being returning characters: there’s Jim Jaffe, a “black mercenary” who appeared in #33: Satellite Slaughter, and also Uchi Takayama, who helped Mark fight Preacher Mann in #38: Hawaiian Trackdown. Curiously, that installment was by Chet Cunningham, meaning that Roberts was at least familiar with the books written by the other “Lionel Derrick.” These guys are all part of a larger force put together by a ‘Nam Special Forces badass named Toro Baldwin; in a flashback we learn that Toro (a nickname he got in the war, naturally) recently called together various men who served under him in ‘Nam to see if they’d be willing to take part in a mercenary operation and free some captured Americans in Persis. 

Very clearly rankled over the contemporary Iranian hostage crisis, Mark Roberts condems US foreign policy in the opening section, as expected raking the “weak-hearted liberals” over the coals. Toro gives evidence of how the only way to deal with hostage-takers, either foreign or domestic, is to go in with guns blazing. This he intends to do for the latest batch of Americans taken on Middle Eastern soil, employees of a corporation Baldwin now handles security for. Mark, we’re informed, was never in Special Forces, but did handle a job or two on the side for Toro in ‘Nam, hence Mark too has been summoned – Toro’s meeting with his potential soldiers rendered in a flashback sequence which occurs after the opening action scene. 

I forgot to mention! Roberts dedicates Hell’s Hostages to none other than Joseph Rosenberger: 

So in addition to William Crawford, that’s another Pinnacle writer we now know Mark Roberts was friends with. And also I love that “patriot” description of Rosenberger (“extremist” in modern parlance, btw), because from the get-go I realized that not only was Hell’s Hostages dedicated to Rosenberger, but it was also written like Rosenberger. In short, this could just as easily be an installment of Death Merchant, with Camellion on foreign soil and in charge of the latest group of redshirts. There’s even a “pig farmer” presence (though Roberts doesn’t use that phrase), with the Soviets funding the Islamic radicals who have taken the Americans hostage. The only difference is that Mark bangs the Soviet babe in charge. Otherwise even the action scenes are the same, with Mark even busting out martial arts moves while blasting away with a machine gun in total Richard Camellion fashion: 

The only problem is, it’s not The Penetrator, and it’s even more indication of how bored Roberts was with the series at this point. Nothing that gave this series its quirks is present in Hell’s Hostages. Mark’s entire point for being here is also brushed over….Toro Baldwin intimates that he suspects Mark might be the Penetrator, and also that Mark being on his force was a suggestion made by none other than Dan Griggs (ie the Fed that’s supposed to be tracking down the Penetrator but instead secretly assists him). But as we all know, the Penetrator generally operates in the US, yet here he is in the Middle East commanding various fire teams in attacks on enemy compounds. And the helluva it is, it’s boring – there’s none of the immediacy of typical men’s adventure action, going for that same pseudo-“military fiction” vibe of The Liberty Corps. 

Things are only salvaged by the presence of two women: Rosalyn Kramer, a “blonde, sloe-eyed beauty” who acts as Mark’s CIA contact in Persis, and Major Katrina Something-Or-Other (I was too lazy to write down her long Russian name), a hotstuff but “masculine” KGB babe in charge of the Persis guerrillas. Roberts gets kinda creepy-crawly pervy for the latter, serving up an arbitrary and explicit flashback detailing Katrina’s rape…at age 11. But on the more fun side of sleaze, Mark and Rosalyn get it on posthaste, in the first explicit sex scene in a Penetrator novel in forever: 

Like The Liberty Corps, a lot of the narrative is comprised of padding. Mark gets his own personal team together, part of the larger group Toro Baldwin runs, and trains them. There are periodic action scenes but for the most part Hell’s Hostages is a slow churn. Even more like that later series, there are even periodic cutovers to the various characters under Mark’s command, like this is suddenly a “team” series and not the lone wolf setup we’ve become accustomed to over the past 40 volumes. As I say, it’s as if we’re reading another series entirely. Things only pick up, again, when the female characters are concerned, as Mark is blindsided by a goofy reveal and soon finds himself a captive. This serves up a fun part where Major Katrina shows off Mark and the other captives for the world media – the US reporters of course left-wingers who clearly seem to be on Katrina’s side! 

But the finale just continues with that war fiction angle, with Mark and soldiers freeing the hostages at novel’s end – I mean literally, the entire 180 pages is just buildup to this one event. The only promising thing is that Major Katrina survives the tale and vows revenge on Mark. With only several volumes left in the series, we’ll see if she gets her chance. But anyway, Hell’s Hostages wasn’t very good, and one of my least favorite installments yet.

The Penetrator #40: Assassination Factor

The Penetrator #40: Assassination Factor, by Lionel Derrick

January, 1981  Pinnacle Books

Well folks this volume of The Penetrator is something else entirely…this is, I’m fairly sure, the only volume of the series yet in which hero Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin doesn’t get in a single fight. And he doesn’t even get laid! Poor Chet Cunningham must’ve been supremely weary of writing the series at this point; I mean, even his previous half-assed contributions, like #30: Computer Kill or #36: Deadly Silence, actually featured a little action, not to mention the death of the main villains…even if the villains did Mark the favor of killing themselves. Not so here; for once again Assassination Factor comes off like the novelization of a bland TV movie. 

In fact, Cunningham is so bored that he spends most of the novel writing about other characters. As far as I’m concerned, with these series novels the series protagonist should always be the primary character. But Cunningham here spends much more time with one-off characters, in particular a professional assassin named Butler (not to be confused with the other Butler) who is killing off famous people who use their platform to speak ill of the United States. (Boy would this guy have his work cut out for him today!) We see him in action at novel’s start, taking out by methodical (not to mention pages-consuming) means a variety of targets. He’s pretty diverse in that he hits anyone who bad-mouths the US, whether they be Liberal, Conservative, or even Independent, as demonstrated in his first kill, which really threw me for a loop. Check this out and see if a certain phrase jumps out at you:

“Make America Great Again” was a slogan originally used by Reagan in his 1980 campaign for president; Trump bought the rights to it in 2016 and obviously branded it more than Reagan ever did. But at the time Assassination Factor was published, this phrase would’ve resonated as Reagan’s, and initially I thought Cunningham was “taking the piss” (as the British say) out of series co-writer Mark Roberts, who as we all know was a pretty conservative guy. But as it turns out, Butler kills liberals as well as conservatives; as the novel progresses we see him take out a civil rights activist (where Cunningham doles out the dreaded n-word), a wealthy Iranian, and finally a Jane Fonda analogue, who presumably is the busty babe on George Bush’s cover…and yes, the “No nukes” stuff works into the plot. Anyone who denounces America on a public stage becomes Butler’s target. 

But as mentioned Cunningham is bored with it all. For example, Mark Hardin is fishing when we meet him, and then he hears about this assassination early in the book. He heads back to the Stronghold and, playing a hunch, starts making a list of all the recent deaths of notables, and gradually comes to the conclusion that it’s the work of a hitman who is making the kills seem like freak accidents or whatever. And folks, Mark spends the first 76 pages investigating at the Stronghold! Literally sitting at a desk and looking at computer printouts and making lists! It all gave me bad flashbacks to when the similarly-“badass” hero spent nearly the entire novel pecking away at a computer keyboard in Stand Your Ground. 

On the plus side, this is by far the most the Stronghold has ever featured in a Penetrator novel. While it isn’t much brought to life, it was interesting to see Mark Hardin there so long, as generally we get but a page or two at his “home base” before he heads off on his latest mission. Curiously though the Stronghold is explained to us again, how it’s built on an old Borax mine and how the Professor built it and all this other setup stuff that you think wouldn’t be necessary in the 40th volume of the series. But again, poor Chet Cunningham is bored with The Penetrator and he’s doing his damndest to fill up the pages and meet his word count. He’s even got Mark calling up various contacts – including even Dan Griggs, the Justice Dept dude who is supposed to be finding and arresting the Penetrator – to ask if they have any info on these mysterious murders. 

Cunningham only proceeds to pile lameness on top of lameness. Intermittently in Assassination Factor we will encounter one Marshall Songer, a guy in his early 20s in Los Angeles who likes to go around…pretending to be the Penetrator. He’s got plastic blue arrowheads, a .45 he managed to acquire, and he blusters his way into shopping areas and whatnot to give people lessons on the danger of crime and etc. The cops nearly bust him at times and Marshall always gets away – there’s also a weird gimmick that he does magic tricks on the side – and Mark eventually finds out about it. We already know there are “Penetrator fan clubs” out there, and while Mark is okay with those, he’s concerned this imposter Penetrator, whoever he is, will get killed by the real Penetrator’s many enemies. 

Of course as it plays out, Mark eventually heads to LA, finally leaving the Stronghold (on page 76!) to scope out an Iranian whom he thinks will be the assassin’s next target. Mark will be proven correct, though he’s unable to catch or prevent the killer. Instead, more focus is placed on Mark coming across Marshall Songer during one of his “Penetrator” routines, and then tracking him back to his home and doing like a “scared straight” sort of thing, where he convinces the punk that he is in over his head. This sequence ends with Songer pretty certain that his mysterious visitor, who claims to be a reporter, is likely the real Penetrator. But luckily that’s all there is to this particular time-waster of a subplot. 

But man, that’s what The Penetrator has been reduced to by this 40th volume of the series: a guy who sits around and “investigates,” occasionally giving pep talks to wayward youth. And believe it or not, after meeting Songer he goes back to the Stronghold to investigate some more! Finally he figures that famous movie star-slash political activist Jane Marvel will likely be the assassin’s next target. Clearly a spoof of Jane Fonda, Marvel is a hotstuff brunette with “full breasts” (“thirty-nine inches,” we are specifically informed) who, when not making films, is known to get involved in the latest activist stuff. Currently she’s been denouncing various nuclear plants and silos, and folks you better believe that Cunningham wastes pages and pages on Jane protesting at not one but two events, her activist husband Larry Tollison (ie Tom Hayden) in tow. Her third husband, we’re informed, Cunningham slyly setting it up so we won’t be too shocked when Jane makes her inevitable pass at Mark. 

Curiously, Jane Fonda herself was mentioned in a previous Cunningham volume: #28: The Skyhigh Betrayers. This means that there is both a real Jane Fonda and a fake Jane Fonda in the world of The Penetrator. Jane Marvel, we’re informed, even watches movies on “the China Syndrome,” an unsubtle reference from Cunningham to Fonda’s real-life film of the same name. Furthering the similarities, Jane Marvel even went to ‘Nam during the war to protest, which ran her afoul of the servicemen there; later in the book, when Mark and Jane meet, the actress asks Mark why he’s trying to help her, given that he served in ‘Nam and thus should hate her guts as a traitor. Mark’s response is that, while he doesn’t agree with most of what Jane preaches, for this one instance they are aligned. Plus he’s a big fan of her movies! Even if she’s “an all-around extremist,” so far as Mark is concerned.

Mark gets into her confidence via goofy means. He scopes out Jane’s mansion, up in the richer area of Beverly Hills, and slips past her elaborate security system. There he rings the house phone and speaks to Jane on it, informing her that he’s waiting for her in the den! Mark manages to convince Jane and her husband that he’s certain an assassin is coming for her, and that he’s here to help. Soon enough he’s shadowing Jane on the studio lot, and prevents her “accidentally” being crushed by a sandbag that falls from the rafters or somesuch. But it’s clear at this point that there will be no action finale for Assassination Factor. Instead, the only time Mark fires his gun in the entire novel is while guarding Jane’s home that night, shooting at Butler’s shadow out in the woods. We get a retread of the very same thing the following night, but this time Mark manages to lure Butler into a trap and knocks him out, ties him up…and then tells Jane to call the cops! 

I mean he doesn’t kill the bastard or anything! Nor do we have a big confrontation between Mark and Butler…for that matter, Butler himself at this point is lost in the narrative, just a mysterious figure Mark’s trying to stop. You might imagine him as this buzzcutted humorless super-patriot, but Cunningham does absolutely nothing to bring him to life, nor to let us know what makes him tick. No, Mark just knocks him out, ties him up, and takes off – another assingment complete. And as mentioned he doesn’t even have the expected sleazy shenanigans with busty Jane Marvel; she plants a big kiss on him twice in the book, and at one point bluntly propositions him, but Mark Hardin can’t be bothered with such things. I mean, the lady’s married! The Penetrator has morals, folks! 

It’s all just so lame and stupid…you almost wonder if you’re reading a TJ Hooker novelization. Actually that’s an insult to TJ Hooker, plus I don’t think the show was even on the air yet. But you get my drift. Overall this one was very lame, as bad as Cunningham’s previous “worst installment ever,” #22: High Disaster.

The Penetrator #39: Cruise Into Chaos

The Penetrator #39: Cruise Into Chaos, by Lionel Derrick

November, 1980  Pinnacle Books

The back cover of this 39th installment of The Penetrator promises a tale in which Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin takes on a Mafia scheme involving a WWII U-Boat that preys on cruise lines and other ships, so it only makes sense that the story itself is more concerned with Mark first posing as a mobster, then getting in an extended survival sequence in the desert. The actual “U-Boat preying on cruise lines” material doesn’t even occur until the final chapters of the book. 

So then it’s more indication that Mark Roberts was bored with the series, but then he’s also clearly lost the bloodlust that drove his earliest installments. Once again “The Penetrator” comes off more like a TV detective or cop than he does the brutal revenger of early in the series. I mean, the bit with Mark impersonating a mobster. Mark corners the guy in Portland early in the book…and merely knocks him out, then gives him a drug dosage that will keep him under for several days. I mean what the hell happened to the Penetrator who would’ve blown the guy’s brains out with nary a concern? This puzzling change to the series – which is also reflected in the volumes written by Chet Cunningham – is to me the most interesting aspect of these later Penetrator novels. Were both authors just drawn to a kinder and gentler protagonist, or was someone at Pinnacle involved in the change? Or it could be the opposite – maybe the early, brutal Penetrator was a Pinnacle mandate, and the requirement waned as the series went on. 

Who knows or cares, as this point it’s very clear that The Penetrator was just a way for Roberts to indulge in his latest interests and get a steady paycheck for it. So this time he must’ve read something about U-Boats, and maybe planned to take a cruise, so decided to integrate both elements into the story. Oh, and maybe he’d also read about desert survival so thought he’d include that, too. But what I mean to say is, his heart doesn’t seem to be in it, but given that he’d written so many volumes at this point you can’t blame the guy. It’s just that these latter volumes make for poor entertainment when compared to the wild volumes of the earlier years. 

Anyway per usual we have the opening of Mark in the Stronghold, going about his usual daily activities and deciding he’ll look into this recent rash of piracy off the coast of Baja California. We’ve already seen the U-Boat in action in the opening, complete with a boarding party of pirates. They are a pretty vicious lot, wiping out some of their prey. Roberts delivers an effective opening in which he takes us into the perspectives of the various victims, among them a young woman taking her first cruise. Back to Mark in the Stronghold, who figures the Mafia is behind the action. An interesting element here is that Professor Haskins, formerly the guy who came up with missions for Mark, has almost been reduced to butler status, like the Penetrator’s version of Alfred. All he does is make drinks for Mark and act as a sounding board. 

Our hero heads off to Portland, where as mentioned he assumes the identity of a Mafia bigwig, one named Boots. Once again Roberts refers to previous volumes; one of the Portland thugs immediately pegs “Boots’ as the Penetrator, given that he stood face-to-face in front of him “a couple years ago” in Nebraska. This would be a reference to the Roberts-penned installment #17: Demented Empire. Mark bluffs his way out of it, but this sets off what will consume the first half of Cruise Into Chaos: Mark Hardin posing as a mobster and his cover constantly in danger of being blown. Speaking of being blown, Mark also spends the majority of the novel turning down a young woman’s pleas for sex: this would be young Massalina, daughter of the Portland don, with her “small, high-poised breasts.” Despite her seductive nature, not to mention her claims of sexual activity since she was 10 years old, Massalina is only 17, and Mark spends the entire novel kicking her out of his bed. 

So anyway “Boots” is like a U-Boat specialist or somesuch, and thus had been called in to Portland to help the Don figure out how to operate this U-Boat piracy thing better, so Mark does some manual-cramming to be able to bluff his way through training other mobsters. Roberts shoehorns in a lot of stuff he’s gleaned about captaining submarines and whatnot, just like he shoehorned in all the similar techincal stuff in #33: Satellite Slaughter. There’s only a bit of action here and there, usually due to various mobsters trying to prove “Boots” is really the Penetrator. For once Mark actually kills a couple people before the last few pages, as has been the common trend of the past several volumes. But despite which his identity is uncovered, leading to a thrilling bit where Mark’s able to escape the mob’s holding pen in Mexico and make his mistake. 

This seemingly-endless sequence is straight out of Gannon’s Vendetta, with Mark making his way across the unforgiving desert while trying to elude his pursuers. In fact, if I’m not mistaken a similar sequence occurred in a previous Penetrator novel. But it goes on and on, with Mark setting up traps for rabbits, finding some water, trying to turn the tables on his pursuers. At one point he gets hold of their helicopter and makes his escape, able to get back to the Stronghold to plan again. There then follows a random bit where Mark gets hold of a B-25 bomber and makes a bombing run over the mob’s Baja California base, blasting them to pieces but still unable to get the U-Boat itself. The most humorous part here is that Roberts has his hero flying a WWII bomber and blowing away the bad guys, but rushes right on to the next part as if not comprehending how big of a deal this is. Or more likely he just hurries through so more thoughtful readers won’t ask any questions. 

This finally leads to what the back cover promised; Mark becomes a passenger on a cruise through this passage of the sea, hoping it will be attacked by the U-Boat. And in these more lenient days he’s managed to bring along his entire arsenal in a carry-on crate: machine guns, pistols, even an M-79 grenade launcher. His brilliant way to bypass discovery is to tell the porter he’ll carry the crate himself! So Mark just lounges around and takes advantage of the various dinners as he waits for the U-Boat to hit. He figures he’s on the right ship when none other than Massalina shows up, propositioning him once again, even if he’s the Penetrator. And once again Mark turns her down. Why Massalina would be on a cruise ship about to be hit by her dad’s thugs is a question Roberts doesn’t ask, nor answer. But after this latest refusal Massalina tries to take out Mark herself, “accidentally” shooting at him with a shotgun for clay pigeon practice, then later tossing a fire extinguisher at him. 

The finale is cool if not suitably exploited for all its worth, a sort of proto-Die Hard at sea, with a heavily-armed Mark getting the better of the boarding gangsters. But even here the spectacular gore is toned down, and once again it’s a “kinder, gentler” Mark Hardin, who at times merely knocks out his opponents instead of blasting them to gory bits. However it does get fairly bloody when one of the gangsters, escaping on the U-Boat, is blown in half by Mark’s M-79, and his corpse prevents the hull from fully closing, thus making for a fatal dive for those aboard. Given that he’s already had his hero fly a WWII bomber earlier on, Roberts again says to hell with reality and has Mark merely toss his weapons overboard and talk his way out of custody – though he does let the cops know who he is before escaping. 

Another interesting thing about these later installments is the battle between Roberts and Cunningham over who Mark Hardin’s “real love” is. For Cunningham, it’s a character he created: Joanna Tabler, hotstuff Federal agent. For Roberts, it’s a character he created: Angie Dillon, widowed mother of twins. Both women are aware Mark Hardin is the Penetrator, and both are in love with him. Cruise Into Chaos closes with Mark making the random decision to head on over to Utah for some hot lovin’ with Angie. Given that Roberts penned the final volume of the series, I’m going to assume Angie is the woman he ended up with – and unfortunately for our hero, it was a permanent end.

The Penetrator #38: Hawaiian Trackdown

The Penetrator #38: Hawaiian Trackdown, by Lionel Derrick

October, 1980  Pinnacle Books

I love the cover of this installment of The Penetrator – take that, “Adult Books!” And humorously enough there is a sequence where Mark “Penetrator” Hardin assaults a series of adult bookstores; he doesn’t do it with a shotgun, but instead goes into them and rips up all the pedo magazines. For that’s what Mark is up against this time: I was hoping for a sleazy installment of the series, with Mark wading into the murky waters of porn flicks and whatnot, but instead the focus is on child exploitation. Fortunately Chet Cunningham isn’t nearly as exploitative of this topic as the somewhat-similar Ninja Master #7 is. 

We meet Mark as he’s pacing around the Stronghold, wondering what to do next. He gets wind of some recent pedo-ring busts in California, violent ones in which people involved with it have been murdered or found dead. In fact we see a few one-off charcters meet their grisly ends on account of their involvement with it, in particular one young guy who fell into it thanks to a honey trap who took him to an orgy which “introduced” a few kids into the mix, with the guy – drunk and high – being photographed as he was encouraged to engage with the kids! For this he’s being blackmailed, but at any rate his head is blown off like a few pages after he’s introduced, so really it’s just Cunningham filling pages instead of introducing a character that will have ramifications on the plot. 

Mark has to look up “pedophilia” in the dictionary – a sad reminder of when stuff like this wasn’t common knowledge. He is sickened by the very thought and decides to bust some heads. He flies to Sacramento – luckily there’s no “amateur aviation” stuff as there would be in a Mark Roberts installment – and hooks up with old pal Captain Kelly Patterson, last seen in #26: Mexican Brown, but I believe first introduced in #2: Blood On The Strip (which happened to be Cunningham’s first novel in the series). Here Mark muses that he first met Kelly “more years ago” than he’d like to think of, yet Mark is still presented as being the same age he was back in the first volume! Otherwise there’s no big character development here, and Patterson could’ve been any other one-off character; he has no reall scenes with Mark other than to trade a little info and to then show up and arrest the people Mark has tracked down – Patterson being one of the few people who know that Mark Hardin is the Penetrator. (This list seems to be growing!) 

Mark won’t be in California long; he first visits a few adult bookstores, where he’s sickened by a kiddie-focused magazine titled Life Child. He tries to find where it’s published, but there’s no info. Eventually he meets up with a producer in Hollywood, Mark posing as a “member of the league” who is into pedo stuff. The guy, who is involved with pedo movies and magazines, throws a party, where Mark runs into hotstuff babe Drisana, aka Drisa, who comes on strong to him. She turns out to have “acted” in some adult films on the side, though she claims to have nothing to do with the pedo stuff. Mark ends up torching the studio and tying up the producer – not to beat a dead horse, but let’s recall that Mark Hardin is curiously wimpy these days, the series having more of the vibe of Magnum P.I. than the ultra-violent early installments. In fact Mark doesn’t kill anyone until page 161 – which makes it all the more grating how he’s constantly threatening people throughout. There’s even a part where he tells some guy, “I should cut off your balls and laugh while you bleed to death,” and of course it’s just bluster…but in reality you could see the Mark Hardin of an earlier Cunningham novel, say #12: Bloody Boston, actually doing such a thing. 

Drisa will turn out to be the main female character of the novel, and she’s a typical Cunningham creation: hot-to-trot but with the emotional content of a child. She’s the closest we get to what I wanted this novel to be – a hotstuff pornstar who becomes Mark’s willing accomplice. But Cunningham is just as determined to neuter the sex as he is the violence – the expected boink occurs off-page, Mark scoring with Drisa in the back of the Brown Beast (that sounds wrong on so many levels, so I should clarify that “The Brown Beast” is Mark’s nickname for his truck and trailer combo). As if to jab the knife in further, Cunningham has Drisa merely talking about the sordid activities, next day, which is how we even learn anything happened between them. As Mark Twain once said, “Don’t just tell me the hero banged a pornstar, show me!” 

But as mentioned Drisa is woefully unexploited; Mark learns from her that all the “pedo stuff” comes from Hawaii, so off he goes to track down the source of Life Child. Drisa manages to tag along because she claims to have overheard the name of the guy behind the magazine and other pedo ventures; she just can’t remember the name, and swears to Mark she’ll be able to if she can come along with him and stay in the hotel, etc. Cunningham must’ve recently visited Hawaii, as we get a lot of topical detail when the two arrive at the airport, Drisa going on in total childlike detail about every thing they see as they drive to the hotel. Mark for his part is humorously blasé, as he’s “visited Hawaii several times.” I imagine this must’ve been back in his ‘Nam days, as I don’t recall him visiting Hawaii at any point during the series. Also the fiftieth state is here transformed into a murky den of iniquity, in which pedo rings secretly operate out of every other business and all one has to do is bypass “the usual tourist spots” to find hardcore smut, particularly of a child-exploitative bent. 

The Magnum P.I. vibe is very apparent, what with the Hawaii setting (not to mention Mark’s moustache on the cover)…and the fact that all Mark does is drive around and question people. At this point he’s essentially a private eye himself. For the most part a large portion of the novel is Mark looking around for wherever the pedo magazines are published from. Along the way he spots a trio of young black men, and wonders if they’re members of a rock band(!?), given that he believes black people aren’t commonly seen in Hawaii. This turns out to be the clunky introduction of the main villain of the novel, “the amazingly evil black man” Mark tangled with back in #24: Cryogenic Nightmare: Preacher Mann. For this is the name Drisa finally remembers…folks, her part in the book is literally reduced to sitting around in the hotel room and scribbling names in a notebook until she remembers the name of the mystery figure behind the pedo ring. 

But at least Cunningham makes it interesting: After Mark realizes Preacher Mann is indeed the same guy he fought before, Drisa whips out a gun and says “they” told her it could only be the Penetrator if he knew the name Preacher Mann. So she’s been a plant all along, which of course calls into question the part where she stood by as Mark torched an entire warehouse of porn flicks and magazines. Anyway she shoots at Mark and takes off, and this is the last we’ll see of her until the very end. Mark picks up another helper, though: Uchi Takayama, a buddy of his from ‘Nam who lives in Hawaii and has fallen on hard times. Uchi becomes yet another person who learns that Mark is really the Penetrator, and helps him out as Mark continues his seemingly-endless search for where Life Child is published out of. Along the way they get in a few fights and shootouts, but still Mark doesn’t kill anyone. He threatens people a whole bunch, though, and even throws in some unexpected racial slurs when he gets hold of that black trio he spotted earlier in the book. They of course turn out to be thugs employed by Preacher Mann. 

And just as with Kelly Patterson, there’s no reason why this particular character has been brought back; Cunningham does nothing to bring him to life and it could’ve just been any other random villain for the Penetrator. Preacher Mann only appears a handful of times, where we learn he now has a burnin’ yearnin’ to wipe out the Penetrator, given that he destroyed his whole “let’s freeze hookers and send them to clients” plot. It’s assumed he now heads up this “International League” of pedophiles, blackmailing people and whatnot, but ultimately we’ll learn – via lazy exposition – that Preacher Mann isn’t even the leader of the group. All of which to say Cunningham does little to exploit the fact that this is one of the few (if only) times we’ve had a recurring villain. 

As if to further distance ourselves from early volumes, in which Mark Hardin would go around with enough weapons to take on a small army, we have a protracted sequence here where he tries to buy some guns. This takes us to the climax, such as it is, where he and Uchi assault Preacher Mann’s hidden headquarters. Cunningham has a fondness for pulp-style death traps Mark gets caught in, and he delivers two of them here in the final pages. The second one is the most tedious, with Mark trapped in a bathhouse while little darts are fired at him. When Preacher Man arrogantly comes in to look at Mark’s corpse, he finds that the Penetrator was able to protect himself with nothing more than a few bath towels(!!). This leads to a big reveal where Mark learns who the real villain was – culminating in one of the few instances in which our hero blows away a female character. Actually now that I think of it, that is something we haven’t seen since the earliest volumes, though here it’s made very clear that Mark only pulls the trigger after he’s been fired at. 

Overall Hawaiian Trackdown is an altogether stilted, slow-going affair, with little in the way of the sadistic action of earlier installments. Probably the highlight is Mark’s rampage through several adult bookstores in Hawaii, where he grabs up every issue of Life Child and tears them up, telling the owners if they don’t like it they can call the cops! Otherwise it’s more of the same…just a slow-going and generic entry in what was once a very entertaining (and brutal!) series.