Death Contract

After starting with #7 in the series, THE ICE GODDESS, I was able to go back to the beginning of Pyramid's paperback series about John Eagle, the Expeditor. Author Paul Edwards (whoever he may be) does a nice job telling the tale of Eagle's origin, which only takes up the first few chapters. The half-Scotch/half-English Eagle was raised by Apache after his parents' deaths. Growing into a strapping young man and trained the Apache way in the arts of tracking, trapping, and living off the land, Eagle answers an ad placed by mysterious billionaire Mr. Merlin, who, with the support of the U.S. President and the Secretary of Defense, is organizing a private force of Expeditors to fight injustice all over the globe. Eagle is the first, and completes two years of arduous Expeditor training by being parachuted into the wilderness, hundreds of miles from civilization, with three hired killers on his tail. If Eagle survives and destroys his hunters, he graduates. Since it would be a short book if Eagle died (and Edwards interestingly keeps the killings off-page), the brave young adventurer heads right into his first mission, which is to parachute into Mongolia and find a death ray that is zapping airplanes.

NEEDLES OF DEATH basically has the same plot as THE ICE GODDESS, which also finds Eagle trekking across rough country accompanied by a young native virgin. The scenes with Mr. Merlin, the elderly puppetmaster behind the Expeditors (of which Eagle is the only one, so far), are interesting, giving the series a faintly Bondish vibe. Eagle is outfitted with various gadgets, including a skin-tight chameleon suit and a dart pistol that produces instant death, though they aren't overly outlandish. Published in 1973, NEEDLES OF DEATH was packaged by Lyle Kenyon Engel, who was also responsible for the Chopper Cop books. Speculation is that Paul Edwards may be Robert Lory, Manning Lee Stokes or Paul Eiden.

Abominable Sisterhood

John Eagle is a Caucasian who was raised by Apaches. For some reason, pulp fiction and comic books are filled with white guys who were reared by Indians. I suppose the strange reasoning is that the authors wanted to exploit various Indian folklore, but didn't want to alienate readers they believed would only identify with white men. Seems silly to me, though so does much of THE ICE GODDESS, #7 in Pyramid's adventures of "the most exciting new adventure in paperback," written by Paul Edwards.

Eagle is a member of the Expeditor Group, which is owned and operated by the mysterious Merlin, an extremely wealthy man who uses his power and money for good. Eagle functions as an agent of sorts. Merlin calls, and Eagle comes. He has never seen Merlin, who prefers to contact his operative through one-way closed circuit television.

Eagle's assignment is to investigate the polar ice caps, which appear to be melting at an exorbitant rate, almost as though they're being melted by an outside force. Cruising beneath the water in Merlin's one-man atomic sub, Eagle eventually discovers a bizarre society dominated by women in brightly colored jumpsuits.

It isn't until close to the end when THE ICE GODDESS really perks up with sleaze and scope, presenting an epic sci-fi setting of an above-ground Arctic community hidden beneath an enormous ice dome and dominated by a megalomaniacal female leader who demands the men in her employ undergo sex change operations to remove their genitalia. The last sixty pages or so is where all the action and pulpy stuff take place.

The middle is dominated by what I can only describe as padding. Eagle is stranded in the tundra, where he befriends a teenage Eskimo couple who provides him with food, shelter and sex. Eagle does fight a polar bear that he dispatches with an axe, which is cool, but outside of this, THE ICE GODDESS feels like a short story padded to feature length. It's rare, though, to find a hero who willingly sleeps with a 14-year-old girl while her husband is in the room, so that's unusual, at least.