Butler #6: Killer Satellites

 

Butler #6: Killer Satellites, by Philip Kirk

No month stated, 1980  Leisure Books

This was the last volume of Butler written by series creator Len Levinson, and it’s clear that Len intended Killer Satellites to be the final volume of the series, as it wraps up the storyline of hero Butler, essentially taking him full-circle from where he started in the first volume. There is also a focus on telling us more about Butler this time – we even learn his first name! – as well as giving him a Happily Ever After. Which of course makes it all the more frustrating that Leisure Books continued the series in 1982 – without Len’s involvement or awareness – farming it out to some unknown writer(s) for an additional six volumes. 

But honestly, I have no intention of seeking out or reading those later Butler books; this was Len Levinson’s series, and his volumes are the only ones that exist in my world. So basically there’s a “Len six” and a “Ghostwriters six” for Butler, and curiously it’s the latter six volumes that are the most overpriced on the used books marketplace, indicating that they had scarce print runs. It’s funny that they even exist, as Killer Satellites is clearly a send-off for Butler, courtesy his creator. 

This one picks up a few months after the previous volume, and Butler is still with the CIA. In fact there is no mention whatsoever of the Bancroft Instititute, and as mentioned above it’s the first volume of the series that is most often referred to in the narrative – particularly, that Butler was fired from the CIA by series regular FJ Shankham in that volume, “two years ago.” (Though in the typically-poor editing of a Leisure publication, on the very next page we’re told this happened “a year ago.”) But now with this sixth volume, Butler is so ingrained in the CIA that he’s spent six months studying how to speak Russian (and curious spoiler alert, but he never even gets a chance to speak Russian in the course of the novel!). The Bancroft Institute setup is dropped, as is recurring enemy organization HYDRA. 

The back-cover copy as usual tries to heighten the “thriller” elements of the story, but more than any previous volume Killer Satellites is less concerned with action than it is with Butler’s soap-opera life. When we meet him he’s boarding a small plane for a vacation in nearby Cape Cod. As I’ve mentioned frequently in past reviews, Len Levinson’s protagonists are unique in the men’s adventure field in that they try their damnest to pick up women; an inversion of the usual pulp template of the lady throwing herself at the protagonist. Butler hits hard on an attractive young woman on the plane (she looks, we’re informed, like Faye Dunaway), as usual saying stuff that would get a guy at least slapped in the real world. For instance: “You’re rather attractive, and I’m rather horny.” 

And, as usual for Butler, he’s rebuffed; the girl, Mary Ellen, has no interest in him, and just wishes to read her novel. In a curious miss on Len’s part that drove me crazy, we never learn what novel the girl is reading, despite Butler incessantly asking her what the title is! I was hoping Len would do a little in-joke and have Mary Ellen reading one of his own books. Anyway, it’s not that they have much time to really talk, as the front of the plane explodes and it crashes into the ocean – moments after we’re informed Butler is afraid to fly. But Butler’s able to keep his wits and swims to safety, rescuing the girl as well. The plane was intentionally crashed – though how is curiously never stated – and Butler soon learns that a host of his CIA colleauges have also been killed. Oh, and Mary Ellen vows that she will be Butler’s “slave” for having saved her life. 

Soon Butler is made the director of the CIA by whiskey-sipping President Smith; there’s a super-goofy part where Smith, in the bunker beneath the White House, bluffs on the phone with Premiere Brezhnev in the USSR about a satellite being shot down. This part again confirms that Butler is essentially a comedy series,with the assembled joint chiefs of staff even taking off their hats and yelling “hooray!” when the Soviet satellite is shot down. All this, by the way, is in retaliation for a US satellite that was destroyed, and I love the way Len has these heads of state calling each other directly and bluffing one another, making idle threats, etc. There’s also a goofy recurring joke about the Albanians. 

I really get the impression Len was winging his way through this one; the plot changes willy-nilly, with Butler thrust from one crazy situation to another. So he’s made director of the CIA because everyone else was killed, and his first act in this capacity is to call back onto duty the love of his life, Wilma B. Willoughby, who quit after the caper in the previous volume and now teaches at UCLA. In the meantime we are almost casually informed that Butler’s first name is Andrew – his full name is Andrew P. Butler – by a radio announcement Butler listens to while shaving in the shower, announcing that he’s been made the new director of the CIA. Butler’s first name has always been a mystery and no mention is made here that Butler hates it, something that was often remarked upon in previous installments. But the very fact that we’re told Butler’s first name this time could be another indication that Len intended Killer Satellites to be the series finale. 

Meanwhile, Mary Ellen has come to Butler’s home in Georgetown to be his slave, leading to the typical XXX-rated sex scene of the series. I found myself laughing out loud, though, because even in the sex scenes Len goes for laughs – in particular Mary Ellen bluntly asking Butler, “Do you want me to kiss your dicky?” To which a shocked Butler responds, “I beg your pardon?” Len has a lot of fun with this sequence, as it’s a reversal of the earlier scene betwee the two, when Butler was hitting on Mary Ellen on the plane; here it’s Mary Ellen who must convince Butler to have sex with her. Finally he does, in full-bore detail – only for Wilma to come in and catch them together and throw a hissy fit, calling Butler a “pig” and leaving. 

Again we get indication that this is the final volume when Mary Ellen explains to Butler that Wilma is only upset because she clearly loves Butler. Otherwise why would Wilma be so angry to find Butler in bed with another woman? Butler realizes this must be true, but meanwhile Wilma is kidnapped on her way to her hotel. When Butler finally figures out she’s been captured the following day, he decides to make none other than FJ Shankham the deputy director of the CIA, to handle the administrative side of the job while Butler goes out in the field to find Wilma. Here’s where we have the reverse setup of Butler #1, with Butler reflecting on the irony of his being in charge of the man who fired him “two years” (or was it one year?) ago. 

But man, it seems evident that Len was winging his way through Killer Satellites. Subplots are brought up and cast aside within a few pages. Like for example Mary Ellen. Despite pledging herself as Butler’s “slave,” she’s quickly removed from the narrative, Butler insisting that she go home so he can figure out who has been killing his fellow CIA agents. Then next thing you know, Butler is in his red Corvette and driving cross-country; his goal, apparently, is to act as bait for the people who kidnapped Wilma, but still…I mean he literally just drives across the country. We even get more of Butler’s random attempted pickups when he hits on an attractive female bartender who (per the template) turns Butler down, given that she’s married. But if you haven’t noticed, this is how the plot constantly changes in Killer Satellites; just a few chapters ago he was conferring with the President on how he could stop the “killer satellite” business, and now he’s on a cross-country road trip. 

Even what appears to be the big villain reveal is brushed aside after a few pages; Butler does indeed get captured by the same people who took Wilma captive, and they turn out to be…right-wing Canadian extremists. From their hidden location deep in the wilds of Canada they have a missile silo and have been taking down US and USSR satellites in the hopes of causing a war between the two superpowers…but man, like just a few pages after all of this is revealed, US planes come out of nowhere and bomb the place to the ground and Butler and Wilma escape into the snowy forest. The entire “Canadian radicals” development only takes up a handful of pages, and again the focus is placed more on Butler’s love life. 

But still, it’s very funny. Butler and Wilma hide in a cave and Wilma makes it clear that she has no intention of sleeping with Butler, even though we know from the scenes in her perspective that Butler’s the best lay she ever had, and she still dreams of the previous times they made it, etc. But as usual Wilma plays it tough, not wanting to look a “fool” for Butler, and she makes him sleep on the other side of the cave. Butler, sure that Wilma will shoot him with her machine gun if he tries to go over to her, decides to jerk off…no mention is made, by the way, of the “vow” Butler made to himself to never masturbate, as stated back in the fourth volume. Meanwhile Wilma, who is impatiently waiting for Butler to come over to her, looks over and sees “a piston” pumping beneath Butler’s sleeping bag, and angrily realizes he’s jerking off. So she has to take matters into her own hands, so to speak, leading to a sex scene between the two that takes up several pages of text. Even here it’s a payoff on those earlier sex scenes between the two, with Wilma finally giving herself in full to Butler and not pretending like it all was a “mistake” or etc. 

More finalities – on the morning after their idyllic tryst in the cave, Wilma informs Butler that she is saying goodbye to him forever, because she’s too crazy about him, and knows she’ll do nothing but have sex with him all day. (This after Butler asks her to marry him!) We also get the interesting backstory that Wilma was a hippie in the late ‘60s and dropped out of school to screw her boyfriend all the time, and she’s afraid she’ll do the same with Butler, because she likes him even more. So again, despite the “killer satellite” setup and Butler being in charge of the CIA and whatnot, it’s more about Butler moping around and wondering if he’ll ever find true love – not that this stops him from scoring again. In another humorous XXX passage, Butler goes up to Canada to look into the leader of the Canadian radicals, and ends up banging the secretary at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police HQ. 

Here we have another of Butler’s don’t-try-this-at-home pickup lines: “You’re the kind of woman a man would love to go down on.” This is stated mere moments after the woman happens to sit by Butler in the park, and soon enough Butler’s gotten it out of her that no one’s ever gone down on her and etc. So they go back to his hotel where they go down on each other, then have sex, all of it in the usual explicit detail of the series, but again a lot of it’s funny because of the dialog Len gives the characters throughout. But also, none of it has any real bearing on the plot, and is another indication of the ever-changing nature of the storyline; just twenty or so pages ago Butler was the captive of some right-wing Canadians in the woods, and now here he is dining at the Y with a slim secretary who looks “like the actress Lee Remick.” 

It all moves so quickly that Len has to go for a finale that is more out of a mystery than an action thriller, with Butler exposing who secretly funds the Canadian satellite-killing radicals. SPOILER ALERT, so skip this and the next two paragraphs if you don’t want to know, but given that Killer Satellites appears to be so scarce I thought I’d be comprehensive in my review for the people who can’t find a copy. Anyway, it turns out that FJ Shankham has been behind the plot, financing the Canadian radicals – and here we have a reprisal of the first volume, with Shankham again the manipulative bastard who holds Butler’s fate in his hands. But in another strong indication that this was intended as the final volume of the series, Butler literally blows Shankham’s brains out, blasting him point-blank in the forehead with his pistol. 

Even in the final pages subplots are brought up and cast aside within the span of a few paragraphs. Butler meets with President Smith again, and none other than Brezhnev calls in and offers Butler an all-expenses paid trip to Moscow as thanks for preventing WWIII, insisting that Butler come to Russia within a few weeks, and Butler accepts. Meanwhile President Smith floats the idea of making Butler the ambassador to Russia (and curiously, at no point in this entire exchange is it mentioned that Butler now speaks fluent Russian)…but a page or two later Butler’s already decided he’ll turn down the offer. 

The biggest indication that Killer Satellites was intended to be Butler’s send-off comes next: Butler goes back to his pad in Georgetown…to find Wilma waiting there for him. Wilma tells Butler she loves him and would “rather go crazy with him than without him,” and the book – and series – ends with the two having sex. In fact the last line of the novel is Wilma’s “OOOH!” as Butler gives her the goods – and speaking of which, we’ve learned earlier in the book, courtesy a ruler Mary Ellen puts alongside Butler’s erection, that Butler measures eight-and-a-half inches; which is “only two-and-a-half inches more than the average,” Butler argues! 

This of course is a fitting finale for Butler, given the strong focus on XXX-rated sex since the beginning, not to mention that Butler’s been hooked on Wilma since the beginning. (And apparently vice-versa.) For decades Len Levinson thought this was it for Butler, until I happened to mention to him when we talked on the phone in 2012 that the series had continued on for six more volumes. I still recall how flabbergasted Len was; “That was my series!” he kept saying. A commenter named TrueAim left a note on a previous Butler review that at least some of those non-Len volumes tried to retain the feel of the original six books…so if anyone else out there has read them, please let us know. I’m curious if Wilma even factors into the books. 

But again, I’d say those latter six installments are alternate-reality Butler. The series clearly comes to a close with Killer Satellites, and I’d say overall I really enjoyed these books. Again, the cover illustrations and back-cover copy are all misleading; Butler is more of a humorous affair than an action thriller. As usual with a Len Levinson book, it is the personality of the author that most stands out, and no doubt given that Butler was his own creation, Len’s personality is very evident as the series progresses. Indeed, parts of Killer Satellite, in which Butler reflects on his life or the sad state of his romantic affairs, could almost come straight out of Len’s decades-later autobiography, In The Pulp Fiction Trenches. I also appreciated the glimpse into Butler’s personal interests; this time he has a sudden interest in jazz music, with mentions of The Jazz Crusaders and Ramsey Lewis…I got a chuckle out of this, given that Len had to patiently wait while I shopped for Jazz LPs when I met him in Chicago in 2016. 

If I recall, only the first few volumes of Butler were reprinted as eBooks a few years back. Hopefully the time will come when all six volumes will be available again as paperbacks. Personally I’ll miss Butler and his madcap adventures, but I’m happy that Len gave him a proper send-off.

7/25/24 Update: I received the below email from Len himself, and he asked me to post it here for him!

It is very interesting to read a review of a novel I wrote circa 1979 and barely remember.  So I read the first chapter again to re-familiarize myself, and thought this first chapter simply terrific.

What a great writer I was!  I should have won a Nobel Prize and the National Book Award.  I should be rich and famous and living on the French Riviera with a movie star or supermodel, instead of the small cluttered apartment where I now reside alone in a tiny town way out here on the Great American Prairie.

Many of my books were written very quickly under two-month deadlines.  That’s why they read as if I was “winging it”.  Actually I was winging it, which probably explains why subplots don’t go anywhere and why important characters suddenly disappear.  I also had a tendency to write graphic sex scenes, which probably caused many readers to not take me seriously.

My Butler books were written toward the beginning of my literary career.  I think I got better as I became more mature and gained more experience as a novelist.  Thank you for this very insightful review.  You always understand my books better than I do.

Butler #5: Love Me To Death

Butler #5: Love Me To Death, by Philip Kirk

No month stated, 1980  Leisure Books

This fifth volume of Butler was a lot of fun and definitely my favorite one yet. Len Levinson specifically mentioned Love Me To Death when I met with him the other year, and we talked about it again just the other week when I gave him a call. So clearly this one was important to Len himself, which makes it odd that it turned out to be his penultimate volume of the series. 

As I mentioned in my review of Butler #1, Len only wrote the first six volumes of the series, the last being 1980’s Killer Satellites, after which Butler went on hiatus, returning in 1982 for six more volumes. Len was unaware that Butler continued without him until I informed him of the fact in 2010; he always saw Butler as his own series. It looks like who served as “Philip Kirk” for the post-Len volumes is still unknown, but honestly I have to wonder what the point of reading those volumes would be, as Butler is so ingrained with Len Levinson’s personality that I don’t see how the series could exist without him. I mean, this is a zany series, with a zany mindset, and again the action-centric cover art is quite misleading. It would be one thing if this was just any other action paperback series, but Butler is more Marx Brothers than The Executioner, and it would be disappointing if Belmont just turned it into just your average action series after Len’s departure. 

Speaking of which, I asked Len when I recently spoke to him why he left Butler after this volume. Len seemed to recall it might have had to do with new writing possibilities he’d gotten from another publisher – which would lead him to The Sergeant and ultimately The Rat Bastards. Butler then is the line of demarcation between Len’s ‘70s work for Belmont-Tower and Leisure – crime thrillers with a modern setting – and the WWII-themed material he would be focused on throughout the ‘80s for other publishers. It was an interesting conversation, because I was over halfway through Love Me To Death and thus closer to the world of Butler than the author himself – but then, Len wrote the book 43 years ago. Interestingly, the main thing he recalled about Love Me To Death was an otherwise incidental sequence featuring an otherwise incidental character: Pierre, an old French Foreign Legion solder Butler meets in Morocco. 

This one picks up immediately after the previous volume, with Butler when we meet him flying back into California from Hong Kong, but Len doesn’t much refer to the previous book other than vague mentions that Butler had a mission there. In other words, you don’t need to have read that one to read this one. And indeed, Love Me To Death almost sees a series reset for Butler; at the airport, Butler is approached by a former CIA colleague named Frank Sullivan, who tells Butler that the “right-wing maniacs” who have controlled the Agency are now being opposed by Sullivan’s own left-wing group. Sullivan, who knows Butler hated the right-wingers and the CIA in general, wants our hero to rejoin the Agency and help take on the right-wingers – we’re told even the President is in favor of this idea. 

So after talking over the idea with the mysterious Mr. Sheffield, who runs the Bancroft Institute for which Butler works, Butler decides to rejoin the CIA. And he’ll work in this capacity for the entirey of Love Me To Death. Indeed by novel’s end he’s still a CIA agent, and even requests a vacation from his new boss Frank Sullivan. So what I’m trying to say is that with this volume Len seems to drop the “Bancroft Institute” angle of the preceding four volumes, and now Butler’s back to being a CIA agent. Why Len decided to go this route is a mystery, and I look forward to seeing if Butler returns to Bancroft in this next volume (which is advertised in the back of the book, by the way, with the note that it will be published in March of 1980). 

That said, Len has fun with a discombobulated CIA that is so fractious the agents have to walk and talk in the countryside outside the headquarters in Virginia because their offices have been bugged by “the other side,” ie the right-wingers vs the left-wingers. Curiously FJ Shankam, that other old CIA colleague of Butler’s who has appeared – and plagued – Butler in the previous four volumes, is given short shrift in Love Me To Death. He appears in but a sentence, serving as Sullivan’s “assistant,” and Shankham doesn’t even exchange any dialog with Butler. In fact not much is made of Shankham at all, and other than his name being specifically mentioned you could assume he was just some random agent…not someone who has appeared in the previous volumes. Again, the impression is that this volume sees a sort of series reset, as if Len had grown bored with the overall setup of the series. If that is the case, then there’s little mystery why he jumped ship after the next volume for new writing pastures. 

I haven’t even gotten to the main plot of the novel, and it’s the best one yet in the series – essentially, pretty women are literally “fucking to death” various industrialists, politicians, and other VIPs. This phrase, “fucking to death,” is used repeatedly in the novel, and indeed this is the most sleazy and explicit volume yet. Which is of course to say it’s my favorite yet. The opening is an indication of this sleazy nature, as a beautiful blonde picks up a fat millionaire in New York, goes back to his place, and proceeds to ride him in explicit fashion. But the incredible thing here – and I still recall Len talking about this in the hotel foyer that day I met with him – is that the girl has a “special technique” which causes the fat millionaire to have a fatal heart attack. 

Butler is informed by Sullivan that a ring of beautiful women is possibly killing all of these men, and given that all the victims are American men of influence the CIA suspects some foreign power must be behind the plot. Sullivan wants Bulter to handle the situation because, in Sullivan’s opinion, Butler is an “utter sex degenerate” and thus would be perfect for the assignment. Butler’s idea is to bring in none other than Wilma B. Wiloughby, his archenemy/true love, last seen in the third volume. Auburn-haired Wilma is “a slender young woman with nice boobs” and “one of the most beautiful rear ends in history,” and when I spoke to Len on the phone the other week he described Wilma as his “dream girl.” Here we learn the interesting note that Wilma is sort of in love with Butler, and he gave her such an incredible orgasm in their sex scene in the second volume that she’s afraid to be around him because she knows she will become his sex slave. And Wilma has too much self-respect to debase herself for any man. Thus Wilma treats Butler like shit, hence their constant spatting. 

Despite the hostility she accepts Butler’s offer to join the CIA; she is just as much a left-winger as Butler is, though again be aware that what passes for “Leftism” in Butler would mostly be considered “Conservatism” today, something which Len also agreed with when I spoke to him recently. Wilma is sent off to New York to infiltrate the Women’s Lib movements. Again, this series is zany to the core, so Wilma promptly finds success when she hooks up with a women’s lib gang calling itself The Society To Utterly Destroy Men, and of course one of the members is familiar with the “Killer Fuck Squad” (as Butler refers to the mysterious group of women who are killing American VIPs). But as part of her undercover role, Wilma not only has to pretend to fervently hate men…but she also engages in some hot lesbian action with one of the women. Per the series template, this entails a few pages of extra-explicit material as the two women go down on each other…and after which Wilma decides that she just might be a lesbian! 

As stated in every one of my Butler reviews, while this series might have been conceived as “socialist” by Len, or even perceived as overly “Leftist” by readers of the day, it could not be seen that way today. Yet more indication is given when Wilma meets up again with Butler, Sullivan, and a fellow CIA agent named “Len Vinson” (our author again appearing in his own book – Vinson being 44 years old with a “bald head” and a black beard), and she declares herself to be a lesbian…and is promptly hassled and ridiculed by the men. Take that, identity politics! Another thing I enjoyed here is that Len Vinson claims that he’s always felt that Butler was “a stand-up guy;” this after Wilma and Sullivan have gone one about how Butler is a degenerate. In other words Butler’s creator himself appears in the novel to defend Butler! 

The book goes exactly where you were hoping it would when Butler tangles with one of the Killer Fuck Squad – the same gorgeous blonde who “fucked to death” the millionaire in the opening scene. This part is interesting because Mr. Sheffield returns to the narrative long enough to agree to pose as bait for the killers…but the real Sheffield goes into hiding while Butler disguises himself as the older man and goes to DC amid much media hoopla. In other words, if the killer women are looking for rich notables to off, then Mr. Sheffield should be prime bait for them. Of course the plan quickly succeeds – but first Butler is propositioned by a young “celebrity fucker,” who engages Butler in several pages of explicit shenanigans. Since Butler is unsure if she’s one of the squad, there follows some humor in how he’s hidden his gun in his pants…and keeps bringing the pants to bed with him, much to the confusion of the girl. 

There’s actually a lot of humor amid the sleaze, in particular how the women are shocked that the “old man” is actually so muscular and well-hung. This latter element really throws the blonde killer for a loop; she has her turn with Butler soon enough, and can’t believe how big this guy is compared to the other old men she’s killed in bed. Another recurrring element in Love Me To Death is that Butler’s “big dong” is enough to make these avowed “lesbians” question their entire sexual identity; again, a far cry from anything that could possibly pass as “Leftism” today. Here Butler gets a first-hand view (actually it’s not his hand, but still) of the “occult sexual techniques” these women use on men – basically, they work their inner muscles to access the pineal gland, via the nerves of the man’s penis, and force the men to “fuck faster” than their heart can keep up with. Hence, the old men are compelled to keep thrusting away, even if they want to stop due to chest pains, until it’s too late. However the technique is no match for young stud Butler: 

The action moves to Morocco, where Wilma has learned the woman behind all this is currently located: Kyra Deeb, an Iranian who runs a whorehouse and, given her hatred of men, trains a select group of beautiful women in the “ancient occult sexual techniques.” This part is like a sleazy sci-fi yarn as Kyra has Wilma screw a male dummy that’s hooked up to a scoreboard: 

Meanwhile Butler is engaged in a 23-page sequence that doesn’t have much at all to do with the rest of the novel, and seems to be there to help meet the excessive word count Belmont apparently demanded (the book, like the others in the series, comes in at 224 pages). Basically Butler grills an Arabic guy about the “barbarous” ways of the Middle East (again, impossible to see a Leftist attempting anything like this today) and finds himself challenged to a duel. Meanwhile Butler’s befriended an old Legionaire named Pierre, the character Len mentioned when I recently spoke to him. Despite having not much to do with the plot per se, this sequence is still pretty fun and has a nice recurring joke of how no one thinks Butler will survive the duel – the taxi driver even asks for the return fare ahead of time. 

Len does find a nice way to tie the unrelated plot into the main plot; a victorious Butler is pressured into going to the best whorehouse in town to celebrate, and of course it’s the one Kyra Deeb runs. An undercover Wilma is under suspicion due to all her questions, and to prove herself she’s forced to pose as a prostitute in Kyra’s whorehouse and screw the first man she sees. The reader can see exactly where this is going – and of course it’s none other than Butler himself. Their ensuing boff runs nearly as long as the one in the second volume, and is just as explicit:

You’ll note I haven’t mentioned much action; again, the cover art for Butler is very misleading. Len does deliver an action-packed finale, though, with Butler and Pierre leading the charge into Kyra’s headquarters and Wilma zapping people with her special CIA pen-laser. There isn’t much gore at all, and humorously the book is pretty tame in the violence department…humorous when compared to the explicit sexual material, I mean. Curiously no mention is made that Wilma has been trained in those occult sexual techniques – one would think Butler would be chomping at the bit to try them out. However by novel’s end Wilma has returned to her frosty exterior, and she and Butler are again enemies…with the vow from Frank Sullivan that the two of them will never be teamed up again. 

And that’s correct, both Butler and Wilma are still CIA agents by the end of Love Me To Death, with the implication that they will be reporting to Frank Sullivan – and not Mr. Sheffield of Bancroft – in the next volume, Killer Satellites. I’m curious why Len made this change to the series setup. But as mentioned he only wrote one more volume, so maybe he really was getting a little bored with Butler and just wanted to try something different. If so, that’s not apparent in the novel itself; Love Me To Death is a lot of fun, and Len is fully invested in the tale. And once again he channels his own personality through Butler, making for an always-entertaining read, with Len’s usual gift for entertaining dialog on full display throughout.

Butler #4: Chinese Roulette

Butler #4: Chinese Roulette, by Philip Kirk

No month stated, 1979  Leisure Books

I took longer than expected to get back to Butler, but luckily Len Levinson again delivers a story that stands quite well on its own, only occasionally referring to past adventures. Actually the main volume referred to is the first, mostly just as a reminder of how Butler quit the CIA and started working for the Bancroft Institute, now dedicated to stopping the multinational menance known as Hydra. All of which is to say I didn’t feel like I had forgotten a chunk of the storyline going into Chinese Roulette. 

But then, Len goes for a zany, almost surreal vibe in this series, with Butler stumbling into plots and traps – that is, when not propositioning various women. As I’ve said before, Len is one of the very few men’s adventure authors who has his protagonists work for it; whereas the standard trope is the distressed damsel throwing herself into the arms of the studly protagonist, Len’s protagonists have to put in some serious effort to get laid. This will also at times entail several pages of entertaining dialog, as the protagonist will try his best to convince the girl they should do the deed. Today all this would be considered harrassment, I’m sure, but it’s done with such goofy glee that you can’t help but laugh. Also it furthers the image that Butler, instead of the muscular he-man of the cover, is really more of a loser; the finale in particular brings this home, with Butler being turned down by three women in a row and having to go to bed all by his lonesome. 

The same can’t be said of the start of the book, though, which features Butler and his latest flame, jet-setting Brit socialite Lady Ashley, having sex on top of a mountain in Colorado. Butler’s here for vacation, and he and Lady Ashley hit it off, to the point that Butler’s able to convince her to get it on before they ski down the mountain. Again, Butler’s the one that makes all the moves; I just find this aspect so interesting about Len’s work because you honestly don’t see it anywhere else. What makes it even more interesting is how realistic it is, compared to the genre trope mentioned above…yet at the same time, it’s one of the few realistic elements of the series. But anyway, Butler pours it on and convinces her to unzip her pants so they can do it while still clothed, here in the snow; “They humped each other shamelessly on top of the mountain.” Actually the XXX material here is pretty explicit, as are the few other sex scenes. 

Butler’s called away, though, some guys from the Bancroft Institute showing up and whisking him via helicopter to the Institute HQ “in the mountains of Big Sur.” Here we get a reminder that the Institute is devoted to liberty and stopping tyranny around the world, in particular the tyranny that is threatened by the evil global network Hydra. As I’ve mentioned before (and as Len himself did in the series recap he wrote for my review of the first volume), Len was a “Radical Socialist” at the time he wrote Butler. What’s fascinating to me is that the sentiments Butler espouses throughout are not in-line with today’s Left: he’s in favor of free thought, free speech, and fair elections, plus he’s not hung up on identity politics. So if that was the mindset of the Radical Left in 1979, then some shit has seriously changed. Butler comes off more like the kind of guy who would regularly ignore COVID mask mandates, if only to “shake up the Establishment.” In fact, Hydra sounds suspiciously similar to the Multinational-Big Tech Complex of today: “There appeared to be no shortage of maniacs and psychopaths anxious to gobble up all the wealth and power they could. They even cooperated with each other from country to country, bribing politicians, corrupting democratic processes, and enslaving populations.” 

Humorously Butler’s called in due to some dire emergency, yet Bancroft boss Mr Sheffield (whose face is still never seen, so that he comes off more like Blofeld than M) doesn’t really have much for Butler to go on: something’s up in Hong Kong, and Butler needs to go research it. That’s it; the “bubonic plague” threatened on the back cover won’t come up until much later, and Butler only even learns about it by accident. So he’s almost sent to Hong Kong on a fact-finding mission, which makes the whole “let’s pull Butler out of his vacation” schtick seem like pure sadism on Mr. Sheffield’s part. But then, I know Len would usually write these books quickly, sort of winging his way along as he went; I get the impression Len himself just wanted to write about Hong Kong, so for the most part Chinese Roulette comes off like a travelogue, with Butler sort of stumbling his way around. 

This “winging it” approach will also affect the supporting characters. Butler tells Mr. Sheffield that he’ll need a beautiful female agent to go along with him – not for his own sleazy needs, of course, but because a beautiful woman will be able to loosen up lips that Butler himself might not be able to. Butler requests series regular Wilma Wiloughby (who has a love-hate thing going on with Butler), but is told she’s on assignment elsewhere. Since Butler further demands that this hot female agent also be fluent in Chinese, Mr. Sheffield has little choice: he suggests Claudia Caribou, an Institute chemist based out of Hawaii. However, absolutely nothing will be made of Claudia Caribou in the novel, other than to become yet another object of Butler’s lust and someone for him to bounce ideas off of. She doesn’t even speak in Chinese to anyone! 

But there’s no use complaining, because the Butler-Claudia rivalry turns out to be as fun as the Butler-Wilma rivalry of past volumes. With the big difference here that Butler tries throughout the novel to get Claudia in bed. She turns out to be a mega-hot blonde, much to Butler’s surprise (he figured that as a chemist she’d be a dog), and within moments Butler’s hitting on her…only to be turned down again and again. Ultimately Butler will keep her locked up in their hotel room in Hong Kong, never letting her leave. A funny recurring joke develops that she’s like Butler’s pet, with the big difference that at least he’d take a pet out for a walk, whereas Claudia never leaves the hotel room. It would seem that Len ran out of interest in the character, though; after a lot of verbal sparring, Butler just keeps ditching Claudia in the hotel, at one point even telling her he’s decided she’s no longer necessary and can go home. 

However the focus is more on the zany; I still say Butler is a more explicit take on the “spy satire” series of the ‘60s, a la The Man From O.R.G.Y. and the like. So Butler and Claudia are verbally sparring on the flight to Hong Kong, and Butler gets all hot and bothered. He goes into the restroom, but is determined not to masturbate, as he swore that off when he was 18; he’ll either get laid or just suffer. So he looks out in the cabin, spots a “little oriental stewardess,” and calls her in to “help” with the toilet. She comes in and throughout Butler leaves his massive tool sticking out, which of course serves to get the stew hot and bothered herself. They pull an explicitly-rendered “quickie” at thirty thousand feet…and to make it even more goofy, it turns out the two have actually done this before: the stew remembers Butler’s “big one” from a previous flight! 

The stew, Mai Ling, serves to get Butler into the plot per se, but like Claudia she’s dropped from the narrative soon after. She invites Butler to a party at the famous Madame Wang’s that night, in Hong Kong. Butler’s never heard of Madame Wang, and is informed she is a wealthy businesswoman who owns the Kinki Corporation. Butler leaves Claudia in the hotel – after going out to buy her some books, including Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow – and heads to the party with Mai Ling. Madame Wang turns out to be a sort of Dragon Lady out of older pulp, a ravishing Asian woman of indeterminate age who employs a legion of goons. On no basis other than this, Butler suspects she’s involved with the plot he’s here to investigate. 

The plot too is basically thrown into Butler’s lap; he runs into another familiar face: former CIA boss FJ Shankham, who is also here at the party. Butler’s cover is that he’s now a reporter for a paper out of Big Sur (a recurring joke that no one’s heard of the paper), and he goes around asking blunt questions which again don’t gel with the whole “radical leftist” thing…like asking a high-ranking official from China when China will allow free elections. He hammers Shankham with questions as well, and learns that a ship bearing vials of bubonic plague was recently discovered in the harbor. This will be the Hydra scheme Butler tries to prevent, and he literally only learns about it when asking his old CIA boss what he’s been up to. 

Meanwhile the focus is more on figuring out who Madame Wang is. There’s a nicely-done scene where Butler goes swimming in her opulent pool (during the party!) and surfaces to find the Madame watching him. Butler seems sure she’s involved in the plot, however of course still tries to bang her. No luck, so he heads home (after beating the shit out of one of her thugs, almost for no reason), where Claudia opines that Madame Wang was probably a whore – that’s why she’s now wealthy(!). But regardless, Butler goes around looking for people who might’ve known Madame Wang “back in the old days” to see if she really was a hooker…again, with nothing more to go on than an errant comment of Claudia’s. 

At this point it’s really a Hong Kong travelogue, with Butler shuffling around the city while getting in occasional fights. He still carries a .45, but only uses it rarely. The gun too entails recurring jokes, with Butler often having to explain why a reporter feels the need to carry around a gun. One of my favorites in this regard is when a cop finds him on the street with the gun and Butler tells him he found it under a car. Coincidence abounds, again proving how quickly Len wrote: Butler runs into a street kid and gives him a motorcycle Butler himself stole. Later Butler runs into the same kid, asks him if he knows any old pimps(!), and the kid says his old opium addict uncle would be just the guy for Butler to talk to, as he ran a whorehouse(!!). Even more coincidental – the old guy not only affirms that Madame Wang was once known as “Hong Kong Sally,” but he also loved her as a daughter! 

Ultimately we meet the main villain of the piece: Professor Kee, a wizened old guy who doesn’t appear as much as he should. His intro is especially nice, where he tells Butler his thoughts on reincarnation. Butler ends up a victim of Chinese Water Torture, another well-done sequence where Len hammers home how ultimately horrific this torture would be…the effect of which is a little undone when Butler pretty much just walks it off after a few days of ceaseless water-torturing, having been sprung by an unexpected savior. Soon thereafter we get to another fun scene – several pages devoted to the explicit rendering of Butler going down on Madame Wang, who reveals that she has not had sex for 15 years, since she quit the hooker game. A wild, ribald, XXX sequence containing such unforgettable lines as, ”I’m going to put you on the floor and fuck you like a dog.” 

But honestly at 204 pages of small, dense print, Chinese Roulette sort of runs out of steam. This is mostly because so much of it has been devoted to Butler fumbling his way through his “investigation” that the climax, which sees him leading an assault party of Red Chinese soldiers against Professor Kee’s compound, almost comes off as perfunctory. That said, Butler does call someone a “rat bastard” here, as if unwittingly flashing forward to the title of a future Len Levinson series. But then action is never a central point of Butler; more focus is placed on the zany comedy, like Butler’s rival in the spy game: Geoffrey Stonehall, a James Bond spoof who drives an “Austin-Martin V8” and who mostly just jumps in and out of bed with various women – something which only furthers the rivalry between the two men, given whom Geoffrey gets to score with this time. 

In his series overview Len ranked Chinese Roulette as one of his favorites in the series. I enjoyed it – I enjoy all of Len’s novels – yet at the same time I thought the plotting was a little too laissez-faire for an action novel. Too much hinged on coincidence and improbabilities…but then, such things would only matter if you were looking to Butler to be a “straight” thriller, when in reality it is everything but. In this regard the cover art, nice as it is, is too misleading. To tell the truth, when I read these books I don’t see the guy depicted on the cover as Butler – I see Len himself. So maybe Leisure Books should’ve just gotten him to pose for the covers, same as he did for The Last Buffoon.

Butler #3: The Slayboys

Butler #3: The Slayboys, by Philip Kirk
No month stated, 1979  Leisure Books

The third volume of Butler picks up some unspecified time after the previous volume, the events of which are referred to as “a long time ago.” We do learn that the first volume was three years ago, and when we meet up with him Butler’s in the Caribbean, checking out some hot blonde from afar with a pair of binoculars. And no, he’s not on assignment – Butler’s on vacation, and he’s just kind of pervy that way.

And speaking of which, when Butler hits on the lady it’s in a way that would even make a horny teenager cringe. The Slayboys runs to over 200 pages, and a lot of the running time is made up of long, discursive dialog, usually of a “You wanna have sex?” nature. Here we get our first, uh, taste of this, as Butler hits on the lady by telling her how good he is at dining at the Y – and this like mere seconds after he’s introduced himself. It goes on and on, with Butler doling out lines that would get a guy slapped (at least!), but instead serves to catch the lady’s interest. But just as he’s sealed the deal and he and the lady are headed for her room, a representative of the Bancroft Institute shows up and calls Butler away.

Not to worry, as Butler will get plenty of tail in the ensuing novel. There’s actually more sex in this one than the previous two, I believe, which is funny when you consider how often Butler reflects on his poor relationships with women. In Miami Butler briefly meets with Sheffield, the never-seen head of the Institute; he tasks Butler with posing as a “wealthy Mexican” to infiltrate a right-wing Cuban patriotic force which is in league with HYDRA, that military-industrial complex that has engineered the deaths of various politicians…including, as Butler and Sheffield discuss in humorously casual tones, the murder of JFK.

Butler has the gig because he speaks Spanish fluently, and soon enough he’s “Hector Suarez, of Mexico,” as he constantly introduces himself to all and sundry in Miami. He gets in the graces of the Cuban Patriotic Front rather easily, first bullying his way between a bickering couple, then beating up the irate husband. This puts him in line with Armando Gonzalez, who happens to be one of the Patriotic Front bigwigs. There is a definite humorous tone to the series, and it’s all very light hearted as Butler bluffs his way into the fold as a macho millionaire who happens to be a supreme sharpshooter…just what the Front might be looking for in their plot to assassinate President Jones.

As we’ll recall, Butler is very left-leaning, and Jones, a Democrat, must die because not only does he plan to formally recognize Cuba, which infuriates the right-winger Patriotic Front, but because he also plans to nationalize the banks and other Leftist stuff. Per the series overview he kindly provided for my review of the first volume, Len seems to regret the left-wing tone of the series. However I’d say his only fault here is the naïvety that politicians actually do anything they promise. But anyway, Jones, who will be giving a speech at Union Square, is to be killed by Cuban sniper…some of them the very same who killed JFK, years before; something also conveyed by glib dialog.

Speaking of which, there’s a part early on in the Miami portion where Butler checks into a hotel and discovers that the older guy behind the counter is gay and, guess what, has developed a crush on Butler. This results in Butler ridiculing the dude in dialog that would consign The Slayboys to the average college campus book-burning of today…isn’t if funny how what was once acceptable to the Left soon becomes the very thing the Left stands against? (At least the Right is consistent – they’re against anything that’s fun.) But anyway, while the gay-bashing Butler puts this guy through would no doubt have been considered too much even in 1979, the fact remains that it actually saw print. Today that certainly wouldn’t happen…unless of course the character doing the bashing was clearly definted as your cliched “homophobic straight white male villain.”

All this makes me curious…Butler was e-published a few years ago, but didn’t make it past the second volume due to poor sales. I wonder how the publisher would’ve handled this material in The Slayboys. Would they have just removed it? Or left it in? My jaded senses figure the former…I was recently contacted by a reader who was wondering what happened to all the sleazy sex scenes in the recent eBook editions of The Specialist. After consulting one of my reviews, he concluded that, indeed, the sexual material had been gutted from the eBooks. In other words, Jack Sullivan meets Thomas Bowdler. I might do a longer post on this in future, but anyway, it’s just another sad example of how our sensitive modern era can’t handle what was once considered disposable pulp fiction.

Oh, and if that wasn’t enough…just wonder how the eBook publisher would’ve handled this: one night a dopesmoking sixteen year-old comes to Butler’s hotel room, asks for his help fixing the TV in her room because her mom’s gone out for the night, and Butler decides to fuck her teenaged brains out, whether she likes it or not. He begins in his usual method, hitting on her in outrageous XXX dialog. He then proceeds to screw her silly, the teen giving as good as she gets – she informs Butler she’s fucked the majority of her high school football team – and folks all this goes on for a good 20 pages. So we’ve got gay bashing and underaged sex in this “left-leaning” book…my how the times have changed.

Having gained the trust of the Patriotic Front, Butler sends info back to the Bancroft Institute in another XXX sequence; just a few hours after boffing the teen girl all night long, Butler’s contacted by a sexy redheaded Institute agent posing, naturally, as a hooker. So our boy Butler of course insists she go through with her act up in his room…after all, the place could be bugged, and whoever’s listening in will have to believe Butler’s really getting laid by a pro. So we get another long sex scene as Butler relays info we readers already know while he screws her silly. Not that much comes out of this, as Butler’s all on his own when the next day Armando takes him to California for a rundown of the plot, after which they head to New York. Butler’s under watch the whole time and can’t even let the Institute know where he is.

The attempted assassination of President Jones goes down in almost anticlimactic fashion; Butler quickly deduces he’ll be the Lee Harvey Oswald of this particular plot, and takes matters into his own hands. This leads to one of the better parts in the book when Butler escapes into New York, the cops and the Feds all out to get him…for as with the JFK murder, they’re all part of HYRDA and in on the assassination attempt. This part also sees the return of Wilma B. Willoughby, Butler’s sort-of girlfriend who has been appearing since the first volume. Now she claims to hate Butler, for having “raped” her in the finale of the previous volume, which Butler shrugs off as happening “a long time ago,” so he tells her to just let it go. Wilma doesn’t stick around long, but Len makes it clear that Butler has feelings for her and seems to understand she is the woman for him.

The Jones stuff handled a little too quickly, Len comes up with a new plot to fill out the rest of the novel; Sheffield calls Butler in again and wants him to find out who was behind the plot to kill Jones. It was, of course, the CIA; in particular Butler’s old boss FJ Shankham made the order. So we have another returning character; Butler gets him via another sexy Institute agent, this one a rock chick named Cora Calloway (who of course Butler also screws, but this time it happens off-page). Shankham has a weakness for willowy blondes, so Cora, who of course is one, easily gets past his defenses, drugs him, and questions him, and thus it’s learned that a certain Swami Coomiswamicurry is the one who brainwashed Shankham and ordered him to have President Jones killed.

So the finale goes off on a different tack, with Butler infiltrating the Swami’s ranch near Mount Shasta, where he runs into another recurring character – his ex-wife Brenda, whom Butler engages in more long dialog before screwing. The dude seriously does pretty well for himself, it must be said. But at this point Len’s no longer concerned with writing an “action novel,” per se, such that Butler’s kidnapping and interrogating of the Swami comes off as incredibly easy. But then I don’t think one should look to Butler for action, even though it’s how Leisure Books packaged it…it’s really more of a satire sort of thing, more about the goofy characters and situations and the fun dialog.

Overall the series is growing on me, now that I know what to expect from it…it’s sort of like, I don’t know, maybe James Bond by way of Mel Brooks, courtesy the editors at Penthouse Forum.

Butler #2: Smart Bombs

Butler #2: Smart Bombs, by Philip Kirk
No month stated, 1979  Leisure Books

I was kind of lukewarm on the first volume of Butler, that leftist, late ‘70s take on James Bond courtesy Len Levinson (aka “Philip Kirk”). I enjoyed it, but I felt that the tone was inconsistent, unsure if it wanted to be a straight spy thriller or more of a light comedy. Also, the random left-wing diatribes were a bit jarring. I’m happy to report though that I really enjoyed this second volume, which not only dispenses with the diatribes but also sticks to a consistent tone. Plus it has the memorable characterization and witty dialog we’ve come to expect from Len.

It’s a few months after The Hydra Conspiracy, and when we meet up with him again, Butler (age 32, and as ever no first name given) is on a submarine in the Baltic sea, about to extract a Soviet defector. The defector claims to have the plans to a new bomb-guidance disruption system the Russians have developed, something that could upset the global power balance. Butler’s agency the Bancroft Insititute is dedicated to ensuring the world balance stays intact; whereas the regular spy hero would want to get the plans for the betterment of his or her country, Butler’s task is to get the plans so the Bancroft Institute can release them to all countries, so everyone has this new technology and one country won’t have superiority over the others.

Butler is undaunted by the physical demands ahead, as he bench presses 260 lbs (his “pectoral muscles nearly as big as pineapples”) and he “jog[s] like everybody else these days.” While he’s suited up for any potential trouble, as always relying on his .45 automatic, Butler doesn’t get in any scrapes. However his target, Dr. Kahlovka, is not on the beach. Instead, a pretty young Russian woman who claims to be his daughter, Natalia, is there. A stacked blonde, Natalia claims that her dad was captured by the KGB, but she escaped. With reservations, Butler takes her back to the sub – and here Len engages in a little of the in-jokery we saw back in the first volume, which featured a character named “Levinson.” This time we’re informed a crew member on the sub is named “Lt. Jordan,” which no doubt is a reference to Len’s pseudonym Leonard Jordan.

While Butler doesn’t trust Natalia, even when she passes the “infallible” lie-detector of the Bancroft Institute, he doesn’t waste much time getting into her pants – and she’s eager to comply after a strip search Butler gives her, in one of the book’s funniest sequences. The back copy of the book is headlined “SEXPIONAGE,” and Len does his best throughout to live up to it. Posthaste Butler and Natalia are getting it on in explicit fashion, though as ever couched in those somewhat-goofy terms and phrases Len used in the first volume, ie: “[Natalia] rubbed her little garden against his stiffening phallus.”

Butler gets a lot of action in this one; after dropping off Natalia at the local Bancroft office in Sweden, he gets it on with a pair of French babes, though Len leaves this one off-page. Back at the Sweden office, Butler is informed by the never-seen CEO of Bancroft, Sheffield, that this whole smart bomb technology, which scrambles the lasers that guide missiles, needs to be taken from the Russians, as soon as possible, and disseminated to other countries. So Butler’s going to have to go into Moscow (that is, if he doesn’t mind – Bancroft is a pretty easygoing spy institute). He doesn’t speak Russian, and he’s never been there, but he’s the most experienced field operative in Bancroft. Sheffield informs him that young Natalia will be going along with him.

This concerns Butler as it is becoming more apparent that Natalia, barely into her 20s, is falling in love with Butler. This doesn’t prevent him from engaging her in more XXX-rated shenanigans. After some training in Russian, Butler, disguised as a deaf mute peasant, ventures with Natalia into “the tractless space that was Russia.” In Moscow they meet their contact, an undercover Bancroft member who works in the munitions factory. Her name is Sonia and of course she’s a stacked beauty, but she is, much to Butler’s dismay, a lesbian. Even more alarming surprises ensue, when it turns out Natalia is in fact a KGB spy, and has led Butler and Sonia into a trap.

The goofy tone of the series is displayed as Butler endures the most easygoing interrogation you’ll ever read in a spy novel; mostly he just keeps bragging “I made you come” to Natalia, now revealed as a total KGB goon, one who keeps insisting to her comrade that Butler did not make her come, and that in fact she hated his every touch. Thanks to a laser pen that could’ve come out of one of the Roger Moore Bond movies, Butler is able to free himself and Sonia, though again the whole thing is so goofy…Natalia and her comrade don’t even take the pen from Butler when they catch him, and they naively fall for his request that he use his own pen to sign the confession letter they have prepared for him. Len does prove though that he’ll kill off characters without warning – I expected there would be more to come from Natalia, but that’s all she wrote for the character (so to speak). 

There’s a lot of funny stuff between Butler and Sonia, with Butler constantly hassling her for sex – even begging her at one point to close her eyes and think Butler’s probing fingers belong to a sexy actress! And mind you all this occurs while they’re running and hiding from the KGB. Butler has made a bet with Sonia that, if he gets them to safety, she’ll have to have sex with him, but curiously Len drops this subplot, even though Butler succeeds in getting them both – plus a Soviet bigwig and his mistress – into the US embassy. (A hilarious scene which has the bigwig debating on the embassy steps if he should emigrate to the US, and when he does so, bounding up the stairs and calling down to his former comrades: “I’m going to Disneyland!”)

Butler heads back to DC, Sonia now gone from the book – Butler later on mutters to himself how you can never trust women, using Sonia’s lack of screwing him, even though she’d said she would, as evidence. Instead we get walk-ons from various returning characters, among them FJ Shankham, Butler’s former boss at the CIA, still as duplicitous as ever – Butler catches him out on the balcony of his hotel room one night, recording Butler while he’s having sex with his ex-wife. This is Brenda Day, a promiscuous jet-setter now married to some government VIP. Butler runs into her at a restaurant and talks his way into her pants, as well, in another XXX sequence.

The smart bomb stuff isn’t done yet, though; Butler still needs to destroy the technology. The gizmos are built in Syria, and Bancroft sets Butler up with Farouk Moussa, a former professor turned Bancroft agent, and the sexy Wilma B. Willoughby, returning from the previous volume. And speaking of which, I just re-read my review of The Hydra Conspiracy, and in it I failed to clarify something; Wilma provided Butler’s entrance into Bancroft by staging her own murder. I forgot to clarify that Wilma wasn’t actually dead in my review of the first book. But she and Butler have a fiery relationship, mostly because Wilma refused to have sex with him; with reservations Butler agrees to have her on the mission into Syria.

Wilma is “a cute little bitch if ever there was one,” and her spats with Butler are another of the book’s highlights; a weary Farouk immediately figures out there’s something beneath the surface between these two and recommends they just screw and get it over with. There’s an interesting bit here where Len has Butler, Wilma, and Farouk – ie the Westerners – strap plastic explosives on their persons and sneak into Syrian – ie Muslim – territory. Almost a bizarro-world parallel of the current day. Some things are sadly the same, though; the trio slip through war-torn Beirut, Len documenting the hellish surroundings, with corpses of men, women, and children everywhere.

Humorously, Len sets up the mission into the Syrian munitions plant, with Butler and comrades in black and ready to take on the Russians there – meanwhile Wilma has honey-trapped a scientist that works in the place, so they can get the blueprints of the place via a Bancroft truth serum. But when they get inside the factory, they encounter no resistance and in fact find a team of Israeli commandos already on the scene, taking their own photos of the smart bomb tech plans. Rather, Len goes a different direction for the novel’s climax – that long-delayed Butler-Wilma banging.

“Hate me in the morning, but love me tonight. That’s my motto,” Butler tells an initially-skittish Wilma, in what is the novel’s most memorable and quotable line of dialog. Wilma you see wants to bang Butler as well, but resists due to his priggishness; he successfully gets her to slip into bed with him here in this slummy Syrian hotel, as they’ve checked in as a married couple (Wilma can speak the lingo here, while Butler can’t), and the security guards are known to randomly check rooms to ensure guests are really who they claim to be. But as Wilma suspects, Butler’s ulterior motive is to get Wilma in bed and have his way with her.

Folks, the ensuing boff runs for 11 pages, and is possibly the most explicit sex scene I’ve yet read in Len’s oeveure, complete with thorough descriptions of Butler getting Wilma worked up to the boiling point and screwing her silly – after which Wilma immediately starts the proceedings anew. The two go at it all night, but next day Wilma, while being debriefed in Bancroft’s Syrian office, requests that she never again be put on an assignment with Butler. She refuses to look at him and storms off, leaving both Butler and the reader confused – this after Wilma has sworn to Butler, during that night of nonstop sin, that she wants to go stay with him in some remote cabin for a week or two. Methinks Len is working up a long-simmer romance between these two characters, but time will tell.

All of which is to say I really liked Smart Bombs. Len finds the right vibe throughout; while it’s funny, it’s never a goofy satire a la The Destroyer, where nothing is taken seriously. Butler worries about his safety – a bit more so than the typical men’s adventure protagonist, in fact – and the stakes are always life and death. But it’s all delivered with the goofy charm we know and expect from Len, with characters trading quips and philosophical asides while hiding from jackbooted KGB thugs. I liked this one a lot more than its predecessor, and look forward to reading more of Butler.

Butler #1: The Hydra Conspiracy

Butler #1: The Hydra Conspiracy, by Philip Kirk
No month stated, 1979  Leisure Books

The first series he got to create and write on his own, Butler was basically James Bond as written by Len Levinson. Len wrote the first six volumes of the series, after which Leisure Books – without Len’s knowledge – continued publishing it, employing a few ghostwriters as “Philip Kirk.” In fact Len wasn’t aware that Leisure had done this until I mentioned it to him a few years ago, and he was properly incensed, as Butler was his series.

Unfortunately this is another of those cases where the original books have become pretty scarce and expensive. (The first two volumes were e-published as Kindle books the other year, but it doesn’t appear that the rest will be.) I’ve picked up Len’s six installments over the years and have finally gotten around to reading this first volume. The Hydra Conspiracy works as a fine introduction to the series, introducing hero Butler and his world, but I suspect future installments will be better once Len has figured out the tone for the series.

For in many regards The Hydra Conspiracy is all over the map tonally; it starts off like grim tale of espionage a la Len’s earlier Operation: Perfidia before it veers more and more toward goofy fantasy and satire. The other month, when I met him in Chicago, Len told me that he had been good friends with Ted Mark, creator of the long-running ‘60s spoofy spy series The Man From O.R.G.Y. as well as other such books. It was only after Len told me this that I realized that Butler was almost a late ‘70s take on Mark’s series (only Len wrote his series in third-person, unlike the first-person narrative of Mark’s series).

In many ways The Hydra Conspiracy trades on that same sort of goofiness of The Man From O.R.G.Y. and all those other paperback spy spoofs of the ‘60s, only without all the annoying “funny” acronyms which were mandatory in those earlier books. (But as a tradeoff we do get a lot of socialist invective to make up for the lack of punny acroynms!) But otherwise the tone is the same; there’s really no sense of danger as hero Butler (no first name given) tries to prevent nuclear armageddon courtesy a SPECTRE-like cabal of intelligence/politics/business sadists called HYDRA.

That is, other than the first several pages, which come off like a missing section of Operation Perfidia. Butler, a 32 year-old Vietnam vet (where we was a Green Beret, much like another Levinson protagonist – Phil Gordon in The Camp) who has been a CIA spy for years and who looks like Clark Cable without a moustache (as we’re often reminded), is called into the office of his Agency boss, FJ Shankham. Butler’s being let go from the CIA due to his constant criticisms, in particular his vocal frustrations with the recent operations in South America – the assassnation of Chilean president Allende especially set him off, and Allende is mentioned again and again in the narrative.

Only these opening pages take place in the New York City familiar from so many other of Len’s ‘70s novels, but in many ways The Hydra Conspiracy paves the way for Len’s ‘80s work, where his novels moved out of New York and took place all over the globe. But here again Len captures the New York he knew so well. While drowning his sorrows in a bar Butler is approached by the lovely Wilma B. Willoughby, a stacked brunette whom Butler is sure is a spy, or at the very least some sort of plant – but for who?

These opening pages are heavy on the paranoia as Butler is certain someone is going to set him up for his own assassination; the most likely culprit, he figures, being the CIA. At any rate he hits hard on Wilma, who turns him down and leaves. An hour later Butler returns to his apartment, only to find Wilma’s butchered corpse in his bath tub. The cops show up and arrest Butler, an obvious setup, but when he’s in jail he finds that Shankham isn’t willing to use the Agency’s resources to free Butler. For all Shankham knows, Butler really killed the poor girl.

Here, gradually, the goofy vibe begins to creep into The Hydra Conspiracy. That Butler’s old boss would think he murdered some random girl is ludicrous, but at any rate Butler gets sprung from jail by an Agency-paid lawyer and then skips out of town. Eventually he picks up some cash he stashed away and makes his way down to Mexico, where he decides he’ll live in some anonymous village and look at all the old pyramids – Butler we’re told always wanted to be an archeologist. But he’s caught anyway, doped by a kindly old man posing as another tourist.

Butler discovers that he’s been abducted by the Bancroft Research Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank with offices all over the globe. Bancroft uses its business front as a mask for its true purpose: to stop the efforts of HYDRA, a cabal made up of wealthy villains in the business, intelligence, government, and criminal arenas. The Bancroft Institute is very reminiscent of the Jon Anryn Institute in The Enforcer. (And just as author Andrew Sugar used that series to promote his own Libertarian views, so too does Len uses Butler to promote his own political views, as noted below.)

Butler finds that he’s not really a prisoner, and the man in charge of the San Francisco headquarters, Mr. Sheffield, offers Butler work as a secret agent for Bancroft. Butler’s first mission plays right into his own personal views (not to mention Len’s at the time) and caters to the socialist agent of the Bancroft Institute. A HYDRA bigwig named Philip Noble, famous for his Noble Oil company, is up to something no good in South America. Butler, via his Agency contacts, will be given a job as Noble’s bodyguard. His mission will be to monitor Noble and figure out what he’s up to. But meanwhile Butler must take care of a more pressing concern – getting laid.

Leisure headlined Butler as “the adult action series” in their advertisements in the backs of the books, and thusly Len caters to the enjoyable sleaze that was mandatory for grimy Leisure paperbacks of the day. But as usual, he doesn’t go for full-bore porn, gussying up the sleaze with goofy phrases and terms. For example, Butler’s first score in the book is with a gal name Sheila, and most of it is relayed via XXX dialog, with the actual sexual descriptions featuring goofy terms like “fuzzy little lamb chop” to describe Sheila’s nether region. At any rate Butler scores with both Sheila and her roommate, at the same time, but Len skips the details and ends the chapter with all of them in bed.

Humorously, Len delivers another sex scene almost immediately thereafter, as Butler scores with Philip Noble’s secretary, a sexy gal with “torpedo tits” and a “magic valley” that’s all too eager to accept Butler’s “throbbing screwdriver.” Again we go heavy on the porn dialog as we’re informed that Butler is almost superhumanly endowed. Our hero gradually gets back to the mission at hand; Noble’s nefarious deeds have him venturing down to Halvados, a fictional banana republic in South America which Noble practically runs behind the scenes.

The brazen disregard for reality is prominent now, as Butler just waltzes right out of Noble’s military base in Halvados in the middle of the night, meets the local Bancroft contact (another sexy gal, this one a redhead named Nora C. Morrissey), and then easily gets back on the base the next morning, telling the guard he went into the city for cigarettes! And when Noble’s men discover that someone has leaked last night’s top-secret plans to the locals (namely, bombing the rebels), Butler’s able to bullshit his way out of it! In the real world, this guy, new to the organization and even noted as skipping out of the base against orders, would be the instant suspect.

But Butler is eventually found out and winds up in jail. Not that this poses much trouble, as he uses his fountain pen laser gun – which the guards left on him when throwing him in jail – to melt the bars. In the jailbreak Butler scores his first kill in the novel, at 147 pages in. This is not a violent tale by any means, and Len does not dwell on the gore. In fact the novel is more so composed of Butler making plans, eagerly awaiting the next day, and then running from trouble. It’s all more in the parodic/goofy realm, particularly when you factor in that Len himself appears in the book, as “Doctor Levinson,” a “lean man in blue jeans and a black beard” with “the nose of a hawk and nervous furtive manner” who works for Bancroft and teaches Butler how to disarm an atom bomb. (Len also slyly references his one and only Mace novel, mentioning a restaurant called “Lee Chang’s” in New York’s Chinatown.)

In an overlong sequence Butler poses as a cook on a ship bound for Corpus Christi – a Noble ship which will secretly carry the atom bomb down to Halvados – and disarms the atom bomb without much trouble. But Bancroft’s people fear Noble will just send down another one! Off Butler goes to Halvados again, and soon enough he and Nora C. Morrissey are roughing it through the jungle. Here, in the final pages, occurs the most explicit sex scene yet, as Butler basically bullies Nora into having sex wit him out in the cheap showiness of nature. Len again doles out the goofy anatomical descriptions: “He was hard as a baseball bat as he pushed it into her gooey sweetness.” 

The finale is pretty perfunctory, more chaotic than thrilling, with Butler leading a bunch of rebels in an assault on Noble’s bunker. The villain himself is at least disposed of memorably, eaten down to the bone by piranhas. Meanwhile Butler has more pressing issues back in San Francisco – turns out Wilma B. Willoughby, whom Butler has lusted for the entire novel, has found out about Butler’s shenanigans with Nora, and boy is she pissed off about it. And here we leave Butler, in the doldrums because even though he’s a “hero” no one respects him.

As usual with Len’s writing, the characters take more precedence than the plot or the action; I don’t think it was until the ‘80s, with the Rat Bastards and the Sergeant series, that he really found firm footing with the action genre. For as it is, The Hydra Conspiracy doesn’t offer much for the action-pulp enthusiast; it’s more of a shaggy-freaky ‘70s thing, with lots of socialist invective tossed in for good measure. As Len himself notes below, late 1970s Len Levinson could’ve gotten a job writing material for Bernie Sanders. The novel is filled with leftist rants that, sadly, would probably still go over well with the easily-swayed left-leaning youth of today.

Back in late April I wrote Len to tell him I was finally getting around to Butler. He’d mentioned the series to me a few times in the past, so I was curious what he thought of it today. In response he wrote me the wonderful essay below.

My Butler series was the first series I ever created, after writing eight novels in other series, and nine standalone novels. 

The year was 1978. My goal was to rip off James Bond. I’d read all the James Bond novels published at that time, and had enjoyed them very much. They seemed original, freaky, sexy and totally bizarre, just what the world needed in those days and even today. 

I first heard of James Bond during the early days of the JFK administration, when JFK was reported to be a big fan of James Bond. In addition, a close friend and one of my early mentors, Lin Carter, also was a big fan of James Bond and recommended him to me. 

I met Lin in 1962 when we both were direct-mail advertising copywriters at Prentice-Hall, a publishing company in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Lin later became a popular sci-fi writer and still has quite a following. He was exceedingly well-read and I considered him a great man, one of the most intelligent people I’d ever met. He recommended many books to me and educated me in literature to a large extent. Unfortunately he’s no longer alive and I miss him very much. 

But in 1978 I wasn’t Ian Fleming or even close. Obviously I wasn’t a British gentleman, son of a member of Parliament, never attended Eton. never was a naval intelligence officer, and never had love affairs with titled ladies. 

I was only Lenny Levinson from New Bedford, Massachusetts and had to do James Bond my way. I’d recently seen GONE WITH THE WIND for approximately the fifth time, one of my all-time favorite flicks, and decided that my James Bond would be named Butler, a descendent of Rhett Butler. My Butler also was from Georgia, but unlike Rhett had graduated from the University of Georgia and been a Green Beret officer in the Nam. 

My Butler was not an elegant British gentleman like Bond James Bond. He was a rowdy all-American sex degenerate who also was brave, intelligent and resourceful, with a big sense of irony and bigger sense of humor. It was with high hopes that I began writing this series. 

Joe Kenney recently emailed me and said he was going to review my Butler books for his GLORIOUS TRASH blog. He asked me to write an article about the series to accompany his review. How could I reject this opportunity to promote my so-called literary career which currently is in the deepest doldrums? 

I thought I’d just sit down and write my reminiscences, because I didn’t feel like taking the time to read all six Butler books, but then decided I couldn’t do justice to Joe or Butler if I didn’t actually read the novels. 

So I re-read them all in around five days. And I must confess that I wasn’t very happy about what I read. 

The main problem with BUTLER was goddamned politics. I’m embarrassed to admit that I was a deeply committed Marxist-Leninist Communist lunatic during the 1970s, and these putrid attitudes often spilled over into the Butler books. Many paragraphs sound like Joe Stalin addressing the Politburo, or Bernie Sanders on the campaign trail. 

I regret to confess that I used the Butler series to rant against Corporate Amerikkka, the real estate lobby, big oil, big pharma, the military-industrial complex, the CIA, Pentagon, Wall Street, and all other enemies of Marxist-Leninism. In retrospect, all I did was retail the usual boring loony left baloney, which I fear doomed the series to failure. 

The great Leo Tolstoy said: “I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.” I agree completely with Tolstoy because stories become tendentious and boring when the author is as one-sided as I was in BUTLER. 

BUTLER also contains numerous long meandering conversations that should have been cut drastically. And there also are numerous long meandering sex scenes described in graphic XXX-rated terminology, which I thought at the time would make the series more appealing to the sex degenerate market, but which I now think made the series seem too vulgar, and also helped doom it to failure. 

However I must say in my defense that there are wonderfully funny scenes in the BUTLER series, and much snappy dialogue, and genuinely weird original situations that you won’t read anywhere else. 

My favorite novel in the series was SMART BOMBS, with CHINESE ROULETTE a close second. And I’m proud of some of the peculiar characters such as F.J. Shankham, the sinister double-crossing head of the CIA; Wilma B. Willoughby, Butler’s on again off again spy girlfriend; and the elegant Madame Wang, owner and director of numerous businesses which altogether were called the Kinki Corporation, and who formerly was a prostitute named Hong Kong Sally. 

I also liked the premise of LOVE ME TO DEATH, about militant man-hating feminist lesbians who actually were screwing prominent wealthy older men and government officials to death by employing arcane Iranian vaginal manipulation techniques, but then they run into Butler whose prodigious sexual abilities were more than a match for them. This novel is terribly incredibly politically-incorrect and could not be published today, although I think parts of it are hilarious. 

I’m no longer the person who wrote the BUTLER series. I no longer advocate those tired, failed Marxist Leninist political views. I no longer write extended hardcore erotic scenes. And I’m more inclined to cut meaningless dialogue. 

I have read on the internet that many people have enjoyed the BUTLER books, which astonishes me, but different people respond differently to the same novels. I’m looking forward to reading Joe’s critique, because sometimes I think he understands my books better than I do. 

The first few books in BUTLER series recently were republished as ebooks by Piccadilly, but the series was cancelled due to dismal sales, which unfortunately is the primary theme of my so-called literary career.