Gannon #1: Blood For Breakfast (second review)

Gannon #1: Blood For Breakfast, by Dean Ballenger

October, 1973  Manor Books

I’ve been meaning to re-read this first volume of Gannon for many years; my original review of Gannon #1: Blood For Breakfast was one of the first posts on the blog, way back in July of 2010. Sixteen years later, I can only say that Blood For Breakfast, aka Meet Gannon per the cover, no longer seems as outrageous to me. This is yet another testament to how reading men’s adventure novels will eventually rot your brain. 

For one, I don’t think it registered on me last time that hero Mike Gannon, most often referred to as a “tiger,” never even kills anyone in the book…save for one guy at the very end, but given that Gannon and the guy are struggling for possession of a gun, it could be that the other guy shoots himself accidentally. Instead, Gannon “merely” beats and maims his opponents…and here indeed is where the book is still outrageous, if only for the dark humor Dean Ballenger brings to the gore. 

Speaking of Ballenger, an interesting thing about the Gannon books is how little they come across like his previous work. Many years ago I also reviewed a few men’s adventure magazine stories Ballenger published in the 1960s; the narrative style in Blood For Breakfast is not at all like them…it’s more of a perverted, funhouse take on Spillane, or hardboiled pulp in general. 

Perhaps the biggest difference between this reading and my first back in 2010 is that I now see how similar Blood For Breakfast is to the early volumes of The Butcher, particularly those written by James Dockery. My favorite recurring bit in The Butcher is the opening of each volume, in which a memorably-colorful Mafia goon tries to kill Bucher and finds out Bucher is impossible to kill. Well, the entirety of Blood For Breakfast reads almost exactly like one of those sequences. 

There is no question in my mind that Dean Ballenger was inspired by The Butcher. Everything, from the goofy syntax his underworld characters speak in to their bizarre names, like for example “Rhino Rogers,” could come right out of a James Dockery novel. But whereas The Butcher ultimately heads off into a globe-trotting adventure each volume, Gannon is a proud working-class stiff and stays in the gutters of Cleveland. And by the way, this similarity with The Butcher is something James Reasoner noted in his 2008 review of Gannon #1, so he was way ahead of me! 

Another book Blood For Breakfast has much in common with is the superior (and equally rare) Bronson: Blind Rage. That novel too featured a hero pushed to sadistic lengths to avenge a loved one who had been wronged by the rich and powerful. Both Gannon and Bronson find themselves up against wealthy miscreants who literally get away with murder due to their fancy lawyers, and thus the two men must take gory justice into their own hands. 

Manor Books leaned hard into this setup, with future volumes dubbing Mike Gannon a “Robin Hood” who looked out for the poor. Ballenger, who even writes the third-person narrative in the same gutter-view syntax that his underworld figures speak in, takes rich people to the coals often and frequently in Blood For Breakfast, likely envisioning how his blue-collar readers will pump their fists in agreement. In other words the class divide is very much played up, and it’s very black and white: the average stiff must suffer and follow the law, while the rich get away with rape and murder and own the law. 

I still think it’s interesting that we are specifically told that Mike Gannon did not serve in a war, which goes against the grain of the typical men’s adventure protagonist of the era. While Gannon did serve in the military, it was between Korea and Vietnam, though we’re told he “saw some action” in off-the-books operations. His military background isn’t much dwelt on. Rather, Gannon’s current job is: despite only being 31, Gannon has worked his way up to being the chief security officer at a shipyards in Seattle, where he’s really learned to kick some shit; another thing I’d fogotten in the past 16 years since I last read this book is that Gannon’s colleague at the shipyards is the person who gives Gannon his “spiked knucks,” even warning Gannon that the things are so sharp that they can “shear off ears.” Gannon will prove this a few times in the course of the book. 

Gannon was born and raised in Cleveland, which is where the entirety of Blood For Breakfast occurs. Those from the area looking for a topical view of the city in the early ‘70s won’t find much; Gannon #1 takes place in dingy bars (or, in the weird vernacular of the book, “happy stores”), dingy restaurants, and dingy houses, plus a long sequence where Gannon strangely enough finds himself trapped on a boat as it drifts along Lake Erie. 

Ballenger begins with an action scene – Gannon coming back to his motel to find a trio of hoods waiting for him – and then goes back to tell the story. Long story short, Gannon is back in Cleveland due to “poor little raped Sandra,” ie Gannon’s 15 year-old sister, who was raped by a pair of college-age punks named Reese and Hobbs. A few witnesses came across the raped and bleeding girl on the roadside where the punks dropped her after raping her, and thus Reese and Hobbs for sure looked to be serving time in the upcoming trial…but now suddenly the witnesses have changed their stories, and Gannon suspects foul play. 

He leaves Seattle to go back home, and Blood For Breakfast is also unusual for a men’s adventure novel in that Gannon’s father factors into the story, but Bud Gannon doesn’t have much in the way of dialog or narrative space. Mostly he just argues with his son, thinking that Mike is imagining things. Gannon’s mother is also present, but humorously she doesn’t have any dialog. Same goes, surprisingly enough, for Sandra, who says nothing for the majority of the novel, Ballenger treating her like the Maguffin she is, even though she is the one who was raped and beaten by the punks. 

No, the focus is squarely on Gannon, who slips on his spiked knucks and goes around Cleveland beating and maiming the goons hired by Reese’s father, a wealthy bigshot who is running for Governor. Gannon, trying not to skirt the law, refrains from killing anyone, even though he carries a .38 with him. But instead of killing, he beats, and sadistically so; there is a ton of wonderfully dark humor throughout Blood For Breakfast, particularly the snappy rapport between Gannon and the grizzled cop who always comes around to “clean up Gannon’s mess.” 

The violence is raw and brutal, but Ballenger doesn’t dwell on the maimings. The back cover warns off squeamish readers, and Ballenger certainly lives up to expectations: Gannon “wrecks faces” with his spiked brass knuckles, lopping off ears and noses and disfiguring the goons who try to get the better of him. He also has a fondness for “stomping in the pumps,” ie kicking someone in the balls; there is a bizarre vernacular throughout the novel that almost attains the level a grimy American cousin of Anthony Burgess. 

But while the violence is colorfully and gorily described in a handful of sentences, the same cannot be said of the surprisingly-frequent sex scenes; all of them occur off-page, and Ballenger doesn’t even exploit the ample charms of the female characters. Gannon picks up three women in the course of the novel, but in each case we are only told how Gannon feels the morning after, or we get off-hand mentions that the girl “knew how to screw.” 

Gannon also isn’t very bright, but then his is a cunning street wisdom. Two of the girls try to get the better of him; the first selling him out and the second being a “pussy trap” that Gannon quickly falls for. Not to worry, though, as Gannon will eventually get his girl. Humorously, we are frequently told that the third girl, a waitress in a dive, is not pretty, but she’s there for the taking, so Gannon humps her a few times because he doesn’t feel like scoring a new chick! 

There is a surprising amount of padding for a book that runs only 190 big-print pages. There are also a lot of plot errors that are expected of Manor Books. The main one being: Gannon (which is to say Ballenger) focuses solely on bigshot Reese, the father of one of the rapists…but the other rapist, Hobbs, doesn’t even factor into the book, and nor does his father – even though it’s established from the beginning that both families are wealthy and connected. No, Hobbs is completely forgotten…there’s a part toward the very end, where Gannon is getting his final revenge on the elder Reese, and only then does Gannon think of Hobbs, but he basically says to hell with it. One suspects this is Ballenger himself explaining the error to his readers…but then one also wonders why Ballenger had it as two rapists. He could’ve just removed Hobbs entirely and the book wouldn’t have changed. 

What makes it even odder is that there’s a long, but certainly memorable, part in the final third where Gannon hires a pair of thugs to beat and maim the rich lawyers who got the two rapists off in court. (Okay, the last half of that sentence sounded strange.) While it is darkly humorous – and certainly violent, with ears getting ripped off and testicles getting smashed in as the two thugs trade maiming techniques – the scene could have easily been replaced with Gannon getting revenge on Hobbs. As it is, these two thugs have nothing to do with the rest of the book. 

There’s also a puzzling and long part where Gannon gets trapped on a yacht with one of his female conquests, a pair of maimed goons tied up below decks. Neither Gannon nor the girl know how to handle a yacht, so they are trapped on it as it lazily goes down the river. Ballenger does this for the sake of the plot, so Gannon can’t be there when the trial happens and “poor little raped Sandra” is fed to the wolves by witnesses who have been bought out, but still it comes off as a puzzling interlude that makes his hero seem incompetent. 

Otherwise, Blood For Breakfast moves at a rapid clip, and Ballenger doesn’t waste our time with a lot of subplot or subtext. It’s not that kind of book. Mike Gannon is a “Tiger,” a 5 foot 8 scrapper who “look[s] like Burt Reynolds with a little early-day Mickey Rooney mixed in,” who quickly figures out that Reese has bought off witnesses and has hired goons to prevent his son from going to prison. There are a handful of parts where Gannon confronts the elder Reese in his office – indeed, the rapist kid himself barely factors into the novel – which includes more of Ballenger’s dark humor, particularly courtesy “the lesbian” who serves as Reese’s secretary. 

But Gannon’s chief foe in the novel is Rhino Rogers, a hulking stooge who first appears cradling a Thomspon submachine gun, which he accidentally blows away one of his own goons with, thanks to Gannon’s fast moving. Rhino keeps showing up to get the better of Gannon – Ballenger has his hero being caught unawares too many times for my liking – and it is not until the finale that he is permanently dealt with. 

It’s funny when you re-read a novel after a long interim and you see the stuff that stuck with you over the years. For me it was the guy who got blown up under the car in Blood For Breakfast. This is Spider, and his appearance occurs early in the book; Gannon catches him in the act of planting a bomb beneath his rental, and after a long dialog exchange – in which Spider lies that he was simply trying to break into Gannon’s car – Gannon orders Spider at gunpoint to get under there and take the bomb off. The explosion leaves a “gore-trail” of Spider’s brains on the pavement, and also seems to have inspired the uncredited cover art. 

In conclusion, Blood For Breakfast is more “sleazy hardboiled pulp for the ‘70s” than it is men’s adventure; the debt to Mickey Spillane is clear, even if Gannon isn’t a private eye. But with its focus on maiming and mutilation, it is more of a grindhouse take on ‘50s pulp, with an added layer concerning the class divide. As mentioned Manor played up on this, with the next two volumes featuring Gannon avenging more unfortunates against the wealthy…but still not getting his revenge on Hobbs! In fact, Blood For Breakfast ends so haphazardly that I wondered if Manor cut down Ballenger’s manuscript; Gannon goes off to “roll” the ugly waitress once he’s dealt with Reese, and the book hurriedly ends! 

So yes, I certainly enjoyed Gannon #1: Blood For Breakfast on this second reading, with the caveat that it didn’t seem as outlandish to me now that I’ve read a steady diet of ‘70s pulp over the past several years. The biggest takeaway this time – which I didn’t realize the first time I read it – was how similar it was to The Butcher, with the difference being that Gannon doesn’t kill anyone. At least in this one. I can’t recall if he does in the next two volumes, but I will gradually find out, as I will be reading them again next.

Fire In My Blood

Fire In My Blood, by Edward Hunt

No month stated, 1974  Manor Books

A few things first off about this obscure Manor PBO: the cover photo has nothing to do with the book, and my suspicion is that “Edward Hunt” was trying to get the book published by a more mainstream imprint and ended up selling it to Manor when there were no other takers. Also no idea who Hunt was/is; from my short research I discovered that an author of the same name published a paperback original through MacFadden-Bartell in 1971, titled Fortune Road.  There were a few parts where I wondered if it was a pseudonym of William Hegner, given the haughty bitchiness of the narrator, but overall Fire In My Blood does not demonstrate Hegner’s usual knack for snappy rapport or memorable situations. That said, there’s a part where the narrator’s father rapes her…and she enjoys it. 

That’s another thing: while credited to “Edward Hunt,” Fire In My Blood is narrated by a woman. Indeed, the conceit is that this book contains the unedited tapes of this woman’s life story, dictacted for an autobiography she’s been offered a tidy sum to write. This is because the woman, Marquesa Helen Giliberti, is the “queen of the jet-set,” daughter of a famous songwriter, wife of a famous entrepreneur, and later the wife of a famous Italian marquis. And also, she’s slept with about a zillion people. 

In former common parlance, our narrator Helen would be referred to as a slut. Today she’d probably be called an empowered woman. In the short, 193 pages of the book, Helen recounts how she has slept with practically everyone since losing her virginity at 14, sometime in the very early 1950s (I think; the author isn’t very forthcoming with dates). In an “Author’s Foreword,” which is actually by Helen and not the actual author, our narrator informs us that she’s been contracted to write about her torid life, and has insisted that she alone tell the tale, even though she has no writing background. She tells us that she’s about to speak of her life into audio tape, and the ensuing novel is supposed to be the ensuing recording. 

Edward Hunt, whoever he or she was, does properly convey the vibe of someone telling us this tale. There’s not much in the way of scene-setting or fancy wordplay. Also, curiously, there is hardly any sex. Yes, friends, this is another of those puzzling conundrums I encounter all too often in the world of sleazy ‘70s paperbacks: the “sexy novel” that doesn’t have any actual sex in it. Time and again “Helen” (which is to say Edward Hunt) ellipses the many and sundry sex scenes, usually telling us something as simple as, “it was a shattering experience” when reffering to the wholly off-page conjugations. And, given that the narrator is a woman, there’s none of the exploitation one would expect of the trash genre; I mean, it’s not like Helen keeps exploiting herself. (“My breasts were full, fresh melons, ripe for the plucking,” etc…hell maybe I should take a shot at writing the book.) 

Well anyway, this is also one of those novels where I wonder what the point of it even was. Helen is the darling of the jet-set and screws her way through a host of notables, but there’s no grand scheme to the narrative and no roman a clef moments that would fool the gullible ‘70s reader into assuming Fire In My Blood is the true story of some anonymous, real-world jet-setter. It’s a bland novel, is what I’m saying, and it’s more soap opera than trash. 

Humorously, the novel proper – after the facile “Author’s Foreword,” that is – opens with Helen complaining about 18th Century novels that would go into needless detail about the ancestors of the protagonists, or whatever, ie telling rather than showing…and then telling rather than showing is exactly what Edward Hunt proceeds to do over the course of the novel. Fire In My Blood gave me bad flashbacks to another bust of a “trashy novel,” Belladonna, which was similiarly sunk by an overbearing “this happened, then that happened” narrative that sucked all the life from the story. 

So basically, “Helen” tells us how she entered life as the daughter of a famous songwriter, a “virile” songwriter at that, known for his lusty conquests and whatnot. Plus there’s an older brother from a previous marriage of her father’s, Robert. Helen is sent off to live in a convent or whatever until she’s a preteen; her mother is dead, and she meets her father for the first time when she’s fourteen. She stays with him for a summer at Martha’s Vineyard, where Robert does her a huge “favor” by bringing her into the world of sex – not himself, but through a friend of his, a notorious “cocksman” who manages to take Helen’s virginity without much fuss. 

From here Helen goes full-on slut, sleeping with everyone (off-page, I should clarify). She bangs practically every boy in the vicinity; she tells us sometimes she takes on more than one at a time. Again, all this is told to us; none of these characters have a chance to breathe. One night Helen’s father catches her coming home late from her latest tussle, where she handled some guy on the beach. (Now that I think of it, perhaps this is the inspiration for the cover photo, after all.) Her father accuses Helen of whoredom (“Your teats are sagging,” being one memorable line in his savage appraisal of her post-sex physical state) and then…why then, he too has sex with her! 

After this, Helen’s father shuffles off in shame, and she tells us she never sees him again. Having gotten the ultimate taboo off his checklist, Edward Hunt quickly moves along, shutning Helen’s family to the narrative side; Helen summarily tells us in a few pages of her father’s death, years later, as well as her half-brother Robert’s death. Meanwhile Helen has latched onto the Kennedy-esque Bennet clan. 

Helen’s already told us she was in love with her father, claiming it was this unspeakable love that was the reason behind her whoring – doing anything possible for her father’s attention – but the author does little to explore this. Instead Helen becomes involved with a man her father’s age, family scion Jason Bennet, a widower who has spent decades ensuring his three sons have moved into politics and into law. 

Here too it’s very soapy; Helen comes into the fray because she first is with Ted Kennedy-esque Frank Bennet, even becoming pregnant by him. When she tells the elder Bennet that she’s with child, Jason tells Helen she is no longer to see his son…and then Jason asks Helen to dinner! We get more “tell don’t show” when Helen informs us that Jason Bennet, 51, is like an “old lion…insatiable” in bed. Oh and then Frank Bennet comes home unannounced one night and beats Helen in his rage, causing her to abort, but Helen never tells Jason Bennet about it. And Frank never finds out that Helen was pregnant with his child. 

Jason Bennet buys the farm shortly after, and though Helen is left the entirety of his estate, the three sons bully her out of it, leaving her with “only” a million. Off Helen goes to Swinging London – it’s apparently the mid-‘60s now, though Edward Hunt never specifies dates – and the whoring begins anew. “Before the night was over I would be under them, they would be inside me,” Helen tells us of the sundry men she sleeps her way through, making a name for herself as a world-class lay on the jet-set circuit. 

Here Helen makes her first friend, a wealthy widower named Sonia, but the character doesn’t contribute much to the story…other than to introduce Helen to The Steamrollers, a roman a clef Rolling Stones. “The Pop group,” Sonia clarifies, and Helen ultimately screws all five of them in one all-night orgy: “It was more like a wrestling match than a coupling.” Again, juicy details are threadbare in Fire In My Blood, a “Big Sexy novel” without any sex. 

The Steamrollers factor so meagerly in the tale that the book doesn’t even rate as a rock novel. Rather, Helen becomes involved with another guy, a wealthy British entreprenneur named Sir John Radlett; she meets him at an auction. This sequence is tiresome at best; Radlett has little interest in sex, and though Helen tries to be a good wife she can’t help but be attracted to the servants and whatnot. Given that Helen has screwed around a bujillion guys at this point, the reader won’t be too shocked at how this one plays out. 

The novel limps to a close with Helen in Italy, where apropos of nothing the famous Marquis Giliberti, an old Italian man of wealth, asks Helen to be his wife. But he’s another husband with little interest in her (Helen soon discovers the Marquis is more interested in little boys), and by novel’s end Helen is alone again. 

This is, of course, right where we met her, and Fire In My Blood ends with Helen proud of herself for accomplishing her task of telling her tale to the audio tapes…and informs us that this won’t be it for her: “In twenty years I expect to be writing a sequel.” 

As we all know, Fire In My Blood II: The Quickening was a worldwide success upon publication in 1994…okay seriously, it goes without saying that this obscure novel died an obscure death, and nothing was ever heard of Marquesa Helen Giliberti or Edward Hunt (whoever he or she was) again.

The Cult Breaker

 

The Cult Breaker, by Andrew Sugar

No month stated, 1979  Manor Books

With some serious Clint Eastwoodsploitation cover art (uncredited, but I wonder if was by Anthony “Mondo” DeStefano), The Cult Breaker comes off like the first installment of a series, but there was never a followup volume – nor was there ever another novel by author Andrew Sugar. At least, I’ve never been able to find anything published by him after 1979 – under the name “Andrew Sugar” or under the name “Andrea Sugar,” which was the name Sugar was going by at this time. 

 

As mentioned in past reviews of Sugar’s work, Andrew Sugar reportedly had a sex change sometime in the late ‘70s; I learned this back in 2013 when I was briefly in contact with a person who had served as an “expert witness” in a lawsuit trial Sugar had launched on…well, on Clint Eastwood! Sugar felt that Eastwood’s Dirty Harry flick The Enforcer was an infringement upon Sugar’s earlier series The Enforcer, and took Eastwood to court – only, as my contact revealed, at the time of the trial (June of 1980) Sugar was no longer “Andrew Sugar,” but had become “Andrea Sugar,” a rather “handsome woman.” Learning this was kind of revelatory for me at the time, as it cleared up the mystery in the comments section of my Enforcer #1 review, where James Reasoner stated he’d heard Sugar was really a woman, and then a person named Ralph Blanchette, who knew Sugar in the ‘70s, responded that Sugar certainly was a man. The answer, of course, was that Sugar was both! 

Obviously Sugar had little ground to stand on in the lawsuit, no matter what name or gender he was going by. The trial took place after The Cult Breaker was published, and boy it would’ve been great if Clint Eastwood had been aware of the book. He could’ve just brought it into the courtroom as Exhibit A: “Your honor, who is ripping off who??” (Or would that be “Whom?” I don’t know…Clint would probably know, though.) 

But ever since I learned about that Eastwood lawsuit, I’ve kept wondering about the cover art on The Cult Breaker. Was Manor trolling Clint Eastwood? Did they think the trial would get more publicity and so tried to capitalize on it? Or was it just a fluke? 

I guess we’ll never know, but the important thing to note is that the cover is very misleading, as protagonist Johnny Baron is not described as looking like Clint Eastwood, and he doesn’t carry a gun – indeed, at one point he’s offered a .357 Magnum and flatly refuses to carry it or any other pistol. Instead he uses “shunkens,” or shurikens as they are more commonly known – Japanese throwing stars. He has them hidden in the buckle of his belt, and also in special necklace he wears. It’s the sort of gimmick you’d expect a series protagonist to have, but this was the only adventure Johnny Baron ever had. 

I wondered if this was a trunk novel, held off from publication for whatever reason, as there’s a few-years gap between the publication of The Cult Breaker and Sugar’s earlier Enforcer and Israeli Commandos work, as well as the Manor one-shot Yank. The Cult Breaker came out a few years after all of them – actualy, the same year that Manor finally got around to reprinting The Enforcer #4. But The Cult Breaker was clearly written in the late ‘70s, with a lot of topical mentions, and also at one point the date is firmly stated as being 1979. Random guess: Perhaps this book came out a few years later than the earlier books because Sugar was busy with that sex-change operation. 

Regardless of the real-life background, The Cult Breaker has the same macho vibe as Sugar’s other work. It’s also just as ponderous and weighted down with too much talking and bullshitting. Back when I started the blog, I raved about Enforcer #1 in my review, but something I don’t think I ever mentioned was that I re-read the book a few years later…and didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. I found it…well, I found it ponderous and weighted down with too much talking and bullshitting. I meant to do a “second look” review at the time but just couldn’t drum up the energy, and besides wanted my original reaction to speak for itself. 

This one, though, brings back the feelings I had when I read The Enforcer #1 that second time. It just spins its wheels for the majority of its 218, small-print pages, and there are a lot of similarities to the Enforcer series – which itself became more of a standard “suspense” yarn as the series progressed. In fact, The Cult Breaker is labelled “Suspense” on its spine. It’s not an action-thriller by any means, despite being packaged as one, and, just as Alex Jason in The Enforcer, Johnny Baron spends the majority of the text posing undercover, pretending to be who he’s not, as he gradually figures out what nefariousness a particular cult is up to. 

Like Alex Jason, Baron is a rugged individualist who is yanked out of his normal world and thrust into the role of action-series protagonist. For Jason it was because he was dying of stomach cancer and was given the chance to live again in a series of clone bodies. For Baron, he’s a former mercenary turned smuggler who is caught by a “famous detective” and offered two hundred thousand dollars to infiltrate the private island of the Shrine Of The Forgiven and rescue four people who have supposedly been abducted by the cult. The Objectivist leanings of The Enforcer have been toned down, and instead of the Jon Anryn Institute, Baron’s employer, Ashford Cory, runs a global organization with an army of employees and experts and etc at his beck and call. 

The overall vibe is still the same; just as The Enforcer squandered its pulpy setup by becoming more of a slow-going mystery, so too does The Cult Breaker. Indeed the entire plot, of Baron being hired to rescue four captives, is for the most part overlooked, with more focus placed on his infiltrating the cult. The book could’ve just as easily been titled “The Cult Joiner,” because that’s essentially what Johnny Baron spends the majority of the text accomplishing. Andrew Sugar really grinds the gears in this one, and the novel moves a whole lot more sluggishly than you might expect. I don’t exaggerate when I say that most of the book concerns Baron hoodwinking the Shrine of the Forgiven into thinking he’s a convert. 

Even the setup takes a long time to get underway; we meet Baron as he’s flying in to Corpus Christi from Mexico with his latest smuggling run – not drugs, but priceless artifacts that have been disguised as cheap souveneirs. He’s cornered by some men and starts going into kung-fu and “shunken” mode, not killing anyone but hurting them. He’s knocked out and comes to, to discover that it wasn’t cops surrounding him, but the employees of famous investigator Ashford Cory, who puts forth the $200k job. This sequence alone takes up the first quarter of the novel. 

From there it becomes even more of a long-simmer yarn; Baron’s been offered the gig because one of the top Shrine members is a former mercenary pal of his named Danny Lanz. But, per Cory Lanz has gone crazy, as evidenced by grisly photos Cory shows Baron of the infamous killing technique that was used by a native tribe Lanz and Baron served with during their mercenary days in Africa. Also called the “head peel,” the technique involves slicing the flesh at the back of the neck and then pulling the flap of skin up over the skull until the entire face is ripped off, to be shown to the victim, and if the victim has lived long enough to get to this part he – or she – will immediately die of a heart attack. 

Baron can’t believe that Lanz himself would perform the head peel on people, but Cory assures him that Lanz is full-bore nuts now and is not the same man Baron knew a few years ago. So Baron takes the job and heads to New York, where he’s to “just happen” to run into Lanz and pretend to be sickened in his soul and looking for some purpose, etc, etc. In other words, to make himself a target for the cult. The Shrine of the Forviven runs a sort of commune on 50th Street and some nights they give free booze to old vets at a local bar, one run by another old mercenary pal. 

Sugar often doles out a lot of trash-talk and arrogant posturing in the overly-macho dialog he gives his male characters, and that’s on full display here. But things liven up with the appearance of Oy, an attractive brunette who shows up at the bar and is there to serve as a paramedic but is part of the cult. This scene goes on and on with Baron drinking as part of his guise but getting progessively drunker and afraid he’ll blab too much, then Danny Lanz shows up – wilder looking but still happy to see Baron and get drunk with him – and the “macho dialog” runs rampant as they try to outdrink each other and bet on who pukes first and etc. 

Sugar goes for a poetic approach in the inevitable sex scene between Baron and Oy – like talking about their bodies becoming “one” and such – and also dials way down on the breast obsession seen in the earliest Enforcer novels. In fact, Oy is hardly exploited at all, and about the most we get is she’s pretty and a former hooker who was saved by the Shrine. She will also be Baron’s sole conquest in the novel, and in fact essentially becomes his girlfriend, having him live with her when they repair to the Shrine’s private island in the Bahamas, Eden Cay. But Sugar has a hard time explaining who Oy is, as she isn’t a brainwashed sheep like the other cult members on the island, and seems to do her own thing. 

Meanwhile there’s the cult leader, Uncle Ted, whose schtick is he “looks like someone’s uncle” but can hypnotize you with his eyes, and also insists that everyone toast each other with a special drink of milk every morning. We get lots of stuff about Baron puking his guts out when drinking this milk, given his allergy to dairy or some such shit…it really gets to be a bit much. Plus the dude’s real slow on the up-take because he wonders why every cult member seems so fazed and then only at the end of the novel does he put it together that it’s the damn drink literally everyone on the island drinks every single day. 

But the “cult life” stuff just goes on and on. Baron exploring the island, getting the lay of the land, seeing how the cultists are split into different jobs and etc. And also meanwhile he gets the gig of helping Danny Lanz with island security…but man, even the subplot about Lanz isn’t really exploited. Sugar seems to get bored with it and quickly resolves it just a little over halfway through the novel, with a bizarre shootout Lanz and Baron get in with some rivals in upstate New York, and Lanz going crazy suddenly for no reason. We don’t even get an explanation for the “head peel” stuff, which also is brushed under the narratorial carpet. 

Most importantly, the four people Baron’s supposedly here to rescue aren’t even mentioned. Instead the plot changes to a “doomsday device” Uncle Ted has apparently put together, using toxic waste or something. Suddenly we have stuff where Baron knows how to defuse bombs because he was a demolitions expert in the army and then, with the word count quickly approaching, Sugar does a whole Jonestown Massacre thing with Uncle Ted abruptly revealing that some senators are on the way to the island. Just a few pages later and the senators are dead and Uncle Ted is forcing his flock to commit suicide; I mean it’s like Jonestown on speed. 

Even here Sugar loses the plot thread and instead focuses on Baron trying to defuse that damn doomsday device. In the hugest miss of all, Baron takes no part in the action finale; in fact, a pair of women do all the work (hmmm…), toting guns and blasting at their former cult-friends as Baron tries to take care of the doomsday device. Seriously, Baron hardly does anything action-like in the finale, instead directing a few cult members who miraculously show up out of the woodwork and have just the skills Baron needs a that time – medical, military, etc. Worse yet, the main villains are dispatched off-page, and not even by Baron. 

It's all very underwhelming, and perhaps the indication is that nothing more came from Sugar because he’d lost the spirit. The Cult Breaker is listless and confused, starting off in one direction before veering off in another, sort of like a certain political figure I won’t name. Even the finale is confused, but humorously so. Baron passes out a few times in the final pages, and the very end of the novel features him about to be put under for some quick surgery for injuries he’s sustained, and he’s certain he’ll wake up from it. But the novel ends cold here, and given that Johnny Baron never appeared in another novel, one gets the impression he really didn’t make it through the surgery. 

Back in 2013 James Reasoner and I discussed Andrew Sugar via email, and James turned up the info that an “Andrea Conrad-Sugar” had died in 2010, in New Windsor, New York, which is near the Hudson River – and Ralph Blanchette commented on my Enforcer #1 review that Andrew Sugar had lived in the Hudson Valley. Conrad-Sugar was born in 1933, which seems to line up with Andrew Sugar’s supposed age. James pondered if Andrea Conrad-Sugar and Andrew Sugar were one and the same. But unless we hear from one of Sugar’s children, I guess this will just be a mystery, as Sugar himself – or herself – disappeared from the publishing world after the publication of The Cult Breaker in 1979.

The Aquanauts #11: Operation Mermaid

The Aquanauts #11: Operation Mermaid, by Ken Stanton

December, 1974  Manor Books

Well, friends, it’s my sad duty to report that The Aquanauts does not conclude on a high note; this final volume is the most tepid and uninteresting of the entire series. But then Manning Lee Stokes (aka “Ken Stanton”) has struggled with this series from the start; in each of the eleven volumes he’s taken a series that’s supposedly about a kick-ass underwater force and turned it into a sloooow-moving suspense thriller that’s more concerned with esponiage and crime. But at the very least Stokes has seen his vision through to the end; he clearly wrote every volume, as ever peppering the novels with his goofy, self-referential in-jokes. Operation Mermaid for example features a minor character named “Lt. Stokes” who reports to temporary Secret Underwater Service honcho Captain Greene. 

I still chuckle to myself when I imagine series “producer” Lyle Kenyon Engel receiving Stokes’s latest manuscript; it’s just a guess, but I’m betting that Engel came up with the plot for each volume of The Aquanauts, or at least the gist of a plot, and for this one Engel clearly wanted a mermaid. As I’ve mentioned before, Engel must have had a particular interest in this subject, given that mermaids were also mentioned in the earlier Engel-produced series Nick Carter: Killmaster, in the installment Moscow, not to mention the later Engel series Attar The Merman. So the title is “Operation Mermaid” and a mermaid actually appears in the first few pages of the novel, so Engel must’ve been happy…but after that Manning Lee Stokes turns in a snooze fest that comes off like an installment from a completely different series, featuring a new-to-the-series protagonist for the majority of the tale. I mean hell, “series protagonist” Tiger Shark doesn’t even show up until page 114! And the book’s only 192 pages! 

Rather, our hero for the majority of Operation Mermaid is a guy named Matt Baker, a black Navy intelligence officer who has just been assigned to the newly-formed Intelligence wing of the SUS, or SUSI (Secret Underwater Service Intelligence). This, we’re informed, is one of SUS boss Admiral Coffin’s projects, creating an intelligence wing for the SUS, and Baker is apparently the first guy. Oh and by the way, Admiral Coffin never actually appears in Operation Mermaid, other than talking over the phone and such; we are informed he’s still recuperating from his heart attack a few volumes ago, and Greene is still serving as SUS boss in his stead. So at the very least Operation Mermaid dispenses with that “Admiral Coffin and the head of the Navy meeting in mufti” scenario that was repeated throughout the majority of the series. 

So Baker is our star for most of the novel, which makes Operation Mermaid not even seem like an installment of The Aquanauts. Captain Greene doesn’t even show up until page 64. Instead it’s all about Matt Baker, a junior intelligence guy stationed in Hong Kong. We do see the titular mermaid at novel’s start, though; it opens beneath the waters outside Hong Kong, and a crusty old yank diver is up to no good, trying to get hold of some gold he’s learned about via the underworld. Then a nude mermaid – a Chinese mermaid, by the way – swims up, wearing nothing but her fishlike tail, and mouths the words, “Do you want fucky?” Oh plus she has gills that run beneath the breasts to her back. The old diver is all for it, even though it doesn’t seem real…then he wonders how indeed you would screw a mermaid, only to happily discover that the tail is just a costume the girl is wearing, and she’s nude beneath that, too. But then a Chinese “merman” stabs the diver in the back…and that’s all we’ll see of the mermaids until toward the end. 

Instead, that “lost gold” stuff will be the driving plot of Operation Mermaid. A particular Tong wants it, and a British spy named Ian Phillips wants it, plus there are also the Russians who want the mermaid, and the British government, which also wants the mermaid. Humans who can breathe underwater could change the global power structure! Or so we’re told. But none of it really goes anywhere. Instead it’s more focused on Phillips, an openly gay dude, and how he wants to screw Matt Baker, bluntly propositioning him and whatnot. Stokes has also kept the lurid vibe strong throughout The Aquanauts, at least, but there really isn’t much hanky-panky in this one. Hell, even Tiger Shark (when he finally shows up) goes without any action – even turning down an attractive young woman who practically begs him for the goods! 

But man as mentioned, Matt Baker is the star of the show for most of the duration of Operation Mermaid. And he makes for one helluva lame star. The dude is junior level, in way over his head, and spends the entire narrative either worrying over stuff or trying to figure out what’s going on. I wonder if Stokes planned to make this guy a new recurring character. Stokes has focused on other one-off characters in past installments, but Baker truly is the protagonist for a lot of the book; even when Tiger Shark finally appears, in the last quarter of the novel, his entrance is initially viewed through Baker’s perspective. So hell in a way I guess you could say this installment was Stokes’s version of The Spy Who Loved Me. 

Speaking of which, gay Brit Ian Phillips tries to put the moves on poor Baker incessantly in the novel, and an increasingly-annoyed Baker keeps telling him no. As for Phillips, he’s the British intelligence op in Hong Kong and he serves for the most part as the novel’s villain. He’s the one who puts Baker onto the mermaid business, and Baker goes to the funeral of the man who was killed by the mermaids, and soon enough Baker’s being made to drink by the victim’s loutish friends. Baker is such a loser that he becomes violently ill after being forced to drink some whiskey, because he’s never been much of a drinker – and speaking of which, there’s a lot of vomit-exploitation in the first half of the book, with Baker puking his guts out in the toilet and later having to step in the toilet when making his way into a crawlspace that’s hidden in the ceiling above it. 

Just the typical freaky Manning Lee Stokes stuff. Like later in the novel, Baker has been instructed to play on Phillips’ advances…up to the point of allowing the guy to give him a blowjob. Complete with a nude Baker stroking himself “absently” so as to get Phillips’s attention, and then Phillips going about it, and then Baker using the distraction to knock him out… Each volume of The Aquanauts has been pretty sleazy, but it must be noted that there’s no straight sex this time – except for when Phillips does the mermaid: “She giggled as he entered her from the rear,” and that’s all there is to it. Indeed, Phillips is actually bored as he fucks a mermaid, which should give you an idea of how bored Stokes himself was with this whole series. 

Well, what else? As mentioned a lot of the plot is concerned with planning and subterfuge and Phillips trying to get a coup with both the mermaids and the lost gold, while meanwhile the Russians and the Tongs are closing in. Stokes also works in his trademark crime-sleaze vibe when Baker discovers the corpse of his girlfriend…and we’re informed she’s been raped and strangled, a Manning Lee Stokes staple if ever there was one. For this Baker is wanted by the cops, someone having set him up, but this turns out to be a red herring of a subplot – and also Baker seems to have an easy enough time getting around Hong Kong as “a black man,” despite his concerns. But as usual it’s just Stokes grinding his gears as he pads out the pages. 

As ever, what makes all this so frustrating is that Stokes can still fire on all cylinders when he wants to: there are not one but two underwater combat sequences in Operation Mermaid, both instances featuring Tiger up against Russian frogmen. These are very tense, taut sequences, with Tiger again outnumbered and using his superior skills and resillience to survive. But both scenes are relatively quick, given how much space Stokes has devoted to Matt Baker and Ian Phillips. Hell, Stokes doesn’t even waste the usual time on Admiral Coffin or Captain Greene; the former as mentioned doesn’t actually appear in the book, and the latter only has a few scenes where he talks on the phone or meets with other bigwigs. That said, Greene does get in a shootout toward the end of the novel, the first action I believe he’s ever seen in The Aquanauts. 

But even this is an indication of how messy Stokes’s writing is. So, the novel climaxes with Baker trying to get the better of Phillips with the aforementioned bj, and then a victorious Baker hears someone coming up the stairs – all this is in Phillips’s house out by the docks or somesuch. Then we have Greene, with some Hong Kong cops, in a shootout with Russians and Tongs, outside the house…and then Greene discovers a beaten and half-dead Baker, and we only learn what happened to the poor guy via dialog. What I mean to say is, Stokes makes Baker practically the star of the show, then just unceremoniously drops him at the end. 

When Tiger Shark, the actual star of the show, finally appears, he too seems to have been changed. As stated in previous reviews, in the past couple volumes Stokes has developed this bit that “Tiger Shark” is only a title to be used when Bill Martin is on duty. Whereas in earliest volumes he was “Tiger” all the time in the narrative, now he’s “Bill,” until he’s in KRAB and on the job and is referred to as “Tiger.” It’s just goofy, and my hunch is it was an editorial request from Lyle Kenyon Engel, who was probably concerned prospective readers would flip through the books and see a bunch of references to “Tiger” in the narrative and conclude the series was for juvenile readers. 

But as we know, this is certainly an adult series – though as mentioned “Bill” himself goes without action for once. This time he’s also been retconned into a secret agent or something, and he shows up in Hong Kong with this hotstuff babe who is an undercover Navy Intelligence officer who is posing as his wife, and she basically begs him for sex behind closed doors, wanting to go all the way with the cover story, but our usually-virile hero turns her down because he doesn’t want to mix business with pleasure. WTF? This is another subplot that goes nowhere; the lady is not mentioned again after she storms off when Tiger turns her down. 

The mermaids, you won’t be surprised to learn if you’ve ever read a single Manning Lee Stokes novel, are pretty much forgotten. Actually, they’re just window dressing. They are introduced in the opening – a mermaid and a merman – and then disappear until toward the end, when they’re just bluntly brought back into the tale without much pizzaz. Stokes does try to go into the science of how the Chinese perfected this technology, of implanting gills in humans, but again there’s really not much to it. I also can’t believe Stokes didn’t have Tiger Shark screw the mermaid; I mean you’d figure that would be a given. Instead, Tiger only meets the girl at the very end of the book, and she does mouth the words “You want fucky?” to him beneath the waves, but Stokes only hints at what she’s said – because it’s all she says, all the time, and by novel’s end Stokes himself has gotten so tired of the joke that he doesn’t even write the phrase, and instead has Tiger Shark wondering if he read the girl’s lips correctly. 

The frogmen battles are cool, though, and fairly bloody: Tiger blows up two guys with his Sea Pistol, and another one he dispenses by jamming a shark baton with a charged end into the dude’s “rear” and it blows him in half. But these fights are over quick. We also get some underwater KRAB action, in fact a humorous part where Tiger shadows a Russian sub and then starts showing off when he realizes the sub can’t hit him, doing fancy maneuvers as he flings his ship around the sub. We also get new technology here that would have certainly played into future volumes: an underwater phone line, upon which Tiger can talk to Greene while Tiger is on missions in KRAB. 

But this was it for The Aquanauts. I would guess low sales killed the series, and it’s not surprising the sales were low. I can only imagine there were quite a few dissatisfied readers out there. But as I speculated before, I have a suspicion that Stokes’s last John Eagle Expeditor novels The Green Goddess and Silverskull started life as manuscripts for The Aquanauts. Not only were both volumes different from Stokes’s earlier Expeditor novels, but Silverskull in particular featured a subplot about a villain with a submarine, which would be in-line with The Aquanauts. But I guess we’ll never know. 

So, this ends my time with The Aquanauts. I still remember the day I excitedly came across a few volumes of this series at an antique store in Haltom City, Texas; I think it was in December 2013. This discovery inspired me to pick up the entire series (for a pittance, as it turned out), and a few months after is when I reviewed the first volume. And while I really enjoy the writing of Manning Lee Stokes, it must be said that The Aquanauts was not his strongest work, and I say again it clearly seems that he struggled with it. Other than the seventh volume, pretty much every volume was a little padded and dull. But also Stokes was truly invested in the writing, same as ever, and for that I’ve always ranked the guy as one of my favorites. He might have padded out the pages, but by God he did it with gusto!

The Aquanauts #10: Operation Sea Monster

The Aquanauts #10: Operation Sea Monster, by Ken Stanton

No month stated, 1974

The penultimate volume of The Aquanauts finds Manning Lee Stokes taking the series into more of an undersea adventure sort of realm, dropping the lurid crime vibe of the previous volumes. Believe it or not, there’s no sick sexual sadism in this one! Indeed, there isn’t any kinky stuff at all, a far cry from the sleaze of the previous volume. More importantly, the title of this one is not misleading: hero Tiger Shark does go up against a literal sea monster. 

But man…it’s like only now, ten volumes in, Manning Lee Stokes has finally realized he’s writing a series titled “The Aquanauts.” The previous books have mostly been crime novels, only occasionally spruced up with some undersea frogman action. With Operation Sea Monster Stokes goes full-bore with the nautical angle, with all kinds of detail on Navy subs and sealabs and looking at charts and etc. To the point, honestly, that I actually missed the sick sexual sadism of the previous books. The sad truth is that Operation Sea Monster is kind of boring – and the previous ten books haven’t exactly been rip-roaring thrill rides. (Except for the seventh volume, though, certainly the highlight of the series…though admitedly I haven’t read the last volume yet!) 

While the title isn’t misdirection, the actual sea monster – a gargantuan beast which is apparently the result of a giant sea snake mating with a giant octopus – only appears sporadically. The vast majority of Operation Sea Monster is focused on the attempt to find an experimental sea lab and save its inhabitants. And, following the template of the previous books, Stokes does find the opportunity to have Tiger Shark get in combat with a few Soviet frogmen. And as with the previous books this sequence is the highlight of the book. Manning Lee Stokes has a specialty for putting his protagonists through the wringer, and he does so to Tiger Shark in this sequence, adrift in the sea with dwindling tanks and an unknown number of enemy frogmen coming for him. 

There’s a strange change, though; Tiger Shark’s real name is Bill Martin, one of the more unimaginative action-hero names (down there with, uh, Ben Martin), and this time Stokes suddenly insists on referring to him as “Bill” when he’s not on assignment. Only when he is activated for Secret Underwater Service duty does he become “Tiger Shark.” To the point that even Tiger’s boss, Tom Greene, has to remind himself that it’s “Bill Martin” when Tiger isn’t on duty. It just seems rather strange after nine previous volumes where it was “Tiger” all the time, on a mission or not. It’s just another indication of how Stokes has suddenly decided to focus on the red tape of Navy administration and whatnot; much of Operation Sea Monster is concerned with Navy protocol and the like, to the point that the book’s a bit of a slog. 

Another problem is that Tiger Shark’s seldom in the novel. This too isn’t unprecedented; previous volumes, like for example #5: Stalkers Of The Sea, put the focus more on Greene, and also Admiral Coffin, crusty boss of SUS, has featured in his share of the narrative. But as I’ve theorized before, Stokes must have seen this is as “team” series, meaning the “Aquanauts” were really Coffin, Greene, and Tiger Shark, with the latter being the one who featured in the action stuff. This time though, it isn’t even Greene or Coffin who take the brunt of the narrative; it’s a few one-off characters who are trapped on the lost sea lab. Stokes spends much of the novel detailing their plight, to the extent that you feel you’re reading a standalone novel. It seemed clear to me that Stokes was perhaps getting burned out with writing the series and just did something completely different this time. 

I did appreciate the continuity, though; we pick up some indeterminate time after the previous volume, but we are informed that Admiral Coffin, who suffered a heart attack last time, has just returned as head of SUS. Last time much was made of Greene’s shaky assumption of control in the old man’s absence, but Stokes doesn’t spend too much time with Greene in Operation Sea Monster. There’s an interesting-in-hindsight part where Coffin speculates that if he doesn’t take it easy at work he won’t “be around in 1978,” and as it turned out this was true for Stokes himself; he died in 1976. You can almost wonder if Coffin’s various asides on his age and the strain he puts on himself is Stokes musing on himself and his own prolific writing pace. 

One thing Stokes has whittled down on in the past few volumes is Tiger Shark getting lucky while on a mission. Instead, we meet up with him as he’s on leave in the English countryside, getting busy with a thirty year-old hotstuff reporter named Susan: “Thrusting deeper into the deep red channel that you could never chart absolutely.” Here we also get to see Tiger the pickup artist, as he orchestrates a fender-bender to get the beautiful woman’s attention. This will be it for Tiger’s extracurricular fun; he spends the rest of the text either in his submersible KRAB or on a Navy destroyer as it searches for the lost sea lab. 

The titular sea monster, described as “whale big…blobby and diffuse,” appears in the extended opening sequence, attacking the sea lab and its adjoining submarine near the Mariana Trench, which we are informed is the deepest stretch of ocean in the world. It rips the sub apart with its massive tentacles (which have glowing eyes on them) and sends the sea lab off into the depths of the sea; the Navy receives one message from the lost crew: “It’s following us.” Also, a frogman is torn to pieces by the creature, and we're told that part of the monster’s flesh was discovered on his knife, so a lot of the story has to do with Coffin and the Navy admin trying to determine whether there really is a sea monster or if the crew has gone nuts from oxygen contamination. 

Actually, it isn’t just the sea lab much of the narrative is concerned with; Tiger spends almost just as much time trying to locate the torn-apart submarine that was attending the lab. It’s in this section that the fight with the Russians occurs; a Soviet sub has converged on the area where the downed US sub might be, and it’s clear the Russians will pretend to “help” the stricken ship as a ruse to get in there and take photos or whatever. When Tiger Shark is inspecting the wreck he is ambushed by a frogman, and in a later underwater sequence he is ambushed yet again by two more frogmen from the same Soviet sub. Stokes really excels at fierce combat scenes and here we have Tiger blowing apart one guy’s head with his Sea Pistol and knifing the other. 

That’s really it for the action in Operation Sea Monster. The climax does have Tiger up against the titular monster, though. It’s only for a few pages, but we have Tiger chasing after the fleeing behemoth in KRAB and hammering it with torpedos. But yes, Tiger Shark does witness the monster, so he is a believer by the end of the book; the speculation is the beast lives six+ miles down and only comes up every few “generations.” It looks like Stokes continues with the sci-fi element for the series, as the next (and final) volume of The Aquanauts apparently concerns a mermaid.

The Deadly Massage (Kill Squad #5)

The Deadly Massage, by Mark Cruz

No month stated, 1976  Manor Books

The Kill Squad series comes to a close with an installment that promises a lot more sleaze than it ultimately delivers; save for the narrative tone Dan Streib (aka “Mark Cruz”) writes the book in. While Streib is fond of very crude analogies and metaphors in the narrative, the book per se is pretty anemic in the sleaze department, even if it concerns the titular Kill Squad investigating the linkup between a Chinese massage parlor and the slave trade. 

First of all, this is another book I got from Marty McKee some years ago; in fact I’m reading the same copy he reviewed on his blog in 2013. It’s interesting to see a Manor men’s adventure novel from 1976, given that the majority of publishers were whittling way back on their men’s adventure series at the time. I agree with Marty that Streib goofs by once again taking the Kill Squad out of its California stomping grounds and putting it in a foreign country, which is what he’s done for the past few volumes. The entire premise is ludicrous and gives the impression that Streib didn’t know how to properly handle the series. I mean “trio of tough cops killing crooks” seems like a series that could write itself, but instead Streib’s been running on empty ever since the entertaining first volume. 

But then, book producer Lyle Kenyon Engel himself referred to Dan Streib as “not very good,” no doubt a veiled reference to Streib’s work on the first two volumes of Chopper Cop. As I mentioned in my reviews of those books, Streib delivered an “action hero” who was more of a wuss. And as I’ve mentioned in my Kill Squad reviews, it’s as if Streib had a delayed realization of this and doubled down on making the hero of this series an uber-macho badass…to the extent that main series protagonist Chet Tabor comes off like a hateful prick. Definitely one of the more unlikable heroes in men’s adventure…with the added kick in the crotch that Tabor’s also a screw-up, even though he himself of course doesn’t realize it. 

But the macho drive extends to the narrative tone. In fact one could almost argue that Streib is spoofing the entire vibe of the genre. This is evident in the crudity of the narrative, particularly in such weird word-painting as, “…the [Hong Kong airport] runway extend[ed] like a stiff penis,” or “Malaysia…hung like a penis from the underbelly of Asia.” We learn that Tabor’s old Mercedes has now grown “cranky…like a woman in menopause,” and also that he sometimes takes superior-officer/fellow Kill Squader Maria Alvarez to bed because “she needed that occasionally, so she didn’t forget that she was a woman.” Oh and for the first time, I believe, Streib mentions Maria’s grim ordeal in the first volume: “…a gang rape that had left her nauseated for months when she even thought about sex.” Even the first page is indicative of this uber-macho, almost-parodic tone: 

When we meet them Tabor and Grant Lincoln, the other member of the Kill Squad (aka “the black one”), are moonlighting on the “keyhole-peeking Vice squad,” pretending to be businessmen at the China Doll massage parlor in San Diego, Kill Squad home base. Here’s where Tabor’s dumb-assness comes in; so his and Grant’s task is to get these hookers to proposition them, but Tabor soon discovers his girl doesn’t speak English. So Tabor decides to take his girl – and the two Grant has grabbed for himself (just like Jim Kelly!) – and take them out to dinner!? Right then and there! So he pulls them out of the parlor and some toughs give chase, and in the ensuing shootout one of the girls is killed and the China Doll burns down. 

So clearly this entire plot would be unbelievable even in an ‘80s buddy cop film. Speaking of which, the plot of Deadly Massage is sort of reminiscent of an actual ‘80s action movie: The Protector. But the setup is even more implausible here. Essentlially Tabor, Grant, and Maria bully their “stupid chief” into letting them go to Hong Kong(!) to track down the two massage parlor girls, both of whom were abducted during the shootout and likely have been smuggled back to “the Orient.” The idea is that these two girls could blow the lid off an entire slave-trade operation running out of Red China. Streib even unwittingly brings in some identity politics presience; when the stupid chief denies the entire idea, a fellow cop – who happens to be Asian – shames the chief that he doesn’t care about the girls: “Is it because they’re Chinese?” 

So reality be damned the Kill Squad heads over to Hong Kong. It even gets more ludicrous because the local cops allow them to keep their guns. Some detail is given Tabor’s two new guns: a Webley revolver and a Beretta .380. He might’ve used these in the previous books, I can’t remember, but Streib introduces them like they’re new to Tabor’s arsenal. Not that he will use them much; there are only a few shootouts in The Deadly Massage, and nothing too violent…except when it comes to Streib’s trademark description of a woman being shot in the face. This is a recurring theme in Streib’s novels, complete with the weird constant detail of the cheekbones also exploding: 

But here’s the crazy thing about a novel involving massage parlors and sex-slavery: there isn’t a sex scene in The Deadly Massage! Tabor often thinks about banging Maria – and later in the book we learn Maria gets all hot and bothered by Tabor, too, even though she hates his male chauvinist pig guts. Nothing ever happens, though, however we do learn that Tabor briefly considers becoming a Muslim because he learns that Muslims can have several wives! This is courtesy a local named Low who happens to be “Muslin” [sp] who has four wives, and Tabor can’t get over how hot each of them are. Tabor briefly considers becoming a Muslim to take advantage of this, “before they change the rules.” Indeed Tabor’s male-gazery is so over the top throughout the book that it’s a refreshing balm to the emasculating bullshit of today’s action entertainment. 

Oh, but there’s a dark side, though: Tabor again indulges in his penchant for random racism. This, as ever, is directed toward Grant Lincoln, who curiously receives hardly any narrative space in The Deadly Massage. Tabor is as ever the star of the show, with occasional cutovers to Maria’s perspective. But Grant Lincoln doesn’t get to do much…other, that is, receive some nonsensical baiting from Tabor: “You black bastard! What’s wrong with you, boy?” Oh and we also have the “Jap killer” the Kill Squad chases to Hong Kong – meaning he’s a killer who happens to be Japanese, not a killer of Japanese. 

Streib also works in a half-assed mystery subplot on who exactly is behind the slavery ring, even though it will soon be clear to even the most unengaged reader…though of course the members of the Kill Squad take forever to figure this out. They do a fair bit of traveling around “the Orient” as well, from Hong Kong to Malaysia to Bangkok. The action climaxes in a snake temple, but as Marty notes in his review Streib does precious little to bring the scene to life. Marty’s also on-point with how a major villain is killed off-page, which also sucks. But by novel’s end the Kill Squad has cracked the case and is happily heading back to San Diego – where presumably the three of them will continue acting as a team. 

So in other words, there’s no real finale to the series here, no indication that this was the final volume. One can’t be too upset that there were no more volumes of Kill Squad, though, as Dan Streib never really figured out how to handle the concept. Which is curious, because he did a better job on the similar Death Squad series. But on a random note I found it interesting that Streib used the term “sci-fi” in The Deadly Massage, in reference to “the sci-fi sound of Hong Kong police sirens.” This might be one of the earliest appearances of this term I’ve seen in a mainstream novel…well, not that Kill Squad was mainstream. But you know what I mean. 

Finally, I’m calling bullshit on the cover blurb by “Bestsellers.” There hasn’t been a single damn volume of Kill Squad that’s been “painstakingly well-plotted,” so either the entire review is fake (the most likely scenario) or it’s been lifted from the review of an entirely different book.

The Aquanauts #9: Evil Cargo

The Aquanauts #9: Evil Cargo, by Ken Stanton

No month stated, 1973  Manor Books

Manning Lee Stokes loved his in-jokery, and this ninth volume of The Aquanauts features his biggest in-joke yet, as Manning Lee Stokes himself guest-stars in Evil Cargo. Sort of. I knew something was up when the prologue featured a few quotes on the definition of “karma,” and one of the people quoted was Kermit Welles – a pseudonym Stokes used in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But as it turns out, Kermit Welles actually appears as a character in this Aquanauts yarn, and one can only wonder how much the character is based on Stokes himself. 

The novel occurs between September 1972 and January 1973. There are a few allusions to previous volumes, but the biggest development here on the home front is that crusty Admiral Coffin, boss of the Secret Underwater Service, suffers a heart attack and is taken out of commision for the duration of Evil Cargo. This happens early in the book, as Coffin is briefing Tiger Shark and Captain Tom Greene on “Code Coke,” their new SUS assignment: someone’s stolen a Yankee-class Soviet sub, and it’s being used to run heroin and coke into the US. Coffin has a heart attack before he can finish the briefing – we’ve been told since the beginning of the series that he’s way past retirement age – and control of SUS falls on Greene’s shoulders. He will prove to be a pretty weak-ass boss, and luckily Coffin’s back in action by novel’s end. Given the lack of much continuity in the series, I wonder if Coffin’s heart trouble will even be mentioned in the next two volumes. 

As usual though Coffin, Greene, and Tiger Shark himself almost come off like supporting characters. As I’ve said in just about every Aquanauts review I’ve written, this series has more in common with the standalone crime paperbacks Lyle Kenyon Engel “produced” in the ‘70s, with the “underwater commando” stuff almost an afterthought. This is especially prevalent in Evil Cargo, which doesn’t even bother with the Cold War intrigue at all; it’s really just a crime novel, with the main characters a pair of Mafia creeps who come up with the “drug run via sub” plan. Actually, Kermit Welles is the character who comes up with the idea, but more on that anon. 

The entire novel is almost a prefigure of Stokes’s later Corporate Hooker, Inc., which was in fact one of those standalone BCI paperbacks. It’s got the same setup, with a scheme involving waterborne Mafia nefariousness and a twisted love triangle. Here it’s Dom Caprio, hulking and hirsute New York mob boss, who in a brief opening chapter meets meek Harvard student Harvey Fletcher in 1962. Dom hires Fletcher, we’ll learn, to be his accountant, but Fletcher ultimately doesn’t factor much into the novel; his subplot has him coping with the fact that he’s gay and going to a tough “leather” guy for kicks. After this opening we flash to 1972, and learn that Dom, now a successful mobster, is “banging” Harvey’s wife Anita for kicks – and it was interesting to see that “banging” was being used for sex in 1973. 

This is certainly the sleaziest Aquanauts yet. Dom and Anita get right down to it in full-bore detail, in a crazed matter almost equaling The Nursery. There are some back door shenanigans, you see…that is, after Anita literally measures Dom’s 9 inches with a ruler, and then implores him, “Please, honey, fuck me in the ass!” Stokes was in his early sixties when he wrote this novel – as is Kermit Welles, we’ll learn – so it was great to see he’d only gotten more sordidly kinky with age. But then it’s all even more in-jokery, as we’ll learn that Dom himself is an “inveterate reader of paperbacks,” going through “three a day” at times; he especially likes ones with “plenty of gore and sex,” and judges their quality by how big of a hard-on they give him! 

After this escapade Dom heads back to Manhattan but takes a wrong route and ends up in a “hick town” near Montrose, New York (or perhaps it is Monstrose – Stokes isn’t clear), and, stopping in a bar, meets once-famous author Kermit Welles. Manning Lee Stokes himself lived in Montrose, or near it (according to his Wikipedia page he died in Peekskill, New York, which is just a few miles from Montrose), so it’s clear that he based Kermit Welles somewhat on himself. Further evidence: Dom’s favorite Welles novel is the one where “the lady got her head sliced off by the Jap sword.” Yes, friends, this is The Lady Lost Her Head, the title referenced by Welles himself. In the real world, The Lady Lost Her Head was published under Stokes’s own name, so it’s curious he referenced this book in Evil Cargo and not one of his actual “Kermit Welles” novels. 

But the Kermit Welles of the novel is more successful than the real-world Manning Lee Stokes; we learn that Welles’s The Lady Lost Her Head was made into a movie fifteen years ago, but Hollywood “butchered” it. That was then, though; now Welles is basically a lush, spending most of his time and money in a dingy bar here in this “hick town” in upstate New York. He makes his living off residuals or foreign reprints of his old books, and when Dom meets him Welles is in the process of begging the bartender to accept his check. It’s a down and out caricature of Stokes for sure, or at least I assume so, perhaps along the lines of the self-caricature William Shatner played in Free Enterprise. One must wonder if the description of Kermit Welles matches the description of Manning Lee Stokes:

Unfortunately Welles isn’t in Evil Cargo nearly enough; he pretty much steals the novel as is. He speaks in a sort of highfalutin tone, trying his best not to correct Dom’s poor grammar. He’s also a bit of a coward, but this is understandable given that Dom’s a brawny mobster who has an army of thugs at his disposal. The crux of Welles’s storyline involves Dom coming up with the bizarre idea of hiring Welles to write a novel – for ten thousand dollars – with Dom intending to use the manuscript to come up with schemes for his underworld empire(!). And of course Welles is to tell no one of this, not even the woman he’s “shacked up with.” Stokes’s biggest misgiving is that he doesn’t properly explain Dom’s scenario, and even worse we don’t get to read any of Welles’s manuscript. This would’ve been opportunity for even more metatextual in-jokery, but all we learn is that it concerns a submarine…run, apparently, by a bunch of horny women! 

Given that the novel is told out of sequence, we already know at the start that Dom got this “impossible idea” off the ground (or under the sea, I should say), managing to use some underworld contacts to steal a Soviet sub in Cuba. Welles pretty much disappears from the narrative at this point, and not to spoil anything but he’s still alive at novel’s end; Dom upholds his offer and gives Welles the ten thousand. Welles then ditches the woman he’s been living off of, moves back to Manhattan, and the last we see of him he’s planning to start writing again. “Early sixties wasn’t old, not for a writer.” The same age as Stokes at this time, so one wonders again how much of Kermit Welles here is a reflection of the real-life Manning Lee Stokes; we already know from Will Murray’s 1982 article on Nick Carter: Killmaster that Stokes was “industrious but hard-drinking,” so certainly there’s a bit of truth to Welles’s tendency to be a lush. We also get the tidbit that he doesn’t write as well drunk as he used to! 

And that is reflected in Evil Cargo itself. Because believe it or not the “heroin sub” is kept almost entirely off-page, and Stokes spends more time on the twisted Dom-Anita-Harvey love triangle. There’s a lot of kinky stuff here, all very sleazy ‘70s. For example Dom practically begs Anita to “go down” on him, but she refuses…then one night he sneaks into her place and discovers her giving some other jerk an enthusiastic bj. And meanwhile as mentioned we get some stuff with Harvey visiting his gay acquaintances. In fact, Stokes writes all the sex material for his one-off characters; poor Tiger Shark is celibate this time. We do however get the casual TMI mention that Greene, as ever pining for his wife Evelyn, has had a “wet dream” about her! 

Tiger Shark? I almost forgot about him…even though he’s ostensibly the star of the show. The funny thing is, despite the focus on lurid love triangles and lush pulp writers, Evil Cargo actually contains the best underwater action scene yet in The Aquanauts. Certainly the most brutal. Tiger Shark is sent into Cuban territorial waters to spy on the stolen sub, which the SUS has already tracked down…but at this point Greene’s in charge, and the weak-ass gives Tiger the order to swim over to the sub, pound out a message in SOS on the hull, and tell them they’re all under arrest!! Tiger chafes at this stupid idea, just wanting to blow the damn sub up, regardless of the loss of life – and he’s certain this is how Admiral Coffin would’ve played it. But he’s a Navy man and he follows orders. 

As expected it goes poorly, and for once Tiger Shark is caught unawares. Four frogmen come out of the sub and surprise attack him, leading to a very tense sequence that just keeps going. Stokes, despite his padding, really knows how to ramp up action scenes and take his protagonists through the ringer, and he does so here. In fact Tiger’s so outmatched that he kicks off his gear and races for the surface, 240 feet up, knowing it will be certain death due to the bends. But at least he’ll have a chance, unlike down here. There follows a crazy survival setup where Tiger staggers around a small Cuban isle, finds someone who will help him (in exchange for future payment), and jury rigs his own decompression chamber, using an old car and an air hose. It’s crazy stuff and very tense, but again Stokes pulls this weird gimmick as he always does and, next time we see Tiger, it’s some time later and he’s safely back at SUS HQ. In other words, Stokes completely cuts out the escape sequence itself. 

But then, another tidbit: “Welles had always been good at that – everything first draft and six weeks to do a book.” No doubt more real-world insight into Manning Lee Stokes’s writing method, not to mention possibly explaining why there are often so many missed opportunities in his books. Oh, and not content to sort of feature himself in the book, Stokes also finds the opportunity to slyly reference his own name; we get an off-hand mention of the law firm Birnbaum, Fenster, Stokes, and Engel. Double in-jokery at that; “Engel” of course a reference to Lyle Kenyon Engel. If you can’t tell, I would’ve enjoyed an entire book about Kermit Welles…it could’ve been a more serious take on The Last Buffoon. But as mentioned Welles isn’t in the novel nearly enough, and by book’s end we learn he’s in Federal protection – he himself is innocent so far as Dom’s plans go, as all Welles was hired to do was write a book, with no idea of Dom’s grander plot. And, naturally, it’s a Federal agent named Frank Manning who informs the SUS of Welles’s innocence in the plot! 

The out-of-sequence narrative takes away a lot of the tension of the book, and also Harvey Fletcher isn’t properly focused on, so that his face-off with Dom at novel’s end could’ve been more powerful than it is. Speaking of which, Captain Greene’s foul-up with nearly getting Tiger Shark killed isn’t properly focused on; by the time Admiral Coffin’s back in charge, it’s understood that Greene should have just ordered the damn sub blown, but his plan was “understandable” given that he’s not nearly as cold-blooded as Coffin is. Or something. The helluva it is, Tiger’s finally ordered to torpedo the sub to hell at novel’s end…well, sort of. First, for undisclosed reasons (possibly to pad more pages), he’s ordered to tail the sub in his KRAB submersible, back to the sub’s secret base near Iceland. This is a cool scene at least, with the action taking place on a stormy sea. But at the same time it’s just more padding, as the entire plan for tailing the sub to its base is pointless – and quickly disposed of. 

Stokes scores points by working the title into the novel; we’re told that the sub is carrying an “evil cargo.” Would’ve been cooler if this was the title of Welles’s manuscript for Dom, but as mentioned we don’t get much detail at all about the manuscript. The concept alone though is really out-there; I mean a mobster hiring a pulp novelist to write an entire novel for him, so that the mobster can mine the manuscript for ideas! And Dom wants a full novel, not an outline, as Welles suggests. But what is such a wild concept isn’t properly exploited…I thought Stokes would go all the way with it, and have a fictional underwater service as the good guys in Welles’s manuscript, and etc, but I guess he didn’t want to play it too on the nose. As it is, Evil Cargo is entertaining for the peek at Manning Lee Stokes himself. And also the battle between Tiger and the rival frogmen is the best action scene yet in the novel, or at least one of the best. 

Two more volumes were to follow, and judging from the titles and back cover synopses they get into more of a sci-fi realm, with sea monsters and mermaids(!). Stokes was clearly invested in the series, so I’ll be sorry to see The Aquanauts come to an end.