The Penetrator #45: Quaking Terror

The Penetrator #45: Quaking Terror, by Lionel Derrick

February, 1982  Pinnacle Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Penetrator #43: Rampage In Rio

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

October, 1981  Pinnacle Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Penetrator #41: Hell’s Hostages

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

March, 1981  Pinnacle Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Penetrator #39: Cruise Into Chaos

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

November, 1980  Pinnacle Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Penetrator #37: Candidate’s Blood

The Penetrator #37: Candidate’s Blood, by Lionel Derrick
September, 1980  Pinnacle Books

This timely installment of The Penetrator features an election-focused plot, only it’s a Congressional race in Alabama. Initially I was under the impression that Mark Roberts had taken a look at recent volumes and found them lacking, and decided to bring back some of the fire and brimstome of the earliest installments. But as the narrative progressed Candidate’s Blood turned out to be just as bland as everything else Roberts and series co-writer Chet Cunningham have churned out over the past few years, with a suddenly-emasculated titular character now acting more like a law-abiding cop than the revenge-minded sadist of the earliest books.

But man, the beginning’s great, and has the makings of a trash classic. First of all we meet “Dandy Andy” Wells, a Democrat who is running for the seat in Alabama. A black former civil rights activist, Wells is a “walking stereotype” per his own followers and talks in an affected “black southerner” drawl, even gnawing on spare ribs while he gives his speech! (Which has to do with “normalization” of trade with China, “making friends” with other countries around the world, and of course banning guns.) Meanwhile an assassin named Art Belman watches him from afar…and we’ve already gotten a glimpse of how twisted this dude is, as he actually has to jerk off because he’s so excited that he gets to kill again. (Definite shades of Justin Perry here!) Once that’s taken care of, Belman blows Wells’s head off with a rifle, escaping in the ruckus – and meanwhile Mark Hardin just happens to be watching the live broadcast of all this back at the Stronghold. Which I believe is in California…yet they’re showing live broadcasts of a political rally in Alabama. But whatever.

Given that there’s nothing else on the “trouble board,” Mark decides to fly on over to Alabama and sort this shit out. Mercifully there’s none of the “flying fiction” Roberts indulges in so often, though he does craftily work at least something in later when Mark happens to flip through an aviation magazine. The Penetrator takes a host of weaponry with him, which again had me expecting the action onslaught of the earliest volumes, but inexplicably he doesn’t use much of it. Once again he’s acting more in a detective capacity, hoping to root out the assassin, find out what conspiracy caused the murder of Wells – whose politics, we’re informed, Hardin doesn’t agree with – and bring the perpetrators to justice. Not kill them. Only late in the novel does Mark finally decide that the main villain needs to die.

We readers already know from the get-go who was behind Wells’s assassination: Johnny Herter, a successful and famous businessman who leads a populist movement called…the American People’s Party. Now before you jump to conclusions on who this might sound like in modern-day politics, remember this is Mark Roberts writing the book. Herter’s the villain of the piece, so of course he’s a “radical leftist,” and the APP is a far-left party. (Hard to imagine such a party having “America” in its name these days, though…but then this book was written in earlier, simpler times, before the nation was irrenconcilably divided.) Herter lives in a big plantation house in Alabama where he throws wild bashes with his clingers on: “creeps…drug-pushing hippie musicians…bomb-throwing radicals,” and “slippery fixit-type fund raisers.” Roberts really tries to pile on the sleaze here:

But man, this will turn out to be it. This is the one and only part of the book that goes to this lurid extreme. Worse yet is around here I also thought we were going to get a bit of a rock novel subplot, Roberts doing his own take of The Destroyer #13, maybe, with Mark Hardin venturing into the crazy world of rock. For it develops that Johnny Herter finances a rock group named God’s Blood, which is known for depraved spectacles on the concert stage. But all we ultimately learn is that the lead singer is named Duce[sp] Wilde and we get a sampling of God’s Blood lyrics: “Let’s get down together, baby, fuck fuck fuck!” And this too will be it! It’s like Roberts teases us in this opening bit…racial stereotypes making speeches with ribs on podiums, masturbating assassins, wild parties with naked chicks diving in the swimming pool, and even “acid rock” (in 1980!!) for the soundtrack. And then he just drops all of it and turns out your basic generic Penetrator yarn that we’ve sadly become familiar with by now.

Once again Mark’s the only person who even bothers to investigate; obviously Wells’s murder has caused a national stir, but Mark waltzes around posing as a federal agent and doesn’t even run into any real ones. He does run into an old acquaintance, though: Samantha “Sam” Chase, redheaded NASA security agent introduced back in #33: Satellite Slaughter. She’s no longer with NASA, she says, operating as a freelance detective. There’s barely any history with her so far as the narrative goes; I mean she and Mark had a fling in that earlier volume and even ended the novel on vacation together, but you’d never know that here. In fact, they don’t even “get friendly” throughout the entire novel, unless it happens so far off-page that Roberts doesn’t even mention it. Instead it’s about Sam insisting she’s a “modern woman” who can handle all the gunfighting and whatnot that’s part of Mark’s life, and also she’s figured out he’s the Penetrator. But by novel’s end Mark tells her so long forever because he can’t have someone else he cares about getting wasted.

Mark and Sam reunite during an early action scene; Herter retains a team of security goons and Mark runs into them while investigating. One of them almost gets the drop on him before Sam takes him out with her pistol. But other than a brief explanation that after meeting Mark the whole NASA thing seemed “boring,” there’s really nothing that ties back to the previous volume, and Sam could’ve just have easily been a totally different character. She just happens to be in Alabama as well, hoping to make her career as a P.I. by finding out who killed Wells. Crazily enough, she’ll be the only other character Mark meets who is even investigating this case! Also here we get yet another reference to real-life private eye J.J. Armes, with Sam mentioning she wants to be as nationally famous as “that [private eye] in El Paso.” Roberts also referred to Armes – who sported metal hands – in #27: The Animal Game.

Action is infrequent, which is frustrating given all the heavy equipment Mark brings along. He does most of the early fighting with dart gun Ava, once again going out of his way not to kill unless absolutely necessary. In other words, Mark’s attackers have to try to kill him first before he returns the favor. Otherwise he knocks them out or doses them with a tranq dart. Roberts continues with his penchant for ending chapters on lame cliffhangers, thus Mark is often finding himself in dangerous situations…ones that just as often have anticlimactic resolves at the start of the next chapter. Like when he’s taken in by some local cops who happen to be on Herter’s payroll and deposited in a makeshift prison on Herter’s land. Mark escapes rather easily and makes his escape, ultimately running into a local American Indian who himself is an enemy of Herter. But Roberts drops this subplot, only to clumsily bring it back later, where Mark makes a speech to the assembled tribe, imploring them for their help and ultimately causing them to go into a war dance sort of ritual. 

There’s also weird out of nowhere stuff…like in one action scene, Sam gets shot in the shoulder and she and Mark escape from Herter’s goons…then the next chapter they’re suddenly half-dead from dehydration and starvation and out in the savage elements, having hid without food or shelter for several hours. This part seems to exist just so Roberts could insert some survivalist fiction material. And also Sam’s shoulder seems to heal up without much fuss, but it does factor into Mark’s eventual declaration that Sam must never see him again. His shock that she’s figured out he’s the Penetrator is pretty humorous, though. Roberts seems at pains to introduce a “modern woman” to the series, with Sam constantly going off on how she knows how to handle herself in a fight, and just as often arguing with Mark to let her go along with him. That being said, there really isn’t much else interesting about the character.

Roberts drops the ball on another female character. In the early wild party scene, a naked chick dives in the pool for the viewing pleasure of all the coked-up men, and we’re informed this is Herter’s girlfriend. But strangely enough this is all we see of her – and, as mentioned, all we see of one of these crazy parties. Or “Caligula Revisted,” as Roberts titles the chapter. But honestly it’s like some milk-sop editor at Pinnacle saw the early manuscript and frantically got on the phone to implore Roberts to dial it back, because abruptly Candidate’s Blood shifts tone, leaving us with yet another sluggish and meek installment of The Penetrator. Most damning is that nothing at all is done to exploit the entire God’s Blood subplot; there’s even a concert at one point, but Roberts doesn’t bother to bring it to life. How I wanted to see the Pentrator take on Duce Wilde, but sadly it never happened.

There are a lot of subplots that go nowhere, like a DC-based reporter for a “right-wing rag” who wants to get the scoop on Herter – not just his plots to murder rival politicians, but also his illegal mining schemes. This reporter ultimately meets his fate at the hands of Art Belman. Then there’s more go-nowhere stuff when Sam goes undercover with the APP, getting hit on by Herter – but she takes off before anything happens and the entire angle is dropped. Stuff like this is just frustrating because it’s clear Roberts decided to focus on less-important stuff than what the opening promised. The finale seems to imply we’re headed back in the depraved direction of the opening, as Mark decides to wipe out Herter while one of the megalomaniac’s wild parties is in full swing, but it’s really just another generic late-era Penetrator action sequence, with none of the underlings or killers or whatot meeting any brutal or memorable ends…save for Herter himself, that is. But his death, at the hands of a mining auger, comes off more as contrived than anything else.

Roberts’s patented writing style is in full effect throughout, with his usual oddball choice of words – never before have I encountered the word “crackled” as a dialog modifier (ie, “the boy crackled”). There are also occasional lines that must have been intentionally goofy, like: “The Penetrator left Guthrie’s office with his hunch node humming away like a vibrator.” But stuff like this isn’t enough to salvage what initially promised to be a lurid return to the Penetrator of yore. At any rate, by novel’s end Mark hands all the mining and assassination evidence over to Sam, so she can use her straight-world contacts to break the case and become a famous P.I., but as mentioned Mark tells her it’s over forever between them…not that anything really got started between them this time. Roberts is so busy spinning his wheels that the last pages are given over to Mark eating dinner with Professor Haskins and David Red Eagle back at the Stronghold.

I am curious what happened behind the scenes of this series – it’s very strange that both Roberts and Cunningham made their once-brutal character so bland and upright. Well, there are still more volumes to go, so maybe things will eventually improve.

The Liberty Corps #2: Maracaibo Massacre

The Liberty Corps #2: Maracaibo Massacre, by Mark K. Roberts
December, 1987  Popular Library

Man these Liberty Corps covers crack me up – I mean shirtless and a beret; you can almost hear the Village People on the soundtrack – and sadly it’s the covers that are proving to be the only memorable thing about this series. Mark Roberts continues to write a war novel in all but name; while thankfully shorter than the first volume, Maracaibo Slaughter is still a long, trying read, with our author more concerned with how one supplies an army and entertains its men instead of providing the action thrills one would expect from the men’s adventure genre.

Also again Roberts assails us with way too many Legionnaires to keep track of, but he does at least settle on a nominal “main character:” Colonel Lew Cutler, who served in this capacity last time. It’s curious that Cutler serves as Roberts’s main protagonist, given that Cutler isn’t even officially a member of the American Foreign Legion (aka the “Liberty Corps”); he’s their contact with the regular army. He doesn’t do much in this one, though, mostly flying around on Legion business, hooking up with one babe, getting dumped by her, then hooking up with another. He doesn’t even factor into the climactic battle.

We get the same setup as last time, with the first third of the novel concerned with daily life at the various Legion outposts and bases in America and Africa, and the last quarter devoted to a practically endless military skirmish. And like the previous volume this battle is presented in a military fiction vein, to the extent that one feels he’s reading a nonfiction book about some obscure battle in South America. We’re talking tanks, airplanes, sea vessels, the works, and in all cases it’s one-off Legionnaires who are doing the fighting, robbing the book of any kind of basic action thriller vibe. These characters are all faceless ciphers so there’s no excitement on offer, or at least there wasn’t for me. The honest truth is the book was a bitch to read.

But the thing is, Roberts clearly was into it. He clearly strives to juggle a wide cast of characters, downplaying the pulpish nature of earlier work on The Penetrator and such. Even the usually-egregious Commie-bashing is gone, though we again get some reminders of the seditious US media (if only Roberts could see them now!!). Here we learn the phrase “CLAM,” ie “commie-liberal American media,” which an African native claims to have read in an American gun magazine years before, as he tells Cutler about it over some beers. Otherwise the Commies, again following the orders of mysterious Arkady, constantly try to get moles on Corsair Cay, ie the island HQ of the Legion, off the coast of South Carolina.

This actually leads to one of the few action scenes in the first hundred pages of the book; one of the Red spies tries to take out Cutler and Legion commander Stand Waite, but fails on his first attempt on Cutler, later to be captured by Waite. But man that’s about it. Otherwise it’s a long haul of Waite trying to hire a chef for the base, opening a brewery for the men…even tasking Cutler with hiring someone to retrofit a ship so it can be used as a pleasure cruise line for the soldiers! This actually causes Cutler to get laid, for the second time in the book, though both events happen off-page for the most part, Roberts also toning way down on the dirty stuff. First it’s via a blonde British babe who is hired to do computer stuff for Corsair Cay, then after she dumps him and he nurses a broken heart for a while, Cutler hooks up with redheaded mega-babe TJ Tarkington, who makes her living retrofitting sailing vessels.

Meanwhile we’ve met the villains of the piece; army-backed Colombian drug runners who are in the process of taking over Venezuela. We know they’re real bad because when they’re introduced into the narrative they’re in the process of gunning down Venezuelan innocents – men, women, and even little children. Unfortunately it will take a good hundred pages of padding to see these bastards get sent to hell; President Hunter doesn’t even task Waite with the Venezuela issue until page 84, and it’s not until page 142 that the assault begins. We get more confirmation that Liberty Corps is more of a military fiction series when Waite informs his troops that he plans for a six-month campaign.

As last time the action is given over to one-off Legionnaires on the ground, sea, and air engaging faceless enemy troops; there’s none of the personal thrust of the typical men’s adventure novel. Even the sadist who ordered the killing of the kids early in the book is sort of brushed off in the climactic action, the objective more around staving off the well-armed drug runners who are encroaching into Venezuela. In fact, this is the sort of thing that passes for action:

Dust and debris filled the air along the bank of the Uribante River. James Dean Watton’s spotter, Burke Norton, had shown up in time to convey the awesome news of the approach of Colombia’s crack armor and infantry. Across from the ford, Lieutenant Colonel Asiro Tachikawa deployed the First Cohort hurriedly. A mass of Colombian armor had been spotted approaching at high speed. While the harried Legionnaires hustled into fighting positions, Tachikawa sat slumped in his command post, eyes closed, while he sipped a cup of bancha. The bitter brew, made with green tea leaves and whole-grain rice, soothed him. Outside, all resembled fall-down day at the Tower of Babel.

In the end the Colombian army is crushed, Venezuela liberated, and the main drug runner gunned down, but man it’s a chore to get there. Overall Liberty Corps has become one of my least favorite series ever.

The Penetrator #35: Black Massacre

The Penetrator #35: Black Massacre, by Lionel Derrick
March, 1980  Pinnacle Books

After a glance at the back cover of this installment of The Penetrator I expected something wildly un-PC, given that the villain of the piece is attempting to wipe out the black population with an accelerated version of sickle cell anemia. But in fact Mark Roberts, serving again as “Lionel Derrick,” doesn’t go as uncomfortably over the top as you might expect – save that is for the beginning, which sees the villain of the piece, a biochemist named Raymod Barr(!), being mugged by a trio of black youths.

Before that though we get some of Roberts’s patented in-jokery. He seems at pains this time around to remind us of previous volumes. First there’s a Denver-based reporter named Terry Lucas who helped Mark “Penetrator” Hardin back in the 23rd volume, now looking into his latest story – a nationwide fan club of Penetrator followers who are compared to “Trekees” and refer to their movement as “Penetratoring.” Then we cut to Mark himself, on vacation in Gulfport, Mississippi with more returning characters: Angie Dillon and her two twins, who are celebrating their 11th birthday. Angie first appeared in #29: Aryan Onslaught, had a connection with Mark, and we learn Mark has seen her a few times since.

I almost get the suspicion that Roberts was bickering with series co-writer Chet Cunningham, who long ago introduced a recurring female character intended to be Mark’s main squeeze: Joanna Tabler. Roberts rarely mentioned Joanna in his volumes, and as stated he introduced Angie Dillon, presenting her as “the” woman for Mark Hardin.  Cunningham seemed to respond to this by introducing another “Angie” to the fold: Angie Perez, who was also presented as Mark’s star-crossed soul-mate in #32: Showbiz Wipeout. So now we have three separate women, two of them named “Angie,” who each tempt Mark to give up the Penetrator game and live a normal life. Angie Dillon even reveals that she and her kids have joined a Penetratoring club in their home town, as they’ve figured out who Mark really is. What’s more, Angie asks Mark if they can just live with him wherever his secret headquarters is!

Not to provide spoilers but the other year I peeked through the final volume of the series, #53: City Of The Dead, and I seem to recall Mark was indeed with a woman and some kids in that one. I think it’s commonly known what happens to Mark Hardin in the final volume of The Penetrator, and I’m assuming he does end up with Angie Dillon, after all – perhaps most likely because Mark Roberts wrote the final volume! But I have a couple years to go before I finish the series and find out for sure. At any rate this plot just dangles after the opening section – Mark debating with himself whether he wants Angie and her kids to come live in the Stronghold with him – before it is unceremoniously dropped.

At this point Roberts introduces Dr. Raymond Barr, and our author follows the same template he has for the past several volumes: Mark Hardin disappears for long stretches of narrative and the villains take center stage. There’s a lot of dialog, a lot of page-filling. Barr and his wife are mugged and Barr’s beaten, wakes to find his wife is missing, and later learns she’s been raped and killed. While the black cop working the case finds the scumballs, the liberal courts quickly get them all off with no punishment, and Barr is left with seething but impotent anger. Then he’s summoned by millionaire industrialist Joseph Armbrewster, who reveals his own sad story – his daughter was killed by black hoodlums years before, and he’s been biding his time on gaining vengeance.

Arbrewster’s goal is to eradicate the black criminals who are protected by the liberal courts; he suspects that Barr, with his biochemistry knowledge and his own grudge against blacks, will be able to help. As it turns out, Barr will prove even more bloodthirsty than Armbrewster, looking to eradicate the black population entirely. But he agrees and is whisked off to Puerto Rico, where he’s to whip up a new variation of sickle cell anemia in one of Armbrewster’s high-tech facilities. Here Barr meets up with a local hippie group, led by a freak “with Charles Manson eyes” named Brad Lessor. Dubbed “the Scum of the Earth,” these hippies have been here for years and, conveniently enough, are waiting for the “inevitable race war” which the blacks will win – thanks to help from the US government – after which Brad Lessor will return to America as the white messiah who will rule the victorious-but-incompetent blacks.

There’s grim stuff here but Roberts keeps it off page. Barr first tests his biowarfare on a trio of black Puerto Ricans, and we learn the youngest of them is 13. But they’re dope dealers so it’s okay. Later he starts spraying the poison on business conferences and in other parts of the US, and we learn that adults, children, and even babies are dying. It’s all almost as outrageous as an installment of The Spider, with the caveat that Roberts doesn’t dwell on the mass deaths, as Norvell Page would have. The most we learn of it is that Mark Hardin has read something in the paper, or he mentions the “recent black deaths” in conversation.

As for the Penetrator, he’s busy researching nefarious business in…the shrimping industry! That’s right, folks! This whole element was so goofy and underexplained that I had a hard time understanding why Roberts didn’t just bring Mark into the fold after Barr’s sickle cell started killing people. But, coincidence be damned, it turns out that Joseph Armbrewster is also behind the shrimiping industry shenanigans, so while Mark is investigating the one case he stumbles onto the other. And he really is investigating; at this point “The Penetrator” is more of a private eye, with hardly any of the savagery and sadism of the earliest volumes.

To wit, he hardly kills anyone this time out. He beats up a couple thugs halfway through the book and tranqs one with dart gun Ava. He also carries an “Autoburgler” 12-gauge pistol, which curiously doesn’t appear in the Penetrator Combat Catalog (which makes a return appearance this volume). His first kill in the book is crushing some dude into a “pink smear” with a crane. Action picks up when Mark ventures to Puerto Rico. There’s some goofy humor here as the hippie thugs try to kill the Penetrator, not realizing how outclassed they are, springing lame ambushes on him that Mark easily evades. One of the hippie thugs once worked for Preacher Mann, from #24: Cryogenic Nightmare, but nothing much is made of this, other than being a reference to a previous installment – though interestingly one written by Cunningham.

There seems to be a heavy focus on car chases this time around; I believe Mark gets in three of them in the course of Black Massacre, two of them happening nearly back to back. The action highlight is when Mark and a new comrade stage an assault on Brad Lessor’s commune. Here Mark again uses WP rounds that burn into the flesh of his opponents; there’s a grim bit where one of the hippies screams as the WP burns through his lungs, and Mark blows him away after getting the desired intel. But another reminder of our changed protagonist – Mark tells himself it was the humane thing to do, putting the man out of his misery. 

Either Roberts got lazy or was going for in-jokery because Mark crushes yet another dude in the finale – and the aftermath of this crushing is referred to as a “red smear,” I guess to go along with the pink one from before. Unfortunately though there’s no comeuppance for Dr. Barr, even though I felt he was more of a villain than Armbrewster; Barr wants to kill all blacks while Armbrewster “just” wants to kill off those he deems criminals. But Barr snaps and is put in an asylum, and thus Armbrewster and Lessor must share the brunt of the Penetrator’s wrath. The only problem is neither villain is very interesting; Brad Lessor as a late ‘70s Charles Manson has potential, but Roberts doesn’t exploit the character enough.

At novel’s end Mark goes back to the stronghold and ritually purges himself of the latest ordeal via a steambath or something. After which he’s already thinking about his next assignment, as it appears Professor Haskins has something big coming up. Overall Black Massacre wasn’t bad, not up to the earliest volumes but not as boring as some of the later ones.

The Penetrator #33: Satellite Slaughter

The Penetrator #33: Satellite Slaughter, by Lionel Derrick
September, 1979  Pinnacle Books (incorrectly states “1976”)

Despite the author’s note which proclaims that this installment of The Penetrator is based on fact, it’s clear that Mark Roberts either read about or saw the James Bond film Moonraker, which came out the same year – though given time between writing and publishing I’m wondering if it wasn’t just a coincidence after all. Regardless, this volume is very similar to the Roger Moore Bond film of that year – Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin goes into space, folks. I don’t think the Death Merchant even made it there!

As expected, there’s no pickup from the previous volume. (And another thing missing is the much-vaunted “Combat Catalog,” which appears to have already been scuttled just a few volumes after debuting.) When we reconnect with Mr. Hardin he’s sitting, bizarrely enough, in the press pen, listening to a commercial airline pilot talk about a recent UFO sighting(!). The pilot goes on to joke that perhaps this UFO is connected to the “freak weather” that’s been hammering the country, and this off-hand chance comment is the real reason why Mark is here in San Francisco.

The Penetrator is certain this freak, nonseasonal weather is the result of some chicanery on the part of some evildoers somewhere, and posthaste his wild hunch is justified – when he pays the airline pilot a visit, posing as a researcher, he finds the man murdered in his home. The killers are a pair of “Third World” types, and they’re still in the house when Mark arrives. Cue one of the novel’s few action scenes, as Mark makes quick work of one of them, but the other escapes. These hitmen are members of TWIS, a multi-ethnic spy ring made up of Communist Third World nationalities, and of course this group proves to be the main villain this time around. In other words, non-white Commies, the worst of the worst in the world of men’s adventure fiction.

Mark shuttles back and forth to DC quite a bit this time. He’s back in contact with Fed Dan Griggs, who basically hires the Penetrator to handle this threat, free to work outside the usual agency restraints. Griggs is also certain the Third World bastards have something to do with the weather, and he’s been working with some NASA folks who agree. Because it’s expected of the genre, Griggs hooks Mark up with a sexy female babe of a partner: Samantha Chase, a “rusty-haired” NASA security officer who ultimately proves to be useless to the plot, other than the expected hookup late in the game (which occurs entirely off-page!). Otherwise she just exposits on space research.

And folks, Satellite Terror is friggin’ mired in space research. Similar to the earlier installment Computer Kill in which Chet Cunningham wasted our time with endless programming code, Roberts here goes on and on about space travel and surviving in space and the like, even down to mathematical equations and calculations. This proves to take up the majority of the novel. Before that we have incredibly brief action flourishes, like Mark’s visit to a Third World agency in DC, which of course is the front for a hidden area in which leftist brochures and banners are printed for distribution to the revolutionary masses. Later Mark goes back and blows the place up. Take that, George Soros!

Early on there’s a bizarre “action scene” that’s unlike any other in the series. When tracking down leads on how these hardscrabble Third World people could even get funding for something as expensive as a space station, Mark discovers that wealthy westerners are secretly funding them. One of them is a left-wing banker, and Mark breaks into his home to grill him. Well, the guy’s entire family is there, two boys and a little girl, and Mark ends up shooting all of them with Ava, his dart gun – pretty strange indeed to see “The Penetrator” shooting an unarmed little girl with a sleeping dart. He even darts the dog! The boys put up a valiant fight to protect their dad, and Mark handcuffs them. At least he doesn’t kill their dad.

There’s also an ultimately arbitrary bit where Mark and Sam Chase go to Mozambique, again following leads. This part is developed to the point where you expect a good chunk of the book will occur here in Africa, but all told Mark is there and back within a few pages. What makes this part more interesting is it comes off like a prototype of Roberts’s later work on Soldier For Hire. Mark, under a fake name, has hired two mercenaries – each of whom are given inordinate, page-filling backgrounds – and hopes to filter out the secret TWIS base deep in the jungle. He’s begrundgingly brought along Sam. This part is kind of a waste, but it does show the merciless side of the Penetrator we don’t see very often anymore, when Mark kills two unarmed captives.

But from there it’s to deep in Texas where Mark is embroiled in some heavy-duty space training. Confirmation’s been gained that the Third World terrorists do in fact have a space station, and from there they are messing with the weather in the hopes of decimating the west. But that damn red tape still prevents any official action be taken, so it’s up to “Space Cadet Hardin” to go into space and wipe them out! Roberts tries to spice things up with the occasional action scene, like a would-be saboteur, but it comes off as bland, and the incessant exposition about space stuff doesn’t help. Roberts has done his research and by god, he wants you to know about it.

It's all cutting edge for the era, though; the space shuttle is so new it’s mostly referred to as the “Orbitter.” Mark is also trained in the newly-developed unit which will allow him to fly around on his own in space. Also here is where Mark and Sam become better acquainted; as part of a convoluted undercover scheme, Sam is posing as his wife, and Mark doesn’t waste time consumating the marriage. But as mentioned, for some inexplicable reason Roberts keeps it off page. I still feel some editorial mandate was behind the lack of sex and violence which befell The Penetrator in these later years, but hell, maybe Roberts and Cunningham just mellowed out.

Finally on page 134 Mark launches into space on the Enterprise shuttle; surprisingly, Sam doesn’t go with him. He exits on his own once they’re in orbit and pilots himself out into the depths of space, fixing his bearings on where they’ve determined the secret Third World space station to be. Roberts does not even attempt to capture the beauty of the heavens; no part where Mark looks off into the cosmos and ponders man’s inhummanity to man or other such bullshit. Nope, he just works his way through space via some calculations and figures, and that’s it. Even more incredible, Mark’s attack on the space station – that event the entire novel has been building toward – is as anticlimactic as you can get.

It’s over and done with in just a few pages as Mark uses a specially-designed “Gladiator sword” to break into the station, where he hacks up a few unarmed technicians. The villain is delivered a Moonraker sendoff, exploding as he attempts to escape. We get more space calculations and equations as Mark decides to orchestrate his own weather chicanery on the Third World itself before setting the place to blow. And honestly folks, that’s it – a quick wrapup with Mark and Sam spending some time in a Florida beachhouse.

The Penetrator #31: Oklahoma Firefight

The Penetrator #31: Oklahoma Firefight, by Lionel Derrick
May, 1979  Pinnacle Books

Mark Roberts turns in another installment of The Penetrator, proving again that he’s mostly using the series now as a platform to project his beliefs. Along the way Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin wastes a friggin’ ton of Muslim terrorists who have somehow slipped into the US, posing as employees of a new oil company, gunning them down in action scenes that are almost surreal.

Otherwise The Penetrator continues its downward trend, with a titular hero now such an emasculated, pale reflection of his former self that he doesn’t even get to score with this volume’s babe – though there’s a lot of hand-holding and staring into each other’s eyes. The casual sadism of the earliest volumes is also pretty much gone, as is the brutal charm of the series itself. So I guess you could say the blandness that overtook the ‘70s had overtaken The Penetrator as well.

But it is pretty surreal – there’s this new Arabic oil conglomerate, Al Jihad(!), taking over all the US oil companies. Their goal is to ensure oil interests are only in Arabic, ie Muslim, hands. To this end they want to keep American companies from oil-prospecting even within America itself. So of course they kidnap the daughter of one American holdout, Phelps Lucky Seven, to ensure the complicity of its tough-guy CEO, “Hot Hole” Harry Gorse(!), former oil “wildcatter” turned company executive. As the action opens, the Muslim fiends have sexy young Sheila Gorse in their custody, threatening her bodily harm if Harry doesn’t sign Phelps over to Al Jihad.

Enter Mark Hardin, already on the scene. Posing throughout as “Hulie Crowkiller,” claiming to be a representative of the possibly-mythical “Council of the Good Red Road,” Mark presents himself to fellow “full-blooded Indian” Harry Gorse. Mark lies that “the Council” is interested in this oil business because many of the American oil fields are on Indian land, or somesuch. At any rate this leads to the first of several action scenes, as Mark blasts away a bunch of Jihadists and frees Sheila – who of course instantly falls head over heels for “Hulie,” even though nothing comes of it.

Roberts never wrote for Gold Eagle Books, but it’s interesting that Oklahoma Firefight prefigures the template used by most of that imprint’s series novels. To wit, we have scenes with Mark waging war, and just as many scenes from the point of view of the villains – Arabic terrorists, just as in so many of those Gold Eagle books, who squabble among themselves and worry over what to do about the Penetrator. In this case the main Al Jihadi goon is Ali Hassan, who again is a sad reminder of the oldschool Muslim terrorist, most of whom looked almost like Mister Rogers when compared to the modern Muslim terrorist. Ali you see not only fears death, but is open to negotiation and wants to cement Al Jihadi’s oil rule in as above-the-board means as necessary.

In fact, Mark Hardin comes off as worse than the Jihadis; while they plot and maneuver, the most they do in the book is kidnap Sheila and threaten Harry. Mark meanwhile travels around Oklahoma and Texas and just murders them left and right. He even runs into them by accident, in what makes for some of Roberts’s humorously-convenient plotting; while hunting (and we’re informed the Penetrator isn’t much of a hunter…even though he has hunting licenses in just about every state!?), Mark runs into a roving patrol of Al Jihadis, who take him prisoner, wondering what to do with him. I forgot to mention – the Al Jihadis are also leftists, or at least pretend to be, mostly so they can play to the gullibility of Western leftists (my how times have changed, huh? Oh, wait…). So the leader of this batch sympathizes with Mark, being that Mark’s a Cheyenne Indian, and thus has “also” been exploited by the white rulers of America and whatnot.

Not that this stops Mark from butchering these guys, too, freeing himself by a hidden knife, a new tool in his arsenal which is so built up that it’s almost product-placement on the level of Jerry Ahern. Mark’s escape is damn easy, and it helps that all the Al Jihadi terorists are presented as incredibly stupid and inept. Mark soon captures one of them – a young boy he tortures for info in Sheila’s hotel room, and whose fate Roberts forgets to inform us about. Sheila meanwhile has fallen in love with “Hulie,” and Mark chastises himself that his on-again, off-again girlfriend Joanna Tabler (unseen this volume) would never let him hear the end of it.

The novel is pretty repetitive; both Harry and Sheila are abducted twice each. One of the Harry abductions leads to an actual car chase, one that occurs on the campus of Oral Roberts University – and once again Mark easily rescues his comrade, taking out a bunch of inept Al Jihadi goons in the process. This one features an unintentionally-humorous finale where all the hippie college kids start to take photos of the license plate on Mark’s rented car and he takes off before they can.

Speaking of humor, Roberts is back to his old in-jokery, at least; early on a character refers to “that Camellion fellow,” and a guard at Phelps Lucky Seven is chastised for reading “too many adventure novels.” A later action scene prefigures Die Hard, with Mark alone and surrounded in the Al Jihadi corporate headquarters in Houston. This might be the best of many action scenes in the book, with Mark tearing the place up and making an easy escape thanks to a handy fireman suit he’s brought along with him.

In fact the final quarter is comprised of lightning strikes Mark makes on various Jihadi strongholds in Oklahoma and Texas. There’s also a lot of setup to each of these action scenes, with padding about Mark driving around, talking to locals, asking if they’ve seen any strange new Arab companies opening in the vicinty, etc. Meanwhile Sheila Gorse is caught again, and her fate I admit was a bit surprising, almost casually relayed via Roberts. This incident leads Harry Gorse to whip up his own strike force of Cheyenne warriors – and ultimately he too is caught once again.

The novel does build up to a nice climax, with Mark dishing out bloody payback to Ali Hassan and American traitor Arnold Merritt; but since the Penetrator didn’t get laid by Sheila, Roberts delivers this out-of-nowhere 11th hour reveal that Sheila has a sister, even sexier(!), who works as a model in New York. Oklahoma Firefight ends with the Penetrator about to live up to his title with this particular Ms. Gorse – though per series norm he’s already fretting over his next mission.

Overall this one was okay, a passable time-killer, but I’m hoping the series picks up eventually. It’s never a good sign when the parts I most enjoyed were Roberts’s various diatribes – all of which, mind you, were about things that are sadly as prevalent as ever (the leftist bias of the news, the anti-US bias of the United Nations, etc). Unless of course you’re a fan of those things.

The Liberty Corps #1

The Liberty Corps, by Mark K. Roberts
September, 1987  Popular Library

Mark Roberts really appears to have invested himself in this book, which initiated a six-volume series. Judging from this mammoth-sized first volume (313 pages of small print), The Liberty Corps might have been Roberts’s attempt at fashioning more of a “regular” or at least military style thriller than the men’s adventure pulp he’d been writing for the past several years.

The book opens with much fanfare, Roberts thanking a host of people for their help in the research and even the actual writing of the novel. It looks like big things were hoped for The Liberty Corps, but only five more volumes were to follow (unbelievably, the covert art only proceeded to get even more homoerotic), so I’d wager the series failed to catch a readership. If this first volume is any indication, that might be because The Liberty Corps is a bit too concerned with how to start up an army, at the expense of the action itself – which is what readers of this genre want in the first place.

The novel really is military fiction, having little in common with Roberts’s earlier work on The Penetrator. This I guess is a natural progression on Roberts’s part, given that his work on Soldier For Hire also veered into the military fiction arena when it came to the action scenes. Eschewing the “lone wolf” aspect of The Penetrator, Soldier For Hire would have “fire teams” engaging in smallscale warfare, even employing artillery and etc, yet it at least still felt like a men’s adventure series. With Liberty Corps, Roberts has moved even beyond the basic men’s adventure feel, so my assumption is he was trying to branch out into a new thing, something perhaps with more of a mainstream appeal.

The titular Liberty Corps is the pet dream of President Dalton Hunter, a ‘Nam Special Forces vet who envisions an “American Foreign Legion” patterned after the famous French Legion. Hunter, who enjoys majority rule of Congress, has pushed through his idea after much opposition-party pushback. Folks, believe it or not…President Hunter is a Democrat!! Indeed it’s the minority party Republicans who fight his army pet project tooth and nail. For one, given the usual “Republicans are warmongers” cliché, I figured Hunter would be a Republican president looking to start up his private army, with the Democrats being the party in opposition. But more importantly, we know from other Roberts books, like his Soldier For Hire novels, that Roberts was an unabashed hater of the Left.

This means that the goofy Right-wing jingoism of those Soldier For Hire books is gone, with the Democrats now the “good guys,” at least so far as being the ones pushing for the Liberty Corps. But whereas Roberts lays off on the Democrat-bashing of that earlier series, he does still set his sights on the friggin’ liberal media, in particular noting how the press is infiltrated by Commie agents, even inferring that Dan Rather is chief among them. The media’s oft-stated goal is to undermine the president and to provoke distrust of him, and Roberts will subtly have Russian intelligence agents coming up with a new angle of attack…and then Dan Rather or some other reporter will repeat their exact words in news broadcasts. But again this kinda seemed off to me. I mean, who ever heard of a press that was hostile to a Democrat president??

Plotting against Hunter is a KGB force led by a chief saboteur named Arkady, who is legendary in the biz and has movie-star good looks. Roberts appears to set Arkady up as the recurring series villain, as he lives through this first volume to plot another day. Throughout the book he dissiminates “news” to his vassals in the media, tries to sabotage practically every move Hunter makes in the creation of the Legion, and most importantly sends out the occasional hit team to rub out newly-appointed Legion officers.

This first hit leads to one of the first “action scenes” in the novel, a brief sequence which has a bearish ‘Nam vet general named Gator, just appointed by Hunter to command the Legion, taken out by a squad of KGB assassins in a subway. That Gator was given elaborate background and setup and etc is just the first indication the reader gets that The Liberty Corps will be much heavier on character and plot-building than other men’s adventure novels. Indeed the entire novel is overstuffed with characters, all of whom compete for top dog status. Here are just a few of them:

Colonel Lew Cutler: young Army officer who is booted into the “dead-end” assignment of the Legion because he’s been sleeping with the wrong general’s wife; he’s assigned to be the regular Army liason, and he’s the closest thing we get to a “main protagonist.”

Norman Wade Standie: an alchie, Cherokhee ‘Nam vet who is suffering depression after the death of his wife; he joins the Legion after the murder of General Gator, with whom he was pals in ‘Nam, and given the fact that he was a commander in the war Stadie eventually becomes the commander of the Legion.

Chuck Taylor: firearms expert; I got the impression he was based on Jerry Ahern.

“Arizona Jim” Levine: a city slicker would-be cowboy who proclaims at the recruting office “I’ve read the Executioner books, The Penetrator, Soldier For Hire.”

Patrick Andrews: Special Forces vet whose name is another in-joke, as Patrick Andrews was the main author of The Black Eagles, a series which Roberts wrote the first volume of.

Jacob Martin: snowflake reporter given the assignment to join the Legion under a fake name to get more anti-Legion dirt for the press; “vehemently opposed” to the army and violence, but is eventually won over by the gung-ho camaraderie of fightin’ men.

In addition we have a battery of other characters, from one guy who joins the Legion to escape the Mafia, to a former IRA terrorist named Liam who gets in drunken fight with Cutler in bar and becomes his BFF. All of these characters (and more!) have their own running subplots and sequences in which Roberts hops into their perspectives, so in this way the book really does have the feel of a war novel. Oh, and the novel features an unexpected usage of the dreaded “N-word,” something I thought would be verbotten by 1987 – and it’s spoken by a black Legion soldier, one who humorously enough has not previously been mentioned, and in fact only shows up in a single paragraph so he can say this particular word and then is never mentioned again!

The first 200+ pages of small, dense print are mostly dedicated to how one would go about setting up an army, along with how to train its soldiers. If this is something that would interest you, you’re in luck. Otherwise we must read about orders for weapons and uniforms and the struggles suppliers must endure when working with a limited budget. Ordering (and designing!) uniforms, getting aircraft, tanks, etc. There’s this interminable subplot about the endless struggles they encounter in getting “CETME submachine guns;” it goes on and on, how they’re such great guns but so expensive and near impossible to get what with all the budgetary limits placed on the Legion, to the point where I was about ready to start up a fundraising drive in my office.

As for the uniforms – despite the “loud and proud” cover art, the Legion soldiers do not go into battle shirtless and wearing berets. Their parade uniforms, designed by General Standie, do include gold berets, but the parade uniform itself is a toga-meets-kilt affair…in other words, “skirts,” as the men call them. Battle dress is leftover “Aggressors” stock from the 1950s, ie the “woolen green” uniforms the aggressor army would wear during war games. The Legion you see is forever being supplied with leftover stock and assorted hand-me-downs; this is another interminable subplot. For example, the Legion’s chief infantry weapon is the M-1 Garand, long outdated but beloved by Standie and others of his generation.

Action is infrequent in these first 200+ pages. One moment that harkens a bit back to the old men’s adventure vibe is when Cutler is attacked by a KGB hit team on the streets of Washington. A later, better sequence has Cutler and a small group of men pull a vengeance ambush on the island fortress of Arkady. But for the most part Roberts saves all the fireworks for the last quarter of the book; the action doesn’t truly begin until page 256, which is when the Legion goes into its first mission. A South African country called Zalambia is in the midst of a revolution, with Communist forces threatening to take over. President Hunter monitors the situation, and decides to send in the Legion when Cuban troops set up shop in Zalambia and begin running the show.

But as mentioned, this action sequence is really military fiction. We hopscotch among the huge cast of characters as infantry teams fight it out, fighter planes dogfight, and tanks blow shit up real good. There’s none of the immediacy of men’s adventure action – or at least that’s how I see it. Rather, the personal touch is lost and it’s more about hordes of men fighting and killing each other. Again, the focus of The Liberty Corps is full-on army battles, not the smallscale action of average men’s adventure novels. And also, most of the action is relayed via dialog, with various units radioing back to HQ about their progress and whatnot.

Another thing missing is the sex. Lacking the outrageous sleaze of Soldier For Hire, this one goes more so for dirty talk and the occasional mention of past sexploits. There’s even a part where the Legion hires a veritable army of hookers to “alleviate” the frustrations of the 6,000 soldiers on Corsair Cay (Arkady hires a hooker for the event, one who just happens to be a Commie secret agent!), and it too only barely dabbles in the sleaze. Only in a part where Cutler gets friendly with his latest babe does Roberts return a bit to that Soldier For Hire fun stuff:

Kristen mewed like a contented, belly-rubbed kitten when Lew penetrated her sensitive portals and slid commandingly into her eager passage. Past, present, and future merged in a jumble of sensations, each more delicious than the ones before, until little hiccups of exploding passion sent them into oblivion.

But the helluva it is, at 313 pages you’d think The Liberty Corps would at least be memorable. Rather, at least for me, it was almost a blur of a read – a blur of easily-confused characters and way too much technical detailing on how one supplies an army. Roberts clearly tried for something big, but in the end overlooked that which made his earlier pulp efforts so much more enjoyable – a central character with a central objective. I’d rather read ten volumes of The Penetrator than just one more Liberty Corps, and that might be a good indication of why that earlier series ran for over 50 volumes and this one ran for only 5 more.

Finally, this novel has one of the most hilariously stupid lines ever:

Silence held while the clock ticked noisily.