Richard Blade #39: Les Dieux De La Mort Lente (The Gods Of Slow Death)

Richard Blade #39: Les Dieux De La Mort Lente, by Jeffrey Lord

1983  Plon Books

The French adventures of Richard Blade continue with another volume that was, according to ISFDB, written by Richard D. Nolane. Once again it is hard for me to judge the quality of his prose, given the bland way the book has been translated into English; as Johny Malone speculated, this is likely because it was translated by AI and not a human. 

At any rate, this is one of the most streamlined Richard Blade novels ever: Blade goes to a patch of Dimension X called Winter, a frozen tundra with a fat red sun, and he fights ice pirates and wizards. It’s all very humdrum, A to B sort of stuff, but it is filled with a lot of memorable imagery. Also I must note that The Gods Of Slow Death breaks series protocol by only having Blade sleep with a single woman! Yes, I too was shocked. 

We have the briefest of openings in the real world, ie Home Dimension, where we learn that Blade has picked up an English girl named Ann (“…she was quite tall, with fair skin dotted with light freckles that further-accentuated her cheerful demeanor”), and though we are told she is “kissing Blade’s muscular back” in the intro, there’s no hanky-panky for our hero; he is called to the Tower of London for another trip. 

Nolane is not one for big setup or development; Blade is thrust into an icy world, but unlike the earliest volumes of the series he no longer arrives nude, but wearing armor and carrying a “saber” of an alien metal that can travel across the dimensions. Otherwise the story is identical in development to every other volume of the series: Blade meets a crew of warriors, introduces himself as a warrior from a distant land, and spends the rest of the book proving himself and then leading them in battle. 

I want to think that Nolane was inspired by Barbarella, as Blade immediately encounters ice-roving warriors who go about on sleds that sound very much inspired like the one seen in that film (and possibly the original French comic); I’m talking about the craft that was piloted by the dude who wore the shaggy outfit which when taken off revealed an even shaggier torso. 

Nothing like this happens in The Gods Of Slow Death (fortunately); Blade, near death from exposure, is rescued by these guys, then soon after they are in a battle with ice pirates. As expected Blade proves himself in battle, splitting faces and spilling brains with his saber. 

Abruptly the novel changes pace, coming off like Toga Trash or somesuch; Blade is captured, stripped down to loincloth, and sold to a slave trader named Demetrio. Here the sole female character in The Gods Of Slow Death is introduced: Neysa, a super-hot blonde daughter of nobility who happens to be bad-ass warrior to boot. She too is in the clutches of Demetrio, and Blade’s first “conjugation” occurs when he is ordered to arouse a similarly-nude Neysa…a scene that leads to her visiting his chambers that night. 

Ultimately it will pan out that Demetrio and Neysa are part of a plot to take down the titular Gods of the Slow Death, also known as the Star Gods; Nolane, taking a page from Erich von Daniken, introduces the concept that Star Gods visited Winter centuries ago and now rule from their remote, heavily-guarded mountain fortress. 

The “slow death” refers to the double-edged sword of serving the Star Gods. Certain vassals are chosen and graced by the gods with magical powers, but the cost is a slow death, with facial disfigurement being one of the chief signs of decay. Given this the vassals all wear robes and golden masks; as mentioned, Nolane does pile on some cool imagery in the book. It’s just all underserved by the blasé translation. 

Blade of course becomes part of the resistance, Neysa often fighting at his side. And as mentioned she is his sole bedmate. Nolane adds variety with the off-hand mention that Neysa is kinky, delivering a sequence that again seems like it could come out of a trashy toga ripper, complete with slaves watching Blade and Neysa get busy: 

And as with the The Aerials Of K’Tar, gender often switches during the sex scenes, making for an awkward read, and also there’s again that weird connotation of mentioning the “stomach” in relation to sexual urges. Maybe it’s a French thing. And on that note, I actually read some of The Gods Of Slow Death while in Montreal the other month, so it was all rather fitting. 

The vassals of the gods have total power over all, able to kill people with their minds and whatnot. However Blade discovers that he is immune to their power – a development that superior series author Manning Lee Stokes would have exploited for all its advantage, with Blade ascending to his own godlike status. Instead Nolane’s characters have a reaction almost as blasé as the translation itself, with one guy exclaiming over Blade’s power, but not much else really being made of it. 

Then again, this is a book that features the line, “Of course, wanting to avenge an ice cream seller might seem insignificant compared to the future of an entire world, but history was full of facts of this kind that had set in motion crucial events for its future development.” An odd statement for sure, especially given the fact that there is no “ice cream seller” in the book! 

The finale is pretty good, with Blade leading combined forces on the mountain fortress of the Star Gods, slaying their Star Disciples left and right. It gets very Von Daniken in the end, when Blade discovers a starship in the mountain, the home of the Star Gods, and fights a towering alien – but is promptly zapped back to Home Dimension, where we have a talky denouement in which Blade and J figure that the “slow death” was radiation. Also, we have the offhand mention that Blade (or maybe it’s Lord Deighton, the translation being unclear) has a pet monkey…! 

Overall The Gods Of Slow Death was entertaining, but again it’s tough to truly gauge it because I feel like I’m reading a pale reflection of the French original.

Richard Blade #38: Les Aeriens De K’Tar (The Aerials Of K'Tar)

Richard Blade #38: Les Ariens De K’Tar, by Jeffrey Lord

1983  Plon Books

Recently I did a post on the French series of Richard Blade, and shortly afterwards I received an email from an anonymous reader of the blog. This wonderful person sent me the entire French series fan-translated into English, for which I am truly grateful. Boy, I had no idea how many of them there are – 168 whopping volumes, running from 1983 to 2012! 

So as we all know, Richard Blade ended in 1983, at least in the United States. A collective gasp of “Mon Dieu! must have echoed across France, and it was quickly determined that Richard Blade’s adventures would continue, in France alone. The books all carry a “copyright Lyle Kenyon Engel” note on the title page, but I’d love to know how aware Engel was of the actual books. My guess is he sold the rights but had no visibility into the storylines or plots. At any rate Engel died in 1986, while the French Richard Blade was just getting started. 

The last English volume was #37; appropriately, this first French volume is #38. I love how the French editors just continued the series instead of starting a whole new series specifically for their own market. According to the ISFDB, this first French novel was written by an author named Richard D. Nolane, who seems to have written a great many volumes of the series. 

The translation I have is titled The Aerials Of K’Tar. I should note that there is absolutely no information provided on who did these translations; the books are epub files with the entire contents translated into English, with no information on who did the translating. 

For the most part, the translation is good, though there are occasional mistakes – most notably gender transitions (how very modern!), which usually occur midway through a sentence. I wonder if this is some sort of intentional dark humor from the translator, as the gender switch will usually occur during a sex scene(!)…ie, Richard Blade will be conjugating with some Dimension X babe, and we’ll suddenly get a line like, “Blade kissed him,” when it should be “kissed her,” and this happens so frequently – and always in the sex scenes – that I think the anonymous translator was having a little devious fun. 

Writing wise, Nolane hews closer to second Richard Blade author Roland Green than he does to original series author Manning Lee Stokes. There is a prosaic style to Nolane’s narrative and there’s not a hint of the brutal spark Stokes brought to his original books. But the big difference is that, unlike Green, Nolane injects a lot of explicit sex in the tale…which of course is slightly undermined by the gender mistakes in the translation! And also Blade is not the wussified loser he was in the Green books. 

It’s hard to gauge an author’s work when you are reading a translation, but overall Nolane’s style is very humdrum, with Richard Blade coming off even more like a cipher than he did in the English series. There’s no attempt at giving him any internal drive and his motivation is nonexistent. Characters are minimally described as are situations and characters. This lends the book more of a fairy tale vibe than the original US series had, but again it could be due to the translation. 

Regardless, the editors strived to make this seem like a legit continnuation of the original Richard Blade, which technically it was, of course, but still I thought it was interesting that early in the book some of the most recent volumes of the series are mentioned. We learn, at least from this first volume, that the French editors are not going to rock the boat, storywise, and everything is the same as in the English series: Richard Blade is a British secret agent and the only person who can travel to Dimension X. He reports to J and the architect of the DX program is Lord Leighton. 

Only one minor change is made: in his very brief appearance, Leighton explains that an upgrade has been made to the machine that sends Blade to DX, and now he can arrive with at least some clothes on: a coat of chain mail, and we’re told the armor is from “Englor’s alloys,” which per a note Blade discovered in the Green-written #24: The Dragons Of Englor. Also, Blade can take along a sword, or “saber” as it is most frequently referred to in the translation. 

Posthaste – there is zero in the way of introducing Blade in his “regular life” in London – Blade is sent to a strange planet that seems to be an endless desert. The first part of The Aerials Of K’Tar is slow-going desert survival fiction, with Blade trying to find water and then fighting a massive lobster-like monster called a “ther.” The fight goes on and on and here is where I realized Nolane’s prose style might be a bit tedious. 

Things pick up with the appearance of an aerial ship that sweeps over the desert, and Blade is able to wave to it for help. The people on the ship are Viking types, with chainmail, long beards, and battle axes. But there is a tall “Amazonian” woman in charge of them: Nagra, with her black hair tied in a bun and claiming to be the daughter of the “tyrant” who rules her particular air city; Blade soon deduces that this planet, K’Tar, is comprised of aerial city-states that are similar to the city-states of Ancient Greece. 

Like practically every other Richard Blade novel, our hero will be caught between warring and scheming kingoms, and will find a way to either unite them or have one of them defeat the others. But Blade’s personal impetus is even more remote than usual; he literally floats around on various aerial boats as he’s shuffled from one incident to another. 

The plot, then, is as uninvolving as a typical Roland Green installment, with one glaring exception: unlike Green, Richard D. Nolane is sure to include a few explicit sex scenes. He also dutifully follows the pulp mandate of exploiting his female characters: 

Not sure if “cum like hell” was in the original French! But otherwise in the second sgreengrab you can see a glaring example of the gender switch I mentioned: “Nagra’s tongue had begun a stunning ballet while his hands continued to caress [Blade’s] body like a bow.” So obviously “his hands” should be “her hands,” and this gender switchup happens so frequently, and particularly during the sex scenes, that it has to be a weird joke courtesy the anonymous translator, but truth be told it’s a surefire way to take us sleazehounds right out of a down-and-dirty sequence! 

Nolane has a lot of exposition in the book, and fortunately we get a handy overview of the exact makeup of this world and the plotting Blade will find himself in the middle of: 

Nolane does provide a little gore in the battle scenes: 

And also some cool imagery, like a brute in a skull mask who turns out to have a deformed head once Blade decapitates him with his sword: 

Oh, and back to the dirty stuff: not sure if it’s a French thing, or once again courtesy the translator, but sexual pleasure is often described in relation to the stomach, which I thought was strange. Like for example, check this out, where the twenty year-old prisoner Jirel, daughter of a slain rebel leader, is forced to give Blade a bj (she ends up being his second of two conquests in the book, btw): 

“Blade…cursed the pleasure which quickly invaded his stomach.” We’re often told something like this in the sex scenes, and I thought this was unusual and wondered if it was some sort of French saying that I was unaware of. Also there is a lot of focus on Nagra’s “thick pubic hair,” which must be a French thing, or at least a ‘70s French pulp thing, as thick bushes were also frequently mentioned in the sleazy French sci-fi novel Yolanda: The Girl From Erosphere. 

The plot follows the usual course, with Blade uniting various factions on land and air against the kingdom of sea pirates, but it’s all told so nonchalantly that, again, I was reminded of the Roland Green books. That said, Nolane pulls some unexpected emotional content out of nowhere in the finale; SPOILER ALERT, but Blade tells Nagra he is from another world, and in the climactic battle Nagra is fatally wounded. Blade grabs hold of her as he is zapped home, the first time he’s brought someone from DX to home dimension. Nagra lives long enough to see this new world, and then we are told Blade refuses any further missions if the project scientists attempt to dissect Nagra (so as to study a DX specimen), and he drops her corpse in the Thames. The end! 

All told, The Aerials Of K’Tar was very fast moving; apparently the original paperback was 200 pages long, but I blew through this thing in no time. As mentioned Nolane wrote a bunch of the ensuing volumes, and I’ll be reading those soon. 

Thanks again to the contributor who sent me these!!