The Terminator #2: Silicon Valley Slaughter

The Terminator #2: Silicon Valley Slaughter, by John Quinn

July, 1983  Pinnacle Books

The second volume of The Terminator is similar to the first: a somewhat slow-moving piece that is more focused on building tension and suspense than it is to catering to Pinnacle’s almost desperate declaration that they (still) are “the number one action-adventure publisher.” 

Dennis Rodriguez is again outed as the writer on the copyright page, which makes one wonder why the “John Quinn” by-line was even necessary. It’s not like Pinnacle’s contemporary Justin Perry series, where author Hal Bennett likely used a pseudonym (and didn’t put his name on the copyright page) so no one would think he was batshit crazy. As with the first book, Rodriguez turns in a book that’s very sedate and methodical in its delivery, at times more approaching the vibe of a hardboiled yarn than an action caper. 

What I find most interesting about Silicon Valley Slaughter is that series protagonist Rod Gavin – who by the way is never reffered to as a “Terminator” in the entire book – is revealed here to basically be a drunk. This was already hinted at in the previous book, where Gavin “fortified” himself with a bottle of booze while lurking in the trunk of a car, feeling “good” and “loose” when he finally came out for the big finale. 

Well, Rodriguez takes that and runs with it in this second volume. Gavin drinks his way through a lot of bottles in the course of the book, even recreating the previous volume’s bit by asking some goons to buy him a bottle of liquor so he can go to sleep and they won’t have to worry about him! I mean if this guy doesn’t have a problem, I don’t know what a problem would even be. 

Rodriguez also follows the template of the previous book in that the majority of the tale is at a slow boil, cutting across a swathe of characters, until reaching a harried finale. A curious thing about Silicon Valley Slaughter is that Gavin has no personal impetus in the plot; he isn’t out for revenge, and indeed only gets into the fray so as to help his friend Duffy (returning from the previous volume). Otherwise Gavin has no personal stake in the proceedings; ostensibly his goal is to rescue Duffy’s hotstuff, 20-something niece, but Gavin’s never even met her. 

The Terminator series is somewhat similar to the earlier Dakota in how Rod Gavin has a supporting group of characters, who appear in each volume. Actually, his “girlfriend” Kendall does not appear in Silicon Valley Slaughter, but she’s mentioned a lot. But there’s also Duffy, a Justice Dept. colleague of Gavin’s, and Dorn, a car mechanic who fixes up a beaten ’74 Trans Am for Gavin…even putting the very “1980s action” augmentation of an Uzi hidden inside of a center console. One can almost see Steven J. Cannell at his typewriter. 

As mentioned, Rodriguez likes to jump around a large group of characters. So for Sicilian Valley Slaughter we have material with Duffy (who is knocked into a coma after his intro, where he will remain for the duration of the novel), material with Duffy’s niece, Susan, and then stuff with both a high-level Japanese gangster as well as the American-born Japanese thug who works for him, with other characters besides. There is a lot of cutting between perspectives – and Rodriguez is good because he gives us white space or a chapter break to warn us of the perspective hopping – which ultimately means that Gavin comes off like a guest star in his own book. 

The plot concerns Duffy’s niece Susan being abducted, and the editors at Pinnacle do a great job of hyping the lurid aspects of this on the back cover, claiming that she’s about to be sent off into sexual servitude. However, author Dennis Rodriguez has much less lurid intentions. While it is mentioned, in passing, that the ultimate plan is to send her off into some sex slavery thing in Japan, for the most part Susan’s been kidnapped because she is working on some top-secret encryption device for an electronics firm in Silicon Valley. 

The novel is quite prescient in its talk of encryption and data, yet at the same time it’s not really the subject I want to read about in a men’s adventure novel. That said, Gavin himself is blithely unaware of all this mumbo-jumbo and tells people gladly that it’s outside of his realm. Regardless, he acts as a private investigator for the most part, trying to find young Susan as a way to pay back his injured friend, Duffy. 

Action is sporadic, and again has the vibe of a Gold Eagle novel from decades before; it’s mostly Gavin punching people. At one point an old Agency colleague gets him a P-38 pistol, a la the gun Gavin wields in the cover portrait on each volume – and also, the copyright page further states that the cover art is courtesy Bruce Minney. But honestly Gavin doesn’t use the gun much, and he’s more prone to hit the bottle than he is to shoot someone. 

Gavin does find the opportunity to get laid, though. While searching Susan’s place he discovers an attractive young woman hididng, fully clothed, in Susan’s shower. This turns out to be Hillary, a friend of Susan’s – a pretty one, naturally, with “full, upswept breasts.” Hillary has no idea who Gavin is – he uses a fake name throughout, claiming he’s a reporter – and later on there’s this unintentionally hilarious part where an injured Gavin needs to hide…and he goes to Hillary’s place and insists that she let him in, then tells her to go take a bath while he prepares dinner! I’ve seen a couple episodes of Dateline with this setup. 

But instead of telling Gavin to go away, Hillary opens the door and invites him in – this total stranger who is bleeding from an injury, who she met just a few days before, when he was snooping through her missing friend’s house. She even goes off to take a bath! Gavin makes a meal and the two eat and then they go to bed, but as with the previous book Rodriguez does not go into detail; indeed, the sex scenes seem to be incorporated merely so as to meet a publisher requirement. 

It’s the drinking, though, that makes me question how serious Dennis Rodriguez was about this whole affair. There’s actually a part where Gavin thinks to himself, “You can’t be on duty twenty-four hours a day,” and proceeds to get drunk. By himself. Then Dorn drives to California with the rebuilt Trans Am and Gavin gets drunk with him, too. Then there’s the part I already mentioned, where Gavin is caught by these yakuza thugs and he tells them to buy him a bottle so he can get drunk and won’t be “much trouble” for them! And it isn’t even some clever ploy, like Gavin throwing the booze on them and then flinging a match on them (which would totally combust in an action novel, there’s no reason to question “the science”). No – Gavin really does just drink until he goes to sleep! 

Another interesting thing is that Gavin keeps screwing up, thinking to himself that “the old Gavin would never have been caught” and that “the new Gavin [is] an amateur at this.” He’s an assassin – well, a Terminator, technically – and he’s been programmed to kill for the government. But acting on his own in a lone wolf capacity is outside of his experience, and he keeps messing things up and getting caught – even knocked out at one point, by nothing more than a bartender! 

As with the previous installment there’s a lot of cutting across the group of people, from the yakuza thugs to the treacherous employees of Susan’s company. And speaking of which, Rodriguez fills up so many pages with his scene cutting that Susan’s surprising fate is almost anticlimactically rendered, and the reader thinks he’s missed something. The worse thing is that Gavin is reduced to a supporting status, and we waste our time reading about one-off characters. 

But again it all is quickly wrapped up with an action scene that spans a few pages. And yes, Gavin does manage to get his Uzi out of his hidden Trans Am console, though the setup for this to happen is incredibly belabored and hard to buy. Rodriguez is again shy with the juicy details, though we do get occasional lines like, “One burst [from the Uzi] ruptured their chests, blowing pink meat against the walls.” 

Otherwise it’s a quick wrap-up after this, with Gavin dispatching practically all of his foes in a page or two. There’s not much in the way of a setup for the next volume – in fact, Gavin is essentially listless and without any plans for the future at all – but I did get a chuckle out of how the back cover proclaims that The Terminator series is “taking America by storm!” If that’s not hyperbolic copy, I don’t know what is.

The Terminator #1: Mercenary Kill

The Terminator #1: Mercenary Kill, by John Quinn

September, 1982  Pinnacle Books

Here’s another latter-era Pinnacle offering, one that amounted to five volumes. It’s also another series Marty McKee hooked me up with some years ago, and I’m only just getting around to it. The Terminator is credited to John Quinn, but the copyright page outs Dennis Rodriguez as the real name of the author. Per Brad Mengel’s Serial Vigilantes Of Paperback Fiction, Rodriguez “was editor of pornographic magazines for Pendulum Press where he worked with Ed Wood Jr.” However, also per Brad, “While director Ed Wood Jr. also used the John Quinn pen name, there is no evidence that he wrote any of the books in this series.” And to be sure there is little in the way of Wood-esque weirdness in The Terminator, at least judging from this first volume, which sticks to a clear-eyed “realism” throughout. 

As I read Mercenary Kill I kept having flashbacks to another late-era Pinnacle offering: The Force. It’s been ten years since I read the first volume of that also short-lived series, and I haven’t read another volume since, but something about Mercenary Kill kept reminding me of it. Maybe it was the writing style, or the fact that the main protagonist of The Force was a cynical vet of the spy game, same as Rod Gavin, the main character in The Terminator. The Force was credited to “Jake Decker” and came out the same time as The Terminator, so maybe it too was the work of Dennis Rodriguez. Again per Brad Mengel in Serial Vigilantes, The Force was “the only credit for Jake Decker,” lending further impression that “Decker” was a pseudonym. Whatever the case, I did enjoy Mercenary Kill more than I enjoyed the first Force novel. 

Oh and just to address the series title – obviously this series came out before the Schwarzenegger movie. But in the world of this book, “Terminators” are a special section of the CIA, sort of like the “00” agents in the Secret Service in James Bond. Agents who are sent out on kill assignments. Per the deal it’s eight and done, and Gavin when we meet him is on his eighth assignment, after which he intends to retire. Curiously we’re not given a description of Gavin, so Gil Cohen’s cover will have to suffice. It is implied he is 34, though, and also a ‘Nam vet. Mercenary Kill is clearly an ‘80s offering because, unlike the majority of the men’s adventure novels of the ‘70s, it is focused on world-building and scene setting. In effect it comes off as a standalone novel, and doesn’t really even set up the potential for more action-heroing in future volumes. Gavin is not presented as an Executioner-esque crime or terrorism fighter, I mean to say, and his actions throughout Mercenary Kill are all made in the name of self-preservation, not to save anyone else. 

The novel opens on the action, though, with Gavin in Miami, where he takes out three commie agents. Here we see that Rodriguez will have a bit more of a “literary” vibe to his prose than the genre standard; again, another similarity with The Force. While the novel is not spectacularly gory, we do get memorable descriptions, like “pink spray” blowing out of a guy’s head when Gavin shoots him with his .45. It’s a cool and memorable description, but at the same time it gives the impression that Gavin’s just shot a cartoon character. Rodriguez maintains a crisp style throughout, with lines like “[Gavin] brought his blood pressure to boil with a couple quickly-smoked cigarettes.” Oh and as a random note, I found it interesting that “flight attendant” was used in the novel instead of “stewardess,” so it must’ve been the late ‘70s or very early ‘80s when that earlier term, so championed in trashy paperbacks of the day, had fallen out of favor. 

Another thing unusual about Mercenary Kill is that there are a slew of minor characters to keep track of. And Rodriguez keeps hopping around them with little introduction or setup, leaving the reader out of sorts. Things move a lot more smoothly when he just focuses on Gavin, though. Our hero, who is pretty taciturn and cipher-like, has carved out an off-the-grid life for himself in Colorado, living in a rented apartment with no phone. He’s so off the grid that he doesn’t use banks; when he goes on a job he takes a big envelope of money to one of his few friends to safeguard while he’s gone. Gavin’s also in love with Kendall, the owner of the bookstore across from his apartment. While she doesn’t factor into the novel much, Kendall is often on Gavin’s mind, which also gives the novel a different vibe from the average; Rod Gavin is one of the few men’s adventure heroes who is in love. Not that this stops him from having a little extracurricular fun on the job. 

One of the many supporting characters in the novel is Barnes, Gavin’s boss at the Agency. The two have an antoginistic relationship that really reminded me of the one Butler had with his CIA boss in the Butler series by Len Levinson. But again this series is more serious in tone, thus Barnes comes off as more nefarious than satiric. He questions Gavin’s lack of commitment to the Agency, telling him he is “not a believer.” Regardless he gives Gavin his latest – and final – mission: go to the country of Costa Bella in Central America and terminate a soldier named De Leon. In one of those many subplots we’ve seen De Leon get in trouble: he’s inadvertently massacred a car load of nuns, at the order of sadistic commanding officer Rojas. This has set off an international incident, with De Leon, clearly framed, thrown in a Costa Bellan jail. They’re all involved with the US to some extent, with De Leon being working undercover for a State Dept guy named Duffy. 

My assumption is Duffy will factor into future volumes of The Terminator, as he becomes Gavin’s main accomplice in Mecenary Kill. In this volume the two meet; Gavin’s been sent to kill De Leon, and Duffy heads to Costa Bella because he’s heard the CIA is getting involved. Meanwhile other agents are afoot, including one minor character who is run down in Costa Bella; Rodriguez’s description of this guy’s death is an example of the dark sort of humor that runs throughout the narrative: “…a painless impact that he actually thought was kind of funny.” What’s weird though is Rodriguez throws in the curveball, one that’s barely explored, that Gavin knows De Leon. The two attended some sort of training a decade before. Rodriguez does little too exploit this, and just has Gavin (rather easily) carry out his job, after which the main plot kicks in – Gavin realizes that he himself has been framed, as Rojas, the man Barnes told him to connect with down here, now chases after him for the murder of De Leon. 

Throughout Rodriguez sticks to more of a realistic vibe, save for a bit midway through where Gavin runs into a group of Costa Bella guerrillas. Of course, their leader is a sexy chick named Maria Angela, and of course she ends up going to bed with Gavin. Rodriguez leaves it off-page, but at least we know that our hero isn’t too devoted on his girlfriend in Colorado. Maria also hooks Gavin up with a gun: a P-38, which he uses for the rest of the novel. Judging from Cohen’s portrait of Gavin that runs on each volume of The Terminator, I’m assuming this P-38 will become his trademark gun. Hopefully Bucher doesn’t mind! Maria isn’t the only helper Quinn encounters; as mentioned Duffy also meets up with him, and after a shaky start the two develop a sort of friendship, with Duffy providing Gavin a place to stay once Gavin’s made it back into the country. (Curiously, Rodriguez leaves Gavin’s escape from Costa Bella off-page; one would think it would almost be a story in itself.) 

There is more of a modern hardboiled vibe to The Mercenary Kill than the cover of Rod Gavin blasting an AK-47 would have you believe. And in fact, he doesn’t even blast away with an AK-47 in the novel, or at least he doesn’t that I can recall. Instead of a slam-bang finale, we have something more befitting a Gold Medal paperback as Gavin traces Rojas and Barnes to California, where the two are involved in a heroin ring. Barnes has been using his CIA role to run drugs, his biggest deal coming through and etc. He of course was behind the frame of Gavin, as well as of De Leon; we’ve also learned almost casually that Barnes is gay and has a fondness for young men. Ah, the days when being gay was just another “villain attribute” in pulp fiction. Simpler times. 

I have repeatedly mentioned that Rodriguez goes for realism, but this is not to say we have a totally believable situation. The finale features Gavin locking himself in the trunk of Rojas’s car, fortifying himself with a couple sandwhiches and a bottle of J&B scotch. He drinks half the bottle as he waits for Rojas to drive into the remote area where the drug-dealing’s going down. By this point Gavin is a little buzzed; we’re told he “feels good” and “relaxed.” He gets out of the trunk, does a few stretches – and then proceeds to do some quick shooting with his P-38. I just thought it was funny our hero got drunk for the finale, but Rodriguez doesn’t imply that this might slow him down at all. That being said, one guy does get eaten by a dog here, though it happens off-page. 

As also mentioned Mercenary Kill comes off a lot like a standalone novel. By the end Gavin’s gotten his revenge and he’s headed back to Colorado to reconnect with his beloved Kendall. There’s no indication that he’ll return in a future volume to see any action; indeed, we get the impression he’s done with the action and killing business. This makes me wonder if, a la The Revenger and other series openers that came off like standalones, Rodriguez wrote Mercenary Kill as a self-contained story, and then either he or Pinnacle decided to farm it out into a series. Overall I enjoyed Mercenary Kill, and eventually will get to the next ones. And once again a big thanks to Marty for hooking me up with the series.