Showing posts with label Dan Streib. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dan Streib. Show all posts

Thursday, August 4, 2022

The Deadly Massage (Kill Squad #5)


The Deadly Massage, by Mark Cruz
No month stated, 1976  Manor Books

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, May 6, 2021

Dead End (Kill Squad #4)


Dead End, by Mark Cruz
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

Dan Streib returns as “Mark Cruz” for this fourth volume of Kill Squad (around this time Manor Books dropped the volume numbers from their series, but the Manor ID number at the top right of the cover indicates this one was published after Dead Wrong). He continues with the schtick of previous volumes: removing his titular trio from their San Diego stomping grounds and making them do stuff that falls outside the boundaries of police work. This time they serve as bodyguards for a wealthy Arab as he travels around Europe. 

But really it isn’t even much of a trio this time. Chet Tabor, blond-haired lunk with the scarred face, has always been the main character of Kill Squad, with co-cops Grant Lincoln and Maria Alvarez serving as supporting characters. But while those two have at least had some share of the plot in past, this time they’re really incidental, only there to occasionally trade dialog with Tabor and then disappear into the background again. In fact they’re only along on the Europe trip because Tabor demands that they come along to back him up. Otherwise Tabor is the star of the show, featuring in all the action scenes and calling all the shots. 

There is no continuity in the series, so no pickup from the previous volume nor any other volume. About the only “new” development we have is that Tabor now carries a .44 Auto Mag, meaning Streib must’ve been reading The Executioner. This gun is built up at great expense, used a few times, then lost in England (there is an apparent bitterness toward the British ban on guns – Streib rakes the Brits over the coals throughout the entire England portion of the narrative). Otherwise another change is that Tabor is even more uber-macho this time around, constantly thinking of sex (even during firefights) and planning to “get a woman in bed” no matter what. He also mouths off a lot, gets in people’s faces, and doesn’t listen to othes. It’s as if Streib wanted to go the exact opposite direction of the wussified Terry Bunker he delivered in the first two installments of Chopper Cop

Yet for that matter, we are often told how “afraid” Tabor is. This is so recurrent in Streib’s work that it doesn’t even come off like him adding characterization. Constantly Tabor will be ducking for cover and fighting down panic, then forcing himself to get up and fight back. Or just as often he’ll wonder why he’s even in the line of danger; there’s a part early on where thugs attack people at a park, and Tabor – a cop!! – wonders why he’s even risking his neck to save them, given that they’re all strangers! Of course all this is similar to Terry Bunker’s attitude, with the only difference that Tabor bullies through his fear and gets in a lot more fights, shootouts, and chases. He doesn’t come off as the most likable hero, though. I mean in that part where the thugs open fire at the park, Tabor hides in a gondolla and lets Grant and Maria handle the action, only coming out when they start screaming for his help! 

This opening action scene will be the only sequence in San Diego. Tabor, Grant, and Maria (we’re told only the press has dubbed them “The Kill Squad”) are serving as bodyguards for visiting Arab Ali Saud, an uber-wealthy oil guy who is here with his two daughters and half brothers. Of course the daughters are in their twenties and smokin’ hot; this is the pre-radicalized early ‘70s so the girls are very westernized, going around sans face coverings and wearing revealing clothes. In fact the youngest of them, Zainab, is a definite tease, and went to college in Berkley. Saud is “a billionaire with petrodollars burning holes in his robes,” and the city has rolled out the red carpet for him, hence the personal police protection – and much to the dismay of “stupid chief” Chief Jackson, Tabor and team have gotten the job. 

Turns out there’s a bounty on Saud’s head, and sure enough a group of would-be assassins hit the entourage during an idyllic gondolla ride. Here’s where Tabor hides, of course with the two girls, one of whom falls on him for cover – Tabor enjoying the “soft, full mounds” on his back and taking the opportunity to cop a feel! As I say he is particularly infantile in this one. In fact we’re informed he’s “thirty-one with two marriages behind him.” Tabor’s also a bit of a loser in the hero department. He finally gets out to fight, and one of the attackers takes a little girl hostage. Tabor chases after – again wondering why he’s even bothering to – and takes a darkened stairwell up the tower the attacker has fled, hoping to sneak attack him. But like a dumbass Tabor overlooks the fact that the bright sunlight will hurt his eyes, which have grown used to the dark, thus he’s temporarily blinded…and in the gunfight the little girl is killed. 

Streib has this weird schtick, in just about every book of his I’ve read, where he has a female character getting shot in the face and killed. Usually the eyeball is blown out, too. This happens here, but having it happen to a five year-old girl is a bit too much, I’d say. Chief Jackson yells at Tabor good and proper, and even Maria and Lincoln are upset he didn’t try harder to save the kid. When it turns out that Ali Saud wants Tabor to accompany him on the Europe – he was impressed with Tabor’s ass-kicking, we’re told – Tabor says the little girl’s memory will fuel him, as he wants to nail the bastard who hired those thugs. Ie, the person who hired them was responsible for the little girl’s death. As with the previous volumes, Chief Jackson is just happy that his three most problematic officers will be out of his hair for a few weeks. 

Also fueling Tabor is the opportunity to get in the pants of either or both of Saud’s daughters. Zainab is the saucy younger one and Hayat is the slightly more conservative older one. A running subplot is that Saud intends to take his daughters back to Saudi Arabia after this Europe-America jaunt and return them to “the old ways.” In particular he feels that Zainab is “disturbed,” her brain rotted by American decadence. There’s actually more meat here than you’d encounter in a book of today that might cover the same topics; I imagine most American authors of today would be afraid of being branded Islamophobic. But Tabor has no problem with chastising Saud that Muslim men “keep their women as virtual slaves,” and he also doles out such impossible-today gems as “You didn’t learn that behind a veil,” when Zainab gives him a sultry kiss. 

For Zainab, we learn, is the one who really hired Tabor – she wants a piece of that uber-macho hunk. When Tabor learns this he takes umbrage; he’s no “hired stud.” Indeed he goes out of his way to talk down to Zainab…and when she goes off in a huff he wonders if he should wake up Maria for some quick sex, given how turned on he is! (For those taking notes, Tabor and Maria are a nonevent this time; she really does nothing more than deliver a few lines and shoot a few people, more on which anon.) Tabor’s muleheadedness is especially hard to understand, given how determined he is to get either of the girls in bed; there’s a later part where Zainab comes to him again, this time in lingerie, and an angry Tabor gives her a paddling! “Here’s what I think of Women’s Rights,” he tells her before bending her over his knee, casting doubt on his entire anti-Muslim tirade. The funniest bit here is Tabor’s shock to discover that Zainab isn’t nearly as turned on by the paddling as he is! In fact she screams and fights him so crazily that she wakes up the entire hotel. 

Streib is fond of female villains – I think every book of his I’ve read has featured one – and Zainab’s anger at being forcibly returned to “the old ways” should set off alarms. Instead Tabor constantly rebuffs her…while he meanwhile wonders how he can get her in bed on his terms. Or better yet her sister, whom we’re told Tabor finds hotter. Meanwhile we get some of the England-bashing I mentioned above. Streib has practically every British character quake in fear at the sight of Tabor’s gun; even some guys from Scotland Yard come by and say that, if he were to use one of those guns, the full weight of the law would hit him. Of course he has to use it, most memorably in a long-running action sequence in Stonehenge, where more would-be assassins come after Saud’s party. 

During this battle Tabor learns that an infamous contract killer named Purcelli is behind all the attempted hits on Saud; this will be a character Streib doesn’t much build up. Streib attempts to develop tension later when the entourage is leaving the hotel and Tabor suspects Purcelli is going to spring an attack. This part sees more wussified Brits panicking as the action goes down, particularly when a bomb goes off on the premises. This part also has an unexpected outcome in that a character in the entourage is suprisingly killed off. The bigger outcome so far as Tabor is concerned is that he loses his Auto Mag, having to hand it over to the authorities. Unbelievably Saud continues on his European journey, despite his personal losses; turns out it’s really a business trip, as Saud is meeting in private with oil contacts at these locations, to talk away from spies. 

The action moves to Monaco, where Tabor finally has his way with Zainab…or, “entering that dark and welcoming place,” as Streib puts it in a fairly non-explicit sequence. After which the two go on a boat ride, where Purcelli tries to take out Tabor; an action scene that just keeps to go on and on, and ends with the infamous assassin again running off. This part sees another character outed as a villain – the reveal isn’t much of a surprise – and as Tabor struggles with her for control of a gun he grabs “the tender V between her legs” in a brutal move. This takes us into the climactic action scene, as Tabor races against time to stop Purcelli from killing Saud in a villa. 

Streib isn’t done killing kids, though; one of Purcelli’s men, we’re informed, is a “young boy” who comes at Tabor with a gun, and Tabor almost casually blows him away…only to later discover that the kid was merely holding a target pistol! This revelation doesn’t seem to faze our hero in the least. But then he and his comrades are particularly brutal in this finale; there’s a part where Maria “carefully” shoots another of Purcelli’s goons in the crotch, and if I had a fancy doctorate in literature I’d suggest that this might be due to residual hatred she has for all men, given her gang-rape in the first volume

The finale seems to come out of a Hollywood blockbuster, with Tabor and two of the villains on a runaway train. It occurs to me that Streib has a firm template for Kill Squad, as each volume features the trio outside of San Diego and each ends with Tabor recovering in the hospital, with Chief Jackson paying him a visit. So happens here, with Jackson again telling Tabor to take an extended vacation to stay out of his hair. Otherwise Dead End didn’t hit the lurid heights of the first volume, but it was definitely more entertaining than the third volume, which mostly featured Tabor and Lincoln sitting on an airplane. One more volume was to follow.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

Voyage Of Death (aka Kill Squad #2)


Voyage Of Death, by Mark Cruz
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

Dan Streib seems to have learned his lesson from Chopper Cop, the series from which he was apparently fired by book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel; the first volume of Kill Squad was much better than either of Streib’s Chopper Cop novels, featuring more biker action and exploitation than both of them put together. This second installment continues the trend, at least in that it’s sleazy ‘70s crime. However this time there’s an almost goofy disregard for reality or common sense.

Actually the goofiness is prevalent throughout, with almost the entirety of Voyage Of Death featuring the titular Kill Squad – blond Chet Tabor, black Grant Lincoln (we’re reminded many, many times that he’s black, of course), and sexy Maria Alvarez – on a luxury cruise ship bound for Mexico. Streib pulled the same trick in the lackluster third volume, taking his heroes out of their San Diego stomping grounds and putting them in an unusual locale. My suspicion is he was shoehorning them into various mystery novel ideas he had on the backburner. For example, the plot of this one could feature practically anyone as the protagonist; a trio of rule-breaking San Diego cops seems forced. 

There’s no pickup from the previous book; we meet the trio as they’re aboard a ship in San Diego, working a stakeout on drug runners who’ve been smuggling heroin into the city from Mexico. Maria’s kid brother Pedro’s on board, a junior cop who has been working the case. There’s a quick firefight where Tabor inadvertently kills all the bad guys – Tabor is an almost bafoonish protagonist, more of which later – much to the dismay of their “stupid chief” boss, Chief Jackson.

We get our first taste of the ridiculous nature of the book when Tabor leaves the crime scene…and goes to a party in his apartment! And then Lincoln and Maria show up to yell at him! The yelling of course gets Tabor and Maria properly heated, so that they’re engaged in some sort-of explicit hardcore shenanigans on Tabor’s bed, a reminder that these two “have a casual sex thing going” (per Marty McKee). Then Lincoln barges in on them (not the last time “the big black” will barge in on Tabor while he’s getting busy) with a box that’s just arrived for Tabor.

You guessed it, folks…pre-Seven style it’s Pedro’s severed friggin’ head in the box. Well this of course ruins Maria’s randy mood good and quick. Things get even more ridiculous…Tabor and Lincoln march into Chief Jackson’s office and flat-out tell him they’re boarding the cruise ship they’ve determined is behind the heroin smuggling…if Jackson doesn’t “make some calls to Washington” and get them assigned they’ll just go as ordinary civilians. So Jackson relents, mostly because it will get these two out of his hair for a while, and thus these San Diego police officers are flown to Los Angeles so they can board a luxury ship bound for Mexico.

Oh and to make it even more ludicrous, a grieving but determined Maria comes in and says she’s going too, like it or not. But it gets goofier, folks…’cause Tabor, who as you’ll recall started all the action at the opening of the book which ultimately led to Pedro’s death, is basically like “Who gives a shit?” that the kid’s dead, and disregards it because there’s nothing he can do about it now. And so Tabor looks as the cruise as ample opportunity to check out some swinging ‘70s chicks and maybe take a couple of them back to his stateroom, which he shares with Lincoln; “the Negro cop” will just have to find his own place to spend the night.

To this end Tabor insists that he’s only going to check out the young female passengers on the ship; the evidence shows that life preservers have been missing from staterooms occupied by single male passengers, and thus it seems clear that the smugglers are stealing them and using them to float the heroin shipment before the ship comes into port, to be picked up later by boat. While Maria and Grant believe this means that single men are behind the heroin pipeline, Tabor is certain it’s an all-girl pipeline, sleeping with those single men and stealing their life preservers the next morning.

There are supposedly a few hundred passengers on board but Tabor keeps bumping into the same three women – a willowy librarian named Winifred, a standoffish blonde named Sabine, and a sexy brunette named Kirstin – and immediately deduces that one or all of them is involved with the heroin pipeline. Of course he’ll be proven correct, coincidence or plot cliches be damned. Meanwhile Grant Lincoln hooks up with Winifred’s Japanese roomate; Streib often includes Japanese babes in his novels, I’ve noticed, with Tabor scoring with one in the third volume. 

But it’s just all so goofy…Tabor, despite his better judgement, ends up with Winifred, even though he’s sure she’s a virgin. He just feels sorry for her. Plus she drops enough hints that she’s on the cruise for reasons other than just pleasure, so Tabor’s suspicions are aroused. They have some fairly explicit sex, where it turns out Winifred is indeed a virgin. Late that night Tabor wakes up alone in bed, searches his room, and finds that his life preserver is indeed missing! He gets in a chase with a shadowy individual on the empty, dark deck – there are a lot of contrived “action scenes” where Tabor is haunted by someone he somehow can’t see on this massive, empty ship.

The next big action sequence has Tabor and Lincoln shadowing Winifred as she sneaks around Puerto Vallarta, immediately after the ship docks. She appears to do a drug deal while “chuting,” ie flying along in a parachute behind a boat. To make it even more ludicrous Tabor and Lincoln chute behind her, tailing her to a remote island, where they get in a shootout with some Mexican thugs…a shootout for which Tabor is arrested and thrown in jail. And then folks, a friggin’ helicopter descends on the prison that night, dropping a ladder for Tabor, and it’s piloted by Maria and Lincoln: they got the helicopter from the ship’s captain, who wanted to ensure his passenger could get back on board the ship!

Yes, that all really happens. There is I say an almost brazen disregard for reality in Voyage Of Death. Somehow Tabor’s unable to determine Winifred’s complicity in the smuggling, though it seems clear she’s gotten in over her head and is being used as an unwitting mule. It doesn’t matter, because shortly Winifred is dealt with, and again Tabor is unable to see the attacker even though this happens on an otherwise empty deck. After this his sights set on Sabine and Kirstin, though suprisingly Tabor doesn’t have sex with either of them, Winifred and Maria being his only conquests this time around. 

The climax occurs at the next stop, Acapulco, and by this point Tabor’s certain the smuggling mastermind is either of those two women…but also one of them might be the private eye the Mexican government has put on the ship, keeping his or her identity a secret. There’s a nicely done shootout at a half-finished, abandoned hotel, which proves that our heroes don’t really live up to the badassery of their “Kill Squad” name, in that for the most part they run for cover, scream “Stop! Police!” and trade ineffectual return fire. One of the two ladies is killed here, but Streib lamely has it that no one’s certain whether Maria shot her or an unseen sniper did.

This leads to the climax, in which Tabor confronts the main villain…at dinner. He’s already arranged for a date with the lady, and here he accuses her of her villainy and whatnot…and she ends up falling to her death when a vengeance-filled Maria shows up, looking for blood. I was surprised that the female villain didn’t get shot in the face so her eyeballs popped out – believe it or not, a recurring image in Streib’s novels.

Streib doles out frequent action but it seems clear he mainly wants to write mysteries…most of the novel’s centered on the lame suspense of which of the three women is behind the pipeline. But it’s a mystery with a moronic protagonist; Tabor does little to gain the reader’s sympathy or even interest, stubbornly bulldozing his way through the narrative with little regard for others. He spends a lot of time fighting with Lincoln and Maria, too. But it’s all still miles better than Streib’s work on Chopper Cop.

For those taking notes, Tabor and Maria didn’t get friendly in the third volume – perhaps indication that Maria’s not forgiven Tabor for Pedro’s death. She blames him frequently in Voyage Of Death, and of course Tabor doesn’t give a damn. So we’ll see what happens in the fourth volume, though there isn’t much continuity in the series.

Monday, July 22, 2019

Moscow At High Noon Is The Target (Hot Line #3)


Moscow At High Noon Is The Target, by Paul Richards
No month stated, 1973  Award Books

Curiously the final volume of Hot Line isn’t copyright Lyle Kenyon Engel, like the first two were, which makes me suspect this short-lived series suffered the same fate as the Engel-produced Nick Carter: Killmaster: total control eventually went over to Award Books. But anyway Hot Line never really got off the ground, only managing three volumes.

Thanks to Spy Guys And Gals we know this one was a collaboration between Chet Cunningham and Dan Streib. Streib co-wrote the previous volume, and his stamp is frequently evident here, particularly when protagonist Grant Fowler whines about how tough his life is and desperately wishes to quit and get married. Streib’s action protagonists usually lack any balls, as most notably demonstrated in the Engel-produced Chopper Cop series. Like “tough cop” Terry Bunker, Streib’s Grant Fowler is a worry wart who is determined to quit the spy game asap and find some woman to marry. This is a far cry from the grizzled asshole who starred in the first volume.

There’s no pickup from either earlier volume, though we are informed Fowler has only been the President’s man for a few “months.” Fowler when we meet him is in Copenhagen, still successfully perpetrating his wealthy gadabout cover. Now he’s hawking a new business venture called Antique Aircraft Inc, which specializes in rebuilding exact replicas of WWI airplanes and staging mock aerial combat around the globe. There’s a lot of flying material in this one, about as much as you’d encounter in the average William Crawford novel, and it gets to be boring after a while.

This is too bad because the opening of the novel’s pretty cool, promising more thrills than what is ultimately delivered: a group of commandos, possibly American, stage daring, bloody heists behind the Iron Curtain. They’ll hit armored trucks, banks, whatever, taking out guards and innocent bystanders with subguns and explosives. The commie powers at be are convinced America is behind these attacks, and tensions have escalated to the point of WWIII. The President of course decides to call in his sole Hot Line man, Grant Fowler.

It seems to me that Cunningham handled the brunt of the writing duties; the book reads very similarly to his work. But it might be Streib who writes the occasional cutovers to the President and his secretary, who deal with their own somewhat-boring subplots in DC while Fowler handles the action overseas. I say this because these scenes are page-fillers with fretting, worried protagonists wondering what might happen next; there’s a lot of stalling and repetition. Personally I think some of the opening heists could’ve been more fleshed out.

More info on the heisters would’ve been wise, too; as it is, we only get to read about “The Commander,” who leads these American servicemen turned criminals. They operate out of Berlin and use surplus military gear in their raids. It’s dangled as a mystery who the Commander is, but gradually the puzzle pieces together until we realize it’s one of two characters, both of whom happen to work with Fowler on the assignment. This group calls itself The Brigadiers, and their next heist will be particularly audacious: the theft of Lenin’s embalmed corpse, on display in Moscow.

Fowler only knows that something’s going to be stolen in Moscow, so must get over there without blowing his cover. Luckily Antique Aircraft is scheduled to take part in a mock WWI battle in that very commie city, so Fowler’s able to get himself in the show due to the fact that he’s a pilot and he’s the owner of the company. He heads over to Frankfort, Germany (and yes, it’s spelled “Frankfort” throughout) to take over the preparation for the mock combat, and finds time for some shenanigans with Elaine Katz, the hot brunette pilot who runs the European branch of Antique Aircraft – and I can’t believe I forgot to mention that Fowler’s already had some off-page shenanigans with a blonde babe in Copenhagen.

Here in “Frankfort” Fowler meets two men who will add the mystery to the narrative, as one of them is the Commander of the Brigadiers: first there’s Okie Bob Arnold, a CIA man with “mod clothing” and a flashy moustache who has been sent to help Fowler on his assignment, and next there’s General Sloane, an older retired military man who is flying one of the planes in the mock combat. Cunningham kills the mystery posthaste, as one of these men makes a phone call and next chapter Fowler finds out Elaine’s been killed in an airport “accident,” chopped up by prop blades. Cunningham tells us which of the two men made the call, totally blowing any chance at mystery. I couldn’t believe he was so brazen about it. Particularly given that the rest of the narrative tries to play the reader along over which of the two men is really Fowler’s enemy.

Fowler’s bummed over Elaine’s death – which occurs like an hour after they sleep together – but soon enough he’s checking out bikini-clad Maria at the General’s place. She’s been sent along from Moscow as a sort of state rep to ensure everything goes well. There’s also some flatfooted suspense about whether Fowler can trust her or not, and honestly all this stuff comes off like the work of Streib, with a suddenly-wimpy Fowler moaning how hard it is for him to open his heart to a woman, due to how she could be an enemy just waiting to stab his back.

There isn’t much action. In Moscow Fowler and Okie Bob go to a bar frequented by circus freaks, a surreal setting that’s handled in Cunningham’s trademark meat and potatoes narrative style. Fowler’s deduced that the Brigadiers are using an old tunnel beneath the bar to sneak in and out of Moscow, paying the midget bar owner a fee for the benefit. Fowler slaps around the midget and then goes down the tunnel, promptly getting in a shootout with some unseen Brigadiers. He kills one with his .357.

He’s also found the time to get busy with Maria, and again I have to point the finger at Streib because here Fowler becomes a lovey-dovey sap. This is going to be his last job, no matter what, he’s done with the spy game and all the death and all that, and what’s more he’s going to bring Maria back to America and marry her and start a family. The authors basically telegraph what’s going to happen to Maria and don’t even try to be subtle about it. But then this was the last volume of the series, so hell, they could’ve just had the two go off for a happily ever after.

The Lenin corpse heist isn’t even the climax of the novel; the title comes into play because it’s learned that the Brigadiers will steal the body at noon, and Fowler manages to get in the viewing line at the right moment. He causes a scene and Moscow police intervene, stopping the ambush that would’ve caught them unawares had it not been for Fowler. After this we have the belabored mock aerial combat, with planes again factoring into the actual finale: Fowler versus the Commander, who plans to steal the Russian royal jewels or somesuch and fly away with them. His true identity is officially revealed in the final pages.

Overall Moscow At High Noon Is The Target was pretty lackluster. Grant Fowler never did manage to make himself memorable to the reader, with even his occasional gadgets coming off as lame, like the “deadline clock” wristwatch he wears which ticks away a time set by the President. I was more interested to find out if Engel just dumped the series on Award, disinterested in Hot Line himself. Readers certainly weren’t interested, and this was it for the series.

Thursday, May 10, 2018

The President Has Been Kidnapped! (Hot Line #2)


The President Has Been Kidnapped!, by Paul Richards
No month stated, 1971  Award Books

The second volume of Hot Line perhaps indicates why this series never got beyond three volumes. For one, the entire series concept is dropped – that hero Grant Fowler has a “hot line” to the President thanks to a two-way communicator hidden in his cigarette lighter. There’s zero reference to the previous volume and it seems evident the author isn’t even aware of what happened in it.

Again thanks to the Spy Guys And Gals site we know this one was courtesy George Snyder and Dan Streib; while Snyder was also credited for the first volume, his stamp isn’t as evident on this one. Mainly because Fowler isn’t a bossy, arrogant ass; rather, this time he’s prone to fretting and constantly worries over his safety. That is, when he isn’t wondering if he’s fallen in love and should just quit the entire “President’s Agent” game. This stuff is a hallmark of Streib’s work, though, as is inordinate padding and uneventful plotting, all of which runs rampant in The President Has Been Kidnapped. The writing is slightly better than the other stuff I’ve read of Streib’s, so maybe Snyder did some polishing or something, who knows.

Anyway Folwer is re-introduced to us as a 39 year-old with receding brown hair who often considers himself “getting too old for this” and contemplating retirement, yet another recurring Streib staple. He goes to great lengths to pose as an “international wheeler dealer,” and when we meet him he’s negotiating the purchase of an airline. It occurred to me that this novel might’ve been written at the same time as the first one, or maybe Streib just didn’t even read the first one, but anyway it seems great effort is made at introducing Fowler and setting up his character, whereas we already met him in the previous book.

Fowler also now has an assistant, Matthew Lemon, who handles his finance matters; “Grant hated the frail man and his bookkeeper mind.” As if that weren’t enough vitriol, Lemon is later referred to as a “sissyish little accountant.” But Lemon seemingly blows the airline deal, barging in on the conference with news Fowler doesn’t want shared, and thus he’s left with an airline it turns out he didn’t even want to buy – it was all a show, part of his carefully-maintained cover. Turns out the government is going to handle the cost, as Fowler’s services are needed pronto, no time for fancy wheeling-dealing; that Fowler is the “President’s Agent” (his recurring title throughout the book, which makes me suspect this was perhaps the planned series title) is a secret no one knows save for three people, one of whom is the President.

So Fowler puts on his shoulder holster with its .357 Magnum (because nothing says “secret agent” like a bulky hand cannon beneath your left arm) and heads for the White House, where he eventually learns from Secretary of State Michael Kremky – one of the three people who know who Folwer really is, with the President’s matronly secretary being the third – that not only has Air Force One been skyjacked and taken to the banana republic of Conduras (which is between Cuba and Panama, we’re informed), but that the President himself happened to be onboard at the time; something known only to Kremky.

Fowler’s job is to head to Conduras on one of his newly-acquired airliners, posing as a businessman looking to branch out into this new market, and somehow orchestrate the President’s release. Conduras, described by Fowler as a “voodoo den,” is run by a despot named Juan Bahia, who keeps the people in tow; the island is comrpised of “Creoles, Caribs, and blacks.” Fowler puts together a crew on one of his new planes, including arbitrarily enough some dude who used to go adventuring with Fowler in the old days, and a couple busty stews. The Conduras air force shoots them down upon entering Conduran air space.

Here’s another thing about Grant Fowler – he comes off like a complete idiot. Maintaining his playboy cover by all means, he insists the plane keep approaching Conduras, despite repeated warnings from ground control. This results in the airliner crashing, his old pal getting killed (again, one helluva an arbitrary “plot point”), and even the stews getting horrendously injured. Only mousy Matthew Lemon emerges unscathed, but he too will suffer misfortune, as if Streib relishes in occasionally putting him through hell before delivering an almost perfunctorily coup de grace in the final pages. But Fowler of course isn’t injured at all in the crash, and emerges to find Conduras on the verge of revolution.

The novel trades off on “tense” scenes of Fowler hopscotching between the tyrannical forces of Bahia and the native rebels, led by a voodoo priest named El Vicera. It just sort of goes on and on in a permanent spin cycle. We’ll go from the rioting voodoo worshippers to the debauchery of Bahia’s circle. In each instance Fowler finds himself involved with a woman – for the voodoo folks, it’s an “olive skinned” babe with blue eyes named Angela who has an instant lust with Fowler as soon as they see each other, culminating in one of the novel’s few memorable scenes as the two have sex in the middle of the jungle as Bahia’s soldiers hunt for them. The sex scenes by the way aren’t very graphic at all; “She pulled him in to the hilt” and the like.

The other babe is Consuela, Bahia’s incredibly depraved teenage daughter. She’s the type of whip-wielding villainness I like so much; moments after meeting Fowler she’s trying to screw him, and when he turns her down for being a “kid” she’s begging her dad to have him killed. Humorously, Fowler and Consuela have sex, though Streib forgets to inform us of the event until several chapters later – this happens after an elaborate feast Fowler attends, Bahia treating him as an honored guest, given Fowler’s cover as a wealthy businessman looking to branch out into Conduras. After a serving girl is nearly raped for the eager crowd – something Fowler prevents from happening – Consuela leads him off to his room, and only much later does Streib bother to inform us what happened there.

Really though it’s because Fowler has fallen in love with Angela, who is a sort of white goddess for the voodoo-practicing rebels. Fowler is saved by her in their first meeting – which leads to that immediate boink in the jungle – but Angela says Fowler will be considered an enemy if he tries to meet with Bahia. But this Fowler must do, so as to get aboard Air Force One, which, by the way, is sitting on the Conduras Airport tarmac under heavy guard. We’ll eventually learn that Bahia orchestrated the skyjacking, abducting the child of a crew member to ensure complicity. Bahia’s goal is to get the US to turn over control of a supply ship which carries atomic weapons. Bahia however doesn’t know that the President is actually onboard the plane; in fact, no one knows save for Fowler and Kremky back at the White House, but despite this Bahia’s men have wired Air Force One to blow by a certain deadline if his demands aren’t met.

Streib attempts to broaden the action with cutaways to Kremky back in Washington, dealing with various politicians and military officials who want to nuke Conduras. We also have some scenes with the President, fretting aboard his plane. But it’s all just sort of bland and uneventful. Even the occasional action scene is harried and boring, mostly comprised of Fowler trying to run away and hide. Again, he’s lost a lot of the bad-assery he displayed in the previous book, and this is certainly the work of Streib, who is notorious for wussified protagonists. Otherwise there are a few oddballl touches here and there, like Bahia’s personal guard, in black uniforms modeled after the SS; all of them, Fowler notices, have “long, slender fingers, perfectly manicured…the hands of classic homosexuals.”

Even the rebels do the heavy lifting in the finale; Fowler has promised Bahia that supply ship – on orders from the President – but he’ll give the weapons to the rebels. This he promises Angela after another jungle boink. Oh, and Fowler loves her for sure, even begging her to come back to the US with him and get married! This is Streib for sure, folks, and even a newbie to the genre will know what happens to Angela by novel’s end. The finale is pure chaos, with the rebels storming the tarmac before the explosives can go off, and Fowler just managing to get aboard – here Streib pulls Matthew Lemon back into the narrative long enough to kill him off!

Fowler exceeds in freeing the President and Air Force One and preventing Bahia from getting the atomic weapons, but at great price, yadda yadda yadda. No surprise, poor old Angela didn’t make it out on the plane – but another female character did. Given that we’ve learned this particular gal can do “special things with her mouth,” you wonder why Fowler’s so upset. (Okay, spoiler alert – it’s Consuela.) But really it’s the reader who benefits, ultimately, because here the novel ends.

Only one more volume was to follow, courtesy Streib and Chet Cunningham, and here’s hoping it’s better than the others. But given the two authors I’m not holding my breath.

Monday, October 9, 2017

Kill Squad (aka Kill Squad #1)


Kill Squad, by Mark Cruz
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

I had low expectations for this first volume of Kill Squad; after all, the third volume was pretty tepid. But damn if Dan Streib, posing as “Mark Cruz,” didn’t entertain me with this sleazy action yarn that makes no pretense at reality, coming off like a moronic but fun grindhouse film – one that makes sudden detours into pretty grim stuff.

This one really starts off the series, as the Kill Squad bands together, though Streib never actually refers to them as such. I guess this would be their origin story. Once again white cop Chet Tabor is the main protagonist, a good-looking blond-haired hunk of man with a scar on his face – a scar, we’re often reminded, which the ladies somehow find sexy. We learn this time that Tabor was once a sergeant in the San Diego PD, but got busted down to patrolman status after revenge-killing the criminal who gave him that facial scar. I don’t believe Streib mentions this time that Tabor is also a ‘Nam vet; I’m pretty sure he did in Dead Wrong, though I may be mistakenly thinking of Streib’s similar “killer cop” series Death Squad.

Streib as we’ll recall was the dude who wrote the subpar first two volumes of Chopper Cop, and whom series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel deemed a “not very good” writer. But it seems like Streib found his mojo in the interim between Chopper Cop #2 and this first Kill Squad, and indeed, it’s possible that this book started life as the third Chopper Cop Streib never wrote, as the antagonists this time are bikers – in fact they simply call themselves “The Bikers” throughout. But I’ll tell you this: this story is miles better than either of those Chopper Cop books Streib did, and it even has more bike-riding action than both of them put together!

We see the Bikers in action posthaste, as they run roughshod into quiet La Jolla, CA, bypassing Chet Tabor, who sits in his patrol car. Despite the progressivist weakenings enforced upon his department, Tabor refuses to just think of the bikers as tourists or whatever; his cop instincts tell him they’re trouble, here for no good, and he’ll be damned if he’s going to ignore his instincts, new departmental rules or not. This leads to a goofy bit where Tabor heads off a hundred bikers with nothing more than his Webbley revolver; Tabor is a gun-nut, by the way, with an “arsenal” in his apartment, and basically just picks a new gun to patrol with every day.

A riot threatens, with Tabor firing into the air and some bikers crashing into each other; he’s called for backup, and of course “big black cop” Grant Lincoln shows up. Tabor and Lincoln are already friends, and Streib implies they’ve had a sort of Razoni & Jackson-esque history, Lincoln constantly complaining how Tabor gets him in trouble. Lincoln by the way is considered a “black honkie” by the other black officers on the force, due to how clean-cut he acts! He saves Tabor’s ass, only for the two to get back to precinct HQ, where “stupid chief” Jackson bitches at them for their insubordinance. 

Chief Jackson has a new idea: he’s brought in a chaperone from the LAPD to watch over the pair. This is Sgt. Alvarez – Sgt. Maria Alvarez, the two cops are shocked to discover, with Tabor openly gawking at Maria’s big boobs and nice ass, both of which of course are prominently displayed by her too-tight uniform. There ensues such over-the-top rudeness from Tabor that it all comes off like the stupid sexual harrassment videos you have to watch every year in the corporate world, culminating with Tabor goosing Maria after she’s made Lincoln and him march through the detectives’s room like a pair of recruits.

Streib doesn’t waste any time on long-simmer attraction; despite her clear dislike of Tabor, Maria is also clearly just as attracted to him. Even after he calls her a “bitch” and storms off to his apartment, telling her he’s had enough of her shit for one day. She chases after him, snarling, and attacks him in his apartment, hissing and scratching at him, until Tabor bends her over his knee for a good spanking(!). This of course leads into some hot (off-page) sex. That out of the way, Tabor sneaks out on a sleeping Maria that night, having gotten a lead on one of those bikers – he lost his Webbley revolver in the riot, and knows they’re going to pull something with it.

He calls Lincoln and demands “the big black cop” get out of bed with his latest playmate. (“Finish her,” he orders Lincoln. “Climax her, pal.”) We get a cool, Cobra-esque part where the two engage in a shootout with a male-female pair of bikers who have knocked over a convenience store, the female taking a small boy hostage. Here Streib indulges in his recurring penchant of having a female character getting her eyeballs blown out – I swear this has happened in every Streib book I’ve read. But Tabor shoots the biker-chick right in the face, Streib gleefully documenting her exploding eyeball. This will actually happen again – two more times, to two different female characters – before the novel is over.

This scene features a bonkers finale in which Lincoln again saves Tabor’s ass, after which Tabor berates him, “Damn you, n – !” Streib leaves no racist or sexist stone unturned in this book, which is proof that, for once at least, the dude knew exactly the market he was writing for and just what sort of outrageous stuff was expected of him. Adding to this is how Maria comes off as so naïve and, well, stupid, despite being proclaimed as a medal-winning cop from Los Angeles. Not that Streib really does much to tell us how exactly she earned those commendations, or what exactly Jackson’s intent was to have her brought in as chaperone for Tabor and Lincoln.

But Maria is muleheaded that Tabor and Lincoln started this whole shootout, and also that Biker leader Paul Kane is really a nice guy and has no intentions, despite Tabor’s hunches, of starting any trouble in San Diego. To the point that she even goes with Kane to a nudist beach. This whole part is beyond silly, but again superb so far as exploitative material goes. Tabor and Lincoln secretly follow her, spying from afar as Kane’s biker minions and their sexy babes bare all and frolic on the beach. 

But when the sun goes down the sadism level goes up, with biker guys chasing biker girls around, tying them up, threatening to barbecue them, etc. Tabor and Lincoln are waylaid by a pair of biker chicks who try to have sex with them, but when Tabor sees one of the bikers going too far he rushes to the fray. He escapes yet another stomping thanks to sexy rich babe Jessica, the girl Tabor himself just saved from the sadistic bikers, a hotstuff blonde who clearly doesn’t belong with these biker scum but hangs out with them regardless – turns out she’s Kane’s woman, and is with him because he supplies her with heroin.

Tabor ends up having more off-page sex, this time with Jessica, who “thanks” him for saving her by taking a shower in front of him and inviting him in with her. This is all in her posh penthouse. She informs Tabor that Kane is planning a heist of a hundred banks tomorrow, to be carried out by his biker army – the exact plot, by the way, of The Blood Circus. So again,you can see how this novel is more “Chopper Cop” than either of the two books Streib actually wrote for that series. Jessica wants immunity in exchange for the info. 

Then Kane comes in, Maria in tow, his biker minions with him. Here the book takes that detour into grimness. Tabor goes for a gun, knowing he’s screwed, but stupid Maria stops him, still insisting Paul Kane is “a good man.” Then the bikers beat the shit out of Tabor and gang rape Maria. Tabor passes out during it, only to wake the next day, praying that Grant Lincoln will come save him (again!). This of course happens, leading to a reality-be-damned finale in which the three cops stop off at Tabor’s apartment and raid his arsenal.

Maria, in a daze after the rape and filled with vengeance, has deduced that Jessica hoodwinked Tabor – while the bikers are going to rob banks, Kane’s real goal is likely a heist of the massive Novak Bank downtown, owned by Jessica’s father, J. Robert Novak. (Hmmm…could Streib have been the “Robert Novak” who wrote the first two volumes of Belmont Tower’s Super Cop Joe Blaze series?) Armed with pistols, carbines, and on motorcycles of their own, the trio haul ass for the Novak bank, stopping the heist in progress. There ensues a bloody firefight in which more bikers (and biker-chicks) get their eyeballs blown out – and in which Maria gets her revenge on Paul Kane. And Streib delivers another recurring element, with his hero blowing away a woman he thought he was beginning to love, as for example in the finale of Death Squad #1.

Here the novel ends, with Maria’s raping being kept from Chief Jackson. It’s left up in the air if the three are even going to become a team, so maybe Streib wrote this not knowing if he’d write more volumes. There were four more volumes to follow, though; as mentioned, I didn’t enjoy the third one that much, but here’s hoping the other three are more along the grindhouse lines of this first one.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

Chopper Cop #2: The Hitchhike Killer


Chopper Cop #2: The Hitchhike Killer, by Paul Ross
No month stated, 1972  Popular Library

Fortunately, the second volume of Chopper Cop is the last one to be written by Dan Streib; one can almost imagine series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel putting down Streib’s manuscript and immediately drafting a letter of termination (not that he wouldn’t still send it to Popular Library – there being a deadline to meet and all). For once again Streib fails to grasp the gist of the series plot, turning in a slow-moving murder mystery that could just as easily feature a 90 year-old widow as the protagonist.

As we’ll recall, the titular “Chopper Cop” is 27 year-old Terry Bunker, who despite the cover image has “slightly long brown hair and muttonchop sideburns.” He’s based out of California and basically answers to the Governor only, though he reports to “stupid chief” Raymond Haggard, with whom Bunker has a venemous relationship (Haggard refers to Terry as a “long-haired ape”). We’re often informed that Terry’s “craggy looks” are appealing to the ladies, and he’s racked up quite a healthy score-count in his day, with the tidbit that at one point he even had to hire a secretary to keep track of all the women calling for him.

Not that we get much of that, this time. No, Streib once again must remind us that Terry is “lonely;” as I mentioned in my review of the first volume, Terry Bunker is altogether womanly, at least when compared to the average men’s adventure protagonist. He’s constantly moping or brooding, and he’s more often afraid than not. So far as the babe magnet quotient goes, there’s a part early on where he runs into Haggard’s sexy secretary, with whom Terry was once involved, and Terry thinks to himself that, while the lady is suitably hot and being with her was fun, she wasn’t able to quelch “the loneliness inside” Terry. Oh, brother!!

Streib makes vague references to some woman in Terry’s past, one who was apparently killed sor something, and Terry’s never been able to get over her. Streib doesn’t elaborate, and I can’t recall if this woman was mentioned in the previous book, but as someone once said, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” This was it for Streib on Chopper Cop and I highly suspect the co-authors of the next one (which was to be the last) won’t dwell on all the maudlin bullshit and just deliver a fun book about a chopper-riding cop. At least, here’s hoping they will.

Streib does make Terry suitably rule-breaking – but to the point where he’s mostly an asshole. When heading into Sacramento to meet with Haggard on the latest assignment, Terry, for no reason at all, begins taunting his fellow cops – none of whom realize biker Terry himself is a cop – and leads them on a chase through the city streets, with the outcome of Terry being arrested on the steps outside the capitol building. Chief Haggard has to come out and admit Terry is actually a cop. One begins to understand why Terry is so hated by his brothers in blue.

Terry refuses to read the paper so the recent murders of three girls around California is literally news to him. We readers have already witnessed one murder in the book’s opening: a biker in a leather jacket and a “full face mask” of white plastic picks up a hitchhiking young girl named Diana Cole, gives her a lift, and takes her to an abandoned area, where the biker then runs over her. Terry learns there have been two similar murders across the state and the governor, aka Terry’s boss, wants Terry on the case, as he’s certain only the “Chopper Cop” (a title never used in the books, by the way) can prevent more murders.

Here’s the funny thing about The Hitchhike Killer. Throughout the book Haggard keeps nagging Terry to look into “the biker gangs” that are plaguing California, as Haggard and his fellow cops are certain it’s a bunch of bikers doing the killings, and not just a sole murderer, as Terry suspects. So in other words a bona fide pulp biker novel is promised in the text but denied us; Streib is determined to turn in another slow-moving murder mystery when he could’ve easily done something like The Blood Circus (which likely is what editor Lyle Kenyon Engel had in mind when he came up with the series concept!).

Because honestly, Terry’s biker aspect doesn’t factor much into the tale; he spends the majority of the narrative flying a commuter airline around California and then staying in a house with a pair of stews. Immediately upon looking at the items found at the murder sites Terry notices something the other cops missed – cigarettes from sample packages once given out by certain airlines. While Haggard keeps pressuring Terry to look into those biker gangs, Terry instead flies around with a regional plane that goes to the three areas the murders occurred – and sure enough, the crew reveals that those cigarettes are no longer given out due to “health concerns,” but there’s so many of them left over that the crew has open access to them.

So basically Terry’s already solved the case…someone in the crew of this very plane killed the three girls. We even learn that all of them, pilots and stewardesses alike, are biking enthusiasts! But Terry shoots the breeze with them, smoking cigarettes in the cockpit(!), and here we meet the incredibly small cast of characters Streib gives us for the duration: co-pilot Paul Dunn, Terry’s instant prime suspect; super-sexy blonde stew Lisa; and Lisa’s roommate, equally-sexy brunette stew Chris.

Terry has an instant thing for Lisa, but we’ll recall that Terry is more than just virile lust; he thinks Lisa might be “the one.” (Oh, brother again!) He thinks there’s equal sparks, thus he’s crestfallen when it turns out Lisa is having an affair with Paul, who is married. Instead, Terry goes back home with the stews and ends up boffing Chris, who doffs her top and says “Announcing Twin Mound National Park.” Streib doesn’t get too explicit in this or the few other sex scenes, though he does add the memorable bit that a climaxing Chris starts screaming for someone named “Joey.”

But mostly Terry just tries to put the moves on Lisa, who is alternately interested and stand-offish. Occasionally he tracks clues, visiting the various murder sites and putting himself in the minds of the victims, complete even with a moronic scene where Terry runs along the desert, tracing the footsteps of one of the murdered girls, and only stops when he notices his fellow cops laughing at him(!). Chopper Cop, baby!! I mean the whole book is damn hilarious in how lame it is. We do finally get a bit of biker stuff when, in San Bernadino, Terry runs afoul of some teen bikers who discover the two-way radio on his chopper, call him “pig,” and beat him unconscious.

Streib from what I’ve read of him was fond of female villains, and he pretty much lays all his cards on the table with an arbitrary chapter from the point of view of “the killer,” in which the gender is cagily never mentioned. But anyway “the killer” dreams as the various girls die over and over again, unsure if they are dead in reality or if it’s all a dream. So by this point the reader is pretty certain the mystery has been figured out – the killer is a woman. Couple this with stew Chris, given to her flighty emotions, her disappearing at night, and her being near the murder locations in each instance.

We get a chase scene in the final quarter – but notably, Terry is not on his bike during it, which should be all the more indication that Dan Streib was the wrong writer for a series called Chopper Cop. Instead, Terry’s not only in a car for the chase, but he’s riding shotgun as a fellow cop drives! They’re chasing after Paul Dunn, who turns out to be innocent – Chris, meanwhile, has been uncovered as the villain, killing the girls in vengeance for a boyfriend named Joey who was sent to prison on a rape charge.

Terry finally gets on his bike for the finale, high-tailing it into the desert, where an oblivious Lisa is going to pose as a hitchhiking decoy for Chris, in one of Streib’s more belabored and unbelievable setups. Terry’s desperate to get to her in time, as Terry has finally gotten to act upon his “thing” for Lisa, engaging the somewhat-reluctant girl in one of Streib’s somewhat-explicit sex scenes (“He did things with his hands and his tongue until she was ready” and the like). And since Terry earlier cried wolf by having Chief Haggard summon the forces on a bust of a stakeout, the chief refuses to answer Terry’s pleas this time, so it’s only Terry himself who can ensure Lisa doesn’t become the latest victim.

But our hero is such a friggin’ chump, he fails!! He gets there just in time to see Lisa’s bloodied form, having been run over by Chris, and Terry goes off in pursuit. Here Chris becomes a raving lunatic before driving herself off a cliff, all while “the Chopper Cop” just sits there like a lummox on his bike. And meanwhile we never learn if Lisa even dies…Chief Haggard, who did in fact send a squad car after all, has her sent off to the hospital, and tells Terry “if she lives” it will only be because Terry got to her in time…

And here Streib ends the tale, on a downbeat note that was typical of the grindhouse biker fare of the era, so at least he got that part right. But boy The Hitchhike Killer was a lame, tedious affair. The next one has to be better, if only for its awesome title: Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert.

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Death Squad #2: Killers For Hire


Death Squad #2: Killers For Hire, by Frank Colter
No month stated, 1975  Belmont Tower Books

The second and final volume of The Death Squad is just want I want in a lurid ‘70s cop thriller – it’s sleazy, gory, and rude. Dan Streib returns as “Frank Colter,” but strangely the book seems to be a little more polished than the first volume, with more introspection, reflection, and description than I recall being in that earlier book. Maybe editor Peter McCurtin or one of his ghostwriters touched up Streib’s manuscript?

Another interesting change this time is that the members of the Death Squad – San Diego cops Mark Sanders (the tough white guy), Sam Durham (the tough black guy), and Raul Gomez (the tough Hispanic guy) – are very concerned with not blatantly breaking the rules and with covering their asses. As I recall they basically gave everyone the finger in Gang War and casually slaughtered their enemies, with no concerns over red tape or legal troubles. In Killers For Hire the three are constantly fretting over the law and the fact that they might go too far some day. Indeed a firefight midway through the book has our heroes mostly worried about being found out for killing several bikers.

But at any rate, according to the Catalog Of Copyright Entries this novel was written by Streib, same as the first. He pulls a clunky fast one on readers, starting the novel with Sam Durham as the featured character, making the reader suspect that this will be his story. Not so; as with the previous book, Streib soon brings on Mark Sanders as the main guy and keeps him in the spotlight for the duration, with Durham relegated to supporting status (and Gomez practically a nonentity). But Durham’s there in the beginning, trying to prevent a young woman from killing herself by jumping off a bridge. Durham soon discovers that it’s really attempted murder – a Hispanic guy is trying to throw the girl off.

Sanders and Gomez are on duty nearby and are called in to assist; Durham meanwhile gets in a shootout with the killer and tries to keep the girl from plummeting. But even with Sanders’s assistance she still falls, which leads to an incongrous bit of racial-slurring between Durham and Sanders. As before the series makes a cop’s plight seem hopeless; when “stupid chief” Lt. Hailey shows up, he flat-out disbelieves Durham’s story that there even was a murderer, and further disbelieves that anyone shot at Durham, claiming that Durham himself shot up his patrol car! But a lot of this stuff is just unbelievable, like when the girl’s corpse is hauled out of the water and her fingers are missing, shot off by the killer, and Hailey insists that a fish could’ve just bitten them off. Surely the wounds would look different?

Anyway it doesn’t matter. Durham has a delayed realization that the killer he saw on the bridge was none other than Carlos Reyes, an independent hitman known for boasting of his kills but always evading the law; none of his hits have ever been successfully pinned on him. Hailey again disbelieves Durham, which leads “the big black cop” to vow his own revenge. Pulling Sanders out of bed with his latest girlfriend, a “tiny Japanese broad with the suction cup mouth,” Durham insists the Death Squad head to a posh nearby hotel in which Reyes is hosting a high-society party. The Japanese stewardess meanwhile “chatters” at Sanders – the novel is filled with that pulpy ‘70s stereotyping we all know and love – and we’re informed Sanders doesn’t even know her name!

This volume has a bit more focus on sleaze than the last one. Sanders gets laid a few times – and we’re reminded often how orally skilled that Japanese stewardess is – and while it never gets into full-bore porn it’s still more explicit than the fade to black dirty stuff in the previous book. Anyway this sleaze is displayed posthaste as the party at Reyes’s hotel becomes an orgy, initiated when a girl is forced to strip and streak through the crowd, culminating with her sort-of rape while the partygoers excitedly look on. Soon enough Sanders and pals, having crashed the party, are waylaid by their own “shills;” hot women on Reyes’s payroll who use their womanly wiles to distract our heroes.

Sanders is given a stacked redhead who, while hot, has “the flare of a woman’s libber that [Sanders] detested.” The book is also filled with the lovable feminism-bashing expected of mid-‘70s Belmont/Leisure, which reached its apotheosis in The Savage Women. This series though has never been kind to women, with Streib last time taking pleasure in detailing the gory deaths of several women; accordingly Sanders gets rough with the redhead, backhanding her and beating her for info on Reyes and where the killer was the previous night – the cops still determined to get a solid case on the Reyes. But have no fear, the redhead likes the rough stuff and soon treats Sanders to her own oral skills – again, though, nothing too explicit.

After getting in a brawl with Reyes and his henchmen, the Squad finds itself in jail, and here Streib inserts some of that unexpected introspection, as Sanders we learn is terrified of enclosed spaces and swears that he’ll never so cross the line that he himself winds up in prison. Streib throws in another unexpected angle with Lt. Hailey berating the Squad and telling them to take a leave of absence – and in fact, why not go to Vegas, which is where it turns out Reyes has been visiting of late. In fact there our heroes might get the leads they need to bust the bastard. So with Hailey’s sort-of blessing the Death Squad grabs a bunch of guns from Sanders’s private armory and hops in his Mercedes for the long drive across the desert.

Here occurs that firefight with the army of bikers, who ambush our heroes in the middle of the night on an open patch of desert road. Sadly though, Streib focuses more on the worries of the Squad, in particular of Gomez, than on the actual fireworks. And the gunfight, which sees Durham wielding two Wild West-style revolvers, is so chaotic and brief that it never gets as gory as the stuff in Gang War. The Squad is sure these bikers have been hired by Reyes, who clearly wants to prevent the Squad from arriving in Vegas and figuring out how to unravel the lie he’s used to keep him in the clear for the murder of the girl on the bridge (who by the way has turned out to be the inheritor of a few million dollars).

The sleaze returns with the entrance of Kay Drummond, a “nympho” stripper who is sisters with Jennifer Drummond, a hotstuff brunette Sanders met at Reyes’s party. Jennifer, who appears to be Reyes’s kept woman but who clearly thinks Sanders himself is hot stuff, calls Sanders in his Vegas hotel and begs him to look after Kay. Figuring Kay too knows the goods on Reyes, Sanders resolves to his usual methods; moments after allowing himself into her penthouse suite he twists her arm behind her back, slaps her, and beats her around. Will you be surprised to learn that she too likes it? Fairly graphic sex ensues, more so than anything else in the series.

Streib really seems to enjoy putting female characters through hell and then killing them sadistically; just after nympho Kay has gotten her fill of Sanders a dude in a mask kicks in the door and guns her down! (“Mark was still inside her when the bullet hit.”) As in the previous volume we get copious detail on how a bullet can destroy a woman’s face, all of it similar to the finale of the previous novel, where Sanders himself blew off the face of the girl he was in love with(!). Now Kay’s dead, mere pages after her introduction, and Sanders finds himself in bed with a corpse. Once again he clears himself from going to prison, and meanwhile Streib never even bothers to tell us who Kay’s murderer was, nor why the guy didn’t also kill Sanders – the lame suspicion is that he assumed Sanders was just “another of the girl’s marks.”

Killers For Hire climaxes in the ghost town of Jerome, Nevada, where Sanders is taken by some bikers who easily get the drop on him. Lovely Jennifer has also been captured, and even though she initially blames Sanders for Kay’s death she still begs him to screw her – and time it so Reyes can walk in on them during the act and get pissed off! More sleaze ensues, but is quickly put to a stop by an enraged Reyes, who orders Sanders to be killed. The finale sees Durham and Gomez arriving in the nick of time, guns blazing, in a running shootout with Reyes and his biker henchmen, with the villain himself delivered an appropriately-horrible comeuppance, wrapped in flames.

And that’s that – that is, once yet another female character has been gunned down and killed off. Killers For Hire ends with the Death Squad victorious, having uncovered Reyes’s stupid ruse for exoneration, and clearly ready to bust more criminals off the books. But for whatever reason no further volumes of Death Squad ensued, whereas meanwhile Streib’s other killer cop series, the inferior (and similarly-titled) Kill Squad, ran for more volumes than it deserved.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Chopper Cop #1: Valley Of Death


Chopper Cop #1: Valley Of Death, by Paul Ross
No month stated, 1972  Popular Library

Yet another men’s adventure series produced by Lyle Kenyon Engel and his BCI outfit, Chopper Cop attempted to meld the vibe of Easy Rider with the tough cop genre. It ran for three volumes and, at least judging from this first volume, wasn’t very successful in its attempt.

According to Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms, Chopper Cop was the work of three writers: Dan Streib, who wrote the first two volumes, Valley Of Death and The Hitchhike Killer, and the writing team of Bill Amidon and Nat Freedland, who collaborated on the third volume, the awesomely-titled Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert.*

The series protagonist is Terry Bunker, 26 years old and described as “craggy, but handsome.” Formerly a lieutenant (the youngest police lieutenant in the country, we’re informed), he was spotted by California’s “colorful” governor, who retained Terry to be his own personal go-to guy. Now Terry is an agent for the State Department of Criminal Investigation, and gets his missions directly from the governor, though he reports to Chief Haggard of the Sacramento police. Terry has “longish” hair and drives a chopper – a “Rickman frame with a 659 Triumph engine” – and gets a lot of grief for his appearance.

But anyone expecting “Hell’s Angel turned cop” will be disappointed. Terry Bunker is just a regular action series-type cop and there’s nothing to differentiate him from the genre norm. Other that is than his chopper, which really doesn’t factor into this particular story much, anyway. Rather, we’re informed that most cops just don’t get along with Terry because of his long hair and his casual threads, like jeans and a “turtlenecked sweater.” What a rebel! If anything I’d say this is another indication where the book’s producer wanted something much different than what the author delivered.

Because here’s the thing about Terry Bunker – he’s kind of a wimp. Throughout the novel he’s constantly afraid; there are innumerable scenes of him taking deep breaths to steady himself and to remember his “training.” He’s also kind of womanly, as just as often as he’s afraid he’s lonely…! There are many parts where he’ll wish someone else was with him, as he feels so alone. I mean what the hell kind of a shit-kicking men’s adventure protagonist is this? And when he does get in fights he’s usually just ducking and shooting and hoping he doesn’t kill anyone. For that matter even his weapon of choice is blasé; it’s just a standard police-issue revolver.

In a 1981 interview with Will Murray, which was published in Paperback Parade #2 (1986), Lyle Kenyon Engel had this to say about Streib:

Dan Streib, oh God, Dan Streib I see is with Chet Cunningham. I knew Dan, I used him on another series, and then I stopped using him because he wasn’t any good.

Engel mentions Streib being “with” Cunningham because the two authors collaborated on a volume of Nick Carter: Killmaster titled Night Of The Avenger. Engel’s reference to “another series” he used Streib for must be Chopper Cop, because after this Streib was on his own, publishing under various house names for different publishers, like the Death Squad and Kill Squad books. And while Engel’s off-hand criticism might sound harsh, I can’t say I disagree with him.

What’s interesting though is that Valley Of Death presents Streib as filtered through the editing/producing of Engel. The writing here is a little more polished than that in the Kill Squad or Death Squad books, ie the ones Streib did without Engel. But it seems pretty clear that Engel envisioned Chopper Cop as being more about the concept he’d come up with, whereas Streib turned in a rather standard mystery novel, one graced with a lackluster protagonist at that.

In fact, parts of Valley Of Death are like a Gothic novel, except instead of a virginal heroine we have a “craggy, but handsome” long-haired cop for a protagonist. And at 207 pages of big print, the book at least moves at a snappy pace. This caper has Terry investigating a “hippie sex cult” that operates out of Death Valley; three beautiful young Californian women, each of them members of wealthy families who became members of the cult, have committed suicide in unusual ways. But now, a few weeks later, their parents are receiving ghostly phone calls from their deceased daughters, asking for half a million dollars so they can be “resurrected.”

The Gothic stuff mostly plays out in the palatial home of Annette Caldwell’s parents; one of the three suicides, Annette apparently jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, her suicidal act witnessed by a random motorist. But the beautiful young girl’s ghost seems to haunt the home; during his brief stay there Terry sees a ghostly female form rushing from various scenes, hears her playing an organ in the house, and he even kisses her in a strange sequence. Meanwhile Terry’s being constantly propositioned by Penny, Annette’s equally-pretty but virginal 19 year-old sister, who is a fellow biking enthusiast.

There isn’t much action to be found. After a few ghostly visits Terry heads over to San Clemente, where another of the “dead” girls has returned. This leads to a scene where Terry goes out into a desert cemetery in the middle of the night for the money drop off, but it leads to an assassination attempt, culminating in a quick motorcycle chase. But really Terry’s chopper knack isn’t much highlighted by Streib. You get the impression that Engel came up with this cool idea and handed it off to a dude who didn’t know what to do with it.

The cover proclaims a “hippie cult of sex and death” but it must’ve sat out on the actual book, as the cult here is lead by a dude named Arnold Van Doren who appears maybe a page or two and doesn’t offer much. The “sex and death” angle is woefully underplayed, the farthest it gets being a sort of orgy ceremony Terry and Penny walk in on in the middle of the desert, but Terry flashes his badge and the hippies disperse. But the whole cult deal is really just a snow-job, as Valley Of Death is more about a typical blackmailing scheme.

The climax returns to the Gothic tones, playing out in an old mansion somewhere in Death Valley. Here Terry, once again alone (and afraid), sneaks up on the big house in the middle of the night, only to be frightened by an organ that plays in the otherwise-deserted place. (Turns out to be a player piano.) Streib has used female villains in his other books I’ve read, and he does so here too, though you’ll see her “surprise reveal” coming a mile away. But she’s not a bloodthirsty villainess, and the finale, tying in to the womanly feel mentioned above, features the poor girl crying on her father’s shoulder!

Valley Of Death is not an auspicious beginning for the Chopper Cop series; action is minimal and sex and violence are nonexistent.  Let’s hope that Streib’s next one is better. Failing that there’s always the third volume, which should be better if for no other reason than it’s not by Streib.

*Lyle Kenyon Engel also produced another book credited to “Paul Ross” which was not associated with the Chopper Cop series. It was titled The Assassin (1974, Manor Books) and was one of those standalone BCI crime paperbacks; it was written by William Crawford.

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Death Squad #1: Gang War


Death Squad #1: Gang War, by Frank Colter
January, 1975  Belmont Tower Books

In 1975, Manor Books published the five-volume Kill Squad series, which was about a trio of cops who liked to bend the rules in order to take down the guilty. That same year Belmont Tower published Death Squad, a two-volume series that was about a trio of cops who liked to bend the rules in order to take down the guilty. 

“Frank Colter” was the credited author for Death Squad, and “Mark Cruz” was credited for Kill Squad. However, both authors were one and the same – Dan Streib. It seems to me that he put more focus on the shorter-lived series, though, as judging from this first volume Death Squad is worlds better than Kill Squad, which, at least if the second volume was any indication, was pretty lackluster and tepid. Death Squad #1, while not perfect by any means, at least serves up plenty of action and heaping helpings of gore.

Also, whereas the Kill Squad trio were hyped on the back cover as rulebreakers but in reality weren't so much, the dudes in Death Squad (never actually referred to as such in this first volume) really are asskickers of the first order, to laughable extremes. Throughout the novel they’ll give their lieutenant the finger and then blithely announce that they’re about to “go off duty” so they can kill criminals without any fear of reprimand or any red tape getting in the way!

Unlike the Kill Squad, the Death Squad is comprised of men only: first there’s Sergeant Mark Sanders, 31, a ‘Nam vet who is the star of the show, just as Chet Tabor is the star of the Kill Squad series. Next there’s Sam Durham, a big, muscular, Jim Brown-type black cop. (The black cops are always Jim Brown-types in these books.) Finally there’s Raul Gomez, a stocky Hispanic patrolman who gets the least amount of narrative time in Gang War (the title by the way has zilch to do with the actual plot).

These three San Diego cops have apparently been working as vigilantes together for a while; Streib isn’t very clear about this. He also has a half-assed rivalry between Gomez and Durham that seems to come and go. Also, these three aren’t partners, at least so far as it goes officially; in fact the novel opens with the gruesome and unsettling murder of Sanders’s new partner, a young black officer who has just joined the force. 

Responding to a rape call, the duo arrive to find the perpetrators, a pair of young white men, rushing away. However due to all those goddamn rules and procedures, Sanders is unable to pull his gun until he’s certain he’s in danger. Meanwhile one of the perps, hidden behind a bush, whips out a gun and shoots Sanders’s partner right in the crotch. Streib doesn’t shirk on the shiver-inducing details; as if this wasn’t enough, the poor bastard gets shot again, and lays there waiting to die. Again, due to the damn rule book, Sanders is unable to leave the side of the rape victim, a young Hispanic girl, and the perps get away.

But when Durham and Gomez show up, Sanders promptly gives his lieutenant the finger, goes “off duty,” and chases after the rapists on his own! This entails the first of many action sequences, however the perps escape. Handily, though, Gomez reveals that he’s taken a pin from the rape victim’s hand; it’s an image of joined nautical knots, and it apparently fell off of one of the rapists. Instead of turning this in as evidence, the three decide to use it to root out the culprits, and break up to investigate the various local yacht clubs to see if this is the logo of any of them.

Of course, Sanders strikes gold at his first yacht club, where in the midst of a bunch of rich, snotty college-age kids he meets the ravishing Jessica Kane. Here the uber-wealthy sit on their yachts and have endless parties, and Sanders instantly runs afoul of them, in particular two college punks, Robbins and Talbott, both of whom are sons of highly-influential pillars of San Diego society. Jessica comes on strong to Sanders, even inviting him home, though Streib is firmly in the “fade to black” category when it comes to the actual screwin’.

Not only is the framework of this series similar to Kill Squad, but it also shares some of the same plot developments. Namely, just as Chet Tabor went back to his apartment in Dead Wrong only to walk into an ambush, so does Sanders go back to his apartment and receive a mysterious call that the place is about to blow. This sees more overdone gore as Streib lovingly details a poor airline stewardess/next door neighbor getting blown to bits in the explosion – capped off with the dark humor “punchline” of Sanders announcing that he just “slept with her last week.”

Gradually we learn that the Death Squad is dealing with the Terrorist Liberation Army, regular hippie terrorists, of the spoiled rich kid variety. Sort of like in Father Pig, or, more accurately, Len Levinson's The Terrorists. The Squad dishes bloody payback to one of them, the above-mentioned Talbott, who immolates himself after a sort-of-endless chase aboard one of the yachts. This leads to a vendetta against our three heroes, who meanwhile are brought before the commisioner and mayor and etc and accused of being fascists and the like. In response Sanders whips out that middle finger again and tells bigshot lawyer Robbins that his son is probably one of the Terrorist Liberation Army.

The climax is another nice action movie-esque scene in which the TLA hold several people hostage in the sprawling San Diego zoo, and of course Sanders goes in alone to free them, with Durham and Gomez on the sidelines to provide backup. This is a fairly violent scene in which Streib again relishes in gorily killing off women, first with a grandmother who gets shot in the head (complete with detail of her eyeballs popping out) and later, a .44 Magnum-armed Sanders shooting one of the female terrorists right in her most private of areas! (And the poor girl lies there in numbed shock as she slowly dies, while Sanders kneels over her and berates her!)

Streib is not good at building up mystery, and it’s painfully obvious someone Sanders trusts is secretly in the TLA – so obvious, in fact, that Durham and Gomez basically slap Sanders in the head and tell him to snap out of it and realize that Jessica Kane is working with them. And of course, this turns out to be the case, with one of the more casual “reveals” in a finale yet, as Jessica comes out of the veritable hippie-terrorist closet, announcing herself to a chest-shot Sam Durham (who despite what sounds like a fatal wound survives). 

Streib gives us an unsettling finale, in which Sanders, who has just discovered that Jessica is a terrorist, announces that he had been falling in love with her and was even thinking of marrying her…and then he shoots her point-blank in the head! Once again we get detail of how a girl’s face explodes, including how her cheekbones splash out on Durham’s lap – and, mind you, she wasn’t even aiming her gun at Sanders when he shot her! So in other words, he just plain murders her.

And that’s it, the end. Certainly it’s over the top, but really that’s what I want from these grimy men’s adventure novels of the ‘70s. There is nothing heroic about Sanders, Durham, and Gomez, and they’re presented as straight-up murderers. What’s more, they’re very open about their desire (and enjoyment) of killing criminals. It’s funny, because you realize that “the book” and the rules and regulations and etc are all there precisely to prevent such murderous fascism on the police force; so in other words, these three basically create the very “red tape” they bitch about.

There was only one more volume of Death Squad, which I can’t be too sad about; while Gang War was entertaining, at least so far as the overdone tone and gore went, there really wasn’t anything that special or memorable about it.