Showing posts with label George Snyder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Snyder. Show all posts

Monday, August 16, 2021

Time Clock Of Death (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #58)


Time Clock Of Death, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1970  Award Books

Not just “yet another insallment of Nick Carter: Killmaster,” Time Clock Of Death is special for a few reasons: One, it features the last-ever appearance of Julia “Julie” Baron, a fellow AXE agent (and bedmate) of Nick Carter’s. And two, in a 1981 interview with Will Murray (published in Paperback Parade #2 in 1986), series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel stated, “I know I did that one,” referring to Time Clock Of Death.* 

Officially Time Clock Of Death is credited to George Snyder, and the book reads identically to the rest of his work. The only interview I’ve ever read with Lyle Kenyon Engel is Murray’s, and I’ve never seen it stated anywhere that Engel himself wrote anything. He was the idea guy, the one who would farm out plots or concepts to his ghostwriters. So either his claim of authorship for this book (and the others, noted below) was b.s. or maybe it was just exaggeration; maybe Engel just embellished the manuscripts in question. I would believe this one if only because Julie Baron, the hoststuff brunette AXE agent with “almond eyes,” is heavily built up in Time Clock Of Death and her previous adventures with Nick are often referred to. I would believe that the series producer would be more aware of these previous yarns than a contract writer would be. 

First appearing in Run, Spy, Run (ie the first volume of the series), Julie is presented as Nick’s equal in most ways, the yin to his yang and whatnot, and they’re clearly made for each other. In fact she is so empedestaled (I just created that word, btw – you can file it beside “embiggened”) that it’s almost ridiculous; not only is she in love with Nick, but Nick is in love with her! Besides Run, Spy Run (in which the two also seemed to fall in love), I’ve only read one other installment with Julie: Lew Louderback’s Danger Key, and it’s been so long ago I can’t recall how lovey-dovey the two got in that one. The way they come off in this one you wonder why they don’t just quit the spy game and get hitched – a proposition Julie actually makes in the course of the novel. And indeed, Julie was removed from the series for precisely this reason: In Will Murray’s excellent article on Nick Carter: Killmaster in the The Armchair Detective volume 15 number 4 (1982), he states that Engel “eliminated Julie Baron, Nick’s steady girlfriend,” because she “kept getting in the way of Nick’s love life, which became increasingly torrid after [initial series ghostwriter] Valerie Moolman left the series.” 

However the Engel embellishing – if indeed there is any here in Time Clock Of Death – is only partly accurate: Nick tells us that he’s been on “two assignments” with Julie, but meanwhile she appeared in a handful of volumes, this being the last of them. And yes, Nick “tells us;” we’re now in the series’s unfortunate first-person narration years, which, also according to Engel in the above Will Murray pieces, was a requirement of the publisher, so as to compete with the Matt Helm books. I personally hate first-person narration in my men’s adventure, but as I’ve mentioned before, George Snyder’s hardboiled narrative style usually comes off as first-person even when it’s not, like in the Operation Hang Ten series. 

And Time Clock Of Death is definitely the work of Snyder, or at least the majority of it is. It has all the hallmarks: a pessimistic hero, burned-out vibe, focus on fisticuffs and knife-fighting instead of gunplay, and a fair dose of misogyny, not to mention women getting killed. In fact the novel opens with Nick in bed with some chick, and someone comes in and blows her away while Nick’s sucking on her nipple! His life is literally saved because she offers him her “large breasts” before their latest round in the sack. A murdered woman almost always factors into a George Snyder novel (again, the hardboiled connotations), and this one’s no different. 

Nick’s already on the job when we meet him; he’s been handed an assignment so vague that you wonder how he even gets started. But Snyder barrels along so that the novel speeds by; as most others at this point in the series, it’s a mere 156 pages of big print. So Russia has revealed a new “super jet airliner,” a big passenger airliner that’s faster and more massive than anything America has. They were in the process of showing it off in New York when the thing plumb disappeared. Yes, someone managed to heist an actual airliner; we’re hastily informed that a new “antiradar” device onboard has prevented anyone from finding out where it has been taken to. So clearly the plot is implausible, but then also seems to predict the future real-life MH370 mystery (which doesn’t seem to be much of a mystery anymore; the wreckage appears to be in the middle of the Cambodian jungle). 

With this shaky setup Snyder still manages to deliver a fast-moving yarn with plentiful action and a lot of sex, most of it more explicit than earlier instances in the series. And all of it – save for a bit where Nick is raped(!) by a heavyset woman into whips and bondage – is with Julie Baron, again putting forth the notion that the two are a steady couple. Nick, following scant leads, heads over to London, where he gets in a fight with a hulking “Oriental.” This leads Nick to Hong Kong, where boss Hawk tells him that, conveniently enough, Julie Baron’s been working on a case, one involving a mysterious figure known as “The Colonel.” And wouldn’t you believe it, but the two cases soon coincide! Nick is actually excited to see Julie again, and the part where he meets her in a crowded Hong Kong bar is nicely done. 

In Snyder’s hands, Julie Baron is memorable indeed. She too has been looking forward to seeing Nick again, to the extent that she’s taken “the pill” in preparation for her first night with him! This bit is actually turned into a running gag, as Julie fears she’s “wasted” the pill, because duty interferes with the longed-for shenanigans; that “Oriental” from London is here as well, and Nick manages to knock him out and take him back to their hotel. Angered at this intrusion, Julie wants to be a “sadistic bitch” when the guy wakes up, toying with Nick’s stiletto and begging “please let me have him” to Nick in a sort of twisted good cop-bad cop routine. From here – their burning yearnings still unfulfilled – the two fly off to Singapore, trying to track down the Colonel. 

Snyder can’t be accused of spending much time on the plot, though. Nick and Julie, disguised as a traveling salesman and his somewhat-portly wife, merely go around saying they’re looking for “The Colonel,” and the villain comes to them. At any rate they get to the bedroom stuff straightaway. Snyder really pours it on thick here, with Julie telling Nick “I want you so bad I can taste it,” and Nick responding “I’m going to take my time having you.” And he certainly does, as the scene starts off pretty explicit so far as Nick’s oral explorations of Julie go, but then it takes a turn to the poetic, complete with a random bit of present-tense narration (“I’m always afraid I will hurt her,” etc), before getting into a fantastical vibe with stuff about a “cloud” the two are on in some metaphysical astral plane or somesuch. Another Snyder hallmark: “completion” is here and elsewhere used instead of “climax.” Nick and Julie are such a fantastic match that Julie actually cries afterward…not that this stops her from waking Nick a few hours later, for another somewhat-explicit bout. 

Snyder doesn’t let the lovey-dovey stuff get in the way of the random lurid factor, though. Soon enough Nick and Julie are captured, and Nick eventually finds himself naked and chained to a medieval torture rack. He’s now the captive of Fancy, a “husky” woman of indeterminate age (Nick tells us she could be anywhere from her 40s to her 60s) who dresses in an s&m leather getup and employs a legion of similarly-husky women, dressed the same, who wield whips and like to snap them in Fancy’s direction while she rides her latest victim. Fancy works with the Colonel, who of course turns out to be the mastermind behind the plot, coincidence be damned. The Colonel will get Julie, and Fancy will get Nick; both will die, it’s just a matter of how. 

So Snyder delivers this crazed, out-of-nowhere sequence where Julie, clearly harboring a secret plan, gets Nick all worked up so he can, uh, respond to Fancy, and then Fancy gets up on top of Nick and starts riding away while her “leather ladies” snap their whips at them! And then Julie sneaks off and gets a submachine gun. Folks it’s for insane shit like this that I will always prefer Nick Carter: Killmaster to the James Bond books. But unfortunately after this things sort of stall out for a while. First we have some nice running action where Nick and Julie, dressed like coolies to blend in with the other Asian soldiers in the place, blow away scads of goons with various weapons. But then they sneak on a freighter bound for Java and it’s back to that other perennial Snyder hallmark: excessive description of the characters sneaking into and out of places. 

Things finally come back to a boil when Nick and Julie find themselves in a remote location complete with a medieval-style castle. Plus the plane’s here. They set fire to the place to alert the nearby marines, which leads to this curious typo: “My eyes were stinging as I stepped away from me.” Ponder that, friends! Julie really does get in Nick’s way here in the finale; she certainly holds her own in the action scenes, and even proves she’s made of tough stuff when she walks off a major knife wound (actually she drinks it off, more like, thanks to a shot of bourbon), but of course Nick spends the climactic action scene afraid that she might get killed. Snyder has no qualms with his hero fighting female opponents, so we have some nicely-handled stuff where Nick takes on Fancy’s leather ladies, all of whom wear knee-high boots and leather cossets with holes for their nipples to stick out of, by the way. (Yet curiously Snyder buzzkills his own lurid imagination by constantly telling us how fat and ugly the women are!) Nick shoots them, beats them up, and even in one memorable bit repeatedly bashes the face of one of the bondage women into a brick wall. 

As for the Colonel, he’s not nearly as memorable as Fancy: he’s a Napolean-esque squat little guy with a bald head and beady black eyes. He too enjoys his time with Fancy; not content to just have this happen once in the novel, Snyder has Fancy again riding someone while her leather ladies snap their whips around, only this time the guy’s the Colonel and he’s apparently enjoying it. That said, Fancy’s sendoff isn’t very spectacular; Nick doesn’t kill her, at least, but he does as mentioned take her leather ladies through the wringer. Meanwhile the Colonel somehow manages to escape with a knocked-out Julie, and it’s up to Nick to save her. But again, Julie isn’t nearly a damsel in distress. Snyder is at such pains to put Julie’s fate in doubt here, even at one point having her fall off a cliff, that I thought she was going to be permanently removed. 

As it turns out, Snyder could’ve just followed through with the death threats, after all, as Julie wouldn’t appear again after this one. Instead Snyder ends the tale with Nick and Julie about to enjoy some more “down time,” as it were, and again the lovey-dovey stuff is so thick that you can’t comprehend how these two could even bear to separate. Interesting then that she wasn’t to appear again; certainly some readers out there wondered when Julie Baron would return. It makes Nick especially appear like a cad in that he’s clearly in love with her, even as mentioned telling her so, yet in the following books he won’t even mention her again! But then that’s only to be expected when you’re the product of a revolving cast of ghostwriters. 

*The other Killmaster titles Engel claimed to have written were: Cambodia, Ice Bomb Zero, and The Mark Of Cosa Nostra. Curiously, all four of the titles Engel claimed as his are officially credited to George Snyder.

Monday, December 7, 2020

Operation Hang Ten #9: Death Car Surfside


Operation Hang Ten #9: Death Car Surfside, by Patrick Morgan
No month stated, 1972  Macfadden Books

Well friends, this is the last volume of Operation Hang Ten I currently own; this series is grossly overpriced on the used books market, so I’ll just have to be content with what I have. And besides, it seems evident that George Snyder, again posing as “Patrick Morgan,” has run out of steam. The previous volume was a chore of a read, with “The Cartwright” falling in love. This one’s even more middling, the only difference being that “The Cartwright” is an outlaw for the majority of the tale – and a pretty unlikable one at that. 

I’ve noted from the first volume I reviewed that Bill Cartwright, “hero” of the series, is probably the biggest dick in all men’s adventuredom. But what’s become more clear with each volume I’ve read is that he’s also a pretty lame-ass “spy.” He talks a big game and thinks very highly of himself, but “Bill” (as Snyder most often refers to him…or, as ever, “The Cartwright”) really doesn’t do much of anything. He’s a grand failure, so far as a surfer turned spy goes; Jim Dana, head honcho of the Operation Hang Ten program, supposedly has taken hippies, surfers, and other assorted “youth types” from their elements, trained them to be spies, and put them back in their elements as operatives. And I believe Bill is the best one he’s got (at least according to Bill!), which is not a good indication of this particular agency’s effectiveness. 

Past volumes have featured Bill blundering his way through the latest assignment, usually getting a woman (or two) killed in the process before finally figuring out the bad guys’ plot and shooting a few people in the final pages. He’s certainly not a hero; he’s too assholic for that. I mean he’s not even an antihero, he’s just a plain jerk. Death Car Surfside takes Bill into even more jerky territory. In this one, which occurs over a single day, Bill manages to knock out a cop, steal tips off restaurant tables, carjack a Mustang, break into an innocent person’s house, and even barges in on the homeowner just as she’s stepping out of the shower. When she asks him if he’s going to rape her, Bill checks out her hot nude bod and says he’s considering it! Of course, this being a men’s adventure yarn and all – not to mention one of the more aggressively macho ones, courtesy Bill’s assholic attitude – the young lady doesn’t mind Bill too much, given that he has “good vibes.” Oh and Bill also beats the shit out of this girl’s boyfriend, tying him up in a closet…where he’ll later be discovered by the bad guys and murdered. Not that Bill feels one pang of guilt over it. 

There’s no pickup from the previous volume, just a passing mention that Bill took a lot of grief from Dana for the events that happened therein. When we meet him at the start of Death Car Surfside, Bill’s doing some pre-dawn surfing at Hermosa Beach. We’re informed this is because all the lousy tourists clutter up the beaches during the day; per the series template, the narrative is peppered with arbitrary and digressive bitch sessions on this or that. Humorously this time they are shoehorned in at the oddest places, like during car chases or when Bill’s running from someone. But while Bill is surfing in the dock he’s shocked to see a Mustang hurtle over the pier and crash spectacularly into the ocean. He barely caught a glimpse of a comatose young woman behind the wheel. 

Bill dives down to save her; this will be his only heroic act in the entire book. She’s been tied into the car and clearly was planted there to be driven to her death. Bill pulls her up to the surface and some other girl comes out of the gloom, saying she witnessed it all. Bill checks the comatose girl’s ID, and next thing he knows he’s slammed in the head, obviously knocked out by the girl who claimed to be a witness. When he comes to it’s morning and the girl from the car is still lying there, but now she’s dead, courtesy several stab wounds. Here’s where Bill’s taken in and read his rights by the cops; the muleheaded main cop won’t buy Bill’s story and comes up with an even more unbelievable one, one which of course “proves” Bill is the killer. Instead of asking to call a lawyer – or better yet Jim Dana – hotheaded Bill instead decks the cop and makes a run for it. 

He’ll operate in this capacity for the rest of the novel, trying to stay one step ahead of the law to clear his name by finding the girl’s killer. But he only makes things worse for himself, proceeding to commit even more crimes along the way – stealing, carjacking, breaking and entering. Even as mentioned unintentionally causing the death of an innocent man who has nothing to do with anything – save for being the boyfriend of the girl whose house Bill breaks into while hiding from the cops. Pretty much everything he touches turns to shit in the book, yet Bill never once questions himself or his actions. Hell, as mentioned even when running from the cops or the bad guys or whatnot, he still finds the opportunity to bitch about society or people in general. He’s almost comically unlikable, but the thing is the reader doesn’t get the impression that Snyder himself feels this way – Bill is presented as the studly and cool hero, even though he comes off like a complete prick. 

Bill’s escape from the cops is one of the few action scenes in the book. Bill runs and swims and runs some more, eventually losing them in the summer tourist crowd. Here’s where he starts stealing so he can get to a payphone and call Jim Dana – and also where Snyder starts page-filling with abandon. It starts off with a pair of old ladies finishing their lunch at an outdoor restaurant and getting into a long conversation – which takes up a few pages – over the tip amount they should leave. Bill, dressed only in a “mini-wetsuit” deal, is actually asked by the management to leave, given that he’s been standing there so long , waiting for the women to leave their table so he can steal their tip. Next he sets his sights on a few dudes who have just eaten, and he snatches their tip. However, Dana doesn’t answer the phone – and won’t answer it until the very final pages, giving the lame excuse that Bill “isn’t his only Operation Hang Ten operative” and thus has been busy with another of his spies! 

The murdered girl was named Charlene Morris, and Bill remembers her address from the ID he briefly looked at. It’s in Newport Beach, so Bill steals some poor guy’s Mustang so he can drive back to his car, “the woody.” At least this preys on Bill’s conscience, to the point where he calls a tow truck driver and offers him a bonus if he hauls the Mustang back to Hermosa with no questions asked – yet more page-filling. I forgot to mention, Bill learned from the cops that there was another corpse in Charlene’s car: her father, a rocket scientist, whose body was shoved in the trunk. Of course the cops are trying to pin both murders on Bill. So he heads to the home Charlene supposedly shares with her dad, and there finds a bunch of hippie squatters – obese Ma and two Manson lookalikes. There are also two women, one of them a willowy blonde and the other a super-stacked one named Cherry. 

Bill suspects something’s afoot, and gets confirmation when they try to attack him. This leads to yet another chase scene, with Bill running from the “family” as well as the cops. He plows through the back yards of some residences and then ditches the woody, picking out which house to break into to hide. I mean folks this is our hero. Of course, the house he settles on turns out to be occupied by a super-built blonde with long legs…and of course, she just happens to be in the shower when Bill breaks in. So he looks around her stuff, checking out her photos and her drawers and stuff…and then waits to confront her as soon as she’s stepping out of the shower! This is how he meets what will become the main female character of the novel: Sam, aka Samantha, probably the most memorable female character yet in the series given her smart comebacks. 

She’s not too shocked by Bill’s appearance, and indeed goes about getting dressed…while Bill keeps oggling her, holding his .22 Magnum on her. Again, this is our hero. As mentioned, she does wonder if he’s going to rape her, and Bill rubs his chin and says he’s thinking about it. Bill is also a dick when it comes to his verbal treatment of women; his style of coming on to them appears to be mocking and denigrating them. All very schoolyard juvenile, but again nowhere is it implied that Bill is wrong for this. Nor is it implied he’s a bad guy when Sam’s boyfriend comes over, a big lug who towers over Bill…and Bill proceeds to beat the shit out of him. And then tie him up and toss him in the closet. Sam says she’s not too crazy about the guy to begin with, plus she’s upset he failed to protect her! Oh and Bill’s such a dumbass he’s unaware “Sam” is a nickname for Samantha. I guess he’s too busy surfing and bitching to watch Bewitched

So Bill, who still can’t get hold of Jim Dana, goes back to follow Ma and her people, because he assumes they were behind the murder of Charlene and her rocket scientist dad. Now here we get an opportunity for some “secret agent” sort of stuff, but as mentioned Bill’s a joke in that regard. He has Sam drive her car and sits there as she follows Ma and her group in their school bus, Bill finding the opportunity even here to bitch about society. But of course Ma’s freaks have spotted the tail and end up crushing Sam’s car. Bill’s knocked out, and when he wakes up he’s tied up in the back of the school bus and Sam’s gone. I should mention we’re over halfway through the novel at this point. I mean it’s almost a joke, that’s how bad it is. 

Ma’s not here, and a bound Bill watches as Cherry goes out into a school, talks up some teenaged girl, and brings her back on the bus – this is how Ma’s family kidnaps people. The new girl’s tied up alongside Bill, and off they go to find Bill’s trailer. Here things get pretty dark, as the poor teen girl is raped by one of the Manson types; this, we’re to understand, is her punishment, given that she didn’t free Bill when she had the chance. The poor girl deserves it! Cherry takes Bill into his swank trailer and basically demands that he screw her on his round bed with the roller bar and the colored lights that change in tempo to the “violin music” Bill can play with the touch of a button. Here ensues one of the more explicit sex scenes in the series, as Bill manages to talk Cherry into untying his hands…then taking her and himself all the way to “completion” before knocking her out. 

Oh and meanwhile, the Manson-esque rapist has accidentally killed the poor girl he was raping. Yet another female character Bill Cartwright has failed to save. He gets his .22 Magnum and finally dishes out some payback. Here we get an almost arbitrary catering to the cover art, where a helicopter comes out of nowhere and starts dropping grenades on Bill. I almost get the impression Snyder was ordered to include such a scene by series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel, as the cover artwork had already been commissioned. Perhaps the biggest development of Death Car Surfside is that Bill’s beloved “woody” (for some reason the car is never capitalized) is destroyed, courtesy the helicopter falling on it when Bill shoots it out of the sky. 

Bill cries over it a bit, then later wonders over how much work it would take to build a new one. But ultimately he seems to cast aside this idea, feeling that a new woody would just be a recreation, a replacement for something he loved and lost. He rents a Charger, which he drives the rest of the novel, but I’m assuming in the next (and final) volume, Freaked Out Strangler, he gets himself a new car. I don’t have that volume, so we’ll have to be content with Olman’s review. Olman excerpts some narrative about Bill’s car in his review, but doesn’t state what car it is. At any rate Bill’s big problem right now is finding Sam, whom he’s been told is a captive of Ma’s. Only, Bill doesn’t know where Ma lives. All this is so far removed from a spy novel – the entire book really has nothing to do with the rest of the series, save for a last-minute development that Ma is working with some Red Chinese agents and she’s been kidnapping the children of prominent American scientists and whatnot for ransom, to give their secrets to the Chinese. 

The book’s only real action scene occurs in a big shopping mall; Bill finds out that Ma’s meeting with a secret Chinese agent who runs a restaurant inside the mall(!?), and Bill barges in there…and is immediately caught. Yes, that’s correct…Bill, who again has the opportunity to demonstrate his bad-ass secret agent skills, is immediately captured by the Chinese agents when he walks into the back room, in which Ma is meeting with her contacts. There are several men there with guns, and Bill meekly hands over his .22 and has a seat. As I say, Snyder was clearly worn out with the series at this point, as so much of the “plot stuff” is relayed via lazy exposition, as here, where the entire plot is exposited by these one-off characters. At least it culminates in a long-running action scene, with Bill, once he’s found out Ma’s address, gorily disposing of several Chinese agents with his .22, before getting in a long chase with Ma that turns into a knockdown, dragout fight. 

You’d think Sam would be a little freaked out that she’s spent the last few hours tied to a bed in a darkened, empty house, but instead she just has a few smart remarks for Bill, once he’s taken off her gag – and Bill replies with some acidic retorts of his own. At this point the entire thing is just nauseating. And of course, next chapter picks up with the couple post-boink in Bill’s swank trailer; the little fact that Sam’s boyfriend was murdered just a few hours before is brushed under the narrative carpet, with Sam pretty much shrugging and saying she never felt the same way about the guy as he did for her! Oh and here Bill finally gets a return call from Jim Dana, who as mentioned basically says he was busy with other crap, so stop your bitching. 

In his review of Freaked Out Strangler, Olman comments that, by that tenth volume, the “faux beat poetry style” Snyder employs for the series seems “almost condensed, thickened, as if it had been left on the stove too long.” This is pretty spot on. As mentioned in my review of the seventh volume, decades later Snyder was under the impression he’d only written five volumes of the series, whereas all other sources peg him for all ten volumes. Could it be that he grew so bored with the series he merely forgot he’d written five more volumes? Or maybe it’s because each volume seems like a retread of the one that came before, so he just thought he’d only written five when he really wrote ten. 

Who knows. This is all of them I have for now, so unless I spot some more for super cheap these are the only volumes of Operation Hang Ten I’ll be reviewing. I’m certainly not going to shell out the $$$ online book sellers are asking. And in fact, what with the woody being destroyed and all, Death Car Surfside makes for a fine pseudo-finale of the series.

Monday, December 9, 2019

Operation Hang Ten #8: Beach Queen Blowout


Operation Hang Ten #8: Beach Queen Blowout, by Patrick Morgan
No month stated, 1971  Macfadden Books

Well it only took eight installments, but we now actually have a volume number on the covers of Operation Hang Ten. Unfortunately only two volumes were to follow, so one wonders if the numbering helped or hurt the series. George Snyder again serves as “Patrick Morgan,” turning in basically the same novel as the other three volumes I’ve read: egomaniac protagonist Bill Cartwright (aka “The Cartwright,” as he often thinks of himself) bumbles his way through a lurid caper in which at least one curvy young beauty is sadistically murdered, usually as a result of Bill’s own foolish actions. We also get sermonizing on the general shittiness of the world.

That being said, Beach Queen Blowout certainly promises a lot. In fact it has a setup frequent blog commenter Grant would appreciate: a gang of hotbod young women, led by a bikini-clad babe who sports a heart-shaped birthmark above her left breast, has been knocking over banks and terrorizing the business establishments around Huntington Beach, California. There’s also some stuff about oil rigs off the coast being sabotaged as part of a blackmail scheme. But Snyder takes this material – which possibly was devised by series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel – and basically ignores it, instead intent on telling the tale of how “The Cartwright” falls in love for the first time

Yes, friends, it’s a “very special episode” of Operation Hang Ten, with Bill (as Snyder usually refers to him) falling head over heels for a young beauty named Lynn he meets early in his investigation. This at the expense of the more lurid (and potentially sleazy) setup promised by the back cover copy – no lie, much is made of this mysterious criminal babe in her bikini that shows off a heart-shaped birthmark, and while Bill makes some cursory attempts at finding out who she is, ultimately her reveal is almost casually dropped on the reader and Bill doesn’t even bother taking her down himself. And the rest of her bikini-clad gang is similarly dispensed with off-page, our hero more concerned with doling out justice to a handful of people.

As usual the entire premise of “Operation Hang Ten,” as devised by chief Jim Dana, is hard to buy, especially if Bill Cartwright’s performance in the line of duty can be taken as a sign of how the other operatives fare. Regardless Dana, who appears a bit more in the narrative this time than in previous volumes, vociferously defends his organization, claiming that the young surfers, punks, and whatnot he’s hired have a better chance of squaring counterculture problems than regular secret agent types could. So Bill’s been sent to Huntington Beach to figure out who the girls are behind these crimes.

There’s no pickup from the previous volume, but John “Fast Black” Washington, the black surfer we saw in #3: Deadly Group Down Under, is again hanging out with Bill. We aren’t reminded as often that he’s black this time, no doubt because he isn’t in the narrative very much, other than to meet some local gal and fall in love with her. Love is certainly in the air in Beach Queen Blowout. Bill and John are hanging around Huntington Beach, complaining about all the lousy beaches given the recent oil spills. Bill meanwhile has been sent here specifically to find out who is damaging those offshore rigs, but instead he bitches about the “punk waves” and wonders if he’s ever going to crack this case.

We’re often told via Bill’s reflection on events that some hotbod women (along with a few “hard-core bitches” who are a bit more “Amazon” in stature) have been hitting businesses, led by the notorious birthmarked babe. Bill’s sure these girls are behind the oil rig hits – eventually we’ll learn the oil company which owns the rigs is being blackmailed for a million dollars or the rigs will be destroyed – but he doesn’t do much to investigate. Not that he needs to, as all the answers will literally fall into his lap. And I mean “literally” in the, uh, literal sense, and not in the figurative sense that most people mistakenly use it in, ie “Steam literally came out of his ears.” (A comment I’ve actually seen online.) 

Bill and John run into a pair of gals in a dune buggy, both of them “table stuff,” as Bill often reflects. He goes for the hotter of the two, Lynn, though keeps reminding us that the other one, Alice, is almost just as hot – she’s just more quiet and shy. Lynn seems to like Bill and tells him she knows of the one good beach left in Huntington, a private cove. She invites him to it, and Bill finds it inundated with women – some of them rather butch-looking – with “Beach Queens” painted all over the place. He makes cursory attempts at looking for any heart-shaped birthmarks; he’s determined Lynn doesn’t have one, thanks to her skimpy bikini, but shy and quiet Alice always covers her big ol’ boobs with a t-shirt, mysteriously enough.

The focus is more on the budding relationship between Bill and Lynn. He finds himself falling for her quick wit, and the great body doesn’t hurt. However, she has ulterior motives; she wants to hire Bill, having seen the “Private Eye” sign on his trailer. Speaking of which, we get a running tour of Bill’s swank trailer, with it’s refrigerator-sized computer that controls everything from the temperature to the drinks Bill is constantly “dialing up.” We also get a good look at his swinging bedroom, complete with mirrored ceiling, colored lighting which matches the mood and flow of the “violin” music that pipes through the speakers, and a roller bar that goes from the foot to the top of the mattress and back again. This latter element is put to memorable use when Bill and Lynn get to their inevitable tomfoolery, Snyder again not descending to outright sleaze but not fading to black, either. In fact this is the most explicit volume of the series I’ve yet read.

Next morning Lynn’s gone and Bill finds himself thinking about her all day. That’s right, folks, even “the Cartwright” can be bitten by the love bug. Meanwhile he’s accosted by Juanita, one of those “hard-core bitches” of the Beach Queen set; she demands Bill get his trailer off their cove by nightfall. While looking down Juanita’s shirt for the birthmark, Bill notices that “it’s a man, baby,” per Austin Powers (probably my favorite bit in that entire movie) – and promptly yanks off Juanita’s fake tits! Operation Hang Ten once again proves itself of a different era as Bill demeans Juanita for “soiling real women,” mocking the she-he good and proper. A dude could get hauled off to jail for shit like that in today’s enlightened era.

But seriously, Juanita’s penchant for cross-dressing is never explained…we do eventually learn “he-she” is the ringleader of the female heisters, even training them for the scuba missions to hit the oil rigs, and I was under the impression the cross-dressing was so as to fool people into thinking he was just “one of the girls.” But Snyder, even if he intended this, doesn’t follow through; he’s too intent on the Bill-Lynn subplot, which becomes the plot of Beach Queen Blowout. And speaking of Lynn, she returns that night to inform Bill she’s really the daughter of a senator, and has been working here undercover herself, helping her dad figure out who is hitting the oil rigs. Hence her interest when she saw the P.I. sign on Bill’s trailer; she feels she’s gotten in too deep and needs some help.

Well after another fairly-explicit all-night bang-o-rama, the two exchange declarations of love. Bill’s caught so off-guard by his own words that he doubts himself for a moment; later he’ll clarify that he’s never told a single woman he loves her, thus Lynn is a first. Finally Lynn gets around to telling Bill what she’s been up to on Queen Cove and how she’s helping her dad and whatnot. And folks this part is laughable because Mr. Bill Cartwright again proves himself to be a jackass of jackasses, probably the biggest dick in the entire men’s adventure universe. Without even hearing Lynn’s full story, Bill starts ranting and raving about her senator father, a guy Bill’s never met and doesn’t even know, accusing him of being dirty and only looking into the oil pollution affair because he’s in the pockets of the oil companies. A crying Lynn storms off to walk the beach and cool down, and jerkass Bill just stands there, fuming. Because Snyder knows we veteran readers understand what’s going to happen to Lynn, he decides to dig the knife in deeper, and has Lynn abruptly turn back and tell Bill he didn’t give her a kiss goodbye! This Bill does, and off Lynn trudges along the deserted beach

Then Alice comes along, asking for Lynn…and here we get more of those “earlier era sentiments” as Bill accuses Alice of being a lesbian, hot for Lynn, and launches off into another rant. But no, Alice has a thing for Bill, she’s just failed to act on it due to her best friend screwing him and all. At this point Alice slinks into Bill’s lap and info-dumps all the, you know, plot stuff we readers have been missing out on: conveniently enough, Alice’s mom runs a motel, and the leaders of the oil company blackmail scheme are all staying there! And Alice overheard their plans! Long story short, there’s some old former madam named Mamie who is plotting with a Mafioso named Eduardo, and Juanita is the hired goon who is training the Beach Queens to do the job – after which the Beach Queens will of course be set up as patsies. Oh, and Alice is worried about Lynn, because she overheard Juanita vow to kill her before storming out of the motel a few hours ago…

Friends, guess what that grisly cover image depicts? (Note even the gash in the poor girl’s throat; the uncredited cover artist is nothing if not thorough.) Yes, Lynn never makes it back from that little walk on the beach. Bill feels an icy coldness descend upon him as he discovers her corpse in the sand: the case no longer matters. His life mission is to find Juanita and kill him slowly. At this point we seem gearing up for a brutal William Crawford-esque revenge thriller, but Snyder just doesn’t have it in him – he’s still intent on doling out something more hardboiled. Thus Bill will ultimately swindle the saboteurs into turning on each other instead of killing them all himself. In this capacity he basically goes rogue from Hang Ten, keeping pertinent info from an increasingly-demanding Jim Dana, and the novel almost works as a finale for the series itself: Bill Cartwright going solo for his own purposes.

The shifting plot focus is displayed posthaste when Bill, about to go out for some vengeance, is accosted in his cabin by sexy Millie, a Beach Queen hotstuff who has been trying to get her hooks in him. She saunters in, announces they’re about to screw, and starts to undress. This was actually a well-conveyed scene because normally such a sequence would be done for titilating purposes, yet the reader is still numb from Lynn’s murder – she was just in Bill’s bed several pages before – thus the exploitation of Millie’s ample anatomy does as little for the reader as it does for Bill himself. Oh, and it’s casually dropped that as Millie doffs her top Bill notices a heart-shaped birthmark above her left breast and thus, literally as I said, the infamous heist-girl leader has fallen into Bill’s lap. So he ties her up, calls Jim Dana, and goes off on his vengeance quest.

But Bill Cartwright isn’t just a dick, he’s also a bufoon. Time and again he’s either outwitted, caught unawares, or makes some foolish mistake. For example, he gets Juanita in his sights several times but loses the “she-he” due to some goof-up on Bill’s part. Then Bill’s caught by Eduardo, the mobster who is backing the blackmail scheme. This at least leads to Bill finally killing someone; he outwits the two hoods who were ordered to kill him, has them lay side by side on a motel bed, then coldly shoots each of them in the head with his .22 Magnum, even after promising not to – and we even get a prefigure of Arnold’s famous Commando line when Bill informs one of the pleading mobsters, “I lied.”

Sadly, the cold revenge yarn Lynn’s murder promised is constantly derailed by Bill’s screwups. I wondered if this was Snyder’s commentary on Bill’s actual youth – the dude’s not even 25, I think – but instead I think our author was just desperately trying to meet his word count and didn’t know what else to do. His attempts at conveying suspense and tension actually make his protagonist seem like a foolish jackass, and this goes on for like 50 pages. And meanwhile Jim Dana’s about ready to fire Bill from the Hang Ten program, given how his “top operative” keeps hiding things. Bill does manage to get Dana to collect a million bucks from the oil company, all as part for Bill to bluff the blackmailers into killing each other – he’s swindled both Eduardo and Mamie into thinking he’ll get the money for them. Oh and meanwhile Bill’s sicced Dana on the entire Beach Queen gang, having snuck on the boat Juanita was piloting to one of those oil rigs. Bill merely waits until the girls have left, then commandeers the boat so that they’re abandoned there…and has them arrested off-page. And meanwhile Juanita escapes Bill yet a-friggin’-gain!

To make it worse, Bill watches on the sidelines as Eduardo and Mamie take each other out, the surviving Beach Queens going full-on Bacchante and tearing Eduardo apart. Then Bill finally gets to square things with Juanita – who incidentally has admitted to killing Lynn – but after shooting him in the kneecap Bill has a “what have I become?” moment and realizes torturing the bastard to death won’t help anyone. Thus Juanita is given a quick sendoff – and it’s a ripoff. I mean I was expecting some William Crawford-esque brutalism. Instead, Bill limps back to his trailer, tells a waiting Alice it’s a no-go on the sex thing (and I forgot to mention the unconfomfortable scene where Alice tries desperately to screw Bill, performing every trick she knows, but the poor grieving boy can’t get it up), because she’ll always remind him of Lynn. And then Bill goes to sit alone in his trailer in misery. “The Cartwright knew love.”

The helluva it is, Beach Queen Blowout is entertaining and sometimes gripping when you read it. At least the first half. But as the various subplots are cast aside, and as Bill constantly screws up his attempts at simple revenge, you start to notice how messy everything is. I mean it’s the second half that really undoes the novel. If only Snyder had gone through with the “cold-blooded Cartwright” plot he initially promised. Instead it’s a mire of crosses and double-crosses, of Bill constantly letting Juanita slip out of his grasp, of various hoodlums getting the advantage f our hero. However, the plot of Bill and Lynn’s romance is well handled, even if Snyder is a bit guilty of telegraphing what’s about to happen to the poor girl.

As stated this would’ve been a fine finale for the series; Bill’s relationship with Dana and Hang Ten is put to the test, almost at times reminsicent of the Timothy Dalton James Bond flick Licence To Kill. However there were two more volumes after this one, and I’m curious to see if Lynn’s even mentioned in the next one. I’ll be surprised if she is.

Thursday, June 27, 2019

The Mark Of Cosa Nostra (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #64)


The Mark Of Cosa Nostra, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1971  Award Books

The last Nick Carter: Killmaster courtesy George Snyder,* The Mark Of Cosa Nostra mines the same territory as later installment Beirut Incident: Nick “Killmaster” Carter, who narrates the novel, takes a break from tangling with the usual foreign agents to take on the American Mafia. However this time he does it mostly in Sicily.

Nick when we meet him is already getting in character in a remote AXE training facility in the Arizona desert. This volume’s unusual in that Nick spends the entirety in his disguise, which has him sporting a thick moustache. He’s posing as a high-level Mafioso named Tommy Acasano but doesn’t know why, nor what the assignment will be. At novel’s opening Nick has been here for a week or so, and as he’s walking from his room one morning he’s approached by a sexy young blonde who appears to be very young. She is – we’ll learn she’s only 19, and she’s a junior AXE agent, here for training.

This girl, Tanya, comes on strong to Nick, and without much trouble talks him back into his room for some hot lovin’. As ever Snyder doesn’t much exploit his female characters, but it must be mentioned that Tanya comes off a lot better than his other female protagonists – and Nick himself doesn’t even show the macho misogyny of Snyder’s other lead protagonist Bill Cartwright, in Operation Hang Ten. But this scene proves to be the first in a series of pretty-funny jokes; Nick starts taking off Tanya’s clothes and sees something metal and cylindrical poking from beneath the waistband of her panties. This turns out to be a “panty gun” which Tanya is testing for AXE; when Nick pulls the panties off the gun barrel snaps forward, the barrel right in Nick’s face, and if it had been loaded he’d be dead.

After this the girl makes a nonchalant phone call to someone to say the test was successful, and that’s that! She has no true interest in sleeping with Nick. To his credit our hero doesn’t come off as brutish as one might expect. In fact he admits that this incredibly young junior agent did get the drop on him. The panty gun appears twice more in the text and in each instance it makes for a memorable moment. At this point Nick’s boss Hawk arrives and over breakfast explains to Nick what the mission is.

Like the later Beirut Incident this is one of the few Killmaster yarns where Nick takes on organized American crime: AXE wants to put to stop the potential Mafia takeover being orchestrated by Nicoli Rizano. Having left America a decade ago, Rizano now rules a fiefdom from Sicily and has made a score selling heroin at dirt-cheap prices to US soldiers in Vietnam. He’s recently had a rival godfather killed off in America and is plotting to return to his homeland as the new main godfather of the United States mafia.

Nick is to pose as Acasano, Rizano’s only friend, who was ordered to compile a list of Mafioso who would support Rizano upon his return to America as the reigning capo. However Hawk relates that Acasano is really dead, killed by an AXE agent. Cagey Snyder figures out a way to slip in a few pages of third-person narration as we read of this undercover agent being outed by Acasano and the two killing each other in New York. Hawk is certain Rizano is unaware his friend is dead, so Nick is to go in disguise to Sicily and turn over a fake list of names to gain Rizano’s confidence and bust up the heroin operation.

This bound-for-failure plan is explained away with the goofy note that the two friends haven’t seen each other in ten years, so it’s hoped that Nick’s disguise will be good enough that Rizano will just think it’s the passing of a decade that’s made his old friend look a little different. No explanation is given on how Nick’s voice would doubtlessly sound different. This is why Tanya is here at the training base; Acasano had just acquired a new woman, a 19 year-old beauty Acasano took everywhere with him.

Tanya is a dead ringer for her (the real girlfriend is being kept in a resort by AXE agents), so she’s to go with Nick to Palermo and help him out. Off they go to Manhattan to wait in Acasano’s apartment for a coded message that should be arriving from Sicily. Snyder finally works in an action scene with the two ambushed by a pair of “Orientals” who lurk in the darkened apartment. Since they have heard Tanya call our hero “Nick” they know it’s not really Acasano, and so must die. Here Tanya proves her skills aren’t just in getting guys into the sack; she actually comes to Nick’s rescue a few times.

More importantly, Nick and Tanya finally get down to the dirty business of screwing. Tanya will prove to be Nick’s only conquest in the novel, a total breach of the series template where “Killmaster” scores with at least three babes per book. However this part does contain the most surreal description of an orgasm I’ve ever read:

There was no way I could hold back. I was a balloon filled with water and rolling across a long flat desert. A large spike was ahead sticking out of a weatherbeaten board. I felt myself pulling and clutching and bouncing until at last I struck the spike, and all the liquid water rushed out of me.

Snyder doesn’t much bring Palermo to life, but then this isn’t really the genre for such things. Instead he has Nick and Tanya locked up in Rizano’s fortress in the countryside, where he’s lived like a mafioso Howard Hughes for the past ten years. Rizano’s in deep with the Chinese Reds, in particular a crafty one named Tai Sheng. Nick as Acasano butts heads with Tai Sheng immediately upon meeting him at the airport. It’s clear Tai Sheng is using Rizano, with the ultimate goal of the Reds taking over the American Mafia. Snyder tries to convey more import to the tale – and also explain why Nick doesn’t just kill everyone – with the idea that Nick plans to steal a list of undercover Red agents from Tai Sheng.

It’s more on a suspense tip as Nick sits around in an opulent room, the “guest” of still-unseen Rizano. Tanya was taken away from him as soon as they entered the fortress. Later Rizano, who turns out to be going to seed and completely controlled by Tai Sheng, happily relates that “Tommy’s girl” was really a duplicate…the belabored story has it that the real girlfriend was spotted by Oriental waiters at a resort(!), and it was instantly surmised that this girl who has been going around with “Tommy” is a secret agent…indeed, an AXE agent! How they even know about top-secret AXE isn’t really explained.

Thus Nick watches on a monitor as Tanya is tied to a chair and beaten around by Tai Sheng – who by the way is also trying to convince Rizano that Nick himself is an imposter. The reader wants “Killmaster” to spring to action, but instead Nick bides his time, hoping for the chance to get that list of agents from Tai Sheng. Snyder wrote this thing in such a hurry that at one point he even has Nick trying to protect his list from Tai Sheng – before Nick “remembers” that it’s a fake list he brought here just to get in the graces of Rizano.

Tai Sheng claims to know someone in Turkey who can attest that Nick is an imposter, and further they’re headed over there for a heroin run, so why not bring along the bound and beaten Tanya as well? What the hell. Snyder all along is building a suspense story, as usual for him something more along the lines of a vintage Gold Medal yarn. The only problem is, he’s up against his word count. So, as hard as it is to believe, the climax of The Mark Of Cosa Nostra plays out on an airport landing strip in Turkey…and features one of the most lame copout finales of any book I’ve ever read.

Here be spoilers so be warned. Okay, Tanya’s already been outed as AXE, and is taken away by a flunky to be raped and killed on one of Rizano’s yachts on the bay near the airport. Soon thereafter, Nick’s cover is blown as well – and he’s blown it himself, slipping up when Rizano asks him a sneaky question, something the real Acasano should know. Okay, so here’s the dumb stuff. Rizano takes out a revolver and shoots Nick, point friggin’ blank. He just shoots him! And Nick falls down behind a car…and doesn’t die!! I mean, I can’t understand any writer who would come up with this sort of a lame bullshit copout finale… “I’ll have my hero get shot, but it’ll just be in the side, and he’ll walk it off…!”

I mean there’s no hidden bulletproof vest, no last-second plan to protect Nick’s cover identity. Nothing! Nick just gets shot! Basically point blank by a guy standing a few feet away! No last second dodging behind a car, or kicking at the gun! Nothing! Hell, even getting shot isn’t part of a plan – Nick’s completely caught unawares by the bullet! Him not getting killed is just a total fluke. I mean it’s just some of the laziest writing I’ve ever encountered…folks, you don’t have your protagonist get shot point blank and just happen to live through the good grace of god or poor villain marksmanship. 

But Nick lays there in a growing pool of blood as Acasano and Tai Sheng have their own final moments together. Then Nick, in a stupor, manages to drive a stolen bus down to the harbor, coming to Tanya’s defense. However the girl, we’ll recall, isn’t the typical defenseless maiden of Snyder’s other books, and has things well in hand. Instead it’s she who comes to Nick’s aid, bandaging him up, and later literally jumps to his rescue when Tai Sheng shows up toting a pistol. This leads to a practically endless fistfight between Nick and Tai Sheng, with Nick’s stiletto also employed, and man it just seems to go on forever.

I’d say the copout stuff is indication Snyder was fatigued on this series, not to mention his contempraneous work on Operation Hang Ten. I see now from a post by Paul Bishop that Snyder died last year, which is unfortunate. I also came across this nice interview with him, from I guess a few years ago. It features such memorable lines as, “I’m a junkyard writer who writes junkyard books,” but also some depressing lines like, “My kids had a new dad they liked better than me.” Judging from the interview Snyder became very prolific in the early 2000s, self-publishing a string of series books. Many of them seem right in-line with Hard Case Crime’s output, so it’s hard to understand why he couldn’t find a publisher, as he admits in the interview.

In fact the entire interview depressed the hell out of me…I mean the guy was a gifted writer, particularly in the hardboiled pulp manner, and sure he hit the occasional wrong note like the above Nick shooting, but let’s keep in mind he was likely overworked and hitting a deadline. But still, to write so long and remain unrecognized is just depressing as hell, and makes one wonder if getting into the writing game is even worth it. But as Snyder also states in the interview, the writing itself was enjoyable, so there’s that.

*Snyder’s name is also attached to the 1974 entry Vatican Vendetta, but as noted in my review that volume was a Ralph Hayes revision of a Snyder manuscript. My assumption is Snyder wrote his manuscript sometime in the late ‘60s and it sat around for a few years until Hayes did some work on it for “producer” Lyle Kenyon Engel.

Thursday, September 13, 2018

The Girl In The Telltale Bikini (Operation Hang Ten #6)


The Girl in The Telltale Bikini, by Patrick Morgan
No month stated, 1971  Macfadden Books

As mentioned in my review of Topless Dancer Hangup, this is actually the sixth volume of Operation Hang Ten, whereas it’s often mistakenly listed as the seventh. The “other books in the series” list in the front makes this clear, and as stated in my previous review, Topless Dancer Hangup features a recap of hero Bill Carwright’s previous six adventures. But, as with most of these “produced by Lyle Kenyon Engel” joints, there isn’t much continuity to worry about anyway, so perhaps the point is as they say moot.

George Snyder once again serves as “Patrick Morgan,” and apparently he did so for the entire series; his style is in effect throughout, though some of the scathing comments on society and ruminations on women have been slightly toned down. But other Snyder mainstays are still here, like the strange insistence on fistfights over all other forms of action – seriously, it seems like Bill’s constantly dropping or losing his “.22 Magnum” and having to resort to his fists. That being said, there are some brutal brawls throughout, with shards of shattered skulls piercing brains and faces just generally smashed.

The plot of The Girl In The Telltale Bikini is almost surreal, most likely because Snyder was winging it or perhaps was given an outline by Engel and had a hard time capturing it. But you know something’s up when the “climax” involves the suddenly-revealed main villain expositing on the scheme and explaining what has been happening. I tend to think it was a case of Engel coming up with the plot, as it follows the old standby of Bill Cartwright having an evil clone, a story Engel previously ran in the Nick Carter: Killmaster entry Double Identity. But, just as with that earlier novel, the “evil clone” doesn’t really pan out and in fact causes more questions than anything, as just as an “evil Nick Carter” served no purpose in Double Identity, neither does the “evil Bill Cartwright” in this one.

A US spy ship has sunk near the coast of Sidney, Australia, and surprisingly this doesn’t much concern Los Angeles section chief Jim Dana of Operation Hang Ten; but when his government associate tells him that a “Bill Cartwright” has been spotted with all the other surfers making use of the phenomenal waves created by the jutting hulk of the ship, Dana perks up – he knows Bill is in California, not Australia. And so he is, enthusiastically screwing his latest girlfriend, a “top-heavy” blonde named June Blue. Bill’s trailer is even swankier this time around; we learn there’s not only a mirror above the bed, but with the touch of a button multicolored lights will flash over the bed. Another button activates rollers beneath the mattress, and June has become very excited about this particular feature.

A recurring bit is how Bill, only “pretending” to be heartless (yeah, right!) breaks it off with this latest girl so he can get on to his secret spy job. This seems to be the last we’ll see of busty June, but we might be surprised. Off Bill goes to Australia, where he goes about his usual method of espionage: loudly proclaiming himself to be Bill Cartwright and getting in frequent fistfights. Not to mention promptly getting himself some local booty; in almost no time he comes across a sexy brunette with a flat tire, and after fixing it Bill finds himself invited back to the girl’s place – and also she tells him he can keep his trailer in the parking lot of the bikini shop she owns.

Her name is Lynda Rahm and she claims to be Turkish or Greek or something; who really cares where the hell she’s from, given her “darker than tan” skin and her “small but ample breasts?” But folks ol’ Bill is pretty dumb this time around, because Lynda is clearly hiding stuff from him, but Bill just sort of goes with the flow and ignores all the red flags. Plus he takes his time about getting her in bed; that being said, when the good lovin’ happens this time, it’s more explicit than the material in the other two volumes I’ve read. In fact Bill and Lynda’s first “encounter” goes on for a few pages of hot and heavy stuff – plus it’s another of those red flags Bill ignores, ‘cause in one of his off-hand ruminations he informs us that women in their 20s and 30s can’t screw worth a damn, whereas women in their 40s and 50s will bang your brains out if you give them the chance, and Lynda’s sack skills are a lot better than her claimed age of 22 would imply.

These off-hand ruminations are a recurring series gimmick, as mentioned a bit toned down this time but still priceless for their reactionary, unacceptable-in-today’s-progressivised, “Miss America 2.0” world. In addition to random bitchery about tourists clogging up the beaches (a series mainstay, but then Bill’s a surfer so it makes sense this would bug him), we get some observations about women, in particular this doozy that would end a career if someone would have the audacity to post it on Twitter:

[Lynda’s kitchen] smelled of just-cooked bacon and coffee aroma. In America Lynda would have been considered a neatnick as a housekeeper. American womanhood was too busy striving for achievements to keep anything but a sloppy house. In Australia Lynda would have been considered an average housekeeper. The women of Australia knew their place and stayed in it.

Bill finds that his name sends young women scurrying away from him – even Lynda initially seemed taken aback when he told her his name – not that this stops him from running around the beach and bullying the sexy surf bunnies. They all run away from him when he announces himself; later he’ll learn that the fake Bill, also a blonde American surfer, is sort of a pimp for Maha Lon Caffrey, guru of a nearby cult. Bill and Lynda crash a meeting at the temple, and here Bill gets a glimpse of his double, who goes onstage preaching how Maha Lon saved him. Of course the real Bill responds with his usual brusque manner and instantly starts a brawl. But Bill has a reason for being pissed, as the previous night a couple temple freaks stomped him in yet another brawl; Bill’s apparently mangled face is only occasionally mentioned by the other characters.

Kudos to Snyder for having the two Bills sort things out in a way apropos to the series: a surfing duel! In fact there’s a bit more surfing material in this one than in the other volumes I’ve read. But just like the “fake Nick Carter” plot fizzled out without much exploitation in Double Identity, so too does it in this novel; the fake Bill is anticlimactically removed from the narrative, and later it will be vaguely explained that he was a crewman on the sunk US spy ship. Why was he posing as Bill? That’s not really explicity stated; the implication is that Bill Cartwright is sort of known on the surfing set and the fake Bill and his companions were looking to exploit his image, in particular his skills with picking up the ladies.

Why? Because Maha Lon’s temple is a cover for a sort of lair of Arabs who smoke hash while they auction off sex slaves, the young women abducted right off the beach and their minds fogged by drugs. At this point the reader can see that George Snyder is basically throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. It’s made all the worse by the laughably poor security these Arabs have; Bill pretty much just walks into the temple, finds the secret passageway, slips on a conveniently-discarded hooded robe one of the cultists left behind, and walks right in on the proceedings. This after the other temple guys beat him up, the previous night – I mean they know he’s the real Bill Cartwright and could undo all their plotting, so why don’t they kill him? Why just beat him up? But Snyder plows on, hoping we don’t think to ask these questions.

Snyder keeps it all moving with frequent fistfights and car chases, not to mention the occasional sex and surfing sequence. Lynda is Bill’s main woman this time around, save for a surprise reappearance by another female character in what is one of the novel’s many hard-to-buy plot developments. But speaking of Lynda, she’s always around when Bill’s ambushed, she has an uncle who owns a shop right beside Maha Lon’s temple, and she has “special” bikinis in her shop which she says aren’t for getting into the water with. She’s also a helluva lot better in bed than she should be, given Bill’s worldly experience, and all this should set off Bill’s warning signals, but instead he just sort of lets things play out. He’s a little muddled because Lynda’s hired him – Bill’s cover being a private eye – to find a friend of hers who is one of the abducted women.

The climax features more brawling, though for once Bill does shoot one or two people with that damn .22 Magnum he’s always dropping. But again the dude just waltzes right into the temple while an auction is going on, the Arabs too stoned to worry about something so minor as security, and starts up a riot. When the main villain is revealed, it’s so hard to buy that Snyder must spend several pages explaining everything. But it turns out that two of the crewmen on the sunk ship – one of whom was the guy who pretended to be Bill – stole a bunch of secret documents, and were sending them over to Arabian bidders via arcane means. The finale at least is fun, with Bill and boss Jim Dana sitting on the beach and watching a bunch of girls model bikinis, all to discover which one has the final coded message hidden on it – the message only revealed when the bikini is wet.

Despite the almost surreal vagaries of the plot, I think I enjoyed The Girl In The Telltale Bikini the most of the Operation Hang Ten books I’ve yet read. Too bad the series is so damned overpriced, but at least I still have a few more to read.

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.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Topless Dancer Hangup (Operation Hang Ten #7)


Topless Dancer Hangup, by Patrick Morgan
No month stated, 1971 Macfadden Books

I was under the impression that George Snyder wrote all ten volumes of the Operation Hang Ten series, but then Justin Marriott kindly sent me a scan of an article Snyder published in a 2005 issue of Paperback Parade where he claimed that he had only written the first five volumes, with no knowledge of who wrote the others. Then to confuse matters even more, Snyder himself left a comment on a revew of this very novel at The Ringer Files, where he stated, “I wrote ten of them…other writers came later after I walked away from the series.”

So what the hell? Did he write five or all ten? I could see him forgetting when he wrote that 2005 article that he’d written one or two volumes, but to forget he’d written five novels? But then, so far as his comment on the Ringer Files goes…there only were ten books in this series, so what other writers could there have been? All very confusing, and all likely moot, as having read this seventh volume* of Operation Hang Ten, I have to say it’s certainly the work of Snyder – which would imply his comment on Kurt’s blog was more accurate than his 2005 article, and that Snyder did in fact write all ten of these books and not just the first five.

It has the exact same vibe as the previous volume I read, #3: Deadly Group Down Under, with a small group of characters and a hardboiled pulp sort of feel. This volume again proves that Operation Hang Ten is more “Fawcett Gold Medal” the “surfing meets spy-fy” hijinks promised by the series concept. Other than one or two sequences where surly hero Bill Cartwright surfs or races his Hemi-powered Woody, the series feels almost exactly like a grim and gritty private eye yarn. Even the cast of characters is whittled down to just a handful, something I’ve noticed is a recurring motif in hardboiled pulp, and the action is mostly comprised of brutal fistfights.

Another indication that this is the work of George Snyder is that Topless Dancer Hangup features that strange tendency of his which I have mentioned before. Whereas the action scenes in a Snyder novel are chaotic, harried, and over within a paragraph or two, the guy consistently over-details comparitively trivial acts like the hero trying to sneak into a building. Just as in The Defector, while the action scenes are over and done with in no time, we will read a couple pages of Bill (as Snyder usually refers to his hero) climbing through a window and trying to lower himself safely to the ground, etc. There are two such sequences in the book, and Snyder’s the only men’s adventure writer I know of who consistently does this – personally I’d rather read a few pages of a shootout instead of a belabored explanation of how Bill jimmies open a window, slides in, and tries to figure out where he can safely land without causing himself injury or making any noise.

Anyway, I enjoyed this one a lot more than Deadly Group Down Under. Bill’s customary opinions on this or that are a bit toned down, and Snyder focuses more on the noirish feel. But still, it’s practically the same book. It seems to me that each of these Operation Hang Ten novels are just noirsh pulp-action yarns with plots that center around a missing or murdered young woman, and Topless Dancer Hangup has Bill venturing to Hawaii to locate a missing Hang Ten operative named Sandra Denny who is the titular topless dancer; she has disappeared with ten thousand in Hang Ten cash along with a microfilm she bought from a Cuban refugee, which purports to show the locations of Red China-funded missile silos in the Cuban hinterlands.

I was unduly harsh on Deadly Group Down Under; it took Kurt’s above-referenced review to make me realize what I’d missed: that Operation Hang Ten is really just a men’s adventure variation of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels, only in third-person (though Snyder’s prose as ever feels like first-person), and with a 24 year-old surfer-spy replacing MacDonald’s “knight errant.” I wonder if this is what series creator Lyle Kenyon Engel envisioned from the start. The similarities extend even to the “wounded birds” Bill encounters each volume, many of whom meet grisly deaths as demanded from lurid ‘70s pulp.

So, while my comments in that earlier review about Bill’s “chauvanism” and “misogyny” (two grossly overused words in the victim culture that is modern American society) are for the most part still valid, Bill’s Cro-Magnon views are tempered this time by…you know, who cares? It just didn’t bug me nearly as much this time, maybe because it just didn’t get as much in the way of the narrative. This time we just get periodic musings on hot secretaries “swishing” their behinds to and from work while Bill eats burgers and watches them from inside a greasy diner (Bill only seems to eat burgers, by the way).

We also get periodic reminders that women were designed to please men. But the most venomous musings are directed more toward the increasing commercialization of Hawaiian surfing spots and how parts of Hawaii will no doubt look just like Burbank in a decade. I’ve yet to read a Travis McGee novel, but it’s my understanding they’re along the same lines – weary cynicism about the encroaching shittiness of the world mixed with ruminations on women. All the same here, if a bit more brutish.

I still don’t buy Bill Cartwright as an action hero. For one, he’s too damn young, for me at least…I wrote elsewhere that I think these men’s adventure protagonists should be grizzled Marlboro Men-types, in their thirties at least….but more importantly he’s kind of a chump. Regardless, we’re informed that Hang Ten boss Jim Dana considers Bill his best operative – which I think is less a commentary on how great Bill is and more of a commentary on how bad the other Hang Ten operatives must be.

But Bill’s called away from his latest steady lay, a good-looking 19 year old surf “bunny” who has lived in sin with Bill for the past three weeks in his high-tech trailer, which as we’ll recall is all run off a computer that mostly just whips up Scotch and sodas for Bill. But our hero is getting sick of how “the girl” is falling in love with him and clearly wanting to marry him; more damningly, she is a neat freak. So when Bill gets his summons to Hang Ten HQ, he throws a “neatnik” tantrum and the girl storms out of his life, just as Bill hoped she would.

Later Snyder softens this a bit by having Bill “sniffling” as he sits alone in his trailer, and it’s intimated that Bill really broke it off with her because he can’t get that involved with a woman; his life is dedicated to eradicating “the lice” of the world. There are parts here and there later on where Bill will mull that his trailer is now “haunted” by the girl’s ghost, but by midpoint through the novel he’s checked out more ass-swingin’ secretaries and ass-baring surf bunnies and has pretty much forgotten about her. That being said, Bill does practically fall in love with another young lady during the course of the novel.

The book is really a private eye thriller; forget any “Surfing James Bond” expectations. Bill heads to Honolulu, as ever having his Woody and his trailer shipped over as well, and goes about scoping out the scene while dealing with the smallscale cast of lowlife characters. He also kills a few pages hitting on a surf bunny named Sue in a subplot that goes absolutely nowhere, mostly so Snyder can provide a humorous scene in which the two openly discuss their intention to have sex in front of a few shocked fellow diners, but regrettably cannot as Sue has not taken her pill that day. The two make a date to screw the following day(!), but “The Cartwright” (as Snyder sometimes refers to his hero, I kid you not) forgets all about poor ol’ Sue.

Rather, the “Cartwright chick” this time around is Marie, a friend of Sandra Denny’s and a fellow topless dancer. There’s a cool late ‘60s vibe bit where Bill checks out Marie dancing in the club, with psychedelic lights playing over her half-nude form. Bill practically falls in love with her, leading to the novel’s one and only sex scene, which is fairly explicit, in particular noting a “small, circular, wonderful movement to [Marie’s] body” that just about blows Bill’s mind. Marie is the only one who knows where Sandra Denny is, and even that she’s a Hang Ten agent, and sets Bill up to meet with her.

As for Sandra Denny, she remains off-page for the duration, being hunted by various people. Bill tracks down her mom, an over-the-hill hussy who comes on strong to our disgusted hero, and also questions Don Arlen, a dark-haired lothario who claims to have been Sandra’s steady boyfriend. (“Were you getting into her?” being an example of Bill’s rather blunt questioning method.) Mostly though Bill runs afoul of three lowlifes from another local club, two of whom shadow Bill throughout the novel, leading to the few (and pretty brief) action scenes.

In fact nothing really comes to a head even though some minor characters are killed off-page. Bill mostly just bitches that he’s getting nowhere in his half-assed investigation and goes back to his trailer to make despondent calls back to HQ and have his computer whip him up some Scotch and soda. It’s only when Marie is captured and put in a sort of dungeon that the novel really kicks into gear, though to be sure it the material leading up to this moment isn’t exactly bad or anything – in fact, I enjoyed it. But I still don’t think the exorbitant prices of Operation Hang Ten on the second-hand market are justified; we aren’t talking about men’s adventure fiction gold here.

Even when Bill goes to Marie’s rescue, Snyder again indulges in his strange penchant for focusing more so on Bill’s climbing through a window and sneaking into the place than the actual action itself. And Bill proves himself again to be a klutz, dropping his .22 Magnum auto and resorting to his hands. The villain ends up blowing himself up. Once Marie’s freed, Bill basically proclaims his love to her and then gets on to the business of figuring out the plot in the last couple pages, with all of it centering around the same small group of characters we’ve been dealing with since the beginning. 

I’ve got a few more volumes of Operation Hang Ten in my collection, and hopefully they’ll be more along the lines of this one. Bill’s bitchery is toned down a bit, and while not much really happens, the tone is nice and hardboiled. It’s a shame though that Manor didn’t reprint the series in full like it did with The Aquanauts; if they had, the books might be a lot easier and cheaper to acquire.

*I was also under the impression that Topless Dancer Hangup was the sixth volume of Operation Hang Ten, as that’s how it’s listed in Brad Mengel’s Serial Vigilantes and on the Spy Guys and Gals website. However the “other titles in the Operation Hang Ten series” list at the front of the book has Girl In The Telltale Bikini, usually listed as being the seventh volume, as actually being the sixth volume. In other words, the order of the two volumes has been swapped in Brad’s book and the Spy Guys site, and Topless Dancer Hangup takes place after Girl In The Telltale Bikini. Not only that, but early in Topless Dancer Hangup Bill briefly flashes back on his previous six assignments for Hang Ten, one of which is the Girl In The Telltale Bikini.