Showing posts with label Pinnacle Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pinnacle Books. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

The Butcher #13: Blood Vengeance


The Butcher #13: Blood Vengeance, by Stuart Jason
January, 1975  Pinnacle Books

At this point my enjoyment of The Butcher is relegated to spotting which previous installments James “Stuart Jason” Dockery rips off. In Blood Vengeance it seems to mainly be #4: Blood Debt that he’s rewriting, given that the book features characters from that earlier installment, but there are also elements lifted from #8: Fire Bomb

But then, Blood Vengeance is the same as every other Dockery installment since the first volume. The opening sequence with the deformed Syndicate thugs versus Bucher, the slackjawed cop who must let Bucher go, the briefing with the never-named White Hat director, the bustling about the globe on the “latest crazy caper” which becomes ever more convoluted as the narrative progresses. The very few action scenes, all of which are the same and feature Bucher’s fast-draw technique making our hero almost superhuman. The grand guignol finale in which all the characters get together for a sadistic send-off, with Bucher wandering off with “the bitter-sour taste of defeat strong in his mouth…” 

All of it is here, as it is in every other Butcher written by James Dockery. The only difference with Blood Vengeance is Dockery’s sudden obsession with castration. This theme runs through the entire novel, with four characters castrated during the course of events; the finale is especially over the top, with three of them being emasculated at the same time. And in true “sweat mag” style the guy turning them into eunuchs is a sadistic “dwarf” who is so skilled at this particular “treatment” that he can castrate his “patients” before they even realize he’s started the procedure. 

All of which is to say Dockery’s dark humor is even more prevalent than normal this time. Also it seems clear that Dockery realizes his readers are in on the joke – that they know he’s just rewriting the same book over and over again, and he’s not fooling anyone. His deformed Syndicate goons are even more deformed this time around: just a few of them would be Warts, who has “large, ugly, horny seed warts all over his face and hands;” Mole, a heroin addict who looks like the animal of his namesake; and especially Spastic Sniggers, a goon who makes an unfortunately too brief of an appearance but whose bio takes the cake: 

Spastic Sniggers was a depraved psychopath who derived delicious enjoyment from watching others die. At the moment of death, at that instant when the soul fled the body, something deep in his fetid mind switched over to a wrong relay and he would be seized by fits of sniggering, all the while starting and jerking convulsively in limbs and body in the manner of a hopeless spastic. 

That made me laugh out loud when I first read it; it still makes me laugh out loud. So clearly The Butcher is for a special type of reader, as this sort of super-dark comedy runs throughout. And also, when I read something like that I realize there’s no way at all that James Dockery is on the level. His tongue is definitely in his cheek…which makes it all the more frustrating that he keeps writing the same book over and over. This is one of the more puzzling things in the world of men’s adventure, how a writer as talented as Dockery couldn’t be bothered to write an original story and just kept ripping himself off, volume after volume. 

To be honest, at one point I thought of extending the joke and making every one of my Butcher reviews the same, only changing the occasional particular – or rearranging them – but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just lazily churn out the same review over and over…and unlike James Dockery, I’m not even getting paid for this! 

Well anyway, for once we get some indication that time has passed in the series; early in the book, when Bucher is taken in by a cop per the template, it’s none other than Captain Handsome Staggers (what a name – up there with “Delano Stagg!”), a cop who apparently arrested Bucher in a previous volume, and knows from experience that Bucher will be let out – even though he carries a silencer “even God” would be arrested for. Checking my reviews, it looks like I failed to note the appearance of Handsome Staggers in that previous volume, which is surprising. His arrest of Bucher is stated as being “some months before” the events of Blood Vengeance, which by the way opens with a hapless stooge getting a phone call that Bucher’s here in Miami, and quickly getting out of town. 

From there to Bucher being stalked by the thugs Mole and Warts, with Bucher offing one of them – with the interesting development that the other will return to plague him, later in the novel. Usually these opening stalking thugs are one-offs, but this time Dockery integrates them into the overall storyline – which has nothing at all to do with the back cover. For the most part, at least. I’ll admit, I was fooled – the back cover notes that beautiful blonde Candy Merriman, one of the biggest stars on TV and the daughter of some bigwig, has been adbucted by a hippie terrorist-type group and held for ransom. I assumed we were going to get a take on the infamous Patty Hearst case. 

But as it turns out, Candy Merriman is a passing thought at best in the actual narrative; she isn’t mentioned until page 65, and even then only appears on a few pages. Rather, the villains of the piece are a left-wing Ethiopian radical group run by a guy named Egor Ginir, and comprised of Sudomics – a cult that is “the Thuggees of Ethiopia.” Working with another of Bucher’s old Syndicate colleagues, Sabroso, Ginir plans to kidnap children of wealth and hold them for upwards of fifteen million each, the money to be used to fund a revolution. But this isn’t enough for Dockery, and as per usual the plot becomes more and more convoluted until it ultimately involves atomic bombs and whatnot. 

Also as per usual Bucher almost immediately finds himself leaving the country, and as ever going someplace where Islam is the chief religion – Islamic culture is so frequently referenced in The Butcher that I assume James Dockery was either obsessed with it, or had worked in these areas and felt informed enough to refer to them. So it is that we get a lot of cultural stuff about Ethiopia, which is where Bucher immediately heads. And here we get more reference to a previous book, with Bucher shocked to discover his local contact is French-Arabic blonde beauty Barbe, who last appeared in the fourth volume, the events of which were “almost a year ago.” 

Checking my thorough review of Blood Debt, I see that Bucher and Barbe had a spatting relationship, and that Bucher referred to Barbe as “ugly.” Not so here, where she’s so gobsmackin’ hot that Bucher wonders why he never gave in to Barbe’s pleas in that earlier volume to get busy with her. But then, no one has yet gotten busy with Barbe; she’s a virgin, saving herself for the right guy. And guess who she’s decided it will be? Of course it is Bucher…leading to one of Dockery’s peculiar off-page sex-scenes. I’ve said it before and will say it again: it’s downright bizarre how Dockery will be so lurid and sleazy with his deformed villains and his focus on rape and torture…but will always cut away when Bucher’s about to have sex. Even the customary exploitation of the genre is curiously absent; there’s a part where Barbe and another hotstuff female agent get naked so as to distract someone, and Dockery can’t be bothered to give either girl even a cursory juicy description. 

That other hostuff agent babe is Eden Massawa, an Ethiopian woman who is related to the new prime minister. This volume is very heavy on the Ethiopian culture and whatnot – and this is where the castration angle comes in. Eden has a cousin who runs a slave trade or somesuch, and with just a call she’ll have someone over to castrate a guy into a new eunuch for such-and-such’s harem. This is actually the fate of two of the Syndicate goons who have tailed Bucher to Ethiopia…Dockery just giving us a taste of the sordid darkness to ensue when the guys are tied to a bed and then informed they are about to be castrated, and start screaming when “the doctor” comes in and lays out his tools. 

We’re often told how nauseated Bucher is by all the killing and torture, and frequently in the book he tries to stop it – but in every case he’s stopped by a woman. It’s an interesting subtext to the series, but otherwise Bucher is even more cipher-like than normal in Blood Vengeance, only getting in a few action scenes to boot. This has never been an action-heavy series, and the vibe is always more along the lines of a Western, with Bucher using his “kill-quick-or-die” fast-draw technique to blow away a handful of goons. And they’re always clean kills, too, with Dockery also curiously sparse with detail on the fountaining gore. That said, there is a humorous WTF? bit were Bucher calls one of the thugs “anus.” 

The other volume Blood Vengeance rips off is Fire Bomb; that one featured a letter Bucher was handed by another character, a letter Bucher put in his pocket and conveniently forgot about – only to read much later and discover that, if he’d read it sooner, he would’ve saved himself a lot of trouble. There’s a very similar bit here in Blood Vengeance where Barbe, who apropos of nothing has found out she has a degenerative eye disease that will leave her blind within a year(!), writes a letter for Bucher…and he puts it in his pocket and forgets about it until near the end of the book. 

But it’s Blood Debt that is most ripped off; that one also featured a famous TV personality who happened to be a hotstuff babe, Twiti Andovin, who ultimately turned out to be the main villain. Blood Vengeance rips all of this off in the form of Candy Merriman, who is first seen being executed – in an eerie foreshadowing of real-life Isis videos – on a tape the Muslim terrorists send to a US tv station. There we see (broadcast uncut on television!) a screaming Candy being forced to her knees and then her head chopped off by the High Priestess of the Sudomac cult – but Bucher suspects something fishy about the whole thing. 

Dockery is also pretty bad with pacing. Bucher hopscotches around the globe, from Miami to Ethiopia, back to Miami and then up to Yellowknife, Canada, but nothing much really happens. The final quarter is especially slow, with Bucher and Eden hooking up with a Canadian mountie and flying over an island Bucher suspects Egor might be hiding his atomic warheads on. But it just goes on and on and it’s clear Dockery is trying to meet his word count; the book would’ve been a lot more brisk without the convoluted plotting and a little more on the action front. 

That said, the sudden focus on castration is also puzzling. In a standard trope of the series, one of Bucher’s female conquests is brutally murdered – Bucher, as ever, almost casually sending the girl off to her grisly fate, completely mindless to her predicament per series template – and Bucher is all fired up to get vengeance on the sadist who “sodomized and garrotted” her. This entails one castration, but late in the novel Dockery introduces yet another go-nowhere subplot, one in which Ginir has also kidnapped a bunch of preteen girls to sell them as sex slaves, and Bucher rescues a fifteen year old who has been repeatedly raped by Ginir; she is insane with the desire to see Ginir castrated. 

The finale is especially dark, with Bucher and a few comrades assaulting Ginir’s island base, which of course has a dungeon where the villains can be strung up to be castrated; I mean James Dockery himself has gone castration crazy this time, with Blood Vengeance ending on the image of three men screaming as they are castrated, a group of people gleefully watching the spectacle. Not Bucher, though – he’s already walking away with that damn “bitter-sour taste of defeat” in his mouth. 

Overall, the castration angle really is the only thing unique about Blood Vengeance. Otherwise it is, like the volume before it (and the volume before that, and etc, etc), just a lazy rewrite of the first volume of the series. Here’s hoping that eventually Dockery will write something new, but I’m not holding my breath.

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Dakota #5: Chain Reaction


Dakota #5: Chain Reaction, by Gilbert Ralston
November, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Chain Reaction is so dull that I could hardly finish it. Really, I spent the last chapter and a half speed-reading, even though this is where the allegedly thrilling climax occurred. It lacks excitement and mystery, the cast of characters is ridiculously and confusingly large, and many scenes exist of filler dialogue telling us stuff we either already know or don't care about. Sort of if a writer was trying to stretch a 50-minute screenplay to a 180-page manuscript.Marty McKee

Man, first they cancelled ALF and now this! It’s the last volume of Dakota, friends, so I’m sure you all are shedding just as many tears as I am. 

Once again Marty McKee has succinctly captured my own thoughts – as mentioned before, Marty sent me his Dakota books, so I’m reading the same copy that he read. Like it’s a holy relic or something! Marty’s comment that “the cast of characters is ridiculously and confusingly large” pretty much sums up my major problem with Dakota. I sort of get what Gilbert Ralston was trying to do, like a family saga mixed with a hardboiled American Indian detective in “today’s West” sort of thing, but I don’t think it worked. As it is, Dakota comes off like a guy who needs to bring a few buddies along with him to the restroom when he takes a leak, and then calls his mom afterward to let her know how it all went. It’s like I wrote in my review of the first volume: Dakota is the only men’s adventure protagonist who regularly calls his mother, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the character and the series. 

The helluva it is, there’s material here for a good yarn…it’s just that Ralston’s insistence on straddling Dakota with legions of clingers-on robs the character of any ass-kicker potential. I’m not so much sure if Ralston was trying a different spin on the lone wolf ‘70s paperback action hero ethic than it was he just didn’t understand it. As Marty also noted, and I concured with, it seems evident that Ralston intended Dakota as the springboard for a TV series. It just seems very clear, given Ralston’s Hollywood background, the large group of characters, the lack of much violence and zero sex at all…I mean it’s not too hard to believe that’s what this series was intended as. After all, fellow Hollywood vet Paul Petersen attempted the same thing, around the same time, with The Smuggler, and that too failed to gain any traction outside of the paperback field. 

As Marty also noted in his review of Dakota #3 (here’s my review if you are super bored – and that installment of the series was mostly interesting because it seemed to be a rewrite of Ralston’s concurrent The Deadly, Deadly Art), Dakota is like “McCloud meets Nakia,” and again it’s not hard to see this might have been Gilbert Ralston’s exact intention. Nakia was a 1974 TV crime show with Robert Foster as an American Indian cop, and McCloud was a ‘70s crime show starring Dennis Weaver as a Nevada marshall assigned to the big city of New York…hey, what if you combined the two concepts into a series and hoped it got picked up for a TV deal? This would explain the tepid thrills, the “ridiculously large cast of characters,” the focus on Dakota’s home town as a central facet of the storyline, etc. 

Unfortunately, it still doesn’t make the series any good. Dakota is a far cry from the ‘70s-mandated lone wolf vigilante hero, though the potential is there for him to be one. We’re often told of how he’s packing a pistol, but rarely if ever does the guy actually use it. Instead, he’s more likely to let one of his many, many friends do the job for him. I mean like a fool I got my hopes up several times in the course of Chain Reaction; like we’re told at the start that Dakota has a .38 hidden in his “new Chevrolet,” same as he had one hidden in his original car back in the first volume…but it’s not really used. Later on he arms himself with a .357 Magnum, but again it’s his buddies who do the brunt of the fighting, one of them using a carbine Dakota has loaned him. 

So it seems clear Ralston was aware of the market he was writing for, he just couldn’t be bothered to do the job right. Once again the editors at Pinnacle understood what the series was supposed to be: the memorable cover art and the back cover copy all illustrate the novel’s most memorable sequence, of a naked American Indian woman hung by her thumbs while a pair of thugs torture her to death. “Hung By The Thumbs” is even emblazoned as the slugline on the back cover, like this was a grimy crime paperback from Leisure Books. But this scene is only vaguely brought to life in the very opening pages, Ralston cutting to brief sequences of this undescribed woman hanging by the thumbs, nude, and some guys passing a flame over her body – all very grim indeed, but hardly exploitative. 

Instead, the big focus of the opening pages is…Dakota’s buddy Joe Redbeard getting married!! Friends I kid you not. While the poor “Indian woman” is hung by her goddamn thumbs and being torture-killed, Ralston keeps cutting away from the scene, back to Dakota…who waits at the airport for his girlfriend Alicia (whom he still keeps begging to marry him – again, pretty much says all you could say about Dakota), and then he goes back to his overpopulated home to shoot the breeze with his many, many hangers-on. Hell there’s even a part where the Indian woman’s daughter has come here to Dakota’s ranch, unknowing that her mother is being tortured to death that very minute, and Dakota literally tells her to wait because first he has to attend Redeard’s wedding! In like a dozen pages you learn everything that is wrong about Dakota. You can almost hear the editors at Pinnacle sighing in exasperation. Like I said before, there’s no mystery why this was the last volume. 

Well anyway, it’s a few months after the previous volume; it’s Spring now, as we learn via some evocative word-painting that again indicates Ralston was attempting his own sort of Spoon River Anthology for the paperback crimefighter set. Dakota’s latest private eye job is courtesy the aforementioned daughter, a teenager from San Francisco whose dad was mysteriously killed and now she has this key in an envelope that was given to her by her mother – who, we readers know, is also now murdered. Dakota, forever putting off Alicia (it might be implied they have off-page sex, but you have to really use your own fevered imagination), takes the job and assembles his unwieldy cast of clingers-on and hangers-on to look into the mystery – and, like the previous volume, that’s pretty much all Chain Reaction is: a mystery novel. 

The opening “sweat mag” vibe is lost…and again Ralston blows his own potential with his refusal to cater to what we want. Those two torture-killing thugs? Dakota doesn’t even deal with either of them. Either of them!! Indeed they are pretty much red herrings on that front, and instead the narrative plays out as more of a mystery: Dakota gradually unravels a plot that connects these two thugs with the crime world guy who has been plaguing Dakota for volumes. The same guy who hired Guy Marten, the ineffectual professional assassin who first appeared in Cat Trap. Luckily Ralston goes back to the Marten subplot here in final installment Chain Reaction, but we don’t get any resolution on it (indeed, Marten by novel’s end is geared to becoming even more of a menace in Dakota’s life, given his advancement up the crime world chain), which indicates Gilbert Ralston did not plan to end Dakota here. 

Dakota gets some pals from previous volumes together and they head off to San Francisco – that is, after Dakota’s let his mommy know. (Not joking, either.) Here they follow the leads on the two thugs and gradually figure out it has to do with Dakota’s old archenemy. There’s occasional action, but again it’s Dakota’s buddies doing the shooting and stuff; Dakota just drives the car during one such scene. There’s another part where Dakota and his mini-army are jumped by some stooges and they get in a protracted fight, but Ralston again proves his lack of mettle in this field by writing so much of it passively, ie “Dakota was handling two of them,” and the like. Dakota does knock out one dude with a “savate kick,” at least, but even in the finale there isn’t much in the gun-blazing action you’d expect from this publisher; it’s more of a taut suspense-thriller vibe. 

But even here it lacks much bite. So without any spoilers, the deal is Dakota’s girlfriend is abducted by Guy Marten, working under the auspices of the aforementioned crime boss, Marvin Kintner. But since Alicia’s hardly been in the novel, this event doesn’t have much impact. Also, she’s not mistreated in any way, so there isn’t much impact in that regard, either. So to get the upper hand Dakota puts together a team (can you believe it??) to kidnap Kintner, and use him as a bargaining chip. It’s written like a heist, with the group breaking into the high-tech defenses of the guy’s place, getting him while he’s in bed with his floozie, etc. It’s an okay scene but again the thrill factor is undermined by the amount of people Dakota has working with him, plus there’s confusion because the names of all these people blend together and you often forget who is who. 

Spoiler alert, but there is no confrontation between Dakota and Guy Marten; the two don’t even meet face to face. As mentioned though Ralston clearly intended Marten to be a continnuing threat, as by novel’s end some crime-world bigwigs discuss moving Marten up the totem pole. Instead, as with the previous volume, the “climax” is more on a mystery tip, with Dakota putting pieces of the puzzle together and getting justice for the orphaned teen Indian girl who hired him. Speaking of whom, I thought she was going to be added to the menagerie of supporting characters, but Ralston indicates at the end of Chain Reaction that she might be moving away with other relatives…I doubt it, though. I bet if there’d been a Dakota #6 she would’ve been in it, probably getting married to Dakota’s young helper Louis Threetrees (marriages being another recurring gimmick of the series, btw…another indication of how Ralston just didn’t get it). 

So this was it for Dakota, and to tell the truth it’s a miracle it even lasted this long. Thanks again to Marty for sending me the books all those years ago (along with tons of others I’m still working through!), but if anything I found Dakota interesting as a failed genre experiment. But then, maybe Ralston didn’t even know it was an experiment. Regardless, now that I’ve read the series I really think Marty is correct – as theorized in the comment he left on my review of Dakota #2 – that the series was Ralston’s attempt at farming out a concept he’d failed to get produced in Hollywood.

Monday, December 4, 2023

The Executioner #19: Detroit Deathwatch


The Executioner #19: Detroit Deathwatch, by Don Pendleton
June, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Don Pendleton hews closely to his template for this 19th volume of The Executioner, but then again if it isn’t broke why fix it? Pendleton’s repetitive structure clearly struck a chord with readers of the day, so he follows it to the letter in Detroit Deathwatch: the opening hit on some Mafia hardsite, the chapters focusing on various one-off characters, the inevitable chapter in which a member of law enforcement recaps everything that’s happened in the novel thus far, the periodic philosophical ruminations courtesy Mack “The Executioner” Bolan, and finally the big action finale. 

But still, it’s becoming increasingly easy for Mr. Bolan. Never does he feel any fear or sense of danger. The possibility of his being hurt or killed never enters the picture – it is others who will suffer at the hands of the Mafia sadists, and Bolan is the hero who must save them. The actual mechanics of waging an ongoing war against the mob come so naturally to Bolan that there is no strategy nor planning required; he shows up, he makes his various hits, he slips away into the night. He’s more a supernatural figure at this point than a flesh-and-blood human, despite Pendleton’s frequent claims that Mack Bolan was “just a man.” Bolan’s also kind of weird by this point, but I’ll get to that in a bit. 

First of all, there’s no pickup from the previous volume. No mention of the busty nurse Bolan essentially pressured into shacking up with him at the very end of the novel. Bolan when we meet him this time is already on the scene in Detroit, launching a waterborne strike against a Mafia hardsite. It’s cool if a little unspectacular, Bolan briefly using his boat as a decoy and then donning a wetsuit (quickly dispensed with) so he can go ashore and blow away a few goons with his customary Automag. The violence has been toned down, for the most part, save for a wildly gruesome finale. Otherwise Bolan only shoots a few hapless thugs here; again, there is no possibility of Bolan himself ever being hit in the melee. 

Pendleton throws a curveball in the works with the sudden appearance of Toby Ranger, the busty blonde Federal agent last seen in #9: Vegas Vendetta. She’s undercover as a bimbo in this particular mobster’s villa, but she’s just been outed and is on her way to her last ride when Bolan intervenes. Bolan calls off his hit and takes off with her to his safehouse in the city, presumably so as to keep her safe. But here’s where the weird stuff begins. Bolan, apparently inspired by his own actions at the climax of the previous volume, essentially pressures Toby into having sex with him – they’re both “professionals,” he argues, they have to live for the moment, so let’s do it. Of course it isn’t presented so bluntly, but still that’s kind of how it happens – and once again Pendleton fails to give us any juicy details. 

But man…next morning at the breakfast table it just gets stranger. Bolan starts talking about “the cosmic sprawl” and ruminating to himself how woman was referred to as a “helpmeet” in the King James Bible, and hey, Toby could be his helpmeet for now. I mean he just comes off as an odd guy. Later in the book he’s even quoting Emerson to himself (the poet, not the prog-rock keyboardist), and keeps referring back to the “cosmic sprawl” (whatever the hell that is) and the helpmeet thing – again, another part of Pendleton’s template is introducing a concept or theme and frequently referring back to it. But it’s all just so weird…I mean Toby’s even like, “What?” when Bolan breaks out his first “cosmic sprawl” utterance, and you’ve gotta figure she might be wondering if she made a mistake last night. I mean, at least Johnny Rock and Philip Magellan had the decency to know they were nuts. Bolan is completely on the level…and you know Pendleton is, too. 

But then, Toby herself is an oddball – another recurring gimmick, one that quickly grates, is her constant referral to Bolan as “Captain” something or other: Captain Virile, Captain Wonderful, Captain Granite; she’s got a name for every occasion, and it gets old. According to my review for Vegas Vendetta, it sounds like Bolan and Toby had more of a sparring relationship in that volume, but this time Pendleton presents them almost as soul mates. Toby Ranger is the type of woman who could bring a men’s adventure series to a halt: she’s such a perfect match for the hero that you wonder why he doesn’t say to hell with the whole mob-busting game and just marry her. And indeed, Toby tries to put her hooks in Bolan throughout the book, even begging that they go off to some “green pastures” to be together after this latest mission is done. 

And as for this particular mission: what starts as a typical Executioner strike turns into something a little more seamy, and along the lines of a plot in one of the Imitiation Executioners that proliferated on the bookstore shelves at this time: beautiful women being abducted and forced into prostitution by the mob. But whereas one of those Imitation Executioners would be a lot more explicit in this regard – see, for example, The Marksman #18, which concerned this very same subject – Pendleton keeps the subject mostly in the background. As ever, this stuff is just the MacGuffin that is used to link together the action scenes and the philosophical asides. 

In fact the prostitution ring angle only enters the narrative via long “morning after” dialog from Toby, who explains that she’s been working undercover in an unofficial capacity, trying to track down her missing colleague Georgette – the “Canuck” member of Toby’s Rangers, also briefly seen in that earlier Vegas-based installment. Georgette was looking into a rash of disappearances concering super-beautiful women (Toby clarifies that these aren’t just gorgeous women…but “super” gorgeous ones!), and of course this being an Executioner novel the trail ultimately led her to the Mafia. But Toby thinks she was made and has been taken off somewhere, or maybe even killed. And she thinks it all happened in that very Detroit hardsite Bolan was hitting at the start of the book. 

Meanwhile we have the expected cutaways to one-off characters. We’ve got stuff from the perspectives of the mobsters themselves, none of whom will have much of an impact on the narrative. We also have stuff from the perspective of a cop who has been called into Detroit now that the Executioner has been spotted – and also legions of Mafia soldiers have entered the city, for precisely the same reason. This is another of Pendleton’s MacGuffins; we’re often told of these bad-ass killer Mafia hit teams congregating here or there, and when Bolan ultimately confronts them – that is, when he even does, as usually the hit teams are kept off-page – it’s such a cake-walk for him that you wonder why the element was even introduced into the narrative. Nearly 20 volumes in, it doesn’t create any sense of tension at all. At this point only a bored readership poses any threat to Mack Bolan. 

Oh and an interesting factoid for those out there like myself who dig such factoids: Bolan at one point in Detroit Deathwatch waltzes into a police station and pretends to be an agent (presumably Federal, as he isn’t wearing a uniform). It’s the name he gives for himself that’s interesting: Stryker. So, did Pendleton just pull this name out of the air, or did he borrow it from the contemporary Pinnacle series Stryker? A series that was written by William Crawford, ie the guy who served as “Jim Peterson” for The Executioner #16, which Pendleton claimed to never have read – and also stated in his interview in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction that he never even discovered who “Jim Peterson” was. So then, long story short, if Bolan’s “Stryker” name was inspired by Crawford’s series, that would be pretty ironic. I mean if that wouldn’t be an example of the cosmic sprawl, uh, sprawling, I don’t know what would be. 

Action is more sporadic this time around; we have the opening hit, then only a few scuffles here and there. Pendleton brings in a bit of a ‘70s crime-pulp vibe when Bolan and Toby fly to Canada and Bolan strong arms the manager of a stripper joint. But this Canada jaunt is over and done with in a flash and it’s back to Detroit – but again, Pendleton doesn’t much focus on the city or attempt to bring it to life. But then, that’s not really what you want from the book. Most of these installments could take place in the same cultural vacuum: “Detroit Deathwatch” could just as easily be “Dayton Deathwatch.” Especially given that the novel climaxes in the same location it started at: the Mafia hardsite along the lake. 

Here Pendleton gets more ghoulish and lurid than ever before in the series, with the reappearance of a “Turkey Doctor,” ie those Mafia sadists who specialize in torture while also keeping the “patient” alive and aware throughout. Pendleton rolls out all the stops here with a squirm-inducing passage in which Bolan comes across “turkey meat” in the sub-basement of the hardsite, mutilated and mauled but still alive and aware. It’s pretty crazy and not like much anything else in The Executioner, making Pendleton’s version of the Mafia seem almost as sadistic and depraved as the one in James Dockery’s The Butcher. So crazy and depraved that by novel’s end Mack Bolan himself is in tears. 

That said, the “green pastures” finale seems tacked on and hard to swallow after the few pages of nightmarish gore we just read. But the important thing is, Bolan’s about to get some good lovin’ again, which was how the previous book ended – so it’s nice at least to see that Pendleton has, for the moment, decided to add a little spice into the series. Speaking of which: if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go tell an attractive co-worker of mine that we’re both professionals, and the cosmic sprawl demands that she become my helpmeet. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll quote a little Emerson!

Monday, July 31, 2023

The Penetrator #43: Rampage In Rio


The Penetrator #43: Rampage In Rio, by Lionel Derrick
October, 1981  Pinnacle Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

Monday, April 24, 2023

The Executioner #18: Texas Storm


The Executioner #18: Texas Storm, by Don Pendleton
March, 1974  Pinnacle Books

By this 18th installment of The Executioner hero Mack Bolan is essentially a superhero; he plows through the Mafia presence in Texas without breaking a sweat, coming off like such a figure of myth that there’s even a bizarre bit where Bolan, in his black commando suit and with grenades and guns and etc dangling from his shoulders, walks into a hotel and starts talking to the receptionist while the hotel guests scramble in fear at the sight of The Executioner himself. I mean no one calls the cops or anything…but then even if they did, the cops would probably pat Bolan on the back. 

I mean that’s the sort of series Don Pendleton is writing at this point. Literally nothing is hard for Mack Bolan anymore, despite the tension Pendleton tries to develop. Hal Brognola, the “head Fed” who is supposed to be bringing Bolan down, is literally chauffered around Dallas by Bolan himself while the two men discuss the Mafia’s latest plan. There’s also a go-nowhere subplot about the “Bolan bunch,” a team of (supposedly) hardbitten Mafia exterminators, who are serving as the new Talifero brothers (ie the previous Mafia killsquad that was after Bolan in earlier volumes), and Bolan constantly makes them look like fools. He’s not even concerned by their presence, seeing them mainly as a nuissance. At this point we’re basically in the same sort of vibe as The Destroyer, but it’s sort of more funny here because you can tell Pendleton doesn’t have his tongue in his cheek. He means it, man. 

There’s no real pickup from the previous volume, but we’re immediately informed that we’re in a new, superhero-esque tone for The Executioner in that Bolan now has his own personal pilot: this would be Jack Grimaldi, a former Mafia pilot who went over to Bolan’s side in a previous volume. The last installment ended with Bolan taking a nap as Grimaldi headed his plane elsewhere; Texas Storm opens some indeterminate time later, with Bolan again in a plane piloted by Grimaldi, but he’s not taking a nap, he’s ready to stage an assault on a Mafia hardsite in the Texas midlands. And the action scenes that ensues follows previous ones, with Bolan all-too-easily wading through superior numbers with his Auto Mag and Beretta pistols, blasting hapless Mafia stooges to hell. 

The thing is, we don’t really get an idea why Bolan is here. He suspects something rotten with the oil business, but it takes almost the entire novel to find out what exactly it is. The main thing is that here Bolan saves a nude and stacked gal (presumably a blonde, per Gil Cohen’s cover) named Judith Klingman, who is being kept drugged and locked away by the Mafia. Judith’s dad is a famous oil baron or somesuch; Pendleton delivers some of his lovably-goofy dialog here, with Bolan and Judith discussing things in the safety of a hotel later on. One thing I’ve noticed is that Pendleton will introduce some gimmick in the narrative or dialog and hammer it past the point of being funny; for example, Judith and Bolan, apropos of nothing, start discussing things in football terms. For like a few pages. 

Another recurring gimmick Pendleton uses throughout Texas Storm is referring to “numbers” Bolan is always up against. “The numbers were running down,” and etc, etc, to the point that it gets annoying. I mean the guy has a template and he’s sticking to it. But unlike Mack Bolan, Don Pendleton was not a superhero, so one can understand his struggling to keep up with the writing pace Pinnacle Books put on him. It’s just that Texas Storm seems to be building and building to something, but various subplots are just dropped (Judith Klingman flat-out disappears from the narrative after this opening scene, only to show up again at the very end), and when climactic events do happen, Bolan waltzes through the situation with nary a concern. 

I mean take that Bolan Bunch deal. So there’s a lot of buildup, these new Mafia killers, coming down to Texas to get Bolan, etc. As soon as the bastards show up, we have one of those series staples where Pendleton writes things from the mobster point of view, and “that bastard Bolan” swoops out of nowhere and ambushes them. But this time it’s particularly goofy. Bolan, hanging on a telephone poll and in a worker uniform, shoots at these guys from half a mile away and they’re all panicking as he blasts apart the house -- but doesn’t kill any of them. I mean seriously. Bolan at this point is like a cat toying with a mouse. Pendleton tries his best to explain away why Bolan doesn’t kill these guys, something about how instilling fear is just as important, etc. It’s kind of lame. It’s also humorous to imagine a guy just hanging on a telephone pole and blasting away at a big house half a mile away and no one even calls the cops on him. But then again, the cops would probably show up and provide cover support for him. 

The plot is pretty prescient, though. Bolan, with his usual omnipotence in regards to the inner workings of the Mafia, eventually gets wind of “Flag Seven,” a plan started by oil man Klingman (apparently), which has something to do with Texas becoming a separate country. There are “extremists” today who are pushing for that very thing, but the irony here is that the Mafia has taken over Klingman’s plan mostly due to the ownership it would give them of Texas oil. It was interesting to read all this from the perspective of our era…though on a side note, I did see something the other week that made me laugh out loud, and I wish I’d taken a photo of it. There was a truck outside of someone’s house, a Tesla-branded truck that was there to set up the electric charging station or whatever in the person’s home…and folks, the Tesla-branded truck was a standard gasoline engine truck. I mean that pretty much said it all, and damn I wish I’d taken a photo. 

Well anyway, that’s the plot of Texas Storm, as exposited for us in the long scene where Bolan drives Brognola around Dallas. Also I have to say, at no point did I get the impression that Pendleton had ever been to Dallas; there was no attempt at bringing the city or its environs to life, and the book could just as easily have taken place anywhere else. Bolan doesn’t even spend any time with many locals; both Klingman senior and his busty daughter are minor presences in the book. The latter as mentioned only returns in the final pages…where Bolan, again apropos of nothing, apparently decides he wants to get laid (because how many volumes has it been?). He then makes insinuating comments to Judith that he needs a “nurse” for some “r&r,” even specifying that he needs this nurse for “three days.” While Judith says she isn’t a nurse, she’s all for the “r&r” point, so I guess we’re to assume there’s some boinkery in the Executioner’s future. Not that Pendleton tells us about it, for the novel ends here. 

The most interesting thing about Texas Storm is how it’s all such a cakewalk for Mack Bolan, even though Pendleton tries his hardest to make it all seem tense. But Pendleton constantly undermines his own tension. Like there’s another part, toward the end, where a big deal is made out of all the “electronic” sensors and stuff the Mafia has set up around a hardsite to keep the Executioner at bay. But Bolan, again dropped off by Grimaldi, blows through all this stuff with such ease that we’re only told about it in passing. Hell, even the majority of the Bolan Bunch is wiped outt off-page. “It was [Bolan’s] kind of fight,” Pendleton states a few times in the narrative. To the point that you wonder what kind of fight isn’t his kind. 

But at this point, 18 volumes in, you pretty much know what you’re getting with The Executioner. I did feel that Pendleton was a bit “off” with this particular installment, though.

Thursday, February 16, 2023

The Penetrator #42: Inca Gold Hijack

 
The Penetrator #42: Inca Gold Hijack, by Lionel Derrick
June, 1981  Pinnacle Books

Chet Cunningham changes up The Penetrator with a series that might cause repercussions in future volumes, but probably won’t. I mean I’m sure series co-writer Mark Roberts won’t bother playing out on any of the developments. But long story short, Inca Gold Hijack features Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin suffering his greatest loss yet in the series – his greatest loss since his girlfriend’s murder, which happened before the first volume even took place. 

After so many, many lackluster volumes, Cunningham slightly gets back to the lurid vibe of the earliest volumes; this “Mark” (as both authors refer to their hero) is still not the same unhinged lunatic who would torture and kill hapless thugs in the earliest (and best!) volumes of the series, but at least he does blow a few bad guys away this time instead of just knocking them out and handcuffing them. (But then, he does that here, too.) Otherwise Inca Gold Hijack, with its trucking plotline, recalls a previous Cunningham joint, #20: The Radiation Hit (and goofily enough Mark uses this very name, “The Radiation Hit,” when recalling the events). 

The novel opens with what seems to be the promise of earlier, more action-focused installments: Mark is already on the job, hovering in a helicopter near Chicago and waging an assault on some trucking hijackers. Mark kills a few, even blowing one of them up with a grenade; Cunningham notes the “gore” in the cabin, which is probably the most violent instance in this series in I don’t know how long. But after that Inca Gold Hijack settles down into the PG vibe of the past twenty or thirty volumes, with Mark Hardin acting more like a TV protagonist of the day, chasing leads and going out of his way not to kill anyone unless absolutely necessary. 

The nice cover is a bit misleading; while there is an attractive “dusky-skinned” brunette in the novel, she and Mark never actually meet face to face. (Or, uh, face to cheek, as per the cover.) Instead, it is Joanna Tabler, that platinum blonde dish of a Federal agent who has appeared in several previous installments (the majority of them Cunningham’s) who factors into the novel’s steamy situations. And yes, Cunningham does finally sleaze things up just a little; when Mark and Joanna rendevous in Chicago, Joanna being in the city on assignment and calling up Mark’s Stronghold HQ just in case Mark too happens to be in Chicago(!?), things get a bit saucy as Cunningham doles out sleaze unseen since those earliest volumes: “Mark kissed her marvelous mounds,” and the like. Of course, when the actual tomfoolery begins, Cunningham cuts the scene. 

Mark and Joanna have not seen each other in “sixteen months;” this phrase is used so often when Joanna first appears that it gets to be humorous. This would be a reference to the previous Cunningam yarn #34: Death Ray Terror, which is also called by that name by the characters themselves. But whereas the two had a casual affair in those earlier volumes, spending vacation together and whatnot, this time Cunningham lays it on thick. Or, rather, Joanna does; within moments of their first boink Joanna’s getting misty-eyed and talking about her “silly, womanish, 1940s dream” of marrying Mark, living in some cottage somewhere, and raising a bunch of kids. Through the rest of the novel Joanna will stay safely in a hotel room, waiting for Mark to come home that night, so they can hit the sack again and she can start crying with worry over him and dreaming the impossible dream of them being together happily ever after, etc, etc. 

Folks, you don’t need a master’s degree in men’s adventure to guess that something might happen to Joanna Tabler in this installment. 

This “Joanna” subplot turns out to be the most memorable thing about Inca Gold Hijack. The main plot itself is threadbare; some Incan gold, you might guess from the title, has been hijacked…by truckers! So Mark Hardin follows leads and suspects that a trucker by the name of Big Red, who runs his own operation, was probably behind the heist, working with the Mafia. It’s very heavy on the early ‘80s redneck tip with Mark going undercover and getting a job as a trucker in Big Red’s operation and hanging around the pool hall and stuff. Meanwhile Joanna, also undercover, gets a job on the clerical staff. 

Action is sporadic and bloodless. There’s some fun stuff which, again, recalls the unbridled fun of the earliest volumes. Like when Mark gets a lead on someone who was involved with the heist, and it turns out to be a gay guy who was blackmailed into it – thanks to “homosexual intercourse pictures” (as Mark refers to them) which were secretly taken of the guy in action and used as leverage to get him in on the heist. An interesting note here is that Mark shows absolutely no judgment of the guy being gay, which must have seemed been pretty novel in 1981. That said, Mark does push the poor guy’s face into a puddle of his own vomit, but that’s just to put some fear into him so he’ll talk, not because he’s gay or anything. 

Cunningham also ties in to some earlier novels and subplots. A few past capers – ones with Joanna – are mentioned, and also there’s a goofy part where Yolanda, the dusky-skinned babe who is in charge of the Incan gold, requests The Penetrator’s help in the paper, at the behest of reporters. When Mark responds to the note in the newspaper, he has to pass a “screening” test from a long-time “Penetrator fan” who asks Mark all kinds of questions that only the real Penetrator would know. That said, the stuff with Yolanda is really just framework to set the action in motion; I just remembered that she does indeed meet Mark, soon after this, but it’s only to talk – and besides soon leads into an action scene. But after that Yolanda slips out of the narrative. 

There’s also the recurring Cunningham penchant for a torture death-trap; midway through Mark is caught in the bad guys’s headquarters and finds himself in a special room from which there’s no escape, where the place literally turns into an oven. Mark uses C4, handily hidden on his ankle, to bust his way out, rendering himself deaf for twenty-four hours(!?) in the process. This is another recurring Penetrator schtick, with Mark getting badly injured. And guess who nurses him to health (while crying) before heading off to her undercover job at Big Red’s outfit “just one last time?” And who of friggin’ course is captured in the process? 

Cunningham again gets lurid with all this; poor Joanna is raped (off-page) by Big Red and four of his men, and then the real torture begins (off-page as well). But the finale is slow-going and it seems evident Cunningham was spinning his wheels (lame trucker-plot pun alert). First Mark captures Big Red, then the two drive around with Big Red running his mouth, taking Mark to different places where he says he’s stashed Joanna, then finally they get to the real place where Joanna is hidden…and only then does Big Red try to run away so he and Mark can get in an extended chase and fight scene. It’s all muddled and lame, but the impact of what happens to Joanna isn’t lessened – the only thing that does lessen it is the likelihood that it will never be mentioned again, except perhaps in passing. And only in a Chet Cunningham installment. 

The justice dealt to Big Red is also suitable and again a reminder of the hard-hearted Penetrator of the earliest volumes…except that this time he keeps reminding himself to shut out his thoughts while Big Red screams for it all to stop. Last we see Mark Hardin, he’s bereft and just wanting to take a cab ride to nowhere, as “nothing will ever be the same” for him now. But then, in eleven volumes Mark himself will be in for the big finale.

Thursday, January 12, 2023

The Butcher #11: Valley Of Death


The Butcher #11: Valley Of Death, by Stuart Jason
April, 1974  Pinnacle Books

I was under the impression I didn’t have this volume of The Butcher, but I was looking in the box where I store the other volumes of the series I have, and lo and behold…well, you can probably figure out where I’m going with this. There it was in the box! So anyway Valley Of Death was the second of two installments written by Lee Floren, who previously wrote #10: Deadly Doctor

It’s been a long time since I read Deadly Doctor, so I went back to check my review. I found it humorous that I referenced Russell Smith in it, because as I was reading Valley Of Death I kept thinking to myself how much it read like a Russell Smith novel. The same surreal vibe, the same writing style; only Smith’s patented exclamation marks were missing. But this one was written by Lee Floren, as it’s clearly a sequel to Deadly Doctor, the events of which are referenced throughout. I only have one other novel by Floren, an early ‘60s sub-sleaze PBO titled Las Vegas Madam (written as “Matt Harding”), but I’ve yet to read it. I’m curious if it too is as surreal and rough as his work on The Butcher

Because this is one rough novel. Again, it is almost identical to something by Russell Smith in that it’s clear the author is winging it from the first page to the last, and not taking anything seriously. Random events happen and only gradually does a plot come together. Like the previous Floren yarn, there is a definite attempt at mimicking the style of main “Stuart Jason” James Dockery. As James Reasoner and I discussed in the comments section of my review for Deadly Doctor, Dockery and Floren both lived in Mexico, so it’s likely they were friends and this is how Floren came to write for The Butcher, not to mention why he strived to capture the style of Dockery for his two contributions. 

So we have the “bitter-sour taste of defeat,” the “koosh!” for Bucher’s silencered Walther P-38, and the recurring character of the director of White Hat (his title, curiously, is never capitalized). Also the repeating Dockery motif of Bucher being arrested by a smalltown sheriff and then being let go after a call to White Hat. But Floren toys with Dockery’s ever-recurring themes. Also, he skips some stuff: there’s no opening moment, for example, where Bucher is stalked by two superdeformed Syndicate thugs he soon blows away. And Floren expands the smalltown sheriff character from the one-off of the Dockery installments into more of a presence in the narrative. A weird presence, it must be stated. 

For that is the main thing Floren captures in his Dockery-isms: the weird, perverted nature of Dockery’s average Butcher story. There is, as in the Dockery books, the feeling that none of this is real, that it is all taking place in some alternate reality; Bucher himself muses at the end of Valley Of Death that this latest caper has been “like a bad dream.” I’ve gone on way too much in previous reviews that the idea is almost like Bucher himself is dead and cast in some purgatory where he relives the same nightmarish scenario, again and again into eternity. Like the entire series is based on the final chapter of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway, where the criminal protagonists are trapped in hell. Lee Floren captures that vibe in this novel, more so than he did in Deadly Doctor

Like a Dockery installment, the “plot” only gradually comes together. But basically White Hat tasks Bucher with figuring out why elections are not going the way the “experts” predicted they would, both in the US and abroad. Yes, folks, we have another vintage men’s adventure novel with a plot that is relevant today. I mean check this out – the only thing missing is the name “Dominion” for the voting machines: 



But what I love is that, even in this surreal, fictional world, there is still enough rationality that everyone acknowledges that the election results are suspect. Floren keeps his politics to himself but does go the expected route and make “the Conservatives” the bad guys in both the US and Poland; we learn there is a new right-wing party, with fascist ties (because of course), that is gaining ground around the world due to those voting machines. But folks there are a lot of parts in this one where Bucher sits around watching TV or listening to the radio as election results come in. In the US it’s the Democrats versus the Republicans, with new party “The Conservatives” faring well in cities but not in rural areas…a curious reversal of today, but then again this book was published in 1974. And in Poland the right-wing Conservative party, dubbed the Sons of something or other over there (I was too lazy to jot it down), have beaten the Communist-backed party, and Russia isn’t happy about that. 

Oh, and there’s also something about the ridiculously-monikered “World King,” this volume’s main villain who is behind the nefariousness. This turns out to be the lamest bit in the novel because Floren does nothing with it. Anyway Bucher’s sure, as ever, that the Syndicate is behind the plot, whatever the plot is. So, the way these things go, he flies a Cessna to the Mojave Desert. That’s another reminder of Deadly Doctor, where Bucher suddenly became a pilot. The “flying fiction” isn’t as egregious in Valley Of Death, but in addition to the Cessna Bucher also flies a helicopter and an F4 Phantom jet. This latter factors into an aerial sequence that seems to be inspired by Chuck Yeager’s near-fatal accident in the NF-104 (which Tom Wolfe later brought to life in The Right Stuff) – an incident Floren was likely familiar with, given that he also names a minor Syndicate thug Zeager. 

The Dockery inversions are most apparent with the slackjawed yokel sheriff, generally a one-off character in Dockery, but here expanded into a supporting character: Sheriff Julia Whitcomb. That’s right, folks: a woman!! Indeed, one with “high breasts…a healthy young female animal.” We’re also told she’s so hot that even usually-unperturbed Bucher is taken aback. But spoiler alert – and we learn this pretty quickly in the novel – but, uh, she is really a he. That’s right again, folks: a transvestite! Boy, Lee Floren was batting two for two in the “relevance for today” department, wasn’t he? This gender-bending switcharoo is revealed when “Julia” is in bed with a Syndicate flunky named Mario Niccoli. 

The villain of the piece, Niccoli is the brother of the two other Niccolis Bucher killed in The Deadly Doctor. Again, Valley Of Death is a straight sequel to that one, with the sole surviving Niccoli burning up to get revenge for the death of his brothers. But Floren further tells us this about Mario Niccoli: “A fag himself, his two brothers had in fact been his wives, for they too had lusted after men, not women.” This tidbit is casually dropped in the opening; again, just very Russell Smith in vibe. Later Niccoli is in bed with “Julia,” and it’s revealed that “no female breasts” are beneath “her” padded bra. 

But it gets even weirder. Adding to the surreal texture is that Bucher is constantly getting “updates” from White Hat which inform him of practically everything going on in the plot, and the backgrounds of the various characters he encounters. Actually it’s the director who gives Bucher these updates, giving the impression that the old man is omniscient – and now that I think of it, furthering the whole “purgatory” conceit of The Butcher, with the White Hat director serving as god to Bucher’s doomed soul. But Bucher is constantly being informed off-page about this or that, so that he is caught up with what’s going on, to the extent that his presence seems unnecessary. White Hat knows all, so why can’t it do all? 

Well anyway, in one of those updates Bucher is informed by the director that Julia Whitcomb is really a guy – curiously, Bucher is informed of this right after we readers learn of it via the scene with Julia and Niccoli, which again gives the idea that all this is a “bad dream” with info gathered and incorporated into the story in real time. So Bucher starts hitting on Julia, asking her out to dinner and making insinuating comments about getting her into bed, and Julia becoming increasingly excited at the prospect. Just weird, wild stuff. But again it’s like Floren is just winging it, or the booze has run dry as he’s been typing, because he drops all of it with Julia leaving Bucher’s room in a huff and the incident never being mentioned again. 

Bucher does get laid, though – by a woman (not that I’m a biologist, you understand, but Floren tells us she is). This too is on the strange “dreamlike” tip: her name is Sandra Stone, and she claims she is a reporter when she boldly approaches Bucher in Poland. (He’s come here, for no real reason, to get more evidence on those voting machines.) Bucher immediately knows Sandra is a Syndicate spy, but soon enough the two end in bed. This actually happens between chapters, so Floren gives us absolutely zero in the way of sleaze. Which, again, is reminiscent of the Dockery books. So too is the weird misogyny on display throughout – Bucher treats Sandra like shit, telling her to take off and leave him alone, even though he knows the Syndicate intends to kill her. Her (expected) fate is still shocking given how casually Floren treats it in the narrative – surely the most blackly humorous moment in a blackly humorous novel. 

Action-wise there’s a bit more going on than in the Dockery books, with Bucher often getting in shootouts. The gore is not as pronounced, though. And also Bucher is slightly more human; Floren’s Bucher still experiences fear, and reacts close to panic at times. He is not the “Iceman” of the James Dockery books, and he’s more prone to displaying his emotions. He does a bit of deducting in the novel but it’s very lame because it’s based on coincidence. Like when in the small town in the Mojave, he just happens to see some “scientist types” go into a building, after which a balloon rises from the building. Gradually Floren will tie this together with the voting machines, but it’s all so hamfisted that it’s just more indication that he was winging it from first page to last. 

This is further demonstrated by the non-event that is the so-called World King. As with a Dockery novel, it all ultimately comes down to the same characters Bucher has been dealing with since the beginning of the book, characters who are suddenly revealed as being more important to the Syndicate plot than we readers were led to believe. Bucher sees more action here – but I forgot to mention! Suddenly Bucher has become a field tester for various White Hat gadgets. In Valley Of Death, he has these pellets he fires from his P-38 which knock a man into a deathlike state that lasts for twelve hours. There are so many scenes of Bucher shooting someone with these – usually firing the pellets straight down their throat – and then watching TV later on as the news reports on the “dead men” found in such and such a place, who later wake up with absolutely no memory, and the doctors trying to figure out what’s wrong with them. 

Oh, and Bucher also has this pole with a choker on it, or some such contraption, which he uses to ensnare various bigwigs. So there’s a lot of stuff where he’ll capture people with this, then shoot them with the deathlike-amnesia pill…it’s just super weird, folks. I mean the whole novel is like a lost installment of The Sharpshooter or The Marksman, we’re talking that same weird, surreal, “booze-fueled first draft” vibe throughout. All of which is to say that Valley Of Death was kind of fun, in a deranged sort of way. Floren’s imagination is so off-kilter that I would’ve enjoyed more installments by him…the book might not be great, or hell even good, but at least it isn’t the same story over and over like James Dockery was doing for the series.

Monday, October 24, 2022

The Penetrator #41: Hell’s Hostages


The Penetrator #41: Hells Hostages, by Lionel Derrick
March, 1981  Pinnacle Books

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

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