Signet Books Archives

The Specialist #6: The Big One

book reviews, John Cutter, John Shirley, Men's Adventure Novels, Signet Books, Specialist Comments Off

Apr 012013

The Specialist #6: The Big One, by John Cutter
December, 1984 Signet Books

Jack Sullivan, the “toughest action hero of them all,” returns in this sixth installment of John Shirley’s Specialist series. This is one hit or miss series, with some volumes, like #4: The Psycho Soldiers, being incredibly entertaining, while others, like #2: Manhattan Revenge, being monotonous bores. Luckily The Big One is in the former category, and it’s a lot of fun.

Speaking of Manhattan Revenge, this volume picks up some threads from that early installment, opening with a darkly humorous scene where Sullivan carries out a hit on a guy who killed one of the child sex slaves in Van Kleef’s den. Per the contract Sullivan has to carry out the hit on the guy’s birthday, and since the guy has mob connections this involves taking out a slew of thugs as well. But then one of the mobsters gets wind that The Specialist is here and tips off the cops, who promptly spot Sullivan’s warwagon as he’s making a leisurely getaway.

This implies that The Big One is going to be a “Sullivan breaks out of prison” storyline, but so much goes down in the 180 pages of this novel that his jail tenure is over in a flash. Sullivan is sprung by the Feds, who actually want to put him on a job – a megamillionaire named Hughes has it in for a neo-Nazi drug kingpin named Reichstone (nicknamed “The Big One”) who rules an island kingdom in South America, where he has the support of the corrupt local government. Reichstone has kidnapped Hughes’s daughter and made her his sex slave (notice a theme developing, here), and has also tortured, with acid, Hughes’s son.

But due to that governmental backing, the US can’t officially become involved. So Sullivan is their go-to guy, as he’s friggin’ legendary, even among the criminal filth of the world. After seeing the ruined figure that was once Hughes’s son, Sullivan is consumed with his equally-lengendary wrath and eagerly takes the job. He brings along Merlin and Rolff, the mercs who have assisted him in previous volumes.

Sullivan’s been equipped with a plethora of hardware, and Shirley takes a page out of Gold Eagle, detailing it all for us. Also on the GE tip is Sullivan’s new Atchisson automatic shotgun, so memorably featured in Able Team #8: Army Of Devils. Sullivan takes an instant liking to the Atchisson, which he uses throughout the novel to blow thugs apart in gory fashion. He gets a chance to take his new toys for a test drive as soon as he lands near Reichstone’s domain, blowing away a few cops and then taking captive their captain.

The Big One operates on all the tropes of a classic pulp melodrama, with constant reversals and unexpected turns, not to mention the old cliché of “enemies turned friends.” Sullivan shows a knack for making people see his way, and during the course of the narrative manages to turn a handful of Reichstone’s goons. And also per those classic tropes we see the return of many characters, in particular Skulleye, the “monster Muslim” terrorist who got half of his face shot off by Sullivan in the previous volume.

Another returning character from Maltese Vengeance is Ollie Tryst, who when last we saw him was planning to marry a spitfire beauty in Malta. Turns out the romance fizzled and Tryst went off looking for merc work…and guess what, he’s inadvertently ended up as a security guard on Reichstone’s island! There are two hundred mercs here, including the Elite, Reichstone’s personal guard, all of them hulking blondes who go about in sleeveless SS uniforms.

Given the “sex slave” angle of the plot, you’d figure Shirley would indulge in some lurid doings, but he doesn’t. In fact he doesn’t even deliver one of his trademark sex scenes until the novel’s almost over, having Sullivan get busy with a “big” redhead who happens to be an undercover Mossad agent. (Even she has heard of Sullivan!) The lurid quotient is relegated to several grisly action scenes, including a great moment – and another indication of Shirley’s gift for dark humor – where a character is eaten by a shark.

One thing that can be said for the Specialist series though is it isn’t as creative in the plot department. Everything goes down just as you expect it will, as in previous volumes – Sullivan shows up, scouts the area, kills some guards, plans his attack, and finally launches his attack. But Shirley at least throws some unexpected elments into the tale, obviously having fun as he mounts coincidence upon coincidence – like, for example, the team of CIA agents who just happen to be captives on Reichstone’s island, and one of them is Sullivan’s old pal! (Later these guys form their own detachment as “the White Berets,” another indication of Shirley having fun with his own story.)

Another unexpected element is when Sullivan himself gets captured, the first time I believe this has happened in the series. Skulleye and Reichstone interrogate him, and Sullivan proves his “toughest action hero” status here, certain he can take the torture. But instead they drug him, and Shirley shows off his horror chops with a very surreal and psychedelic scene where Sullivan hallucinates all kinds of nightmarish shit.

But still it all ends with the expected assault on Reichstone’s fortress, Sullivan assisted by a veritable army of mercs and Mossad agents who just so coincentally happen to be in the area. The Atchisson is again put to use in gory splendor, particularly in Sullivan’s final confrontation with Skulleye – though honestly I expected Shirley to play up this rivalry a bit more. All told Skulleye is barely in the novel. But the payoff with Reichstone’s fate more than makes up for it.

Anyway, this is a fun novel, filled with fun moments, like the scene pictured on the cover, where Sullivan avoids becoming shark-food thanks to a handy grenade. And also Shirley’s sense of humor is a nice change of pace; it’s obvious he’s having fun with the material, slyly poking fun at the characters and events, yet he still provides a quality story. When he’s in form Shirley is capable of delivering excellent examples of what men’s adventure novels can be, and this is exactly what he does here.

Narc #4: The Delgado Killings

book reviews, Marc Olden, Men's Adventure Novels, Narc, Robert Hawkes, Signet Books, Tough Cops Comments Off

Feb 042013

Narc #4: The Delgado Killings by Robert Hawkes
October, 1974 Signet Books

I’m starting to think Marc Olden could be considered the Elmore Leonard of men’s adventure authors, his Narc series being a case in point. Instead of the over-the-top, gun-blazing thrills customary of the genre, Olden continues to write a grim and gritty series that brings to life the sleazy, dangerous streets of 1970s New York City. Olden once again takes us into a sordid world of drug kingpins and street-level warriors, where only the most vicious survive.

As is customary for this series, The Delgado Killings is mostly an ensemble piece, with hero John “Narc” Bolt just one of the many characters. There’s no pickup from the previous volume, and indeed it appears that we’ve missed a lot between installments. For one, Bolt’s girlfriend of The Death List is not only gone and unmentioned, but he’s managed to find another girlfriend in the meantime. Anyway Bolt’s life has been pretty hectic since we last saw him, and Olden spends a lot of time informing us what we missed via backstory.

But as usual with Olden it’s the villains who get the most narrative time. The titular Delgado for example takes up a goodly portion of the novel; a cocaine kingpin, Delgado is in the sights of Bolt’s agency D-3 and is about to be put on trial. At great cost Delgado has gotten a list of the names of the people who will testify against him. His plan is to kill off these witnesses, and to do so he hires Victor Poland, a former cop who has become a hitman who specializes in helping those in the narcotics industry.

Mostly though Delgado wants Bolt dead. It turns out that Bolt has killed Delgado’s lover – Delgado is gay (he’s actually referred to as “The Snow Queen” on the back cover…man, you can’t get much more pre-PC than that), and this murder has sent him over the edge. Delgado’s homosexuality is often ridiculed throughout the book, and it’s another indication of how the times have changed…vast portions of this stuff would not be publishable in today’s tepid, sterilized, PG-13 neutered world.

Like previous novels, The Delgado Killings takes place over a short period of time, specifically during a very hot summer. We’re reminded, quite often and at length, of the extreme heat and the uncomfortable conditions. But then Olden mentions that it’s 85 degrees out, and I had to laugh…I mean, when it’s 85 degrees down here in the hellish heat of Dallas, that’s when we know it’s finally getting cooler and summer’s wrapping up! Anyway Olden fully brings to life the mire of a New York summer, just another indication of his writing talent.

Poland takes the job and hires his own little band of hitmen, and together they begin killing off the witnesses, making each look like accidental deaths. Bolt himself doesn’t even appear until well into the book, and we learn of his involvement in the Delgado case in backstory, including how Bolt caused the death of Delgado’s lover. Bolt’s the only one to quickly deduce that Delgado is behind these “accidental deaths,” and when a gunman tries to kill both Bolt and one of the witnesses in a staged holdup, he knows for sure that he’s had a death warrant placed on him.

I have to say though that Bolt really isn’t much fun of a character, which is perhaps why Olden spends so little time with him. He has all the standard attributes of your average men’s adventure protagonist, but no sparkle, no charm. In fact he’s pretty humorless, something Olden plays up on with the other characters, so it seems to me that it was Olden’s intent to make Bolt such a grim cipher. What’s strange though is the guy had a lot more pizazz back in Narc #1, including a nihilistic bent, all of which has disappeared – and by the way, what happened to Bolt’s martial arts guru, also unseen since that first volume?

But then, this is an ensemble piece and the minor players are more interesting than the protagonist. Poland comes off as a street-smart warrior with one hell of a mean streak; there’s a Stephen King-esque sequence late in the tale where Poland takes up an axe and hacks off the head and hands of one of his men. Olden really captures the sick horror of this, having another of Poland’s men puke at the sight – in fact there’s quite a bit of puking going on in The Delgado Killings, with even Bolt himself blowing chunks in the finale.

The new woman in Bolt’s life is Anita Rona, a gorgeous young model who worked as a courier for Delgado until she was busted by Bolt, who was working undercover on the case in Paris. Apparently Bolt and Anita became quite serious despite this unusual “meet cute,” but Bolt had to break it off when they got back to the US, much to Anita’s surprise and devastation. Again, all of this is relayed via backstory, and therefore lacks much impact, as we’re supposed to really be worried about Anita and regret the fact that she and Bolt couldn’t be together.

In fact, Anita only appears in a single sequence, a nonetheless taut one where Bolt comes to her rescue as Poland and his men attempt to kill her in a grocery store. But she disappears from the narrative after that, as if Olden only brought her into the tale so he could write a damsel in distress scene. It all would’ve been so much more powerful if Olden had used one of the female characters from a previous book.

There are a few action scenes, but again they’re played out on a very “real world” scale, with Bolt going into combat with nothing more than his .45 or his ankle-holstered Beretta. This in particular is his sole weapon during another taut sequence, where he chases after Bookbinder, the Poland assassin who attempted to kill Bolt in the staged hold-up. Olden does strive to make Bolt human, perhaps a little too much so. There are many, many scenes where we are informed that Bolt is afraid or nervous, and while it’s a welcome change from the traditional ultra-heroic protagonist of this genre, it gets to be a little much after a while.

Despite which The Delgado Killings is still another enjoyable Olden offering, leagues above what you’d expect. I guess my biggest problem with it would be the ending. Bolt’s entire mission here is to ensure the witnesses don’t die, so that Delgado can be put on trial and both his public stature and his criminal empire ruined. But all of this is rendered moot in the final action scene, when Poland, set up by Bolt to believe he’s been double crossed, goes after Delgado for revenge.

Another problem I had was with the resolution – namely that there is no resolution. For one, Poland’s fate is left in doubt and it seems obvious that Olden intends for him to return, but given that he did the same thing in Black Samurai #6 and that villain never returned, I kind of wish he’d just had Bolt put a bullet in Poland’s head. Also the storyline with Anita Rosa is given too much buildup and too little follow-through, especially when you assume that, like every other woman in Bolt’s life in this series, she’ll be gone and forgotten by the next volume.

The Mind Masters #4: Amazons

book reviews, horror, Ian Ross, John Rossman, Men's Adventure Novels, Mind Masters, Sci-Fi, Signet Books Comments Off

Jan 232013

The Mind Masters #4: Amazons, by Ian Ross
March, 1976 Signet Books

There are a few changes afoot with this volume of the Mind Masters series; most notably, the author is now credited as “Ian Ross” instead of “John Rossmann,” but make no mistake it’s the same dude. Also there’s more of a team dynamic at play, with series protagonist Britt St. Vincent sort of brushed to the side for many sequences so that the author can focus on other members of Britt’s Mero Group. Also, believe it or not, there isn’t a single sex scene in Amazons, though it still brims with a general air of sleaze and exploitation, as is customary for the series.

Another change worth mentioning is the name of the villainous CIA psychic warfare lab that goes up against Mero; throughout the series Rossmann has referred to it as the “Hary Diamond lab,” but in Amazons it’s suddenly the “Harry Hammond lab.” Unlike the other changes, this one actually occurs in the novel; Rossmann writes “Harry Diamond” when he first mentions it early in Amazons, but thereafter it becomes “Harry Hammond.” So are we witnessing the mindset of a paranoiac at work? Did Rossmann, afraid he’d let out too many “secrets” with the previous three novels, suddenly get scared, changing his own name to a psuedonym as well as material within the actual book? Who knows.

Anyway, Britt’s life continues its hectic pace; this installment picks up apparently just a few weeks after #3: The Door. Britt’s now in Brazil, where he’s looking into a string of political murders that might or might not be tied into some ghost activity: Furtado, the CIA-backed new president of Brazil, has had a powerful medicine man killed, and word is the medicine man’s ghost is out for vengeance. But that’s just one of the plotlines; there’s also Dr. Sin, a North Korean anthropologist who’s gone missing down here. Like The Door, there are a wealth of plots going on in Amazons, and Rossmann skirts over some and forgets others.

As we’ll recall from the final pages of The Door, Britt’s also journeyed to Brazil due to reported sightings of valkyrie-like blonde beauties who have been seen with these politicians shortly before they turned up dead. As luck would have it, the mission coincides with Brazil’s infamous Carnival, during which a racing event will be held – perfect for the Mero Group’s cover as a racecar team.

Once again it’s the preparation for the race that takes the brunt of this portion of the storyline; very rarely do we see Britt or the team’s head driver, Greg, actually take part in a race. And also these prep scenes continue the series’s curious homoerotic tenor, with lots of otherwise-pointless details about Britt “gripping” gearshifts or screwdrivers or what have you. (Not to even mention the many, many references to Britt’s “heavy penis” and whatnot…sounds like a medical condition, if you ask me.)

While Carnival rages in all its uninhibited glory about them (which gives Rossmann ample opportunity to mention all of the “swaying breasts” and “erect penises” of the naked celebrants), Britt and teammate Karl head off into the jungle. Their destination: the ruins of a Mayan temple from which the dead medicine man’s ghost supposedly operates. Karl though can’t hack the bad vibes and takes off, leaving Britt solo. When he spots yet more swaying breasts and erect penises headed his way – a line of Carnival celebrants branching off into the jungle – Britt follows them and pretty soon gets his ass caught by bona fide jungle Amazons.

These statuesque blonde women are so incredibly beautiful that men lose all senses when looking at them; this though is due to their psychic powers. Also, they walk around the jungle fully nude! Shackled in their village in the depths of the jungle, Britt also meets Dr. Sin, the supposedly “missing” North Korean anthropologist. Sin is actually a James Bond-style villain and has come here to harness the psychic powers of the Amazons to take over Brazil…and then the world! Also, Sin is a hermaphrodite!!

The level of sleaze Rossmann descends to (ascends to?) throughout this section is a wonder to behold…naked Amazon beauties traipsing about; a CIA agent captured, tortured, roasted and then eaten; copious descriptions of Sin’s hermaphrodite anatomy; tons of strange scenes where a nude and shackled Britt loses sexual control of himself due to the psychic manipulations of the Amazons; and even an actualization of that curious tenor where Sin (consistently referred to as “he” in the narrative) grabs hold of Britt’s manhood seconds before Britt orgasms from the Amazonian psychic chicanery!

Again, the only thing missing here is an actual sex scene, which is only strange given how plentiful (and explicit) they were in previous volumes. What’s odd is that much is made of how the Amazon chieftess makes Britt her lover for one night, the challenge being that if Britt doesn’t please her she’ll have him castrated, but Rossmann doesn’t get into details on the actual night, despite building it up so much. (An even bigger miss is when, later in the narrative, Britt’s girlfriend/teammate Kelly is challenged to sexually pleasure the Amazons or face death…and Rossmann apparently forgets all about it!)

A staple of the previous books was the longwinded explanation the villain would give Britt once having him in custody. Here Rossmann takes that and basically spends around 75% of the novel on it; once Britt’s been captured, we are faced with an endless string of scenes where Sin will question Britt, baldly exposit on the latest metaphysical research, and then tell him his plans for world conquest. And of course Britt exposits right back; vast chunks of the Mind Masters books read like excerpts from a magazine article on ESP or psychic research or whatever, with quotation marks merely bracketing the information in a lame attempt at passing it all off as “dialog.”

Meanwhile Britt’s fellow Mero operatives try to find him. Kelly, the young American college student Britt saved back in London, in The Door (I’m sure we all remember that unforgettable and touching scene where she screwed the gearshift of Britt’s car, right??), has apparently become a fellow operative in a bit of narrative sleight of hand. Somehow in the unstated time between volumes she’s gone from London to LA, where she’s offered herself as a human guinea pig to Mero to test-case those psionic-boosting pills Britt popped in the last volume, and now she’s come to Brazil, here to put her newfound powers to use in the quest to rescue Britt.

Even Greg, previously a blank slate of a character, has a lot of narrative time here. Rossmann also builds up a nasty feud between John, the scientist of the team, and Kelly; the pointedly stated reason behind John’s dislike being the sole fact that Kelly is a woman. (Hmmm…) Whereas the earlier books shunted these other Mero members off to the side while Britt handled everything on his own, here we have extended sequences where we read all about their trials and tribulations.

Britt learns all about the Amazon beauties – and this being Rossmann, we learn all there is to know. They’re almost clones of one another, and savage rites ensure that only the strongest survive. Also, they rule men, keeping them shackled, castrating ugly and frail ones and keeping the “good” ones in breeding pits. And all men in the Amazon village are kept in line with a garrotte-like string that’s tied about their scrotums; one yank from an upset Amazon and it’s bye-bye to their balls.

Even though Rossmann denies us the scene, Britt apparently keeps the head Amazon honcho happy, but that doesn’t stop her from attempting to sacrifice him when Britt refuses to give Sin the info he wants. Sin, through some nebulous means, is able to rule the Amazons…Rossmann has it that his hermaphrodite nature gives him this privilege. Finally we have one of the few action scenes in the novel, Britt once again blasting away with psychic eyeblasts, as in the previous book…cue lots of “dialog” about how the fear of incipient death might unleash awesome psychic powers.

An interesting thing about Amazons is that our heroes are presented as a bunch of paranoid pill-poppers who are united against the US government. There’s a strong anti-US foreign policy sentiment at work here, very unusual in the world of men’s adventure. Sin rails on and on against America and how Vietnam was really waged so that the US government could get hold of more oil fields. (Which doesn’t sound familiar at all.) He claims that the US is doing the same thing in Brazil, looking to exploit the country’s untapped oil fields by installing a puppet president.

Also, Amazons is sort of like the men’s adventure novel Terence McKenna never wrote. There’s a goofy scene where Britt is saved by an actual ayahuasca vine – one that crawls across a field so that it can place one of those psionic-boosting pills in Britt’s mouth! There’s a lot of material in Amazons that could almost come out of McKenna’s 1993 book True Hallucinations, which served for an unusual reading experience for me, given that I’d recently listened to McKenna’s 1984 “Talking Book” audio production of True Hallucinations (complete with “psychedelic” sound effects and hippie rock…search for it online if you want an unusual listen on your work commute).

Rossmann eventually gets around to amping the tension. Kelly proves herself a more memorable protagonist than Britt, arriving on the scene and kicking Amazon ass in no time. Popping those pills and blowing blonde psychic warriors away with eyeblasts, she succeeds in getting herself crowned as the new chieftess, though as mentioned to do so she must pass two tests. First she must fight, unarmed, several ferocious men to the death, after which she must sexually satiate several of the Amazon women! But while Rossmann fully documents the first test, he completely omits the second, not even mentioning it again…and I doubt it was something the publisher cut out; a lesbian sequence would’ve been the least of this series’s exploitative moments.

There’s more action later in the tale as a CIA strike force descends upon the Amazon village, blasting away from some Huey helicopters. Here Britt, for I think the first time in the series, actually acts like a men’s adventure protagonist, going up solo against the invaders. Of course, he’s using his eyeblasts instead of a genre-customary machine gun or whatever, but still, at least it’s something. Strangely though Rossmann chooses not to end the novel with this powerful scene, instead apparently remembering all that shit about the medicine man’s ghost and so now focusing on that plot.

So then Amazons limps to a close as Britt and Karl dig up the medicine man’s body in an attempt to “free” the ghost, and then the spirit goes off and quickly wreaks vengeance…it’s all like Ghostbusters or something, and you wonder where the naked blonde beauties went. Oh, and Kelly’s passion for Britt has “cooled” in the weeks(?) since last seeing him, but she might still love him, or maybe not…I get the impression Rossmann is attempting to build up a long-simmer love story here, a will they or won’t they? sort of thing, which of course is rendered moot given how much sex Britt has with various women during any given assignment. (And one last time, let’s not forget that gearshift-screwing scene…)

Only one more novel in the series was to follow: Recycled Souls, which is actually referenced, by name, on the last pages of Amazons. In a “funny” bit of self-reference, Rossmann has it that Britt’s cases are given the same names as the actual Mind Masters novels, and “Recycled Souls” is the name of his next assignment. Also Rossmann slyly mentions again that “real” Mero operatives are out there, getting information out to the people…including one author who is writing it all under the guise of an action series.

So who knows, maybe there really are megalomaniacal North Korean hermaphrodites out there with an army of psychic Amazon warriors at their beck and call…

Zardoz

book reviews, psychedelic, Sci-Fi, Signet Books Comments Off

Nov 122012

Zardoz, by John Boorman and Bill Stair
April, 1974 Signet Books

Zardoz is one of those films that’s more fun to talk about than to watch, just a weird blitz of a movie, with a flying stone head, future hippie communes, rampant toplessness, and Sean Connery running around in thigh-high boots and red diapers. At the very least, I can respect director/writer/producer John Boorman’s attempt to “go beyond 2001.” I mean, you’d never see someone attempt anything like this movie in today’s world, where most sci-fi is just cgi-laden, PG-13 junk that caters to the tweener market.

What’s most surprising about this novelization is how slim it is. Given the elaborate/psychedelic nature of the actual film, one would expect the novel to be a bloated mess. Instead it is so focused that it almost comes off like some tractate from a forgotten gnostic religion. According to his preface, Boorman’s initial draft of Zardoz more resembled a novel, and after filming the movie in late 1973 he decided that perhaps it should be a novel after all. So he called in colleague Bill Stair, who helped Boorman during the writing stage of Zardoz, and went about fashioning it all into a book, using excised portions and storylines from his earlier screenplay drafts.

One thing I can say is, if you rewatch the actual film after reading this book, you will certainly understand everything you see. Zardoz is pretty unique in that it’s a film that shows more than it tells, so this novel really fills in a lot of blank spots. And this isn’t the typical sort of film novelization, where it’s the work of some contractor who’s churning out a book based on some early draft; this is the actual work of the film’s creator.

The story follows the film quite closely, only changing things here and there, with the biggest changes coming at the climax. Those who have seen the film though will not find anything much different in the opening section, other than a brief background on protagonist Zed – we learn that his father was also an Exterminator, thus high above the common rabble, and so Zed too was raised to be a leader of men.

The setting is hundreds of years in the future, and some apparent calamity has sent hummanity back into a near-primitive existence. Zed is an Exterminator who rides about on his horse, armed with pistols and rifles, blowing away the Brutals, ie peasants and the like. His god is Zardoz, a gigantic stone head that flies around and pronounces things like “The penis is evil” in a booming voice, then spits out more pistols and rifles from its gaping mouth. (Can you imagine Boorman pitching this to the studios? Man, there will never be another time in Hollywood like the early ‘70s.)

We meet Zed as he has snuck into Zardoz’s mouth, lifted off into the air and flying inside his god. Zed is not filled with holy reverence, though. We eventually learn that Zed is here for revenge. Instead of being the murderous villain we expect him to be, Zed is actually enlightened – for one, when Zardoz proclaimed that the Exterminators stop exterminating and instead force the Brutals into slavery, to harvest crops, Zed started to suspect something was up. Then, after a mysterious meeting with some shadowy figure in a library, Zed began to read, homeschooling himself…and he was a fast learner, too, as the novel informs us that Zed is a “super mutant,” with both physical andmental superiority over normal humans.

All this is learned much later in the book (and film), but long story short, Zed discovers in the goofiest possible way that his god Zardoz is nothing but a joke. (Famously, the name is a play on The Wizard of Oz.) So Zed has snuck within the stone head to find out where it comes from, who is behind it. So focused is he on his mission that when he sees another man inside the stone head (Arthur Frayn, the creator of Zardoz, though we don’t learn this until later), Zed simply shoots the bastard and watches him fall to the ground far below.

The stone head lands in a vast plot of land filled with buildings and robe-wearing Eternals, ie humans who have somehow learned to cheat death and now live in a sort of hive community. This place is called the Vortex, and it is protected by an invisible barrier. Zed comes in contact with some of the Eternals, but plays dumb, not admitting to having killed Frayn. Not that it much matters, though, for the Eternals regenerate, even if the body is destroyed, and even now Frayn’s embryo is growing into an adult being.

A pair of Eternals latch onto Zed as if he’s a wayward dog, or at least one of Pavlov’s dogs. The first “normal” human they’ve seen in perhaps centuries, they marvel over Zed’s “barbarian” nature and carry out various experiments on him. In particular they are fascinated by his lusts and desires. Since these people cannot die they’ve cast aside their sexual impulses, with the result that no one now has sex and no children have been born for hundreds of years.

Things proceed much as in the film. After a psychedelic group mind-vote, the Eternals deem to allow Zed to stay in the Vortex for a few days, until Frayn has regenerated – then they can get to the bottom of what happened to him. Meanwhile Zed is shuffled around the Vortex, sometimes hanging with Friend, a male Eternal who despises his immortality, other times being traded off between Consuella and May, female Eternals who harbor lustful thoughts behind their sneers. The book even replicates the unintentionally hilarious scene where the gals try to goose Zed’s libido via a series of sexual images projected on a screen.

Zed’s mere presence fosters revolt within the Vortex, which in addition to Eternals is made up of those who have rebelled and have been aged as punishment, and finally those who are so apathetic that they do nothing but sit around and stare into nothingness. The moral of the story is that man is not designed for infinite existence, and immortality will eventually lead to apathy and madness.

Along the way Zed learns a bit about the Vortex. Most importantly he learns of the Tabernacle, a mysterious force which apparently controls the Vortex and its occupants. It also mentally unites them and keeps them from remembering how it was created, or indeed where it even is, so that they may never destroy it. Zed, who has sworn to destroy the Vortex, realizes that to do so he must destroy the Tabernacle. But to do that, he must first figure out what it is. Meanwhile, he discovers that the Tabernacle is trying to destroy him.

With a group of Eternals led by Consuella out to kill him, Zed hides out with Friend and a gaggle of May’s female followers. They understand that Zed can save them, but he must be prepared first. Since time is of the essence, they must instruct him by “touch-teaching.” This entails a very elaborate and very psychedelic section where Zed mentally voyages into inner and outer space, and really clarifies all of the nonsensical stuff that occurs in the film version.

Here the novel delivers the answers that the film did not. For one, we discover that the Vortex is really a spaceship, one that never left the earth. Hence the force field which surrounds the place, which is really just clear material of dense construction that was created to endure the rigors of space travel. (Why is it clear? So the spaceship occupants could see outside into space and thus manuever around asteroids and the like…!) The Eternals were so created so that they could survive the long years of space voyaging, and indeed their fellows are far out into space, but for whatever reason this particular ship never took off, and the Eternals instead became vapid occupants of a desolate earth.

Still in his psychedelic mind-trip, Zed sees the construction of the Tabernacle. Created by a scientist, it “lives” in crystals which are implanted in the minds of each of the Eternals. Further, to ensure that none of them ever died, the scientist made each of them, including himself, forget how the Tabernacle was created. It just sort of goes on and on, with Zed free-floating through psychic space, witnessing past events – that is, when one of the female Eternals isn’t having astral sex with him. There’s a lot of psychedelic-hued purple prose here, with Zed getting busy on the mental plane with a few of the Vortex gals.

The denoument is basically the same as the film. Chaos overtakes the Vortex and Zed’s fellow Exterminators swoop in, delivering the sweet relief of death. Zed, who was being prepared as the ultimate deliverer of the Eternals, has been reborn after his astral/psychic voyaging, and can no longer bring himself to murder. Nothing stops his old Exterminator friends, though, who chop down characters like Friend and the reborn Frayn, who go to their deaths with cheer, in what I assume we are to take as a happy ending. Zed meanwhile escapes with Consuella, where we are told – just as in the film – that they eventually have a child and then grow old together and die.

Writing-wise the book is pretty good, with a literate feel...or, at least, the striving for a literate feel. It does though have the expected clinical/sterile tone I get from most British pulp, but in this case it actually complements the aloof tone of the story itself. Finally, the authors are adept at doling out metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, serving up some truly delirious dialog. (Choice line: "Stay close to me, inside my aura.")

So then, the novel really exists as a clarification of the events in the film, sort of like a companion piece. I guess the biggest compliment I can pay it is that, after reading this book, I wanted to watch Zardozagain. And who knows, maybe one of these days I’ll get drunk enough that I actually will.

The Specialist #5: The Maltese Vengeance

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Aug 302012

The Specialist #5: The Maltese Vengeance, by John Cutter
October, 1984 Signet Books

Unfortunately it’s one step forward, two steps back for the Specialist -– after a mostly-great fourth volume, author John Cutter (aka John Shirley) reverts to the repetitive, page-filling nature of the first two volumes of the series. The Maltese Vengeance is sort of a tedious affair, mostly given over to hero Jack Sullivan trying to figure out who wants to kill him while he’s vacationing on Malta, and Sullivan’s ensuing plans for vengeance. The reader spends the entire tale hoping that the plot will open up beyond this, but it never does.

My guess is that the breakneck publication pace was wearing Shirley down. The Psycho Soldiers was a cool slice of action exploitation, with a Charles Manson-esque killer running afoul of Sullivan. The Maltese Vengeance loses all of that, coming off like just a generic action novel. It opens with a bang, though: Sullivan, fishing off the coast of Malta, is fired on by a cannon from a fort in the harbor. Trying to find out who is behind his attempted murder, Sullivan takes on the local cops (not killing any of them) in his escape attempt, and eventually hooks up with Oliver “Ollie” Tryst (Oliver Twist??), a fellow mercenary and an old friend of Sullivan’s.

The two learn that the culprits were a force of American traitors, ‘Nam vets who now sell military hardware to terrorists. The guy in charge is Gortner, who back during the war massacred a village of innocents. During his massacre Gortner happened to murder a young Vietnamese woman and her child – this was the wife of Warneck, a disillusioned, drug-addicted shell of a man who now lives in Malta. It turns out that it was Warneck who summoned Sullivan to Malta; Warneck’s intent was to hire Sullivan to kill Gortner, but somehow Gortner’s men got hold of the news first, and so decided to take out Sullivan before he could take out them. Their mistake, as Sullivan often states, was that they didn’t kill him.

So this proves to be the plot entire. Gortner and his cronies are bringing in a host of new, experimental weaponry to sell to a delegation of Libyans. The most interesting character here is Skulleye, a Libyan so called due to the blue skulls tatooed on his eyelids. Skulleye you see was a follower of the infamous Blue Man, ie the terrorist leader Sullivan killed back in #3: Sullivan's Revenge. I guess Shirley must’ve realized he bumped off the Blue Man too soon, as he sets up Skulleye to be an even greater threat.

In fact Skulleye’s scenes are the only ones that bring to mind the better parts of the preceding novel. Skulleye is apparently impossible to kill, and there are several scenes where he’s shot up or blown away, only to come back to life. It’s a deft bit of dark comedy, and Shirley intimates that Skulleye will return in later volumes. Unfortunately the other characters aren’t nearly as memorable; Gortner in particular is pretty bland, and doesn’t get much narrative time, vastly outshone by Skulleye, who isn’t even the main villain of the piece.

As usual Sullivan still manages to get lucky, and here it’s with Rosalita, a fiery local beauty who throws herself at him. This entails the one graphic sex scene in the book, but Rosalita becomes a bit annoying, and in fact proves to be the (near) undoing of Sullivan and Tryst. Spurned by Sullivan, she tries to set him up, going to Gortner and telling him that Sullivan is planning a nighttime raid on Gortner’s compound. Gortner has his men lie in wait.

What’s unexpected is that this sequence proves to be the climax of the novel, taking up a full third of the narrative. It’s sort of endless, with Sullivan on the prowl in Gortner’s place, escaping the trap, fighting as he evades both Gortner’s soldiers and the Malta cops, rushing to a long standoff on a clifftop. It just kind of goes on and on, and again lacks the twisted nature of the last book.

Shirley still works in some of his humor, though. I haven’t figured out yet if he’s spoofing the stereotypical gung-ho action hero through Sullivan or what, but there’s a laughable part (intentional?) toward the very end where Sullivan, alone against a horde of enemy soldiers, psyches himself up to keep fighting by recalling the innocent people slain by Gortner all those years ago, and Sullivan starts screaming, “For the children!” as the enemy converge upon him. Shirely writes it that even the enemy soldiers are baffled at this, so who knows.

I didn’t much enjoy The Maltese Vengeance, but I figure this was only a momentary lapse. I mean, for all the boring stuff, there are still a few inventive touches, like the Arabic slavemaster Sullivan and Tryst deal with midway through the novel. And I still say The Specialist is everything those Gold Eagle Executioner novels should have been.

The Mind Masters #3: The Door

book reviews, horror, Ian Ross, John Rossman, Men's Adventure Novels, Mind Masters, Sci-Fi, Signet Books Comments Off

Jul 192012

The Mind Masters #3: The Door, by John F. Rossmann
November, 1975 Signet Books

I'm still trying to figure out if the good outweighs the bad in the Mind Masters series. While I found the first volume to be a poorly-written bore, the second volume was an awesome blast of Eurocult sleaze. This third volume sadly returns to the sometimes-banal nature of the first volume, but occasionally brings back some of the sleazy nature of Shamballah.

If anything, the life of hero Britt St. Vincent is a hectic one. We learn that The Door takes place a mere week after the events in Shamballah (and Shamballah took place two weeks after Mind Masters #1!), and Britt and his fellow racing team/psychic investigators are already in Salisbury, England. The race takes up a large portion of the narrative this time; rather, I should say the preparation for the race.

I'm by no means a fan of Formula 1/NASCAR/etc, so this stuff really bored me -- and I don't exaggerate when I say that many, many scenes are nothing more than Britt and his team standing around in a garage and picking up screwdrivers (there's probably a Freudian element at play, I'm sure). As usual Rossmann's characters are a gabby bunch, and so again with The Door we have blocks and blocks of "dialog" in which the characters dump information upon one another in the baldest display of exposition I have ever encountered.

Beyond the exposition, Rossmann clumsily juggles too many plots. Is the concern here the psychic emanations from nearby Stonehenge? Or is it the massive power lines which are apparently sending the locals into fits of rage? Or is it Jack the frickin' Ripper, who apparently is alive and well and eating the livers of young women while they're having sex in the darkened moors of Salisbury? Actually The Door is about all of these things. Given that we have here the makings of three fairly interesting plots, you'd figure that the story would move, but The Door instead is the slowest-paced entry in the series yet, much more focused on Britt's conversations with a local professor who has been researching Stonehenge.

The professor has it that Stonehenge was a monument created by "ancient astronauts" (a topic which I hate to my core, mostly because it steals away mankind's gift for innovation and hands it to mythical, nonexistent aliens of the past) who, after their spaceship crashed, built the monument as a sign so the rest of the astronauts, scattered about the world as they bailed out of their crashing ships, could find their fellows and go home. Stonehenge then is "the door," a conduit through which the astronauts could astrally travel back to their home planet.

But even this storyline is a bit messy, because Rossmann (via his speaking conduit the professor) further states that the ancient astronauts were travling in "plasma form," which makes me wonder why they'd need a space ship. No matter, though -- the professor's theory is correct, of course, and there's actually a tunnel beneath the sacrificial stone in Stonehenge that leads to a cosmic pyrmaid...exactly like the one the mummified Nazi used "last week" in Shamballah!

If you are rolling your eyes at all of this, get prepared to roll them some more, because staggeringly enough The Door gets dumber. First though I need to tell you more about Jack the Ripper. Kept alive via the same "cosmic mummification" methods as seen in the previous volume (indeed, Jack just hangs out in the hidden cell beneath Stonehenge), the Ripper comes to every twenty-eight years to kill nubile women and eat their livers.

Britt comes upon these grisly murders shortly after meeting a cute American college student who comes by the garage, asking each of the racing team for their dates of birth. She's a gypsy, living near Stonehenge, and makes her living giving horoscopes; as Britt gives the girl, Kelly, a ride home, she tells him that another gypsy family has arrived on the scene, a mysterious one which sets off Britt's Spidey sense.

Previous novels were marked by some of the most extreme and explicit sex I've yet read in the men's adventure genre, in particular Shamballah, which was for the most part straight-up porn. The Door backtracks on this; you know of course that ladykiller Britt is going to have sex with Kelly, but Rossmann holds back until about seventy pages in. (This must be an unusual turn for Britt, given that in the previous volume -- remember, just "last week" -- he was having sex with his German girlfriend promptly after meeting her...not to mention going to a Black Mass orgy with her immediately afterwards.)

However when Rossmann does write the sex scene we're expecting, it's pretty weird; affected by those mysterious power lines as they sit in Britt's car, Kelly engages in a bit of "auto-erotica" as she screws the gearshift in Britt's car while going down on Britt himself. Personally I'd get the interior of the car cleaned after this, but Britt thinks nothing of it, more confused on why the two of them were so suddenly overcome by passion before passing out. Indeed there's a whole bunch of narratively-convenient passing out in The Door. Britt will often be on the cusp of discovering something, but then will pass out, coming to back in the garage or wherever.

As for those mysterious power lines, apparently they have been built by a corporation with government ties -- Rossmann (and his characters) are very concerned about psychic enslavement, and Britt's company the Mero Group is dedicated to preventing the governments of the world from taking over the minds of the people. Personally I find this naive; if we were to fear psychic enslavement from anyone it would be business corporations or advertisers. But the government is the bad guy in this series -- any government -- and I can respect that.

Anyway, Britt sort of wants to find out what's going on with those power lines that are driving the locals insane -- at one point he's even attacked by a friend of Kelly's and knocks the guy out, making him puke(!) -- but there's also this deal with the Ripper, and anyway Britt would rather go back and gab with the professor about ancient aliens or articles in Life magazine.

The Ripper stuff gets even goofier; attacked by the undead ghoul, Britt chases after him, firing "psychic blasts" from his eyeballs. The Ripper runs off for Stonehenge and Britt gives chase. Here he discovers the cell beneath the monument as well as the pyramid within. And there he finds the mummified Ripper, lying on the pyramid platform, as if asleep. What does Britt do? He basically just shrugs and then leaves!!

Read that again and let it sink in. This is yet more indication that Rossmann has a hard time working out drama or action. He comes up with interesting concepts but tosses them around, not tying anything together until narratively convenient. Britt doesn't destroy the Ripper here, of course, because Rossmann wants to save that for the finale. It doesn't matter, though, because the "power lines" plot sort of takes precedence at this point; Britt discovers that the other group of gypsies is really a ComBlock-trained team of psychic researchers. After another fight Britt is captured, as is Kelly.

As in the previous books, this develops into a James Bond-esque scenario where the villain unloads his beliefs and opinions on Britt for pages and pages. The lead villain is a Vietnamese politician who tries to get Britt to join his side while showing off his toys. Here the lurid vibe of Shamballah returns. This group has kidnapped pretty young local women so they can be sold as sex-slaves. First though the women must be trained. Britt watches on -- aroused, I must add -- as he is shown these bound and nude women as they are screwed by mechanical dildos!

But wait, there's more. The villain encourages Britt to take one of the girls for a test drive. So, while he and Britt lay near one another, screwing the bound and gagged women beneath them, the villain proceeds to talk for pages and pages about his plans for world conquest. The whole scene is staggering in a way. Oh, and I forgot to mention the psychic friggin' computer, which can read Britt's mind and so will know instantly if he's planning to escape; if Britt thinks any such thoughts, the computer will alert the villains, who will kill Kelly -- who, by the way, Britt is apparently starting to love, gearshift-screwing and all.

Britt of course manages escape, killing several of the villains and freeing some of the women, but there's still more of them out there. (Oh, and the Ripper, can't forget about him.) Here Britt becomes a full-on psychedelic superman; the scientist on his team has created pills which boost Britt's psychic powers so that he'll be able to unleash his eyebolts at whim. Britt heads back out into Stonehenge and psychically blows away more of the henchmen, blasting off arms and legs and even causing some of them to explode.

After which we come to the coolest scene in the novel -- as well as the dumbest. The Ripper attacks again, just happening along while Britt's otherwise busy with the ComBlock villains, and Britt goes after him. Chasing him back to the Stonehenge pyramid, Britt himself hops on the platform and voyages astrally into space! Without question the most psychedelic sequence I've read in an action series novel, this whole chapter is well-written and interesting. But then it gets dumb. Then it gets dumb in a big way.

A black hole sucks up the Ripper's astral body and Britt's in danger as well -- he's in a sort of plasma form, just like those damn ancient aliens, so he's susceptible to such things. Britt, about to die, calls out to God for help. And God helps him!! I was reminded of that scene in Blood Bath where Johnny Rock prayed to the Lord to give him the courage to continue feeding mobsters to his rats. (Okay, that never happened.)

Seriously though, it gets even dumber. Upon returning to his earthy form there in the Stonehenge pyramid, Britt proceeds to tell Kelly all about how great God is and how "He" has been unjustly ignored by the snobbish atheists who rule the modern world of science. He goes on like this for the whole chapter! I mean, it's all just...I don't even know what it is. I've never read Christian fiction, but I'd bet that even those authors would never pull such a narrative cop-out.

Anyway, I'm finally wrapping this up. Again Rossmann displays his uncertainty with dramatic structure; after doing away with the Ripper and the other villains, Britt just sort of sits around for the final quarter of the novel. Indeed most of it appears to be set-up for the next installmet, which sounds like it will be a return to the lurid bliss of Shamballah: Britt ventures to Brazil, where he will take on a tribe of psychic-powered Amazon beauties! Still, though, the denoument of The Door is just as lackluster as the first half, with lots of talking and thinking.

So like I wrote above, I'm not sure if the good outweighs the bad with this series. Some of the concepts are interesting, some are aggravating. The characters are lifeless and dull, able to spout out reams of info, no matter how obscure. (The only writer I know of who outdoes Rossmann in the bald exposition department would be Mark Ellis, writing as James Axler in the turgid Outlanders series, where bland, unlikable characters info-dump upon one another in a fashion that would sicken even the protagonists of CSI.) The lurid quotient has been somewhat diminished, replaced by a tepid sort of plodding tone, not to mention an unexpected and unwarranted venture into Christian fiction. In fact, despite the three separate plot lines, not much really happens in The Door, and it comes off as a nonentity in the series.

But for all that, The Mind Masters is still pretty entertaining in its own twisted way -- I mean, William Burroughs was even a fan!

The Specialist #4: The Psycho Soldiers

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Mar 222012

The Specialist #4: The Psycho Soldiers, by John Cutter
August, 1984 Signet Books

With this volume of The Specialist, author John Shirley comes into his own as "John Cutter," turning out what is easily the best installment of the series yet. While the three previous volumes were good, they were still padded a bit too much, with Shirley obviously having a hard time finding his footing in the world of men's adventure fiction. Here though he fires on all cylinders from the first page to the last, delivering a taut, action-filled novel that also manages to poke fun at not only the genre but the protagonist himself.

The novel is titled The Psycho Soldiers, but the psychos here aren't soldiers, which leads me to believe that Shirley titled his manuscript "The Psycho Killers," which is how he refers to them throughout. Swenson is the head psycho, so violently insane that we're told that even Charles Manson looks up to the guy. Then there's Esmerelda, a raven-haired beauty who claims to have psychic abilities. Two others complete the bill, minor characters in the long run: Ortega, who gets off on murder, and another sick bastard whose name I've forgotten.

For some reason I never understood, a KGB cell team breaks these nutcases out of their mental institutions in the opening of the novel. They kidnap an industrialist and his daughter after taking out the rest of his family in horrific ways -- full-on Manson family stuff here, with Shirley piling on the graphic description.

Meanwhile our hero Jack "The Specialist" Sullivan, who is slowly getting back into the mercenary game after the death of his contact/best friend Malta in the previous volume, is contacted by Knickian, a DEA agent who also briefly worked with Sullivan in the past. Knickian has discovered a turncoat within the agency, one who has funded the KGB cell and the breakout of the four psychos. After meeting with the mother of the kidnapped industrialist, Sullivan is raring to find Swenson and his comrades and kill them real good.

Sullivan now has become a full-fledged Imitation Executioner, driving around in his own "warwagon," a customized bullet-proof van that can fire rockets! Shirley also pokes fun at our hero's stern patriotism, at his single-minded obsession with justice and revenge. Shirley also manages to sneak in some of his horror roots, adding a sort of supernatural thrust to Sullivan; he can now "sense" who is good and who is bad -- and the "bad," of course, deserve to be killed. Also, when angry Sullivan becomes a sort of Hulk, his rage powering him to superhuman strength. The cover proclaims him "the toughest action hero of them all," and Shirley takes that to heart; when he's pissed, which is often, Sullivan is basically unstoppable.

Shirley works up the plot a bit, with some mystery over why the nutcases were sprung from their prisons, but the novel eventually becomes more of a chase sort of thing. After Sullivan frees the captured industrialist and his daughter, Swenson and his pyshcos manage to escape, and Sullivan gives chase. This proves to be the plot for the rest of the novel, Sullivan always one step behind Swenson, who cuts a swathe of death and misery through the rural areas of New York state. Along the way Sullivan manages to pick up a female companion, a young soldier named Beth Pepper who is a sergeant in the WAC (ie, "Sergeant Pepper"); she is of course gorgeous, and she's got a crush on Sullivan.

In yet more in-jokery, Shirley reveals that Sullivan is so legendary that exposes are run on him in Soldier of Fortune magazine. (Sullivan's response? "Those bastards! I'll have to cancel my subscription!") Beth happens to have her own copy with her -- she meets Sullivan after taking a few shots at his bullet-proof van, mistakenly thinking he was part of the group who kidnapped the industrialist and murdered his family -- and soon enough she seduces Sullivan. There follows a Shirley-patented sex scene with the obligatory mention of Sullivan's "eight-inches" and even, believe it or not, features the line from Beth: "Will you take me through the back door?" Yeah, you wouldn't read anything like that in a Gold Eagle-era Executioner novel!

But then, Shirley's The Specialist is everything those Gold Eagle books should have been. Rather than playing everything straight and serious like the majority of those Gold Eagle ghostwriters did, Shirley subtly spoofs the genre and its cliches while still delivering a fun thrill-ride. He also delivers on the exploitation angle hinted at in previous volumes, with graphically-depicted carnage that follows in Swenson's wake, and also Sullivan again pulling off sadistic feats that would make Philip Magellan or Johnny Rock envious, my favorite being when Sullivan picks up one poor bastard and hurls him into a trash compactor.

The Psycho Soldiers is proof enough why Sylvester Stallone must have been a fan of the series. The only question is why he made a film merely "inspired" by Shirley's series and didn't just make a straight-up adaptation of it. This particular volume would have made for one hell of an action film. The other question is why Shirley has disowned this series. I can see why he may be a bit hesistant to acknowledge his first few entries, but The Psycho Soldiers is nothing any action writer should be ashamed of.

Narc #3: The Death List

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Mar 152012

Narc #3: The Death List, by Robert Hawkes
September, 1974 Signet Books

The Narc series continues with another installment from the gifted pen of Marc Olden (here posing as "Robert Hawkes"), who brings to life the grim and gritty inner-city squalor of mid-'70s New York City. The Death List though is a bit less of an ensemble piece than previous books; for once, hero John Bolt is the star of the show. Unfortunately though the careful plotting and character-patchwork of previous volumes is lost, and The Death List settles into a sort of repetitive pattern.

The "list" in question is actually a notebook filled with the names and numbers of a globe-spanning group of heroin suppliers, smugglers, dealers, and buyers. It's owned by a high-ranking gangster in NYC named Mr. Church, who is murdered by another gangster early in the novel -- as usual in an Olden novel, the villains constantly plot against one another and indeed are more responsible for knocking each other off than the heroes themselves. But also as usual in an Olden novel, things spiral quickly out of control for the characters.

Frank Spain is the name of the gangster who ordered the hit on Mr. Church; the hitmen are a trio of brutal, dirty cops. They make the hit as an orgy's in progress; one of the attendees is a busty stewardess named Betsy Kerwin (Olden reminds us quite often that the lady is busty, by the way) who occasionally prostitutes herself for some extra cash. In the bathroom when the hit goes down, Betsy is able to throw a topcoat over her nude body and escapes down the fire escape. Later she discovers that the heroin list has been stashed in her purse -- in a narrative bit that doesn't ring true, we're informed that Mr. Church liked to stash the list in odd places, to keep it safe, and the latest such place happened to be Betsy's purse while the orgy was going on.

The dirty cops give chase and soon a young narc-in-training is dead; not only was the guy Betsy's boyfriend, he was also Bolt's trainee. So now Bolt and his comrades at D-3 are determined to find the culprits behind the hit on Church. Bolt handles the brunt of the mission himself, burning for vengeance. He tracks down Betsy, and in another of those stellar Olden setpieces we have an ongoing action sequence that has Bolt getting hold of her shortly after the hit; Spain's hitmen set in upon them; Bolt and Betsy escape, commandeering a cab; the hitmen crash the cab and chase them on foot through the deserted streets of nighttime NYC; Bolt and Betsy break into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where an unarmed Bolt heads for the Medieval section and arms himself with an ancient battle axe and crossbow bolts. It's a taut, exciting scene, the highlight of the novel.

Betsy escapes, though, and here The Death List sets into repetition. Now the rest of the novel comes off like an endless sequence of Bolt trying to find Betsy, only to lose her. Meanwhile the lady herself tries to make a buck; one of the names in the list belongs to a high-ranking US government official, and Betsy calls him with threats: if he doesn't get her some money, and quick, she'll turn the list over to the media. The official meanwhile calls his contact in France, the main heroin supplier in Church's list. The French contact promises the official that Betsy will soon be dead.

Somehow everyone ends up in Paris. Bolt's there too, posing as a Mafia hotshot; he's brought along a former girlfriend, an actual mob gal who's in love with Bolt but who lives under witness protection. For some reason that didn't make much sense, Bolt has brought this lady out of "retirment" so she can use her famous name to make it seem to the underworld that her branch of the Mafia family is in Paris because they know that Mr. Church's famous list is here, and they are interested in buying it.

What's strange is that the Paris scene is over and done with in a jiffy; we have another fine action scene in the airport, after which everyone flies back to the US. Everyone except for Betsy Kerwin, however, who in a moment of panic falls out of a grounded plane and breaks a bunch of bones. Her character then disappears from the novel and it's as if Olden realized he had too many characters to juggle and so disposed of her quickly, despite having built her up through the first half of the book. I really suspect that Olden made up these novels as he wrote, without the beneficial guidance of an outline, and sometimes the books suffer as a result.

Characters from previous novels return, including a black D-3 agent who works undercover as a pimp, going about in gaudy clothes and a big floppy hat. He and another agent serve as backup while Bolt continues posing as a Mafioso; with Betsy Kerwin out of the picture and the list gone (we learn that she mailed it to herself in Paris and it basically drops out of the narrative), Bolt now pretends that he in fact owns the list, so that the scum will come to him. And they do, Spain sending his trio of cops after it; and the cops, of course, want the damn list for themselves and plan to kill Bolt and set up Spain for the murder. Like I said, everyone's mind is always working in a Marc Olden novel.

So, not the greatest volume in the series, but still enjoyable. Also once again the cover shows events that actually happen in the book -- and look, there's the busty stewardess herself!