Review: Too Like the Lightning - Dana Chambers (Albert Fear Leffingwell)

A while back I read and very much enjoyed SOME DAY I’LL KILL YOU, the first novel in the Jim Steele series by Dana Chambers, whose real name was Albert Fear Leffingwell. In the same double volume with that book, the fine folks at Stark House Press have also reprinted the second Jim Steele novel, TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING, and as it turns out, it’s even faster-paced than the first one.

You may recall that at the end of the previous book, our radio-scriptwriter-turned-detective narrator/protagonist was going to be married to his old flame, the beautiful bronze-haired Lisa. Well, as TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING opens, Lisa is dead, or at least presumed dead, in the crash of a missing airplane. Instead of being in bed with his wife, Steele wakes up next to a beautiful blonde. He has holes in his memory, and oh, yeah, there’s a dead guy in the bathtub.

The author explains all this pretty quickly. Or does he? It seems that Steele, in the middle of mourning for Lisa, has been recruited as an intelligence agent by the U.S. government to help get to the bottom of an evil plan by German and Japanese spies to sabotage American bombers. This book was first published in 1939, so there’s a lot of worried speculation about how there are going to be bombing raids along the East Coast and a German army will invade from Mexico. The blonde and the dead guy are tied in with Steele’s assignment, of course.

But in short order, things get more complicated than that. One of the agents Steele is working with gets blown up by a bomb. He gets sapped, shot at, captured by bad guys—or are they?—escapes, finds vital information, hides vital information, calls in the FBI—or are they?—and makes several startling discoveries, each of which changes everything. Leffingwell doesn’t help clarify things by constantly skipping scenes in order to drop us back down in the middle of the action.

All of that makes it difficult to keep up with what’s going on in TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING. However, in the end everything does come together and make sense, and getting to that point is a lot of fun. This book is packed to the gills with witty banter, and Steele’s narration is so swift and breezy, you can’t help but be entertained by it. The ending is quite satisfying, too.

I don’t think I liked this one quite as much as the first one in the series, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it to fans of offbeat wartime espionage thrillers. It’s available in e-book and paperback editions. Stark House has already reprinted the next two books in the series, and I’m looking forward to reading them.

Review: Kruger's Korps - H.W. Crocker III

I’m just the right age to have been a big fan of the TV series THE RAT PATROL when I was a kid, and I read all the paperback tie-in novels based on the show, too. Plus, the first issue of SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS I bought brand-new off the spinner rack was #6, featuring the classic story “The Fangs of the Desert Fox”. Since those days, I’ve read a lot about the North African Campaign in World War II and have even written about it some in my series THE LAST GOOD WAR.

However, I’ve never read anything about it quite like H.W. Crocker III’s new novel KRUGER’S KORPS.

This yarn has a great set-up: Rolf Kruger, a young lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, looks enough like a German aristocrat and officer that he’s recruited into Wild Bill Donovan’s newly formed Office of Strategic Services and sent to North Africa to take the place of that German officer and infiltrate a special unit in the Afrika Korps. OSS spies have gotten wind of some top-secret German operation about to be launched, and they want to know what it is.

This plot strikes me as just the sort of thing you might find in a novel by Jack Higgins, Alistair Maclean, or W.E.B. Griffin, and for the first third or so, that’s what KRUGER’S KORPS reminds me of. But then Crocker veers off in another direction entirely, and wherever you might guess this novel is going . . . that ain’t it.

I can’t go into too much detail without ruining the surprises, but I will say that there are plenty of the things I love about World War II espionage novels: a stalwart but not infallible hero, some dastardly villains, murders, double-crosses, double identities, and of course, a beautiful woman who may or may not be trustworthy. Those elements are put in service of a plot reminiscent of those authors I mentioned above, but with a considerable amount of Sax Rohmer and Robert Kanigher thrown in.

This might be the first book of a series, or it might not be, but either way, KRUGER’S KORPS is a heck of a lot of fun, with plenty of action and a surprising amount of wry humor. Crocker is known primarily for his non-fiction books about war, leadership, and religion, but he’s written several novels as well, including a series of alternate history adventures starring George Armstrong Custer. I think I’m going to have to check those out. KRUGER’S KORPS is available on Amazon in hardcover and e-book editions.

Review: The Bullet Garden - Stephen Hunter

Years ago, I read Stephen Hunter’s novel HOT SPRINGS, the first book in his Earl Swagger series. I thought it was one of the best books I’d read in a long time, so I read the sequel PALE HORSE COMING, and loved it, too, although I thought it wasn’t quite as good as HOT SPRINGS. When the third book in the series, HAVANA, came out, I read it, of course, and it was okay, but not nearly as good as the first two. And after that, I never read anything else by Hunter, although I’ve always intended to and I actually own most of his books.

But then I noticed that there’s a fourth Earl Swagger novel called THE BULLET GARDEN, and it’s a prequel to the others, taking place during World War II, so I had to give it a try. THE BULLET GARDEN is set during summer 1944, after D-Day but well before the Battle of the Bulge. The American forces have gotten bogged down in the hedgerows of Normandy because a mysterious German sniper—or snipers—seems to be able to see in the dark and is eliminating American officers and NCOs, destroying morale and making it impossible for the Americans to advance. Gererals Eisenhower and Bradley want somebody to figure out what’s going on with the sniper and put a stop to it, and who better to do that than Earl Swagger, a Marine sergeant who has already made quite a reputation for himself fighting in the Pacific.

All this is established fairly quickly, and the rest of the novel follows Earl as he’s flown to England, made a major in the relatively new OSS, and launches an investigation into the sniper problem while trying to navigate the tricky back channels of politics and espionage, an area which is not one of Earl’s natural talents.

Hunter’s reputation is that of a guy who writes really well about guns and shooting. This is absolutely correct. His action scenes are very realistic and have an undeniable air of authenticity. THE BULLET GARDEN is full of great characters and scenes and bits of dialogue.

But the plot is incredibly slow to develop and muddled by page after page of description and background that’s well-written but doesn’t really do anything except show off Hunter’s prose. I’m no fan of stripped-down modern writing. I don’t mind some telling instead of showing. A lot of modern thrillers devoid of description and oh-so-careful never to mention the weather or use a speech tag other than “said”—and as few of those as possible—strike me as bland and all sounding alike. But dang, Hunter really goes overboard in the other direction in this book. It’s just too blasted wordy. Then he adds an unpleasant subplot that may be necessary for the overall story arc but really comes across as anticlimactic. There are also several cameos by real-life writers that skirt right up to the edge of being too cutesy but don't quite go over it.

Despite all that, as I said above there are some great scenes, some thrilling, some heartbreaking, that I suspect will stay with me. I still love Earl Swagger as a character and he’s in fine form in this novel. There’s enough real suspense that at times I was flipping the pages, in a hurry to find out what was going to happen. If you’ve read the first three books in this series, by all means you should read THE BULLET GARDEN, too. It’s available on Amazon in e-book, audio, hardcover, and paperback editions. But like HAVANA, it’s just okay.

Also, this novel isn’t just a prequel to the other Earl Swagger books, but it's also a prequel to Hunter’s first novel, THE MASTER SNIPER, published more than forty years ago. I happen to have a copy of that one. I think I’ll have to read it soon.

A Rough Edges Rerun: The Phantom Spy - Max Brand (Frederick Faust)

Instead of one of the Westerns for which Max Brand (Frederick Faust) is most famous, I’m writing about one of Faust’s espionage novels. THE PHANTOM SPY is set in Europe in the mid-Thirties, the era during which it was written. This isn’t a Ruritanian, Graustarkian, comic opera Europe, either. It’s the real thing, with the grim threat of Hitler’s growing power in Germany looming over everything. In Faust’s novel, however, Hitler isn’t even the real menace. The true villains are an international cabal of warmongers who think that Hitler isn’t moving fast enough and want him to go ahead and invade France right away. To further that end, they’ve managed to steal the plans for the Maginot Line and intend to present them to Hitler so that Germany can attack France’s defensive fortifications at their weakest points. (In reality, the Maginot Line didn’t pose much of an obstacle to the Germans a few years later, but Faust had no way of knowing that.) The British Secret Service sets out to steal the plans back before Hitler gets his hands on them, and the agent entrusted with the job is Lady Cecil de Waters, a British noblewoman who has offered her services as a “talented amateur” in the espionage game. (Yes, Emma Peel without John Steed is exactly what I mean.)

Giving Lady Cecil a hand is a would-be suitor of hers, wisecracking millionaire American playboy Willie Gloster, as well as a mysterious phantom spy known only as Monsieur Jacquelin who turns up when he’s most needed. Faust keeps the action moving along briskly as the characters take turns stealing the plans back and forth from each other, and in the process Willie and Lady Cecil uncover the plotters pulling the strings behind the scenes. Sometimes in his Westerns, Faust can get a little flowery and long-winded in his prose, but not here. This one cooks along in a breezy, hardboiled fashion with double- and triple-crosses, characters pretending to be other characters, fistfights and shootouts, and only occasional pauses for reflection. There aren’t many real twists to the plot – really, if you don’t figure out the true identity of the Phantom Spy early on, like when the character first appears, I’ll be surprised – but that doesn’t matter much because Faust is having so much fun, and so is the reader.

THE PHANTOM SPY first appeared as a serial in the pulp ARGOSY in 1937, under the title “War For Sale”. It was reprinted in hardback by Dodd, Mead in 1973 and then in paperback by Pocket Books in 1975, when Pocket reprinted a number of Faust’s non-Western novels. Both of those editions are available pretty inexpensively on-line. As much as I enjoy Faust’s Westerns, I’d really like to see more of his non-Westerns reprinted, especially some of the pulp serials that have never been published in book form. I believe he wrote a Revolutionary War novel that’s never been reprinted, and I’d love to read that one. There are several pirate novels, too, as well as numerous mysteries and contemporary adventures. If you’ve only read Faust’s Westerns, or if you’ve never read his work at all, give THE PHANTOM SPY a try. I really enjoyed it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 3, 2009. Since then, a number of Faust's non-Western novels have been reprinted, and I really need to get around to reading them.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spy Stories, August 1935

I associate A. Leslie Ross with Western pulp and paperback covers, of course, since he did so many great ones, but he did other sorts of covers, too, such as the one on this issue of the straight-forwardly named SPY STORIES. There are some fine authors inside this issue, too, including E. Hoffmann Price, Major George Fielding Eliot, Frederick C. Painton, Harold F. Cruickshank (not a fan of his work, personally, but he was both prolific and popular), Alexis Rossoff, and Dana R. Marsh, a name unfamiliar to me. SPY STORIES was published by A.A. Wyn, who put out five issues in 1929, took a six-year hiatus, and then published five more issues in 1935. This was the next to last issue. The scan and information are courtesy of the invaluable Fictionmags Index.

The Irish Beauty Contract - Philip Atlee (James Atlee Phillips)

THE IRISH BEAUTY CONTRACT is the fifth novel in Philip Atlee’s Joe Gall series of espionage adventures, or the sixth if you count PAGODA, an unofficial part of the series that’s the actual debut of the Gall character. I’ve read all the previous novels, and with the exception of PAGODA, the plots don’t make much sense, but the books are all very well-written.

I’m happy to report that THE IRISH BEAUTY CONTRACT actually does make sense for the most part and gives us a coherent narrative that, thankfully, continues to be very well-written. Joe Gall, who lives on an isolated, mountaintop estate in Arkansas when he’s not working on a contract basis for the U.S. government as an intelligence agent, is in New Granada (a fictional but real-sounding country in South America) pretending to be a military attaché at the local U.S. embassy while he secretly keeps track of a suspicious character from the States who may have ties to communist rebels in the country. He’s also carrying on an affair with the beautiful wife of an Irish lord.

Then violent things start to happen. Shootouts, knife fights, double crosses, secret identities, and an encounter with a jungle emperor lead Gall to a lost city high in the Andes where a final mystery awaits. (And, I might add, the solution to that final mystery is pretty hokey, even for 1966 when this book was first published.) The action flows reasonably well and Joe Gall is a sympathetic if not really all that likable narrator/protagonist.

Philip Atlee was really Fort Worth’s own James Atlee Phillips, whose first novel THE INHERITORS was something of a scandal when it was published in the early Forties because of its unflattering portrait of Fort Worth high society at the time. I’ve never read it, and I ought to. He wrote a few other novels under his real name, but he’s remembered primarily for the Joe Gall books, which were pretty successful paperback from Gold Medal in the Sixties and Seventies. They’re still available as e-books, which is how I read THE IRISH BEAUTY CONTRACT even though I own the paperback. I have the whole series in paperback, by the way, although they’re not easy to get to at the moment. So if I read more of them, which I probably will based on my enjoyment of this one, I’ll probably stick with the e-books. Although as all of you almost surely know, it’s hard to beat the smell and feel of an old paperback . . .

The Seine Vendetta - Ann Sterzinger

THE SEINE VENDETTA is a fine action/suspense novella by Ann Sterzinger set in Paris, as you’d expect from the title. The protagonist is Lisa LaRoche, an American woman who was deployed to Iraq as a Marine reservist and combat nurse. After a violent incident that left her with an unfair dishonorable discharge, she wound up in Paris where she married a Frenchman and they lived an idyllic life for a short time, before he was senselessly beaten to death by a gang of Muslim refugees, who are caught but given only two years in prison after being convicted of manslaughter. (All this is back-story and is revealed very early on, so I don’t consider it a spoiler.) Lisa descends into the bottle, tracks down a couple of the men responsible for her husband’s death after they get out of prison, and kills them. Even as a drunk, her skills at violence are still pretty good.

Then a British intelligence operative known as The Warlock shows up and offers her a job that will not only prevent a terrorist attack on Paris but also give her the chance to kill the other three men who beat her husband to death. All she has to do is stay sober . . .

The presence of The Warlock is a tip-off that this novella is connected to Jamie Mason’s novella THE NORTH ATLANTIC PROTOCOL and to CERTAIN FURY, a political thriller by Mason and Sean T. Smith that I plan to read soon. I read THE NORTH ATLANTIC PROTOCOL a couple of years ago and really liked it. THE SEINE VENDETTA is a bit of a slow burn at first as the characters and the setting are introduced, but Sterzinger’s writing is excellent and draws the reader on with no problem. Then when the action kicks in and the stakes of this supposedly simple mission get higher and higher, it moves at an absolutely breathless pace that I loved. I couldn’t read fast enough, I was so eager to find out what was going to happen.

In a world of too-fat thrillers, THE SEINE VENDETTA is the proverbial breath of fresh air. I had a great time reading it. It’s set up for a sequel, which I don’t think is written yet, but I hope it’ll be coming along soon. In the meantime, if you’re an action/adventure fan, I give THE SEINE VENDETTA a very high recommendation. It’s available as an e-book from Amazon and also on Kindle Unlimited.

The MI6 Files, Book One: Burning Lance - Brent Towns

I bought this series when I was still at Rough Edges Press, but other than that I had nothing to do with it. So now I get to read it as a fan, rather than an editor. Which is good, because I really enjoyed it. THE MI6 FILES is a spin-off from Brent Towns’ extremely popular Team Reaper series. The protagonist, former Royal Marine Commando Richard Todd, previously appeared as a supporting character in some of those books. Todd, now working for MI6, England’s foreign intelligence service, takes center stage in BURNING LANCE.

The title refers to a Russian-designed and built laser weapon meant to be launched into space and capable of destroying entire cities from there with one pulse. However, it’s stolen from the Russians before it can be launched. The identity of the thieves is a mystery. The leaders of MI6 know that such a weapon can’t be trusted in anybody’s hands, so they assign Todd the job of finding the Burning Lance, recovering it, or destroying it if he can’t get it back.

He won’t be working alone, though. The Russians have decided that the weapon is too powerful and should be destroyed, too, so Todd is teamed up with a beautiful female Russian agent in his search. Before you think that you know where that’s going, as it turns out the Russian agent is a lesbian and not interested in Todd romantically. But they do become friends and comrades-in-arms as their mission turns into a globe-trotting adventure with a somewhat surprising conclusion as it’s revealed who has the Burning Lance and what they intend to do with it. This is a high-stakes game, with the fate of millions resting on Todd and his Russian partner.

To put it simply, this is a wonderful book, part James Bond and part Man From U.N.C.L.E. It also reminded me very much of one of the early Nick Carter, Killmaster books in which Nick was teamed with a Russian agent. The writing is smooth and terse and a very welcome contrast to so many current thrillers that are bloated beyond belief and often pull their punches when it comes to the climaxes. The big finish to BURNING LANCE is very satisfying, as is the brief wrap-up that follows.

I always felt a little funny about praising books that I edited, but as I said, that doesn’t apply here. BURNING LANCE is one of the best books I’ve read this year, another winner from Brent Towns, and if you’re an action/adventure fan I give it a very high recommendation. As usual, it's available in e-book and trade paperback editions. The next book in the series is coming soon, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

Luciano's Luck - Jack Higgins

Years ago I read and enjoyed quite a few books by Jack Higgins, but then he started writing a series about a character I didn’t care for (Sean Dillon) and I got out of the habit of reading his books. Plus his writing seemed not as good, much like Alistair Maclean in the later stages of his career.

But I found myself in the mood to read one of his books, and I’m a sucker for books about gangsters, so I gave LUCIANO’S LUCK a try. The plot is an intriguing one: During World War II, a British intelligence agent arranges for Lucky Luciano to be released temporarily from prison so that they can parachute into Sicily and try to make an alliance with the capo of the Mafia there to assist the allies in their upcoming invasion of the island. So it’s a gangster book and a World War II book. Right up my alley.

And I enjoyed it, too, although it’s not without its faults. It was published originally in 1981, about the time Higgins’ books started to get not quite as good. This one is still pretty well-written. The main problem I have with it is that the plot takes a long time to really get going. The mission in Sicily doesn’t actually begin until the book is half over. Before that there’s a lot of assembling the team stuff, including the introduction of a lot of supporting characters and several Nazi bad guys. That results in not much action, which continues even after the scene switches to Sicily.

Ah, but the last 50 or so pages! That last section is a whirlwind of action with unexpected plot twists that really had me galloping along to find out what was going to happen. If the whole book had been like that, LUCIANO’S LUCK would be a classic, and also exhausting. As far as I’m concerned, it redeems the book overall and makes me glad I read it. I think I need to go back and catch up on some of the earlier Jack Higgins books I haven’t read. I have quite a few of them. Meanwhile, if you want to give LUCIANO’S LUCK a try, it’s still available in both e-book and paperback editions.

Traitor! - W. Howard Baker

I was a freshman in high school when Lancer Books published TRAITOR! by W. Howard Baker, a novel that had been published two years earlier in England by Zenith Books under the title DESTINATION DIEPPE. As a World War II espionage novel, the first in a series starring British intelligence agent Richard Quintain, it would have been right in my wheelhouse at the time, and I’m sure I’d have grabbed a copy if I’d ever seen it. As it was, more than fifty years went by before I was even aware of this book’s existence, although I vaguely remember seeing some of the later books in the Quintain series. I didn’t realize they were set during World War II, though.

It’s the summer of 1942 as this book opens. The war has been going on for three years, and Quintain has already undertaken several hazardous missions operating behind enemy lines. He’s just been presented with a medal from the king for one of them when he’s summoned by his boss, Felix Fenner, and given a new assignment. The British army is planning an invasion of the Nazi-occupied French coastal town of Dieppe, and Quintain’s job is to parachute in first, make contact with a local group of resistance fighters, and blow up a bunch of German E-boats that would otherwise be used to help repel the invasion. Quintain has a partner in this effort, a beautiful female agent who’s already been behind the lines in France and knows the members of the resistance cell they’re supposed to link up with.

There’s a twist, however, as Fenner reveals to Quintain in private. He believes that one of the group is a traitor and is working with the Germans . . . and it could easily be Quintain’s beautiful partner.

This novel reminded me a great deal of mid-Sixties TV shows such as GARRISON’S GORILLAS and BLUE LIGHT, wartime espionage dramas that are mostly forgotten these days (but I’ll bet quite a few of you reading this remember them). It’s a little talky and sparse on the action in the first half but then picks up a lot of steam in the second half before bogging down in the history of the raid on Dieppe. Other than Quintain’s involvement and the traitor storyline, the history is portrayed with considerable accuracy, if not much flair.

That said, overall the prose is slick enough that I raced through the book pretty quickly and with quite a bit of enjoyment. We don’t learn much about Richard Quintain in this one, but he seems to be a likable enough protagonist and is both smart and tough when he needs to be. The scene where he’s interrogated by a beautiful blond Gestapo she-wolf (an actual historical character, according to a footnote) is very suspenseful and well done. The book could have used a little more of such things.

W. Howard Baker was as much an editor and publisher as he was a writer, and it’s known that many of the books with his name on them were either ghosted or had uncredited collaborators. For what it’s worth, the style in this one is very similar to the Sexton Blake novel credited to Baker that I read not long ago. Whoever actually wrote TRAITOR!, I liked it enough despite its occasional shortcomings to want to read more of the Richard Quintain series. I’m glad I have several more of them on hand.

The North Atlantic Protocol - Jamie Mason

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a great fondness for good, old-fashioned secret agent yarns of the type that were so popular during the Sixties and Seventies. I also enjoy nautical adventures. Throw a little history in, too, and I’m a very happy reader. That explains why I thoroughly enjoyed THE NORTH ATLANTIC PROTOCOL by Jamie Mason.

This story is told from the point of view of a British submarine commander who’s ordered to deliver a mysterious agent known only as the Warlock to a designated point in the far North Atlantic where, as far as anybody knows, there’s not anything. On the same mission, the British sub is supposed to rendezvous with a Russian counterpart for a goodwill/public relations meeting. Well, you know there’s got to be a lot more to it than that, and the two missions are bound to intertwine more than they appear to at first . . . and you’d be right. There’s an island that’s sometimes there and sometimes not there, and a hatch leading into an underground bunker filled with sinister equipment, and an enigmatic hero in the Warlock who, evidently, is also more than he seems to be at first.

I don’t mind telling you, I had a big grin on my face as I read this book. It’s a contemporary thriller but has a tone reminiscent of Ian Fleming and Alistair Maclean (early Maclean, when he was still one of the best thriller writers ever). The Warlock is a James Bond type of character, while the sub commander reminded me of Maclean’s tough, courageous, but more down-to-earth protagonists. Mason blends the two of them expertly and keeps the action moving at a very nice pace. I had a great time reading THE NORTH ATLANTIC PROTOCOL, and if your taste is anything like mine, I think there’s a good chance you would, too. Highly recommended.

Men's Adventure Quarterly #2: The "Eyes Only" Espionage Issue -- Robert Deis, Bill Cunningham, Tom Simon, eds.

There’s no sophomore jinx for the second issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY. It remains one of the most impressive, beautifully designed publications available today. The theme this time around for this oversized trade paperback is Espionage. It features a lot of vividly reproduced artwork, including both covers and interior illustrations, from a variety of the Men’s Adventure Magazines published in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, along with seven stories (mostly fiction, even the supposedly true ones) from those magazines.

My favorites were “The Deadly Spy Mystery of the Formosa Joy Girls” by Brand Hollister, an acknowledged pseudonym, real author unknown (MAN’S ACTION, March 1963); “Operation Maneater” by Donald Honig (FOR MEN ONLY, February 1969); and “She Knew Too Much to Live” by H. Horace, another pseudonym, I’m thinking (MAN’S LIFE, October 1973). These are all action-packed yarns, and “Operation Maneater”, which is about an American agent’s efforts to bring down a counterfeiter headquartered in a compound on the Amazon in South America, is especially good and would have made a fine novel if it had been expanded. You can’t go wrong with a bad guy who has a pool full of piranha. Of course, a pool full of sharks or alligators would have been pretty good, too.

In addition to the stories and great artwork, there are also informative, entertaining essays from editors Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham and guest editor Tom Simon. MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY #2: THE “EYES ONLY” ESPIONAGE ISSUE is just great fun and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly recommended. (It's also available directly from the publisher.)

Terminal Memory - Brian Drake

Brian Drake has been making a name for himself as an author of action/adventure novels for the past few years. TERMINAL MEMORY is the first book in his latest series and features Sam Raven, a former CIA agent who has left the Company and become a sort-of-freelance vigilante for hire, due to some mysterious tragedy in his life.

After a short section that introduces Raven and has him rescuing a kidnap victim, the main storyline of this book involves a more personal mission. Several years before this book opens, while Raven was still working for the CIA, he and four fellow agents were involved in a mission in Afghanistan that saw them captured and tortured by terrorists. Now three of those former agents are dead, leaving just Raven and his traumatized former lover Mara Cole. It’s up to Raven to find Mara, keep both of them from getting killed, discover who’s behind this apparent vendetta and why, and deliver some swift and deadly justice to them.

I really enjoyed this book. Too many contemporary thrillers suffer from a bad case of bloat and are at least twice as long as their plots justify. Not so TERMINAL MEMORY. Drake doesn’t waste a word and keeps things moving at a very fast pace most of the time. When the characters do slow down to take a breath, those scenes are well-written, too. There are two more Sam Raven novels out already, and I look forward to reading them. If you’re an action/adventure fan, TERMINAL MEMORY gets a high recommendation from me.

Forgotten Books: 14 Seconds to Hell - Nick Carter (Jon Messmann)

I’ve mentioned before that when I was a kid, I was a huge fan of the secret agent boom in books, movies, and TV during the Sixties. As a freshman in high schoool, I came across a book called HANOI, part of a series of spy adventures starring a secret agent named Nick Carter, a name that also functioned as the series by-line. I was familiar with the original, dime novel version of Nick Carter because I’d read an anthology of those old detective stories a year or so earlier, and I had already learned enough about publishing to realize that this new Nick Carter was a house-name, although I had no idea who wrote the books, of course.

All that mattered to me was that HANOI was a great yarn, full of sex and violence and all the other stuff that appealed to my 14-year-old brain. (My 67-year-old brain isn’t that much different, but that’s neither here nor there.) I bought and read every Nick Carter novel I came across all the way through high school and on into college, getting many of them new off the paperback spinner rack at Lester’s Pharmacy.

14 SECONDS TO HELL, which was published in 1968, is one that I missed somehow, and I’d never read it until recently. It’s a fairly early entry in the series, #37, although the books themselves weren’t numbered at that point. (There are 261 Nick Carter novels in this modern incarnation.) During this part of the series’ run, the books are in third person and Nick is usually referred to as Nick, something that makes him a pretty likable and approachable character. He works for a super-secret government agency called AXE, where he carries the Killmaster designation. (Any resemblance to James Bond’s 00 status is entirely not coincidental.) His boss is David Hawk. He carries a Luger that he calls Wilhelmina, a dagger called Hugo, and a tiny gas bomb he’s dubbed Pierre. (There’s a reason the weapons have names, which I’ll get to later.)

In this novel, a tenuous world peace is threatened by the insane scheme of a Red Chinese scientist, Dr. Hu Tsan, who has a secret base in China from which he intends to launch seven nuclear missiles at the free world. Nick’s job is to destroy that base and the missiles, and since Russia doesn’t want a nuclear war breaking out, they assign one of their top agents to team up with him. That agent, of course, is a beautiful blonde, and she and Nick team up in more ways than one, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. The Russian girl has a secret which the cover copy totally gives away, but it’s pretty obvious so that spoiler doesn’t actually ruin much.

The first half of this book is a little slow, since it’s mostly about Nick trying to reach the evil scientist’s base and overcoming a few relatively minor obstacles along the way. The pace picks up considerably at that point, with a lot going on leading up to a slam-bang climax. The problem is, when that climax is over, there are still thirty pages left in the book, so even though there’s a little more action, it feels tacked-on to pad out the wordage.

Overall, though, 14 SECONDS TO HELL is a pretty entertaining book, and it’s not just because of its nostalgia value, either. The author behind the Nick Carter house-name is veteran paperbacker Jon Messmann, and this is the first of fifteen novels he wrote for the series in a two-year span, making him the most prolific Nick Carter author during that particular stretch. Messmann went on to create the Trailsman Adult Western series and write more than a hundred of those novels, many of which I’ve read. His style is pretty easy to recognize in this book. He tends to write long paragraphs and fairly long chapters, but despite that, his stories move along very well. I think the pacing problems in 14 SECONDS TO HELL are probably the result of its being his first entry in this series. I remember some of his later Carters, such as THE LIVING DEATH, THE AMAZON, THE SEA TRAP, and OPERATION SNAKE being excellent. Really, though, I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by him, since he has a good touch with characters and plot and writes good action scenes.

I mentioned the weapons Nick carries and the fact that they have names, and to get back to that . . . I may have written about this in other posts, and some of you know the background already, but for those who don’t, this Nick Carter series was packaged, starting out, by Lyle Kenyon Engel. In interviews, Engel claimed to have created it, but having worked for Book Creations Inc., the book packaging company he founded later on, I suspect his contribution consisted of saying, “Hey, that James Bond stuff is selling well. We should do a secret agent series.” The author hired to write the books was Michael Avallone, and my hunch is that all the details about the character came from him. Avallone was a long-time fan of the pulps and surely remembered the pulp version of Nick Carter, and possibly the dime novel detective before that. He was also a big fan of the pulp series The Avenger, in which the hero carried a pistol and a throwing knife he called Ike and Mike. (Don’t ask me which was which, I don’t remember and I’m not going to look it up.) I’m certain that’s where Hugo, Wilhelmina, and Pierre came from. AXE and Nick’s boss Hawk both sound exactly like things Avallone would have come up with. It’s no secret that Mike and I were friends and corresponded for a number of years, and we probably talked about all this in our letters, but again, that’s too long ago and I don’t recall all the details. But I’m confident that’s what happened and I believe the whole basis of the series came from Avallone, even though he wound up writing only two heavily edited novels and part of another one before he and Engel had a falling out.

Also, ‘way back at the beginning of this post, I mentioned the novel HANOI, the first Nick Carter I read. I had no idea who the author was then, but now I know it was written by Valerie Moolman, the series’ first editor who also wrote or co-wrote a dozen books in the series, including the first eight, so along with Avallone, she really set the tone for everything that came later. Those Nick Carters are her only published fiction, as far as I know, although wrote some non-fiction books and worked as an editor for many years. I owe her and Mike Avallone a debt of gratitude for their work on a series that was one of my favorites and entertained me for a long time . . . and as this post proves, still entertains me today.

Forever and a Day - Anthony Horowitz

In the Sixties, I read all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and stories while I was in junior high and high school, plus COLONEL SUN, the Bond novel by Kingsley Amis writing as Robert Markham. In the Eighties and Nineties, I read most of the Bond novels written by John Gardner (whose Boysie Oakes novels I’d also read back in the Sixties). When the series continued on into this century under the authorship of Raymond Benson, I read nearly all of those books, as well. But I’d never read any of the more recent Bond novels by various hands, until recently until I was really in the mood for one and decided to give FOREVER AND A DAY by Anthony Horowitz a try.

I’d never read any of Horowitz’s other novels, but I’ve seen and enjoyed some of the TV series he’s written. I read enough about FOREVER AND A DAY to know that it’s set in 1950 and is a prequel to CASINO ROYALE, Fleming’s first novel. Setting a Bond novel in the right time-frame was enough to predispose me to like this book. I generally don’t care for updatings and reboots.

The opening is promising, too, with 007 being murdered in Marseille. Not Bond, of course. The agent who had the 007 designation before him. Horowitz then covers Bond’s promotion of the Double-0 section, after which M gives him the assignment of finding out what happened to his predecessor. Bond doesn’t have much to go on: he knows the murdered man was investigating a French drug kingpin named Scipio, and there’s also a connection to a beautiful former British operative known as Madame 16 who has gone rogue and formed her own intelligence network. (Shades of Modesty Blaise!)

Bond’s investigation is very Flemingesque, if that’s a word. Bond gambles at Monte Carlo, meets the lovely Sixtine, has a run-in with the sinister Scipio and is threatened with torture (don’t worry, there’s plenty of actual torture, another Fleming hallmark, later on), and uncovers a connection with an American millionaire who may be an innocent dupe, or not.

There are some very nice scenes and some great Easter eggs about the character’s history (including a chapter based on an outline Fleming wrote), but really, the first two-thirds or so of this book are leisurely paced, more of a slow burn than a thriller. Horowitz really has Fleming’s style down, and it’s a pleasure to read. Eventually things kick into a higher gear, though, and FOREVER AND A DAY really takes off. When it does, it turns into pure greatness. The last 50 or 60 pages are just exhilarating, and I couldn’t turn those pages fast enough. I was back in the Sixties, sitting on my parents’ front porch on a warm summer day, totally caught up in what I was reading, and I can’t give a book a higher compliment or a better recommendation than that.

FOREVER AND A DAY (great title, by the way, also very reminiscent of Fleming) is the best book I’ve read so far this year. Horowitz has written another Bond novel, TRIGGER MORTIS, and I have a copy of it as well, so I look forward to reading it, too. In the meantime, if you’re a James Bond fan and haven’t read this book, don’t miss it.

Skills to Kill -- Brian Drake

Brian Drake has started making a name for himself as an action writer over the past few years, and his new novel SKILLS TO KILL, the first in the Steve Dane series, ought to solidify his position as one of the best new writers in the genre. Steve Dane and Nina Talikova are former intelligent agents, Dane for the United States and Nina for Russia, who have retired from their perspective agencies and teamed up, both professionally and romantically, to make their way through the dangerous world of international espionage as freelance operatives.

SKILLS TO KILL opens with the two of them getting involved in the kidnapping of a Mafia don’s daughter in Italy, but that’s just the first move in a globe-trotting adventure as Dane and Nina try to track down and bring to justice a mysterious, deadly arms dealer known only as the Duchess. Along the way they encounter old friends and enemies alike, and sometimes there’s a question just which is which—with survival riding on the answer.

This novel features plenty of action scenes told in Drake’s excellent fast-paced, hardboiled style. Dane and Nina are likable protagonists, and it’s very easy to root for them. SKILLS TO KILL is dedicated in part to the late men’s adventure novelist Jerry Ahern, and it’s easy to see his influence although Drake has his own distinctive voice. This is a thoroughly enjoyable adventure yarn. There will be at least two more books in the series, and I’m looking forward to them.

Forgotten Books: The Yellow Scourge - Curtis Steele (Frederick C. Davis)

You wouldn’t expect a pulp novel from 1934 called THE YELLOW SCOURGE to be very politically correct—and you’d be right. However, this novel, the third to feature Jimmy Christopher, Operator 5 in America’s intelligence service, actually isn’t all that objectionable. Frederick C. Davis, who authored this one under the house-name Curtis Steele, uses “the Yellow Empire” as a stand-in for Japan, but I doubt if that fooled anybody even in 1934. The Japanese characters aren’t caricatures, though, and the main villain, a freelance female spymaster, isn’t even Japanese as far as I can tell.

The plot of this yarn, which appeared in the June 1934 issue of OPERATOR #5, is pretty simple: a faction of the “Yellow Empire” military wants to start a war with the United States and attempts to do so by launching an attack on its own naval fleet with planes made to look like American craft. The fleet is visiting the California coast and Jimmy Christopher happens to be on hand, so of course he figures out right away what’s going on. Then Yellow Empire ships, again disguised as American vessels, attack merchant ships from England, France, and other European countries so they won’t come to America’s aid when the Empire declares war.

There’s some espionage going on—Jimmy Christopher clashes with the female mastermind behind the plan and undertakes a daring mission to obtain proof of the Yellow Empire’s treachery—but for the most part THE YELLOW SCOURGE is a war novel. In an eerie precursor of fears that were actually common seven years later after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Empire’s fleet bombards the American west coast, their army invades Mexico and advances on the United States from the south, and they try to destroy the Panama Canal. The Americans, led by Jimmy Christopher, of course, strike back with a long-range aerial mission like the one to Tokyo led by Jimmy Doolittle. In a bit that smacks of science fiction considering the era, they also battle the enemy with radio-controlled rockets designed by Operator 5. It all makes for a fast-moving and entertaining, if far-fetched, tale.

Almost all the elements of an Operator 5 novel are here: Jimmy Christopher pretends to be society photographer Carleton Victor and banters with his manservant Crowe; he stops in the middle of the action to demonstrate a magic trick for his pugnacious 14-year-old Irish sidekick Tim Donovan; he worries about his father, a former intelligence operative with bullets lodged near his heart so that too much excitement might kill him. Jimmy Christopher’s twin sister Nan is mentioned but doesn’t appear. This is an important novel in the history of the series, though, because it marks the introduction of feisty gal reporter Diane Elliott, who will serve as Jimmy Christopher’s love interest and the bad guys’ kidnapping target for the remainder of the series.

Don’t mistake my somewhat flippant comments for criticism: I love this series. Frederick C. Davis’s plots always hang together, and he can spin out these apocalyptic scenarios that make the reader believe Jimmy Christopher really does have to save the entire country from destruction every month. As far as I’m concerned, the Operator 5 novels are top-notch pulp adventure yarns, and if you’re a fan of that sort of storytelling and haven’t tried them, you should.

Forgotten Books: The Christmas Kill - Nick Carter (Joseph L. Gilmore)

I started reading the Nick Carter, Killmaster books when I was a freshman in high school. My first one was HANOI, and the blend of sex, violence, and international espionage had me grabbing up every book in the series I could find for the next several years. I didn’t really burn out on them until I was in college, and even after that I would read one now and then.

With Christmas coming up, I thought it might be appropriate to read a Nick Carter novel I’d never read, THE CHRISTMAS KILL, published in 1983. In this one, our hero, Agent N3 (with the Killmaster designation) for the super-secret government agency AXE, is sent to Japan by his boss, David Hawk, because an old friend of Hawk’s has asked him to investigate what appears at first to be a case of industrial espionage and sabotage. It seems that someone has blown up part of a factory that’s making toy robots to send to the United States for the Christmas toy rush, and the owner of the company blames a competing American-owned firm. However, as soon as Nick arrives in Japan, people start trying to kill him, so it doesn’t take him long to figure out that there’s more to this case than what it seems.

And honestly, if you can’t figure out everything that’s going to happen in this book, you’ve never read any secret agent novels or seen any movies in the genre. It all plays out exactly like you’d expect . . . which isn’t always a bad thing. I got a considerable amount of nostalgic pleasure out of reading this one, even though it’s a pretty minor entry in the series. I enjoyed it enough I might read some of the others I never got around to reading before.

When I starting reading these books, I had no idea who was writing them, of course. But I figured out that there had to be multiple authors and I already kind of knew what a house-name was. By now, most, maybe all, of the Nick Carter novels have been attributed to their actual authors. THE CHRISTMAS KILL, for example, was written by someone named Joseph L. Gilmore, who wrote eight Nick Carters as well as at least one suspense novel and one horror novel under his own name. His style is very straightforward, nothing fancy about it, but despite the thin plot he keeps things moving along at a fairly nice pace. This book is from the era when the books were written in first person, and I’ve always been fond of those. (The series is divided into three eras: third person narration and the hero referred to as Nick; the first person books; and then back to third person, with the hero usually referred to as Carter. I like the first two eras the best and never warmed up to the more impersonal later books.)

A number of my friends wrote Nick Carter novels over the years, and I tried to sell one myself, wrote several chapters and an outline for it, long since lost. But I remember the title I put on it: THE MONDRAGO STRIKE. Don’t ask me anything else about it, but I still like the title and think it sounds like it would have made a pretty good Nick Carter.

Stiletto #2: The Fairmont Maneuver - Brian Drake

CIA agent Scott Stiletto is back in Brian Drake’s latest novel THE FAIRMONT MANEUVER, and as usual, it’s a fast-paced espionage thriller with plenty of action. In this one, Scott rescues a Swiss scientist who’s being blackmailed by the Iranians into building triggers for nuclear bombs. That’s just the beginning, though, as Scott then answers a call for help from an ex-CIA colleague and former lover whose father has been murdered by mobsters trying to pressure her into selling her fashion design business. Why would mobsters want to take over a fashion design business, you ask? Well, in a clever plot twist from Drake, the reason doesn’t turn out to be what you’d expect.

I’m really enjoying this series for a couple of reasons. There’s a lot of all-out action, and Drake is very good at writing it in a style reminiscent of the classic men’s adventure novels. Also, Scott Stiletto is a very likable protagonist, human but not weighed down with angst or some cliched back-story. He’s one of the good guys and is very competent at what he does. Nor does Drake burden the tale he wants to tell with page after page of padding, as so many bloated contemporary thrillers do. THE FAIRMONT MANEUVER is lean and swift and very enjoyable.

Coming Soon: Girl in a Big Brass Bed/The Spy Who Was 3 Feet Tall/Code Name Gadget - Peter Rabe

GIRL IN A BIG BRASS BED
Lobbe wants his painting back. Goering confiscated it when the Nazis raided Rotterdam. But now, years later, it has been located, and the German government wants to return it. So Lobbe sends his assistant Manny deWitt to Munich to fetch it. The painting is Vermeer's Apple Girl, Lobbe's prized possession. The mission seems easy enough. But as deWitt soon discovers, those who have the misfortune to come in contact with the elusive Vermeer seem to experience an early and unpleasant death. The sooner he gets the painting and gets out, the better. If only it were that simple.

THE SPY WHO WAS 3 FEET TALL
This time Lobbe sends Manny to a recently emerged African nation called Motana. It's deWitt s job to negotiate the contract to build a road through the country. As usual, Lobbe doesn't muddy the waters with too much information for deWitt. But this time, everyone seems to be up on the project but him. Yum Lee, the Chinese emissary who also wants the contract, is one step ahead of him. Inge, Lobbe's delightful niece, is strictly undercover. And then there's his ubiquitous taxi driver, Baby, who is much more (or less) than what he seems. Just what the hell is so important about this road anyway?

CODE NAME GADGET
As gadgets go, it was supposedly a fairly large one, large enough to fill a medium-sized factory. Manny's mission is to buy it for his boss Lobbe before the competition beats him to it. The mission takes him to England under the eccentric guidance of a pilot named Max Garten, and into the unexpected arms of Meghan Bushmill. Together, the three of them form a kind of team as they try to figure out who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and if it even makes any difference anymore. Because whoever has the gadget can destroy the world, and even Lobbe may not be able to buy his way out of that one.

I had copies of all these books in their original editions back in my younger days and never got around to reading any of them. (Sadly, an all too common occurrence where me and books are concerned.) Now I can remedy that because Stark House is reprinting them in one big volume with a great introduction by Rick Ollerman. I'm really looking forward to these.