Review: Soldier of Fortune #1: Massacre at Umtali - Peter McCurtin

I’d read quite a few of Peter McCurtin’s novels before and always enjoyed them, so I expected to like SOLDIER OF FORTUNE #1: MASSACRE AT UMTALI even though I’m not a very big fan of mercenary yarns. The protagonist/narrator is Jim Rainey, a Texan and a Vietnam vet who has become a soldier of fortune. This is the first book in the series, but it’s not an origin story. The impression I get is that Rainey has been working as a mercenary for quite a while when it begins.

McCurtin starts with Rainey arriving in Rhodesia, where he’s hired by the government to head up an anti-terrorist squad going after a brutal warlord who calls himself Colonel Gwanda. The reader becomes acquainted with some of the other members of the squad, just as Rainey does, and then, without wasting much time, they’re off to the wild country along the border between Rhodesia and Mozambique to hunt down and capture Colonel Gwanda. The authorities want him brought back alive, if possible, so they can make an example of him by hanging him.

Rainey and his men pick up their quarry’s trail at the site of a massacre where Gwanda and his followers have wiped out an entire town. The plot is really pretty simple: Can they find Gwanda and capture him, and if they capture him, can they get him back to the capital alive?

This is a fairly short novel, and the action really races along, to boot. I read it in two sittings, which is very fast for me even when I’m enjoying a book. And I enjoyed MASSACRE AT UMTALI a lot, considerably more than I expected to. Most of the appeal comes from Jim Rainey’s narrative voice. He may be a cold-blooded killer when he needs to be, but he’s also a very likable guy. McCurtin wasn’t a Texan or a country boy in real life, but he does a great job with Rainey’s character.

The Soldier of Fortune series was created and edited by McCurtin and all the books were published under his name even though a few of them were ghosted by Ralph Hayes and Paul Hofrichter. This debut novel was published in 1976, and it’s very much a product of its time, meaning it’s so politically incorrect that it might give modern readers the vapors. I thoroughly enjoyed it and plan to read more in the series.

You can find used copies of the original paperback editions of MASSACRE AT UMTALI (it went through at least two printings with different covers, and I own one of them), and it’s also available on Amazon in an e-book edition from Piccadilly Publishing. That’s the version I read, and it has an excellent, informative “About the Author” section at the end that’s well worth reading. For a long time, there was some debate among paperback fans as to whether Peter McCurtin was a real person or just a house-name. I remember being part of that conversation. Now we know that he was real, even though other authors sometimes wrote under his name and he wrote under house-names, too. I’m glad we know more about him now, and I look forward to reading more of his novels.

Review: One Man's Treasure - Terrance Layhew

Terrance Layhew is an author, a fan of adventure fiction (we’re acquainted through the Men’s Adventure Paperbacks of the 20^th Century group on Facebook), and the host of a popular podcast called Suit Up!, which is devoted to the kind of fiction he likes to read. And write, as it turns out.

Layhew’s first adventure novel, ONE MAN’S TREASURE, is available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions, with an excellent cover, by the way. The protagonists are two brothers from Chicago, Dixon and Sam Hastings. Dix is a lawyer, a somewhat cold-blooded, calculating sort who lives for work and gambling. Sam is an engineer, a more happy-go-lucky fellow who loves tinkering with things and is recently engaged to a beautiful reporter named Amy. Dix turns all their lives upside down when, in a high-stakes poker game, he wins what’s reputed to be a map to a fabulous treasure buried by a famous pirate on a Caribbean island several hundred years ago. Such a thing couldn’t actually be real, could it? Sam, with his quixotic nature, thinks it could be, and he persuades Dix that they should find out—an effort that leads to swordfights, modern-day pirates, shootouts, harrowing adventures, and romance for both brothers.

Layhew takes a big risk in the very structure of this novel: he tells his story in first-person chapters that alternate between the Hastings brothers. I may be too much of a traditionalist, but I’m not fond of multiple first-person POVs. However, I won’t let that keep me from giving a book a fair try, and in this case, Layhew doesn’t just pull it off, he makes it work very well. Dix and Sam are two very different personalities, and that comes through effectively in the writing. I was never thrown by it.

He also does a fine job with the pacing and action, and while there are some serious moments, the novel also has a very appealing light-hearted tone most of the time. ONE MAN’S TREASURE has the feel of an Eighties action movie, and I mean that in the best possible way. I had a really good time reading it. It’s set up for a sequel, too, and I’m looking forward to it. In the meantime, if you’re a fan of well-written, entertaining adventure novels, ONE MAN’S TREASURE gets a solid recommendation from me.

American Mercenary #1: Greatest Enemy - Jason Kasper

I'd heard some good things about this author, so I decided to give one of his books a try. I don't know if GREATEST ENEMY is Jason Kasper's first novel, but it's the first book in his American Mercenary series, so I figured that might be a good place to start.

The narrator/protagonist, David Rivers, is a former soldier, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who, after going through West Point to become an officer, abruptly finds himself out of the army due to a medical condition he didn't even know he had. At loose ends, Rivers retreats into drinking and extreme activities like BASE jumping to fill the sudden void in his life. As it turns out, Rivers isn't really very stable, mentally. But he is really good at what he does, as he finds out when he's recruited to be part of an elite special operations team.

No, he doesn't go to work for the government, as you might be thinking right now. Instead, he works for some shadowy organization that's at war with a group of other shadowy organizations. That's right. These are bad guys. In fact, there are no real heroes in GREATEST ENEMY, just bad guys . . . and worse guys.

I'm not normally a fan of novels with criminal protagonists, although in the past I've really enjoyed Donald Westlake's Parker novels and the two most famous hitman series, Lawrence Block's Keller and Max Allan Collins' Quarry. It's hard to write about unsympathetic characters and make the reader root for and care about them. Jason Kasper walks that fine line here, and for the most part, he succeeds quite well. David Rivers may not be a very likable guy, but he is a very complex and well-realized character. There are also plenty of really well-written and exciting action scenes, the book is fast-paced, and as an added bonus, it's a good length, not one of the bloated doorstops that often pass for thrillers these days.

One word of warning, however: GREATEST ENEMY ends on a semi-cliffhanger, which actually works pretty well because it's obvious that this is just part one of a larger story. There's enough resolution that I didn't feel unsatisfied, and enough still to come that I'm eager to read the next book. Which I already have on my Kindle, by the way.

Homicide: Saigon - Stephen Mertz

SAIGON, 1970.

Meet Cord McGavin, lone wolf investigator assigned to a special operations unit of the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. McGavin’s beat: the mean streets of this sprawling, violent metropolis ravaged by war. From its wealthy bastions of power, paid for by corruption and profiteering, to the alleys and waterfront shadows where human souls are bartered, deception is the name of the game. The threat of death is never more than a heartbeat away.

McGavin has his hands full. The brass thinks he’s too damn cowboy. Viet Cong assassin teams are operating openly across the city. He’s taken on a deadly coalition about to flood the streets of America with heroin. And oh yeah, there’s McGavin’s beautiful wife Kelly, a Pulitzer-class photo journalist newly arrived under an assumed name to document her husband’s war…

“Stephen Mertz writes a hard edged, fast paced thriller for those who like their tales straight and sharp!” – Joe R. Lansdale

(I've known Stephen Mertz and been reading his books for more years than I like to think about. This is his most recent novel, and it belongs in the top rank of his books. Mertz really knows how to spin a yarn, and HOMICIDE: SAIGON moves incredibly quickly, with a tough, smart protagonist in Cord McGavin. Plenty of action, some well-done romantic scenes between McGavin and his wife Kelly, and the occasional touch of dry humor all make this a really enjoyable novel. A couple of very good short stories featuring the same characters round out this volume. Steve Mertz is one of the legends of men's adventure fiction, and for good reason. I give HOMICIDE: SAIGON a high recommendation.)

Forgotten Books: The Eagles #5: Sea of Swords - Andrew Quiller (Kenneth Bulmer)

 

The series that was published as THE GLADIATOR in the United States (by Pinnacle) and as THE EAGLES in the United Kingdom (by Mayflower Granada) comes to end with this fifth volume, SEA OF SWORDS, which was never reprinted in the U.S. As a result, copies can be a little scarce and pricey, but I came across an affordable copy on-line and had it on hand before I started reading the series. Three authors alternated on these historical adventure novels: Laurence James, Kenneth Bulmer, and Angus Wells. When the fifth one rolled around, it was Bulmer’s turn in the rotation, after he previously wrote #2.

The protagonist of this series is Marcus Britannicus, a half-Roman, half-British nobleman and soldier who also fights in the arena as a gladiator, and when he’s not doing that, carries out secret missions for the emperor. Each book opens with Marcus battling in the arena and then flashes back to the main story, which is some exploit he had in the past. In the case of SEA OF SWORDS, the mission on which he’s sent takes him to the Carpathian Mountains (yes, those Carpathian Mountains . . . the ones in, you know, Transylvania) to rescue a beautiful princess from a crazed warlord who likes to . . . wait for it . . . impale his enemies. I hope that’s not too much of a spoiler, but honestly, after a long set-up that has very little to do with the rest of the book, it’s blatantly obvious what Bulmer is going for here. The question is, how well does he carry it out?

I’d say the results are mixed. In most of his work, Bulmer does a couple of things that bother me. He overloads his plots with so many characters that it’s difficult to keep track of who’s who. He also throws in so much technical jargon and minutiae about whatever he’s writing about, whether it’s the Roman military, sailing, or what have you, that the reader constantly has to stop and try to figure out things from context. I don’t like info-dumps any more than the average reader, but at times Bulmer’s prose is so obscure it’s almost like a foreign language.

However, at the same time, he’s very good at depicting his protagonists, his action scenes are great most of the time, and he comes up with some interesting plots. His books generally move along pretty well, and that’s the case with SEA OF SWORDS. Despite being a pretty brutal guy sometimes (he lives in a brutal world, after all), Marcus is a likable protagonist with his own code of honor. It’s always a pleasure watching him triumph over the bad guys.

On the other hand, the main story in this book is a little jumpy at times, skipping stuff that probably could have done to greater effect if so many pages hadn’t been spent on the framing sequence. But the biggest problem in SEA OF SWORDS is that Marcus’s vengeance quest, which formed the spine of the series in the previous four books, was wrapped up satisfactorily in #4, Laurence James’s BLOOD ON THE SAND. As a result, SEA OF SWORDS comes across as sort of an afterthought, as if somebody said, “Hey, we’ve got one more book in the contract. What do we do now?” Occasionally, it reads like Bulmer is trying to set up some other storyline that could continue, but nothing comes of it. Indeed, the whole thing comes to a rather bittersweet conclusion with this paragraph:

“Names rang in his head, names from the past, names for the future. Yes, there remained much to be done, many battles to be fought by the Fox in this grandiose world-shaking Empire of Rome.”

Nope, no more battles for Marcus Brittanicus, also known by his gladiator name Vulpus the Fox. Which is really kind of sad, because despite my reservations about this fifth book, I enjoyed the series overall and consider it well worth reading. It’s bloody and crude and lurid but also fast-paced and exciting. Completists will want to read this fifth volume, too, but just the four volumes reprinted by Pinnacle will suffice for most readers, I think. I have all the entries in another British historical adventure series called WOLFSHEAD that was also written by Laurence James and Kenneth Bulmer, and I hope to start reading those soon.

Infestation - William Meikle

When you tell me that a book is about commandos fighting monsters, you’re really appealing to the inner 12-year-old in me. And that’s what INFESTATION is all about. This is the first book in the S-Squad series by Scottish horror author William Meikle, and I really enjoyed it. The story follows a squad of British Special Forces soldiers sent to a remote Inuit village in Canada, north of the Arctic Circle, to investigate the suspicious presence of what is believed to be a Russian spy ship. When they reach the village, though, they find that something terrible has happened and the inhabitants have been wiped out in bloody fashion. The suspected spy ship, anchored a short distance off-shore, also appears to be deserted . . . but it’s not.

Then things get worse.

The plot of this novel may be familiar, but Meikle’s execution of it is pretty much flawless. He does an excellent job of keeping the story moving along at a fast pace and handles the action scenes very well. The characters are interesting, and Meikle makes the reader care if they survive or not. (Spoiler: some don’t.) He really had me flipping the digital pages. I had a great time reading INFESTATION, even though I’m generally not much of a horror fan, and I’m glad that there are quite a few more in the series. There’s a good chance I’ll be reading another one soon.

Men of Violence: All Review Special - Justin Marriott, ed.

The latest volume in the excellent MEN OF VIOLENCE series is an All Review Special, featuring more than a hundred reviews of men’s adventure novels and series, ranging from classics of the genre to obscure little gems that you’ve probably never heard of. Editor Justin Marriot has assembled a wonderful book to browse and enjoy, and I guarantee you’ll learn a few things, even if you’re an expert on men’s adventure fiction. If you’re a newcomer to the genre, this book is a crash course on it. Not all the reviews are positive, either; some warn potential readers which books to stay away from. Although such things are competely subjective, of course. If a book sounds interesting to you, I always say give it a try and see for yourself. MEN OF VIOLENCE: ALL REVIEW SPECIAL is available as a handsome, very affordable trade paperback. I really enjoyed it and give it a high recommendation.

Forgotten Books: Captain Shark #2: Jaws of Death - Richard Silver (Kenneth Bulmer)

The second Captain Shark novel, JAWS OF DEATH, begins mere seconds after the previous novel, BY PIRATE’S BLOOD . . ., ends. (See last week’s Forgotten Books post for the story on that one.) This makes me even more convinced that author Kenneth Bulmer, who wrote these books under the pseudonym Richard Silver, intended for the story to be told in one long novel.

The cliffhanger from the previous book is resolved quickly, and then Captain Shark sets out on a new adventure, a quest for Morgan’s Gold, the treasure that famous pirate Henry Morgan was after when he sacked Panama, but then the loot mysteriously disappeared. What’s a pirate yarn without a treasure map, and to get his hands on it, Shark has to resort to disguise as he penetrates into the very heart of his mortal enemy’s stronghold.

It’s all very dashing and swashbuckling and romantic (of course there’s a beautiful countess at said stronghold), and just as you’d expect, the action winds up on the deserted island where the treasure is buried, with Shark and his crew in a desperate race against the Spanish to reach the treasure and recover it first. There’s no cliffhanger this time, but once the action is over, one of the buccaneers declares, “Cap’n Shark will return!” Alas, he doesn’t. That’s the end of this short-lived series.

However, the two books taken together make for an exciting, if somewhat rambling, tale. Bulmer has a sure hand with the action scenes, Captain Shark is a likable protagonist (and for a bunch of bloody-handed pirates, his crew is pretty sympathetic, too), the villains are properly despicable, and some welcome touches of humor crop up here and there. These novels are also as violent and lurid as you’d expect from books written for the men’s adventure market in the mid-Seventies, which, of course, doesn’t bother me a bit. I have quite a few historical novels by Kenneth Bulmer on hand and look forward to reading them.

Forgotten Books: Casca #1 The Eternal Mercenary - Barry Sadler

The Casca series debuted in 1979, and for years I saw the paperbacks all over the place and even owned a few now and then, but I never got around to reading any of them. In my continuing effort to at least sample some of the series I’ve overlooked, I recently read the first Casca novel, THE ETERNAL MERCENARY.

Despite never having read any of the books, I was familiar with the concept of the series: one of the Roman centurions present at Jesus’ crucifixion, Casca Rufio Longinus, is cursed with immortality and spends the thousands of years since then as an undying soldier, fighting in many wars in many places, always as a mercenary. The first book opens with him in Vietnam, badly wounded but already recovering from injuries that would have killed anybody else. While he’s recovering, he tells a sympathetic doctor about his life history, focusing mostly on the first couple of hundred years after he was cursed, when he fell out of favor with his superiors in the Roman army, was sent to work in the mines as a slave, was an oarsman chained to his oar in a Roman galley, and fought as a gladiator in the arena. Interspersed with these harrowing sequences are more peaceful times, such as when he meets a wanderer from the mysterious East and learns martial arts from him and even settles down for a while as a farmer and has a wife.

The story meanders around through all these elements and maybe goes on just a tiny bit too long, but Sadler’s style is so infectious and full of life—good and bad—that it kept me turning the pages quite happily. He does a great job of capturing Casca’s personality and makes him a very likable protagonist, despite the violence that seems to haunt the character’s life.

I have to wonder about Sadler’s influences: Casca is very similar in many ways to Wolverine, who made his debut in THE INCREDIBLE HULK five years before this novel came out; and the dialogue and relationship between Casca and his Chinese mentor Shiu is very reminiscent of Remo Williams and Chiun from the Destroyer series, which was hugely popular in the decade before the Casca series began. However, I have no way of knowing if Sadler was familiar with any of that, and all writers are influenced by all sorts of things anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that Sadler makes it all work in this book and comes up with something very entertaining and satisfying. I really liked this one, and I’ll be reading more of the Casca novels.

Stiletto #1: The Termination Protocol - Brian Drake

A deadly nerve agent . . . one man standing between peace and Armageddon . . .

CIA agent Scott Stiletto is one of the best. When a derivative of sarin gas thought destroyed shows up on the open market, Scott races to keep the chemical weapon out of enemy hands. The Agency's only lead is a terrorist named Liam Miller, and Stiletto plans a simple snatch-and-grab that quickly lands Miller in U.S. custody. The rendition soon turns into disaster.

Another terrorist group snatches Miller in a blinding fast raid that leaves four agents dead and Stiletto wounded. Worse, the new players—calling themselves the New World Revolutionary Front—are the ones planning to buy the sarin gas. They use Miller to plant a false trail for the CIA to follow while their deadly plan comes to fruition.

The NWRF doesn't count on Miller having a few tricks up his sleeve, or Stiletto's relentless determination to complete his mission. And once Miller gets away and the two team-up to fight their common enemy, the NWRF faces the wrath of two men who are deadlier together than they are separately.

I read this over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Very much influenced by Nick Carter, Mack Bolan, and the other classic men's adventure paperback heroes, but it has a contemporary sensibility, too. Best of all, unlike most modern thrillers, it's not overwritten and bloated but lean and fast-paced instead, an exciting tale told in a hardboiled style. Great fun, and it gets a high recommendation from me. I'm looking forward to the next one in the series.

The Revenants #1: Assault on Abbeville - Jack Badelaire

Jack Badelaire has come up with a great concept for his new World War II adventure series: five soldiers, each from a different nation conquered by the Germans, are considered missing in action and presumed dead, but in actuality, they've been recruited by a British spymaster to form an elite commando squad that can be sent on vital but unofficial missions behind enemy lines. The squad consists of men from Poland, France, Norway, Belgium, and Holland. To put it in terms that a lot of guys of a certain age will grasp immediately, THE REVENANTS is BLACKHAWK as written by Alistair Maclean, with a little dash of CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN thrown in.

Badelaire brings that concept to life with considerable skill and excitement in ASSAULT ON ABBEVILLE, the first novel in the series, which finds the Revenants being smuggled into occupied France to make contact with a group of partisans and assassinate a German fighter pilot who's been taking a great toll on British bombing raids. This will not only rid the Luftwaffe of a valuable asset but also damage German morale . . . if all goes as planned. Which, of course, it doesn't.

ASSAULT ON ABBEVILLE is fast-paced and full of action and has an undeniable sense of authenticity. Badelaire is a long-time fan of World War II adventure fiction and it shows in this and his other novels. If you're a fan of the genre, you owe it to yourself to pick up his books.

The Target - Brad Taylor

I'm glad that authors of some popular series have started writing stand-alone e-book novellas set in those series. I'm usually not in the mood to tackle some 400 page thriller, but I'm certainly willing to try a 20,000 word novella with the same characters.

I have some of Brad Taylor's novels about the Taskforce, an anti-terrorist group led by Pike Logan (a manly name if I've ever heard one), but I've never read any of them. I picked up a novella by him called THE TARGET, which serves as a prequel to the Taskforce series and provides some back-story on a trio of supporting characters. They're Mossad agents, two men and one woman, all of them with considerable emotional and professional baggage. Thankfully, that doesn't get in the way of the story, which moves right along at a nice clip. They're sent to Argentina to assassinate a former Nazi who was a guard and executioner at Auschwitz (this story is set in 1998), but in the process of setting that up they uncover a dangerous plot that requires them to go rogue and abandon their original mission.

There's a touch of the paranormal in this one that you usually don't find in these contemporary thrillers, but I thought it worked really well. I liked the characters, too, and unlike the bloated and overwritten doorstops you often find in this genre, Taylor's prose is pretty lean. The book could have used another copyediting pass to take care of some typos and a few sentences that don't quite make sense, but the formatting is very good, something that all too often you don't find in e-books coming from the big publishers in New York.

I don't know if I'll ever get around to reading any of Taylor's full-length novels, but there are several more of these Taskforce novellas and I plan to read them, since I definitely enjoyed THE TARGET. Good action scenes, good characters, and short enough that my ever-dwindling attention span didn't kick in . . . These days, that's plenty for me.

A Handful of Hell - Robert F. Dorr

I became acquainted with Robert F. Dorr only in the past couple of years, through Facebook, e-mail correspondence, and one enjoyable phone conversation. He passed away earlier this year. Best known as a military historian specializing in aviation topics, he wrote scores of stories and articles for the men’s adventure magazines. I read some of those magazines as a kid (when I could sneak ’em into the house), so I may well have encountered Bob Dorr’s work back in the Sixties and Seventies, but since I didn’t pay much attention to the authors’ names, I can’t really say whether I did or not. (As an aside, I did notice the names of two authors back then: Wayne C. Ulsh and Roland Empey. Ulsh went on to write several paperback thrillers, and Roland Empey turned out to be Walter Kaylin, one of the most prolific and respected men’s adventure magazine writers. There’s an excellent collection of his work available from the same good folks who put together the book I’m writing about now.)

But to get back to Bob Dorr . . . Earlier this year, The Men’s Adventure Library and New Texture Books (basically Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, the editors of this volume) published A HANDFUL OF HELL, a collection of some of Robert F. Dorr’s best stories from the men’s adventure magazines. They range from Dorr’s debut story, “The Night Intruders”, the story of a Korean War bombing mission first published in REAL, August 1962, to “I Fought Burma’s ‘Red Flag’ Terrorist Killers”, from BLUEBOOK, March 1972. Most of the stories are set during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam war, but there are a few non-military adventure yarns as well.

Some of these stories are only lightly fictionalized accounts of actual incidents, while others are completely made up. But what you’ll notice immediately is the air of complete authenticity that runs through all of them. Dorr’s fiction is so realistic that it might as well be based on true stories. There’s also a great deal of empathy for the American fighting men featured in them. They’re not superheroes. They’re average guys, with individual strengths and weaknesses, just trying to do the best they can in very harrowing situations. Dorr’s style is vivid and clear, making it easy for even a non-military, non-flying reader (like me) to understand and appreciate what’s going on. There are no wasted words. These stories get moving right away and never slow down. They hit like a punch in the gut—and that’s a good thing, to my way of thinking.

I’m sorry I didn’t get this book read and this review posted before Bob passed away, so he could have known how much I enjoyed and was impressed by it. It’s a great collection, one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I give it a very high recommendation. (If you’re going to pick up a copy, I’d go for the hardback edition, which contains bonus stories and material, not to mention being a very handsome volume.)

M.I.A. Hunter: Hostage Town - Stephen Mertz

When an M.I.A. mission goes terribly wrong, Mark Stone and his team are thrust into a showdown with terrorists who have seized control of an isolated Texas border town. But the invaders have not counted on the fury of Mark Stone, Terrance Loughlin and Hog Wiley. It’s a deadly race against time to rescue a church full of innocent hostages when world terrorism strikes the American heartland.

I read most, if not all, of the M.I.A. Hunter books back when they first came out, so when I heard that Steve Mertz had written the first new book in the series in many years, it was pretty exciting news. HOSTAGE TOWN lives up to that excitement. Nobody does this sort of book better than Mertz. Compelling characters, fast action, a real sense of urgency and suspense. He's one of the best adventure writers of our time, plain and simple. Highly recommended.

Peter McCurtin Catalog/Checklist from Lynn Munroe

Anybody who has seen one of Lynn Munroe's on-line book catalogs knows that's not your typical book catalog. His latest features the work of the legendary Peter McCurtin, and as usual it's a treasure trove of information (including previously unknown pseudonyms) and great cover scans. If you have any interest at all in paperback Westerns and men's adventure novels from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, you really do have to check this out.

On a personal note, I recall buying a copy of the Lassiter novel THE MAN FROM DEL RIO at Lester's Pharmacy, in the edition shown above, and realizing as I was reading it that this wasn't really the same sort of thing as Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Clarence E. Mulford (my main Western reading up to that point). Nice to know it was actually written by Peter McCurtin, possibly in collaboration with George Harmon Smith. If I ever come across a copy of that edition again, I'll probably buy it just for old times' sake.

Men's Adventure Magazines: Man's Illustrated, December 1958

This isn't going to be a regular series like the weekend pulp features I run, but from time to time when I finish reading one of these magazines I'll have a few comments about it. This is actually the first men's adventure magazine I've read in many years, and I enjoyed it.

Start off with a pretty good cover by Stanley Borack. With that torn shirt, our two-fisted hero bears a distinct resemblance to James Bama's version of Doc Savage, doesn't he? I'm not well-versed enough to know for sure, but the model for this one could have been Steve Holland, who modeled for hundreds of paintings that wound up as covers on men's adventure magazines. And of course a few years later Holland was the model for Bama's Doc Savage paperback covers. I also like the guy in the back clutching the ax. Old Torn Shirt better watch out.

Moving on to the inside, the Action-Packed Book-Length Bonus mentioned on the cover is "Colter's Run", a lightly fictionalized retelling of frontiersman John Colter's famous run that allowed him to escape from his Blackfoot captors. It's well-written and pretty entertaining. The author is listed as Gene Caesar, but nearly all the bylines in these magazines were pseudonyms.

Speaking of which, the World War II story "That's No Fence – That's Germans!" is credited to George Bush. The story itself is again a lightly fictionalized version of a historical incident, in this case one of the side battles that went to make up the Battle of the Bulge, in which a group of support troops – clerks, cooks, mechanics, even some entertainers from Special Services – have to fight off a German flank attack behind the front lines and hold a town for several days against superior forces for several days until reinforcements arrive. It's a good yarn and pretty accurate historically.

"Case of the Nude Tattoo" by Henry Durling is a true-crime yarn set in New York in the 1890s. It's written well enough, but there's not much to it. The same is true of "Go-Devil and the Butcher of Triton's Tolt" by Colin Thompson, a purely fictional story about an American flyer who crash-lands in Labrador during World War II, falls in love with the girl who nurses him back to health, and returns after the war to marry her, only to run afoul of some local bullies. This one could have been pretty good, but the plot runs out of steam and the story suffers from an odd structure as well.

"Dead Man's Ride" by Stan Smith is considerably better. It's a runaway train story, set in Chicago in 1875, and concerns a young man's gallant attempt to stop an out-of-control elevated train after the engineer suffers a heart attack and dies with his hand on the throttle. I don't know if there's any history to it or if it's all fiction, but it's fairly suspenseful. This one could have easily appeared in the pulp RAILROAD STORIES.

This brings us to the cover story, "Ed Caine and the Love-Cabin Girls of Alaska" by none other than Edwin Caine his own self. I don't have any idea who wrote this, but his tongue had to be firmly in his cheek as the over-the-top action never stops. You've got a tough, hardboiled pilot who flies prostitutes into the wilds of northern Alaska ("a brushhopping pimp", he calls himself), fistfights, shootouts, beautiful girls strung up and whipped by a crazed sex maniac/geologist (you know how those guys are), a plane crash, and an avalanche. Man, if the author had worked in some quicksand and a gator, this story would have had everything. It's great fun, marred only by a slight letdown of an ending after all the wild stuff that's come before.

All the other articles, like "The Plot to Suppress a Cancer Cure" and "Secrets Behind Your Sex Dreams", I found pretty much unreadable. But with two pretty good stories and several more that were entertaining, I enjoyed the issue quite a bit overall.

Now Available in Trade Paperback: Bruce Minney: The Man Who Painted Everything

Some of you expressed an interest in the print edition of Tom Ziegler's book about the great cover artist Bruce Minney. It's now available from Amazon with hundreds of beautiful cover reproductions from paperbacks and men's adventure magazines, plus lots of interior illustrations from the magazines as well.

Bruce Minney: The Man Who Painted Everything - Thomas Ziegler

As some of you know, I've developed an interest lately in the men's adventure magazines of the Fifties and Sixties, even joining the Facebook group devoted to them. There's also an excellent blog about them run by Bob Deis, the founder of the Facebook group. (The scans that accompany this post come from Bob's blog.) These publications, with titles like FOR MEN ONLY, MALE, and STAG, always fascinated me as a kid when I saw them on the magazine racks while I was buying my comic books, probably because they were forbidden fruit. My mother already had enough of a dislike for me reading comics. If she'd caught me with my nose in an issue of FOR MEN ONLY with a racy cover, she would have pitched a conniption fit and that magazine would have been in the garbage faster than you can say, "Smut".

Now, of course, I can read whatever I want to, but the magazines that would have cost me a couple of quarters back in 1968 now fetch considerably more than that on eBay. Even so, I've picked up a few of them and will probably buy more once I've read the ones I have.

In the meantime, that Facebook group I mentioned above has been an education, as well as being highly entertaining. For example, I'd never heard of Bruce Minney, although I was familiar with his work without really being aware of it. (I'll get to that.) From the mid-Fifties through the early Seventies, Minney was a prolific artist for the men's adventure magazines, providing scores of cover paintings and interior illustrations. He painted rampaging elephants, runaway trains, aerial dogfights, gun battles, explosions, evil villains (many of them Nazis), stalwart heroes, and lots and lots of beautiful girls. If there was a way to work it into a cover painting that would catch a newsstand browser's eye and induce him to part with his quarters, Bruce Minney painted it.

Hence the title of this excellent new biography and appreciation of Bruce Minney's work by Thomas Ziegler, BRUCE MINNEY: THE MAN WHO PAINTED EVERYTHING.

Ziegler is in a good position to produce such a book, since he's Bruce Minney's son-in-law, but this volume doesn't whitewash the inevitable hills and valleys of a freelancer's career. It's a fascinating, well-written look behind the scenes of the men's adventure magazine industry, a large neglected sub-genre of popular fiction. (And despite the preponderance of magazines with "True" or "Real" in their titles, most of what was published in them actually was fiction.)

Ziegler doesn't stop with those magazines, however. He explores Minney's career as a fine artist and, of most interest to me, as a paperback cover artist. Until I saw all the cover reproductions in this book, I didn't realize he had painted the covers for so many books that I've read or at least owned during my life.

I bought the e-book edition of this one, read the text on my Kindle, and used the Kindle app on my computer to appreciate the hundreds of excellent color cover reproductions. A trade paperback edition will also be available soon. If you have an interest in the men's adventure magazines, paperback covers, cover art in general, or the life of a freelance artist, BRUCE MINNEY: THE MAN WHO PAINTED EVERYTHING gets the highest recommendation from me. It's one of the best books I've read this year.

Hatchet Force Journal #1

Last night I downloaded and immediately read cover-to-cover this first issue of this new e-magazine devoted to the action/adventure genre.  The brainchild of author (and occasional commentor on this blog) Jack Badelaire, this is a fine piece of work.  Highlights are a lengthy essay by Badelaire about societal influences on the explosion of men's adventure paperbacks in the late Sixties and all through the Seventies, an extensive interview with author Mack Maloney (whose work I'm aware of but have never read, something I have to remedy), and an in-depth review of Sam Peckinpah's film BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (a movie I've never seen, something else I have to tend to).  There are also articles on "The Evolution of Pulp" by Tom Johnson, an authority on that subject and an old friend of mine, and "Movie Adaptations That Beat the Book" by Henry Brown, plus book and TV reviews by various hands, all good.  I had a great time reading HATCHET FORCE JOURNAL, and I hope it's just the first of many issues.  If you're an action/adventure fan, it comes highly recommended by me.

The Jury Series #1: Judgment - Lee Goldberg

Back in the mid-Eighties, I was working in a used bookstore, and I used to see copies of a book called .357 VIGILANTE, by an author I’d never heard of named Ian Ludlow. I could tell it was a men’s adventure novel, a genre that wasn’t nearly as robust then as it had been ten years earlier. I read a lot of those books, but for some reason I don’t think I ever even picked up a copy of .357 VIGILANTE and flipped through it, let alone read it.


This is a classic case of not knowing what I was missing.


Now, of course, we know that “Ian Ludlow” was actually a college student named Lee Goldberg, who went on to become a top-notch novelist, screenwriter, and producer. He’s also a friend of mine and co-creator of THE DEAD MAN e-book series, for which I’ve written one of the books. So this isn’t exactly an unbiased review, but you know I don’t tell you something is good unless I really think it is.


The .357 VIGILANTE series ran for three books, all published by Pinnacle (in its original incarnation, not the Pinnacle line that’s now published by Kensington). There was a fourth book in the series that was never published at the time. However, Lee has brought back all four novels as e-books, which can be fought separately or all together under the title THE JURY SERIES. I just read the first one, now titled JUDGMENT, and it’s a fine novel.


You know right away that this is a little different from the usual men’s adventure novel because of the protagonist, Brett Macklin. Most of the men’s adventure heroes had military or law enforcement backgrounds. Brett is an aeronautical engineer who has become a pilot and owns a flying service that does a lot of work with movie companies, providing helicopters for aerial filming. Brett’s father is a beat cop in Los Angeles, though, and it’s his brutal murder in an apparently senseless thrill killing that starts Brett on the road to becoming a vigilante. The killers, members of a gang called the Bounty Hunters, escape justice in the courts, so Brett sets out to deliver some justice of his own, calling himself Mr. Jury.


Again, though, Brett is no superhuman men’s adventure hero. He screws up, he gets hurt, he’s lucky not to get killed several times, but eventually he uncovers an even bigger plot that puts a lot of people in danger.


This is a really entertaining thrill ride of a story with plenty of sex, violence, humor, social commentary, and great action scenes. When I think about what I was writing when I was in college . . . well, there’s really no comparison. JUDGMENT is the work of someone who was a solid pro, right from the first page.


I have the other three books in the series and will be getting to them soon. If you’ve been reading and enjoying the DEAD MAN books or Lee’s other novels and haven’t tried THE JURY SERIES yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. Highly recommended.