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.

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.

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.

Spy Guys and Gals

If you're a fan of espionage and secret agent fiction (and as I've mentioned before, I read a ton of it during the Sixties and Seventies and still read some from time to time), I highly recommend that you check out this site.  Just be prepared to spend quite a bit of time there.

I chose that Nick Carter cover to go with this post because HANOI was the first Nick Carter novel I ever read . . . but not the last, by any means.