QUICK SHOTS: Aquanauts #1: Cold Blue Death by Ken (Manning Lee Stokes) Stanton

The Aquanauts is a Lyle Kenyon Engle joint, which means he thought it was a good enough paperback idea to commission veteran pulpster Manning Lee Stokes to crank out 11 volumes. Our hero is William Martin aka Tiger Shark aka, the, uh, Aquanaut. A deep-sea commando with enough underwater gadgets to make G.I. Joe jealous. It's a delicious idea for a paperback hero, unfortunately everything in the books tastes a bit stale.

Manning Lee Stokes wrote a lot of books. He started out in comics, writing Seven Seas Comics and like the second graphic novel ever The Case of the Winking Budha. Then he wrote some mystery novels, including the pretty solid (from what I heard) The Grave's in the Meadow. After a while of not setting the publishing world on fire as himself he became names like Nick Carter (Nick Carter: Killmaster), Paul Edwards (John Eagle), Jeffery Lord (Richard Blade), and the like. Also, like pretty much any paperback writer of the time, he wrote westerns and some porn. I like his work with Nick Carter and John Eagle, which would be the place to start if you're interested in his work.

I have the full run of 11 books in The Aquanauts. I got most of them in on foul swoop at the wonderful Gardner's Used Books in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The rest I picked up here and there on the internet. They have some of coolest and wildest covers on any of the 70s Men's Adventure books. The first time I tried reading one I was disappointed and bailed on it pretty quickly. I still kept buying them though. That's called "a sickness."

But as I finish up my next book The Grill-Master, which is the first in a series, I decided to do an unofficial series here where I look at the first book in long-running series. This series isn't too long running, but I figured what the hell, it's my blog. Maybe I just wanted to punish myself, because I knew I was in dangerous waters.

So, Cold Blue Death introduces us to, I'm just going to call him Tiger. He was a 'Nam Vet (obviously) and a frogman (obviously) who gets recruited to be an ocean commando/spy guy by he's given a bitchin' submarine called the KRAB, an underwater dart gun and a bunch of other spy toys. The set-up is a little like Engle's other series Nick Carter: Killmaster mixed with John Eagle: The Expeditor. Only with the fun dialed down to 2.

His mission? It involves a dead Navy man in the Bermuda triangle, nuclear threats, sunken treasure, hot ladies, evil guys named Toad and other groovy 70s action stuff and when the action starts...it's over pretty quickly. Tiger Shark is a fairly boring "standard issue hero," outside of ogling ladies he only thinks of the mission and doesn't seem like he'd be fun to have a beer with. Then the rest of the book is mostly plodding and just over-stuffed with words, descriptions and threads that don't add up to much. It's pretty clear Stokes was making it all up as he went. Probably with a bottle of amber liquid nearby for stamina as he pounded out the keys.

This was a slog to get through. At times it felt like wading through knee-deep water (water, Aquanauts, get it?) and then every now at then Stokes would remember he was writing for entertainment and throw something awesome in there to keep me going. If I hadn't committed to this little "read the #1s" series I got going, I probably would have put this one back on the shelf like I did with the last Aquanauts I tried. But I am glad I finally read one of the damned things. Too bad it wasn't better. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!