QUICK SHOTS: "The Spy Who Didn't" by Jack Laflin

See Steve Holland's ear?

I have pretty much accumulated every book Jack Laflin ever wrote without really trying. That's the way book collecting works sometimes. I found some a the local book pusher for cheap, others picked up in lots on eBay, and one in a truck stop. Not that it's a tall order he only wrote 10-ish novels. Belmont Tower pushed him in the late 60's with high-camp style covers that we obviously a cash-in for the "Batman" tv series. The covers are great and star everyone's favorite male model Steve Holland as the super-duper CIA agent Gregory Hiller. But what about what's under dem covers?

Gregory Hiller is a CIA agent, a Russian CIA agent. A defector turned "No. 1 troubleshooter," which is what I'm going to put on my business cards. Actually he came to America with a little plastic surgery (to look like Steve Holland, who wouldn't?) to impersonate a top man. But he found out he liked the good 'ol U.S. of A and switched sides. It's a nice, interesting backstory that sets him apart from the crowd of Bond-impersonators of the 60's paperback world. Well, so Old Greg is on vacation when he helps a old-man on the run and ends up in a insane asylum being tortured by a Nazi and a Nazi She-Devil. After an escape and a detour to Mexico Greg uncovers dastardly Nazi plots involving sunken Spanish gold, bombs, Man Mountains, the beautiful lady kind of Israeli agents, fights the Ku Klux Klan plus Nazi's in a giant cave AND kills a very notable bad-guy.

Laflin wrote a fun book. More than anything it reminded me of something out of an "Ace G-Man" pulp. Greg Hiller, despite his Russian origins, just screams AMERICA! He works with the FBI and local cops and just comes across less of a International Man of Mystery and more of a working stiff government man with a blazing walnut-stocked .357 Magnum. It makes you wonder what pulp magazines Laflin read a kid. All-in-all it's a romp of a novel, I'm sure Laflin's tongue was at least slightly in his cheek, so the pop-art covers actually fit the contents of the book. How's that for judging books by their covers? 

Laflin wrote the five book Gregory Hiller series, a YA book about football, a 70's horror/disaster novel about killer bees, finally a entry in the The Adjusters series (coincidently the only on that series published under the author's real name) and that was it. Except maybe a hardcover book in 1991 called "Serpent in Paradise" but I haven't figured out if it was the same Laflin. Fill me in if you know the unclassified truth! I'm going to try his Adjusters novel next to see if he molded himself in line for that series or just wrote a Greg Hiller book under a different guise. 

Quick Shots: Shark Fighter by Nicholas (Len Levinson) Brady

The art of the cash-in book or movie is something that always peaks my interest. "Jaws" was a massive success in 1975, it caused a tidal wave (nice little pun there) of imitators, some of them quite good, others very bad. But who am I to judge? I like Jaws 4: The Revenge. But I LOVE "Shark Fighter" by Len Levinson. I rarely read a book twice, but I did just that to write this review. I shit you not, I bought my copy of the pretty hard to find original paperback at a truck stop that sells used books to truckers. I've found some good stuff there, I guess truckers really like the blood 'n' guts like me. I read it in like one siting and enjoyed the hell out of it. So, the other day I just sort of pulled it off the shelf to take a gander at it and found myself reading it all over again. 

"Shark Fighter" star Sam Taggart former frogman for the Navy and present shark hunter and professional beach bum. He's a chain-smoking sex machine who can't help himself and always puts his head in the lion's mouth. He'll piss off anyone, the cops of the small island he calls home, his various lady friends, he's friends with pimps, prostitutes and will do just about anything for a buck including diving for sunken drugs for gangsters. You know, a good guy. His mainline is hunting sharks for meat for the fancy hotels on the island to sever to their guests. It's a living, keeping him in pot, booze and keeping his boat afloat. Things all change for him when he gets hired to fight two sharks on TV for a two million bucks and also falls in love.

This is a loose-structured novel, the first half is just hanging out with Sam on his various hard-boiled escapades, bouncing from danger to sex to boozing and smoking and back again. Normally this might make me loose interest in a novel, but Levinson is very good at making you wonder what will happen next in a rollicking bar-room stale sort of way. Even when the little mini-episodes of the novel seemingly finish Sam's dropped quickly into another jam. Levinson also gives all the side characters enough little quirks and personality to quickly establish exactly what kind of people they are, knowing how pleasantly evil the cops on the island are builds up a nice sense of danger for Sam, they might kill him or skin him or drop an anvil on his head at anytime. The sex is spicy and the action shows Levinson's work under Peter McCurtin at Belemont writing Sharpshooters and Marksman's and the like. This is really what a pulp-paperback is all about, sure things don't always hang together nicely and some characters that seem important just drop from the narrative without much thought, but isn't that life?

The Camp by Jonathan Trask but Actually Peter McCurtin and Len Levinson

One of my first reviews on here was "The Sundance Murders" by stalwart writer of ass-kickers Peter McCurtin. The book introduced Berger a hard-boiled reporter like they don't make anymore. A drunken cut-down Walther P-38 muckraker who travels to the desert and kicks up shit and ass. It was a novel after my own heart. I noted that it very much seemed like a first in a series or an installment in a series but sadly Peter McCurtin was a busy writer and editor at the time churning out his own work, ghost-written work, and editing great series like John (Ben Haas) Benteen's Fargo and everything in-between. So, I guess poor Berger got lost in the shuffle.

Jonathan Trask was Peter McCurtin, but he was mostly Len Levinson for this book. Len Levinson is a fantastic author with paperback-cred longer then your arm, working on series like "The Sharpshooter," "Ryker," "Joe Blaze" and creating  super-spy "Butler" and kick-ass W.W.II tales of "The Sargent" and "The Rat Bastards." Not to mention westerns and stand-alones of all genres. He like McCurtin is an author you can trust to give you a good time. They both seem to understand what their audience wants, their books are lean and fit with no filler and colorful characters. They do have completely different styles and voice, its fairly easy to point out either of their work even if their name isn't on the cover.

So, here's the rub. I think "The Camp" started out as a Berger novel. McCurtin wrote the first chapter, it's really clear that it's his work, it's got a lot of his ticks, old movies on TV, being more morose, heavy drinking etc. etc. The hero is now named Phil Gordon but it it starts roughly the same way with out narrator talking to us about himself. Gordon/Berger explains that he's a roving reporter who packs a Walther and ain't afraid to use it, that they work for a tabloid paper etc. etc. It's nearly word-for-word for a paragraph. I got totally deja-vu. Was this my long lost 2nd Berger novel? Well, yeah I sorta of think it is. It's a Frankenstein book with the two authors narrative styles being quickly bolted together, because after the McCurtin chapter Levinson's behind the wheel and it's his free-wheeling action/adventure with wiseacre humor peppered in. Gordon stops being McCurtin's character and becomes the slightly unhinged, slightly necrotic Levinson character. He's a happening guy with a sweet Porsche, he's good at his job, ex-army and always on the look out for trouble and women. The kind of guy you want to read about.

The Camp's long lost brother?

The plot is real nice I can see why it was saved from either being unfinished or forgotten by McCurtin and handed to Levinson who was producing some of the best work in the Belmont-Tower line. Basically Gordon goes to hang out with his old Native-American buddy in the Maine woods and finds out that there's a mysterious army installation who may or may not be responsible for the disappearance of his nephews. They look into and find the remains of tortured hippies in the camp and then nearly get killed. Gordon's now all in, he goes back home, makes some friends in high places and boinks with a attractive women within a few hours of meeting her and sets up his mission to get the story and hopefully find his friends nephews. It's got some heavy 70's political thriller vibes in the middle, a little "Parallax View," and "All The President's Men" mixed with man-on-a-mission pulp. Gordon gets help from a friendly general and sneaks into the ultra-right-wing-death-to-all-that-disagrees-with-us-murder-camp and gets a guided tour by a randomly gay army officer. Here's the only minor problem I had with the book: Gordon's in the camp for a day, sees what he's going to see  (torture chambers, murdering hippies for sport, etc. etc.) and then raises hell with grenades, rifles and the prisoners of the camp and gets the hell out. Some more time inside the camp with some build up might have been nice but then the result is the same. The ending is total awesome 70's (probably still now) paranoia with a real nice button on the end.

All in all its a fine little paperback thriller, full-tilt and lean with enough character and surprises to spend a pleasant few hours with. McCurtin and Levinson are some top-shelf guys at writing this stuff, buy anything with their names or pseudonyms on it.  There's a lot of hack-work in this genre/type of book (mostly on the best-seller list) and I long for the days of sub-200 page roller-coaster rides. Looking around after reading the book I was mildly surprised to see the price on the second hand market. It must have had a short-print run and Belemont books always seem to be pricey anyway. I got mine in a lot of books on ebay chock full of expensive McCurtin creations. It was a good chunk of change until you worked out how much the books cost individually. I guess the moral of the story is to buy books like things at Costco: IN BULK.

Mercs Vs. Mafia Three Gritty Reviews

I've been laid up after having had surgery on my ankle. So, I've read a lot of a books, basically one a day and they've all blended into a cocktail of mafia hardmen vs. mercenary tough guys or mercenary hardmen vs. mafia tough guys. Maybe it's the pain meds. Meh. So with all these knifing's, gun shots, parachutes, explosions, kidnap victims, codes of honor and political unrest swirling around in my addled brain I figured I'd just write a smorgasbord of a review of some of these thrilling tales of blood and thunder.

It all started with a few gunshots for Briganti aka The Assassin in "Boston Bust-Out." His wife and child were taken from him freeing him up for three books with of death, destruction and being an tough asshole. His adventures continued under a different name as Philip Magellan a.k.a The Marksman by Frank Scarpetta then kinda sorta as Johnny Rock a.k.a. The Sharpshooter by Bruno Rossi and a legion of ghostwriters. That's a whole twisty tale of 70's publishing cash-grabs and politics. But it adds to the mystic of Briganti and his quest of vengeance as he would have to use numerous alias within the book to stay one step ahead of the mafia-scum hunting him why wouldn't the misdirection bleed out on to the copy-write page and a cover. Or maybe that's the pain killers in me talking.

Any-who, Peter McCurtin was the man responsible for the Assassin which started it's life with Dell Publishing but McCurtin worked as an editor at Belemont-Tower and they must not have cared for one of their own publishing a series somewhere else, that or Dell didn't want anymore books past three and McCurtin just changed the names and continued the series at BT. Now "Boston Bust-Out" isn't going to change a person's life with it's deep seated looking at the inner psyche of a vigilante. THANK GOD. Briganti is a total unstoppable killing badass who is always a bit of a uncaring prick, but that comes with the territory of Men's Adventure fiction. One bit I liked is that he looses his cache of weapons early in the book and as he kills mafia goons he keeps picking up their fallen weapons to rebuild is stash. Sorta like he's a video game character. He loves his guns and they are talked about in full detail. He makes particularly good use of a .44 magnum and a .22-250 varmint rifle. But the gun-porn isn't as overbearing as it got to be in 80's Men's adventure or a Death Merchant, he just causally expands on his knowledge of bullets and such. The story is as thin and the paper it's printed on, but moves a nice clip from mafia-murdering to drinking vodka to mafia-murdering. He's out to fuck up the mob in every way shape and form and that's all you need to know. The whole thing is done before you know and ready for the next adventure. McCutin is a solid writer who know his business and leaves out the parts that you don't want to read about.

Peter McCurtin also created the Soldier of Fortune series about hard-as-nails mercenary Jim Rainey
who kicked ass through 18 adventures across the globe. McCurtin's name is on the front of #7 "Operation Hong Kong" but the author is really the prolific (and great) Ralph Hayes who besides writing his own series's like "The Hunter," "Cominsec," "Stoner," and "Check Force" he also wrote as McCurtin and Nick Carter for Nick Carter: Killmaster. Rainey is a mercenary who spends his non-war time as a weapons salesman and after a quick bit of revenge at the beginning. He heads to Hong Kong to sell his super-cool dart-gun (which sadly doesn't reappear) to his old Special Branch buddy where Rainey is hired be the British to quell Communist rioting and uprising. It's got the usual questionable treatment of women (be questionable I mean TERRIBLE) and old fashion politics. Hayes is a top-shelf paperback writer and "Operation Hong Kong" is a fast-paced ass-kicking tale of the the unrest in pre-handover of Hong Kong who fills the book with colorful characters and very fast action. The book is full of very hard-boiled riot scenes, GRUESOME murders and intrigue.  The book works more as a cop/espionage adventure rather then a war or men on a mission tale but Rainey is a cut-throat merc through and through and he gets gets more and more pissed as the bodies pile up and pot that is Hong Kong boils over. I'm glad I have several Soldier of Fortunes to read (all by Hayes by accident) and will have to complete my collection.
 

"In the Hour Before Midnight" by the legendary Jack Higgins is both a tale of the mafia and a rugged story of the mercenary life and the differences in the codes that they both live by. Jack Higgins is a helluva writer especially in this era, before he became a massive success after "The Eagle has Landed" but having wrote enough to fully form his impressive skill set. The "hero" of the book is Stacey Wyatt the grandson of a Mafia capo who became a hard-bitten mercenary by the hands of Sean Burke (Jack Higgins loves the name Sean) and how his two lives collide during a mission to rescue a kidnapped women from bandits in the treacherous kills of Sicily. Deception and dirty dealing mafioso's get in his way and he has to solve most of his problems with his quick-draw action or Kung-fu grip, maybe. In a lot of ways this books is more set-up then execution. We go through Wyatt's pain, misery and questioning his abilities after nearly being broken in a hell-hole of a prison.  The actual "mission" is over quickly and kinda doesn't amount to much, but Higgins sprinkles enough daring-do and intrigue to keep you turning the page. Higgins is a classier writer then most who put out this sort of fiction but he is still very much a pulp-mind author. He knows the pace and action are the key ingredients to his work but he executes them nearly perfectly. The idea of honor is something that he plays with frequently whether it is honor between killers, spies, soldiers on opposing sides, Higgins is obviously likes exploring the concept. After Higgins became a big time author and as he went along he had a tendency to spin his wheels and play in the sandbox sometimes. But he's such a good writer that even when he's not firing all on all cylinders he produces a book worth reading. That being said it's generally a safer bet to pick up an early Higgins. I particularly like Paul Chavasse series which is James Bond but in the rougher and tougher Higgins style. The Simon Vaughn books are also quite good, although they all seem to feature a DIFFERENT Simon Vaughn, so there's Higgins repeating himself again.

The Sundance Murders by Peter McCurtin

Peter McCurtin is one of the select few that get to be a real person and a house name author all in one, plus hiding behind other pseudonyms like Bruno Rossi, Frank Scarpetta, and Gene Curry among others. He wrote crime stories, tough guy vigilante books, mysteries, westerns by the bucketful, stories of hard-bitten mercenaries and they all had his clean-cut sometimes witty stamp on them. Unless of course it was someone else writing as Peter McCurtin. Then it was a crap-shoot. The fly-by-night nature of 70's publishing is part of the fun of theses books for me.Some wild shenanigans are well documented at wonderful sites like Glorious Trash and Paperback Warrior. Both fantastic excursions into the world of Paperbackdom. McCurtin himself is tied to many examples of  Men's Adventure, names like The Marksman, the Assassin, The Sharpshooter, and Solider of Fortune.

The Sundance Murders is a fun ride. Berger, a low-rent tabloid reporter who packs a snub-nose Walther P-38 goes to Arizona to find out if Native Americans are starting a revolution against the government, dressed like Ghost Dance Raiders and armed with machine guns. Along the way Berger gets in shoot-outs with Tommy Guns, drinks a lot, beds the only two women in the book and annoys all the local bigwigs. Its obviously got a lot of negative racial stuff that goes along with the story and time period, but it wasn't overly distracting to me. The racial accept of these books is a major turn-off for some people. I understand. The plot probably wouldn't fly today, but the Native American characters are all treated fairly well with the racial slurs kept to a minimum. When I read a racial or sexist line in a book like this I usually think, "Oh shit, that's just terrible," and move on, shaking my head at the attitude of the books. Casual racism and sexism pepper the books, if you can't get past it, I totally understand but I'm sorry cause your missing out on the rest which can be a lot of fun. The problem lies in that the general mainstream version of these types of books today are benign. They lack the pulpiness I crave like I crave Doritos. I want fast moving yarns filled with PULPY GOODNESS. So, I can look past the objectionable bits a little easier then most.

Berger is a fun character who's got enough sarcasm and humor to really make you root for him. I have a fondness for mysteries and action adventure books set in rural areas. The landscape pays a big part of the novel and lends itself to some fine action scenes. McCurtin wrote a lot of western books, including a great series about a badass named Carmody. This is a Western in modern dress for sure, what with the Ghost Dance Raiders and Berger the pistol-packin' stranger rolling into poke the bear. It also rest comfortably in a all but lost sub-genre of mystery fiction: the Hard-Boiled Reporter story. They read a lot like a classic private eye novel but with a touch of the tough cop novel because they usually have a boss breathing down there neck, so you get the best of both worlds. Actual Pulp examples of this are Daffy Dill by Richard Sale, Kennedy by Frederick Nebel and Flashgun Casey by George Harmon Cox. Berger would have sat right next to these characters at the bar, had a drink and spun tales. 

All in all it was a swift moving story with enough twists and gore to satisfy me. I'm nearly positive Berger was supposed to be another series character for McCurtin, he knew his market and that's what it called for but its a shame that no other Berger books appeared (that I know of) cause I'd devour it. Get it? Berger? Devour?