QUICK SHOTS: Max Roper #1: The Pushbutton Butterfly by Kin Platt

Whoa, I dipped right back into Kin Platt territory. I recently read and reviews one of his Hitman series and I guess his work was still on my brain when I put on my helmet and went down to the book mine that is my library to dig out something to read. I sorta forgot I had finally tracked down the Pyramid paperback edition of the first in his Max Roper series. The Roper books were hardcovers originally, so they are a little classier with more effort and thought put into them his rush-job Hitman books. Not that I'm not a fan of rush-job novels. Stream-of-consciousness can produce some wild shit. The Roper's where the first Platt books I ever read, though it's been about 15 years since I read one. Yikes. Time. 

The later Roper mysteries have a sports gimmick. They each revolve around a different sport, baseball, horse-racing, basketball etc. etc. I'm not too much into sports other than baseball, so that's what probably kept me from diving back into the series. The first two are devoid of any athletics, besides fisticuffs that is, so I was interested in trying #1. Max Roper is one of those private eye/spy-types, an agent for a big national security firm called EPT. A little more high-tech than your average gumshoe but still very much a hard-boiled-school guy. He's appropriately tough, appropriately fond of women and booze, appropriately dumb when the plot calls for it and appropriately sarcastic. My kinda guy. 

I have a real fondness for the 70's era detective novel, you get the hippie angle, a lot of cult/spiritual communes, drugs and just a general shmear of grooviness. This one's got all that. Roper is assigned to find a missing rich-man's daughter (classic) and what follows is a twisting tale of murder, drugs, hippies, communes, stolen cars, switchblades, moider and quite a bit of Roper getting drugged. Platt is a good writer, he's got a fun, slightly tongue-in-cheek style that doesn't take itself too seriously. Probably a hold out from his comic book days. This novel reads like it was a newspaper detective comic strip. Roper could hang out with Rip Kirby or Secret Agent X-9 without skipping a beat.

These kinds of novels are comfort food for my soul at this point. When they are done slickly it's just page after page of feeling at home on those mean streets. This one's "light" hardboiled mystery, not quite as loopy as a Shell Scott but nowhere as tough as a Mike Hammer, its somewhere along the lines of one of M.E. Chaber's Milo March books. I had a good 'ol time with this one, though it's a little longer than it needed to be. This is a 170-page mystery in a 240-page package. Roper and Platt spin their wheels a bit too much in the middle, but they are both pleasant enough to pal around with, so I didn't mind too much. 

All the Roper books have been eBooked by Prologue and that's pretty sweet. Pick one of them up if you're a fan of Mike Shayne or Carter Brown and I'll probably enjoy yourself. Platt had a nice, clean style of writing. He could spin a good version of the standard mystery/adventure story with wit and style and make it look simple.

QUICK SHOTS: Lou Brick: The Jade Cat by George Mair

"The sharpest new suspense adventure hero since Lew Archer," the cover of this book declares. We might be in trouble folks. Since you know 'ol Lew wasn't much of an adventure hero and the only connection I can see between Archer and Lou Brick is a first name. But you can't judge a book on it's copy. So I dove head first into this book about the karate-chopping adventure hero named Brick. I had never read anything by George Mair, who was surprisingly a Scottish doctor in addition to a writer. He wrote a stand-alone or two but mostly wrote about NATO secret-agent man David Grant in a series of 10 books between 1964 and 1973. I guess spies were waning in 1974 so Mair unleashed crack investigative reporter Lou Brick onto the scene for Pyramid books, it was clearly designed to be a series but didn't make it to number 2. 

Lou Brick is big-time reporter man who's always up to his neck in danger and excitement. He's like a lot of reports in these kind of books mostly just comes off like your standard paperback private eye. He's got wise-cracks, fists and is reasonably clever. I also LOVE his name, it just screams 70's pulp. He works for a national service and is fairly famous. We get to know pretty much nothing else past this. The book moves too fast to dive into a Brick-head. Seriously this book never lets up on the throttle. Nearly ever chapter break ends in a cliff-hanger that's usually quickly resolved in the beginning of the next chapter only to set up another wild death-trap for out man Brick. He's hired to find some stocks and bonds to keep a scandal from breaking out for a rich-guy plus there's some blackmail involved all by an evil crime cartel known as The Jade Cat. There's hotel bombings, multiple helicopters destroyed, ransom pay offs, women pulling (multiple) pearl-handled pistols from their purses, a fair amount of time spent in phone booths, double crosses, the Triad and dead bodies. Pretty good for a reporter.

This is incredibly shallow book, but it's also a lot of fun. It just stands up and moves so fast that the short-comings seem to vanish in a fog of daring-do. It also has an odd "got to my word count" quick ending that's a bit of a cop-out. Brick is actually a pretty solid hero for a paperback series, likeable enough with an interesting occupation that would have set him apart from the "Executioner" clones. I recently lucked into one of Mair's David Grant books in a big lot of paperbacks from eBay. I'll have to see how that fairs because Mair certainly delivers the action. The Grant books are available as fairly cheap eBooks, but Lou Brick has never been reprinted and is a little scarce. 

Quick Shots: One Angry Man by Norman Daniels

Norman Daniels had a long career writing whatever "pulp fiction" was at the moment. He hooked onto trends and put out what would sell, all the while producing quality, albeit workman like books. My kinda guy. He created the pulp hero The Black Bat, wrote The Phantom Detective, novels featuring The Avengers (the British spies, not the costumed people) plus stand alone work in the Gold Medal mold and his own 60's spy series with John Keith the Man from A.P.E. He tried a couple of other series out along the way The Baron books, which have nothing to do with John Creasey's The Baron and the Kelly Carvel novels.

"One Angry Man" is the second in the Carvel trilogy, I've read the first one and enjoyed it but didn't review it because it was done with much more style and grace over at Paperback Warrior so head over and check that one out. Kelly Carvel is your standard paperback tough guy ex-cop division. Fed up with the justice system he chucked his badge. He didn't take up as a private eye, instead he got mixed up with The Committee of Ten, a group of big-wigs who want him to act as a personal avenger for injustice. It's a nice series set-up, one that could have gone on much longer then it did. With all the money and connections Carvel has it easier then some of our 70's vigilante heroes, but it's a nice slice of spy on your vigilante sandwich.

"The Rape of a Town" (1970)

"One Angry Man" (1971)

"License to Kill" (1972)

Carvel's one angry man because in the small town where he's police chief (it's part of the fist book) there's a big-time drug pusher. He decides to take him down, along the way he gets help from The Committee of Ten, the Mafia, his number one lady Merryl, and his cop buddy. The action is a little sparse, but well written and brutal when it happens. Carvel is more of schemer, putting chess pieces where he wants them and battling it out across the board. There's kidnappings, threats, courtroom scenes, rude waiters, drugging, shoot-outs and hokey drug language. It's a lot of fun.

The books' a little stiff in spots though, Daniels was clearly an old pro trying his hand at the latest trend, which he pulls off mostly. It's a little out of time; reading like it was written in the early 60's instead of the 70's at places. But with this much time past, what's ten years? "One Angry Man" moves quick, is filled with thrilling stuff and finishes well. You'll probably have a good time with any Daniel's book, I know I do.

Jon Messmann's "A Bullet for the Bride"

Jon Messmann was a journeyman pulp writer who could crank them out and fill the pages up. Seriously his pages are dense with words. He seemed to put effort into his work, which isn't always the case for writers that very often wrote under established house names and who's covers had numbers on them. Quite often there's a lot blank space on pages, but Messmann seemed determined to give you bang for your .95 cents. Apparently he got his star writing comics in the 40's before moving onto books. He created a couple good series in "The Revenger" and "Jefferson Boone, Handyman" and worked in the Nick Carter world and the short-live Hot-Line books. Then turned his gun-sights towards westerns and coming up with the super long running "Trailsman" series of adult westerns. That's a damned fine run of writing books.

Along the way he wrote "A Bullet for the Bride" for Pyramid books. First off it's got a terrible lack-luster cover for the kind of book it is, making the book look like a tame mystery when it's a rip-roaring sea-faring secret agent adventure. Also it's from he 70's, designed for men and has boats in it so it obviously has mention of Travis McGee on the cover which was a prerequisite it seems. It's also suffers from the 70's phenomena of explaining zero about the contents of the book on the cover instead just having a excerpt of a sex scene. I bought the book on a whim because I enjoyed Messman's other work and figured it was worth the 4 dollar eBay risk. The paperback god were smiling upon me. It's even more surprising that I read it nearly as soon as I got it. Books usually languish on my To Be Read Pile for weeks (or months or years or decades) but the stupid bride and groom on the cover called out to me, I guess. Pyramid had some great covers on Joseph (Terry Harknett) Hedges' Stark series and Michael Kurland's War Inc. books, if "A Bullet for a Bride" had some decent artwork it might have sold more. Not that I have any idea how it sold being a guy who was born well after the book was first published and having no idea if any records likes that is kept. It's just that the book is obviously Captain Ed Steele #1: A Bullet for the Bride but just without any more books to follow.

Hard-case Captain Ed Steele is a vet who skippered a boat with his CIA buddy Bryon on missions during the Korean War. After the war the CIA pays for his super cool boat The Squid; that's built like a brick shit-house but looks like an out-house on the outside and got him to pay it off by doing dirty jobs for the company. The boat is described in great detail. I know nothing about boats so I don't know if it's actually well described or just made up. I assume Messmann knew his stuff cause it all sounds like boat things. Not that I care about boats. Ed is a dick in the way that a lot of Men's Adventure fiction heroes, but not unbearable. Messmann has character habits his heroes are often a bit introspective and classically read. Jefferson Boone and Ben Martin aka The Revenger are pretty similar. Messmann knew the kind of guys he liked to write about.

Pretty rich girl, Cam hires Ed to find out if the woman her father is about to marry is really evil. Ed doesn't want the job but gets talked into by his old CIA buddy Bryon and he doesn't even buy Cam's story. BUT SURPRISE the soon-to-be-evil-step-mother is actually evil. So Ed's in hot water with killers, wins a big boat race, sleeps with Cam,gets mugged, drinks a lot of gin, rents a convertible, sails through HURRICANE and sieges a island fortress full of baddies. Along the way he picks up his buddy Domino who acts as his side-kick, shipmate and Meyers to Ed's Travis McGee.

The book is full of enough fun and color to breeze right on by. Messmann is a seasoned pro and it's obvious that he cared about this book, the boating is big part of it and while I'm not the biggest fan of nautical adventures Messmann makes these scenes thrilling, particularly the boat race at the beginning. I loved the combo of the espionage/sea adventure it was an interesting concept that could have supported a lot more salty tales. Its not without it's faults, Cam the female lead is stupid and does all the wrong things at the wrong time. The finale and the evil plan is a bit rushed bit too easily stumbled upon. But even with these few detractors it's a helluva fun book that's packed with action and some wiseacre humor. Also keep an eye out for his Handyman and Revenger series both of which are a lot of fun. He also wrote MY ALL TIME FAVORITE Nick Carter: Killmaster book: The Sea Trap.