QUICK SHOTS: Hunter #2: Operation Alpha Death by Norman Conway

Coming out of the same publisher as the awesomely odd Kirby Carr Hitman books, the two-book Hunter series by Norman Conway really stands out amongst its competitors. I mean, what other books in the Men's Adventure genre feature clowns, no wait, Action Clowns, yeah, so prominently? None, because I suppose all other authors (including me) are cowards. Anywho, Canyon Books was an off-shoot of Major Books which was all probably some sort of Mafia-dodge. It seems to be the case with a lot of these small-time publishers. I could be wrong, but whatever Canyon put out some weird books, so Pulp-God bless them. 

I was at work and bookless on a slow day. Luckily my store *cough* Robot Roy's Toys and Books *cough* is well stocked in the stuff I like. Hell, my name's in the store name. So, after trying to get into a Death Merchant, I gave up and pulled "Hunter #2: Operation Alpha Death" off the shelf, not expecting much and promptly read it in whirlwind. I have both books in my personal collection, but only a copy of #2 to sell or I would have read #1 but it didn't prove to be a big deal. 

Super-badass lawyer-turned-mystic avenger-turned-carnival owner is taking a break from the carnie life in the mountains of a Ruritanian country when he spots a good-looking woman (naturally) and a kid running from an army patrol unit out for blood. He does that badass thing, saves them and then the ball is rolling. Hunter, you see was a lawyer who went up into the mountains in China (I think) to learn the mystic arts, like the Green Lama or Iron Fist to come back and do good for the world also to run the circus he inherited. So, Hunter and the folks he saved hold up in his rented borderland mountain villa and Hunter gets some visions of his Master-guy who tells him he's got a mission, if he should choose to accept it. Then ANOTHER circus with another mystic-avenger type leading it rolls up to help out. Whew.

Along the way there's nearly non-stop action and intrigue. Mountain escapes, ice bridges, commando raids, tough carnies, random psychic ability and ACTION CLOWNS! Seriously this a wild book just crammed full of tropes and tall tales. I loved it, I'm all in for this kind of funky action-stuff. Conway's tongue must have found his cheek, it's full of exuberance for pulp-fiction. Now, it's not going to change your life, but it's worth a couple of hours of reading it and at least it's different. Majorly different.

Now, who was Norman Conway? Was he Norman Conway? The Internet Speculative Fiction Database website credits Conway as Fleming Lee who ghost-wrote The Saint for Leslie Charteris, ISFDB is pretty good most of the time and The Spy Guys and Gals website echos this. But the Catalog of Copyright Entries for 1975 credit "Operation Alpha Death" as Norman Conway pseud. of Mark Rust. Though #1 "Operation Omega" is indeed credited to Fleming Lee in the Catalog of Copyright Entries for 1974. So, I guess Fleming Lee had some wild ideas, wrote book #1 only to not write #2. Enter Mark Rust. It seems odd that Canyon would hire someone else to write #2. I'm sure it didn't sell in The Executioner numbers. There's plenty of #1's in Men's Adventure fictions with no #2s. Ah, publishing mysteries. 

Whoever wrote it I liked it.

Texas Night Riders and Other Drive-In Books: Early Pulp of Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale

I've touched on, more than once, that Joe R. Lansdale is a corner stone in want has made me the reader (and writer) that I am today. Probably, much to his chagrin if he ever caught word. It's an odd relationship reader/writer, it's all a once more personal and less personal of a connection than say being struck by a movie star. You spend a lot of time inside someone else's head when you read a book, but you don't see them, you don't know how they move or what they sound like. After middle school's worth of reading Alexandre Dumas, James Bond and The Saint novels, I had switched my recreation time to horror flicks and vintage muscle cars. The bloodier and the faster the better. 

Somewhere down the two-lane blacktop, I got wind of "Bubba Ho-Tep" which put together of two of my favorite horror-guys, Bruce Campbell and the director Don Coscarelli and it was taken from a short story by a fella named Joe R. Lansdale. An old Elvis fighting a mummy in an East Texas nursing home? Hell, I was sold. My local library had a copy of "Writer of the Purple Rage" that the novella was contained in and boy-howdy I was hooked. Soon, I read most of his stuff I could lay my hands on. Some of them in by dashboard light in my hot rod 1968 Plymouth Fury coupe. I must have been out on the highway avoiding The God of the Razor and staying out of weird Drive-In's. 

Lansdale was the first writer I encountered that seemed to understand life in the small-town/country way with a vernacular to match to boot. I knew guys and gals in flesh in blood like the ones in Lansdale's words. When I read a Hap and Leonard novel, I imagine my late-father as Hap, he was cut from the same country-boy/hippie cloth. An ass-kicker too, 'natch. I guess Lansdale taught me that writing can sound like anything, that it doesn't have to come from the pen of an English ex-spy or some other stuffed-shirt. And he wrote all the things I liked, mystery, horror, sci-fi you name it and it all sound exactly like Joe R. Lansdale talking to you, spinning yarns making you laugh and then turning it on its head and making a shiver run up your spine.

"Texas Night Riders" came out in 1983 from Leisure books with Lansdale writing under the name Ray Slater and it's an all-out tale of western revenge in under 200 pages. Before this he wrote a porn novel called "Molly's Sexual Follies" as Mark Simmons (with Brad W. Foster) and his shattering novel "Act of Love," which is one helluva book. Then came out with a one-two punch of "The Magic Wagon" and "The Nightrunners." Whew. Anywho, "Texas Night Riders" might seem like a typical western. Farmer Jubil Rains used to be a solider in the Confederate army and now is living peacefully with his wife and son...you see where I am going with this, right? 'ol Jubil has his son murdered before his eyes by three bandits and plugged buried alive in the coffin of his recently deceased wife. Well, Jubil does what most cowboy heroes would do and straps on his six-guns and heads out with revenge on his mind. Along the way he comes across the baddies now leading a pack of the titular Texas Night Riders, masked riders out to push people off of their land. Jubil takes up with big time farmer, Brennan and his men in order to kill the nasty Thorton who ran his son through with a saber.

Jubil is a fairly conventual western-type hero, a quiet man out for personal revenge. Lansdale's leads are usually more colorful and interesting characters, but this after all was written for a Leisure pulp-paperback and Lansdale gave them a pulp-paperback hero. He's certainly not a bad character, he's just Clint Eastwood on the page. Thinking about it, what more do you need? This is still clearly a Lansdale novel; his quirks and themes seep in through the mud and the blood. The farmer's daughter, Mattie is a tough lady, like a lot of Lansdale's ladies, who can handle the action with aplomb. While all the side characters are stock players, Lansdale makes them tough, funny and wild in their own ways. And the action is all Lansdale, brutal and wild and at times reaching his early "splatterpunk" levels of gore. There's a hint of horror in the mix, early on the town drunk refers to Jubil as a zombie, all dead inside but walking. There's a bit of "The Night of the Living Dead" as the Night Riders siege a walled-up farm in the dead of night. It's not a book that is going to be amongst the best of Lansdale's work, but it's a fascinating look into the foundation of the writer he became and what was always in there. 

A couple of years later Lansdale returned to the western, albeit with a less traditional tale with "Dead in the West," starring a rascal of a preacher-man named Jebediah Mercer who lands himself in Mud Creek, TX to try to get some soul saving done. It's a good thing he's a pistol-packin' preacher cause soon the dead start to rise, and he's got to stand up and fight. "Dead in the West" is a wonderful little book, seriously little, the only drawback is that there's ain't much of it and you want more of it. It seems like it's ripped out of the pages of "Weird Tales," a fever dream about putting Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Roy Rogers and George A. Romero in a blender then spill it out over a typewriter. Little tips of the cowboy hat to "The Necronomicon" and such put you in the right mindset. The voice is (as always) pure Lansdale. It's funny, it's profane, its gross and blood. So, you know...pure Lansdale and boy howdy how I had fun with this one.

Then a few little years later Lansdale took the western vibe into the apocalyptic future filled with zombies in "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with the Dead Folk." It's a novella which is its only downfall, there should be more of it, there should be a near endless supply of stories in this world. I read this many, many years ago and in rereading it (and knowing more and more about Men's Adventure fiction) now it makes me long for a Lansdale M.A. series penned in the 80's about this bounty hunter named Wayne and his '57 Chevy wandering the new terrifying west. It's a place of (somewhat) domesticated Zombies, lawless border towns, the vague aftermath of the "Chevrolet/Cadillac war" and all measure of scoundrel. If you're not aware Lansdale did contribute to the "M.I.A. Hunter" series with always excellent Stephen Mertz but if Lansdale had had his own series product the Post-Apocalyptic Men's Adventure genre would have been the one, he was most suited for, even over an action series or an adult Western. Sigh. If only. A reader can dream. The novella itself is top-shelf, naughty, vulgar, non-stop action fun piled to the brim with exuberance and wild little touches. Shit. There need to be more of it.

There's no other writer like Joe R. Lansdale. I'd imagine there's folks that wouldn't dig what he is putting down. There are always wrong people in the world. In digging further in his back log I'm stuck by the ferocity of his work. Not just what he puts on the page, then emotion behind it. They read like something he HAD to put down on paper. The young and hungry author syndrome. Lansdale has kept the spark throughout the years, though he's gotten a bit more respectable and written some books that a truly brilliant, easily better then pretty much whatever the "big literary" books are (I'm looking at you, "The Bottoms" and "The Ticket") but he always never lost his spark of weirdness, thank God.   

QUICK SHOTS: "Crab's Moon" by Guy N. Smith

 

After reading my last Guy N. Smith I couldn't resist more. I usually try to break up my reading/reviewing to not clutter it up with the same author otherwise this might turn into a Michael Avallone blog. I'm getting on a major horror kick (it usually happens as summer approaches) and my thirst for monster mayhem was unquenchable as now I'm both writing a monster novel and in the very, very, very, early stages of a possible low-budget feature length horror film being made from a script I wrote. I'm also opening a vintage toy and bookstore, so my time is limited for reading and I know that when I pick up one of Smith's book the fat is trimmed, and the pace is cranked to eleven making for a pleasant coupla hours of blood, guts and killer animals.

So, Guy's legendary Crabs series. I mean who wouldn't dip their toe back in the world of cow-sized killer crabs first? The Crabs series is what Smith is most known for, seven books spanning from 1976 to 2019 plus a few chap books, some short stories and even a graphic novel. Oh, and an "unofficial" movie adaptation "Island Claws" written by The Creature from the Black Lagoon himself, Ricou Browning. That's a helluva run. They are unfortunately, like a lot of groovy horror novels, hard to come by. I lucked into a few of the Dell editions over the years and then paid a lot for some of the others. "Crabs: The Human Sacrifice" still lurks out there on the shores of bookshop shelves for me to find. The crab with the knife really whets my appetite. I really should have done my research since "Crab's Moon" is a semi-prequel/direct-sequel to the first "Night of the Crabs." It takes place during the first invasion of the crabs, but just in a different place. The problem is I only just got "Night of the Crabs" and haven't cracked it yet. It was a bone-head move, I thought I was going to save #1 for a special reading occasion I guess. 

Anyway, I read "Crab's Moon." The Guy N. Smith hallmarks are there, sex, violence, and gore as we bounce around between a few groups of generally unlikeable people trapped on an amusement park island that the military is defending from big 'ol crabs. There are terrible millionaires you hate, love triangles, distrust of authority, big guns plus explosions, one-night stands, dirty hippies, and delicious crab meat. It's a fast and fun read, but since the hero of "Night of the Crabs" ya know sorta wins that book, this one is a little anti-climatic. It's still fun enough to read, it'd be fun to read it back-to-back with #1. Now, these are pure-pulp and crammed with some terrible people which makes it delightful when bad things happen to them, don't go in expecting a hero or a heroine to love. Women especially have a rough go in these books, women characters are generally only there for sex and then to die. That's just a warning if it would bother you. Smith is playing with tropes and that there is some big-time low-brow horror tropes. 

Guy N. Smith is just one of my go-to guys. Should probably be one of YOURS too.

QUICK SHOTS: Feast of the Swamp Goblin by Lewis Stone

I can honestly say this is the first book I have directly read as a result of scrolling Instagram. I'm fairly sure that I was looking (and drooling) over some Guy N. Smith covers (he's popping up a lot lately for me) and saw the title "Feast of the Swamp Goblin" all in a gooey-looking font and after finding out it was a short work of pure-pulpy-horror I knew I had to give it a try. I hadn't ever heard of Lewis Stone before but, I mean "Feast of the Swamp Goblin, c'mon. That's a book screaming to be read. 

The novel is subtitled "A Horror B-Book" and that's what it is: a B-horror-movie on the printed page, or a direct-to-video-monster movie between two covers. It's a classic set-up. A group of college students go out into the woods to have some fun (i.e., booze and sexy sex) to blow off steam...unfortunately Swamp Goblin. There's a nerd, a slightly-more-cool nerd, a jerk-ass jock-type and his annoyed girlfriend plus a Ripley-woman. To top-that-off you have a grizzled hunter who is well, hunting the Swamp Goblin for his own reasons. These are all stock characters; Stone gives you enough to care a little about them and at least most of them are nicer than a lot of the assholes that seem to get killed in old horror novels. There's plenty of gore and the monster-attack scenes are well spaced within the book, not too long but not a constant barrage either. 

Speaking of Guy N. Smith, the nerd character is reading Smith "The Slime Beast," which Swamp Goblin seems to share a lot of D.N.A. with. It's a nice little touch. Stone writes in a clean, unpretentious style and keeps the pace up. All things that I look for in a book. It's a short book, more like a novella so if you like old school 70s/80s paperback horror or monster movies give it a go. It got me to order Stone's other Horror-B-Book, "The Campbell Lake Summer Camp Massacre," which seems like a nice and fun slasher tale. I rarely read any "new" books, so this was a nice change of pace. 

Me, Ralph Dennis and Hardman #8: The Deadly Cotton Heart

They're like an old bar-friends at this point, familiar on the surface but the details of past encounters are lost. That's the Hardman novels now. It's a wonderful thing, I almost get to read them again for the first time. Ralph Dennis's Hardman books were a turning point for me in a lot of ways. They made me realize that there might be good shit (real good shit) in those old paperbacks with numbers on the covers. They clued me in to detective novels in settings that weren't New York or L.A. And they taught me a lot about clean, tough writing with hard-bitten action that moves swiftly, makes sense but isn't too showy. They're all gems. Dennis should have been a major mystery writer after knocking out twelve of 'em in the FOUR YEARS. That's some damned fine writing to be squeezed out between beers in that short of a time span.

Jim Hardman and Hump Evans. Yeah, it's a bit funny when you say it out loud. I can see why some folk might have past them up, not quite Pepperoni Hero level of goofy names but it's just shy of it. The awesome action-packed covers were a bit of a lie too. Hardman wasn't a squared jawed man of action, but a pudgy ex-cop who I suspect looked a lot like Ralph Dennis. Hump was pitch perfect on the covers though. There was action but it's not an "Executioner" or a "Death Merchant." It's a dark alley in a Men's Adventure world. Spillane but a bit less of a fever dream. Hammett in leisure suits. What the Hardman books really are, and they are the closest thing to a pulp-version of the work of James Crumley. C.W. Sugrue and Milo Milodragovitch would throw back massive amounts of booze with Hardman and Hump. 

I've said before I came to mystery fiction via Joe R. Lansdale, Lansdale does an intro for Brash Books reprints (doing the Book God's work), and he says that there's a little bit of Hardman and Hump in my good buddies Hap and Leonard. I've known plenty of beer-drinkers and hell raisers. See, I'm a Kansas guy. That ain't the south, we're kind of a different breed up here. John Brown, flat-fields, western scenery and all that. But you grow up in a small town in Kansas you know guys like Hap and Hardman. Hell, my dad was like Hap in a lot of ways: an overgrown hippie country boy, I guess I didn't fall too far from the tree. You don't often get authentic take in crime fiction about a guy who you've sat next to on a bar stool and drank the heart of a fine spring day. 

Back then I had been on the hunt for the Hardman books for a while, tipped off by the always useful Thrilling Detective Website, but even back then they were hard to come by. Now it's nearly impossible. I found myself in Jacksonville, Florida in a fine Hawaiian shirt bumming my way around a conference on sports broadcasting that I had no business being there for. But the ride was mostly free and so was a lot of my time. I stumbled around town, rode a monorail and found myself in a book shop. At the end of the trip, I left with a nearly overflowing suitcase full of books. A lot of them were by Ralph Dennis. I scored most of the series in one foul swoop and read three or four of them that weekend in a hotel bar or a conference hall while fleecing cocktail shrimp. They seemed like the book I had wanted to write since I started liking private eye fiction (I've written a couple, I'll get around to getting it printed this year, hopefully) and there it had been done for years. 

"The Deadly Cotton Heart" was read in that lost-booky weekend. Luckily that was many moons ago and most of it was lost in my brain, so it was a nearly new book for me. Boasting one of the best titles in the series "Cotton Heart" is a strong entry in a very strong and consistent series. Jim is asked to play the part of an out-of-town-killer for a police sting operation. He doesn't want to, and he's got the right idea cause that's where the trouble starts. The sting goes wrong, puts Hump and Jim in the hot-seat and sets them off looking for a missing wife. They head on down to Tennesse to get into more trouble with a road-side madam, local police, racists, and an old murder. It's a pleasant twisty little action/mystery the way they don't make 'em anymore. 

It's nice to know I got all of the Hardman's to re-read again and again. They were getting hard to come by, but the always excellent Brash Books re-released them not too long ago in handsome paperbacks and eBooks. Ralph Dennis was sadly under-appreciated in his own time, but luckily nowadays he's getting the love he deserved, thanks to Lee Goldberg and Brash Books. Hardman and Hump are companions for my writing life, I often think of Ralph Dennis's clean, hardboiled writing when I'm doing my typing and I try to learn something.

QUICK SHOTS: John Mayo #3: Satanic Apocalypse by Guy N. Smith

When if first watched "Garth Margenghi's Darkplace" several years ago I was in on the joke. In one of those wonderful twists of fate I had recently discovered the mutant crab infested, werewolf and other assorted monsters of the world of Guy N. Smith. Like any sensible reader when I discovered that there was a series of books about giant crabs killing naughty folks across the U.K. I knew it had to be mine. "Darkplace" stars Mathew Holness (someone just give him buckets of money to make things, okay?) as a, well, hack horror writer of the 80's vintage. Margenghi is based on a few other writers of the very British style of horror, but Guy N. Smith is probably the main inspiration. And I think it's a loving tribute. Holness seems to have a real passion for the 70s/80s paperback world, check for "A Gun for George" some wonderful, loving jabs at the world of Men's Adventure. Oh, do yourself a favor and watch "Darkplace" too.

Now, I love Guy N. Smith's work. There's no pretention. The pedal is always to the metal. The ideas a wild and BIG. It's pure and nasty brand of pulp. It's especially how I like my horror fiction which has the tendency in this post Stephen King world to be bloated and overwrought and sadly often devoid of giant crabs. "Satanic Apocalypse" snuck up on me, for some reason I had completely missed that he had written a three-book series about a mysterious spy/government fixer named John Mayo who wears a big black fedora and often finds himself mixed up in the occult realm of espionage. While waiting for the first book to arrive from England I got a jump on the series with the third book, one of Smith's last published works via Amazon prime. It's a nice little mass-market sized paperback from Sinister Horror Company. So, they can still make 'em the right size, hmm.

John Mayo is a retired spy-guy who lives with an understanding girlfriend, his hat and a .38 revolver. Other than that, we get the briefest of backstory about a gruesome murder of his family you don't know much else about him. Of course, I'll probably learn more when I read book #1. He gets turned loose on an assignment to stop a home-grown terrorist cell who's been committing random acts of murder. Oh, and they have a devil-worshipping leader. Oh, and he's supposed to find a missing lady. Now here's the rub. This is a particularly good book? Probably not. Everything falls into Mayo's lap with very little effort on his part. He just happens upon the baddies, the girl and everything at every first available opportunity. Is it a fun book? YES. There's a bit of action, there's a bit of satanism, some bombs, some gruesome murders, forest fires, talk of fedoras and even a miniature version of the "animal on the muck killing everyone having sex" novel that Smith is famous for. I could almost see the paperback cover "Guy N. Smith's WILD BOAR." 

Guy N. Smith's work isn't for everyone. This one might not even be for his usual audience, as that there's really no "horror" going on here. It's really just a Men's Adventure novel in a horror-books-clothing. I'm excited to try out the other Mayo books, there a little like Sabat-light. The origin of the character is fun too, Smith just saw a guy at a wedding refusing to take his hat off in the church. Then the guy gave Smith the hat! Character's are everywhere.

Ed Noon Double Feature: High Noon at Midnight & Death Dives Deep by Michael Avallone

Every now and then you got to dive into the Nooniverse. In the plethora of literary private eyes there's none like Ed Noon, a true man for all seasons and problems. One the same time he's an old school tough-guy detective out of "Dime Detective" and sometimes he's a Don Quixote in the world spies, evil scientists, femme fatales, crooks, cops and even Presidents. He's all of that as well a movie and baseball buff who has soft heart and a (luckily) hard head. Ed Noon is a wonderful filter for Avallone's passions and obvious love of fun, action/mystery yarns. 

I found Ed a long time ago, when I was in high school with a short stack of used paperbacks. They were in rough/falling apart shape and patched with tape. A lot of Avallone's books in used bookstores seem to be a rough shape. I think these were read, passed around and read again. That's a nice compliment to a writer. Over the years I've managed to get a pretty complete set (a couple still illudes me, dammit) but it's not the easiest run to collect as Avallone and Noon bounced between publishers from Perma and Gold Medal to longer runs at Signet and Curtis. Like the back and forth of publishers the series conforms itself to the paperback trends at the time. 50's hardboiled detective novels that morphs itself into a P.I./Spy for the President that transforms itself if a kooky 70s mystery series full of quirks and pulpy death into a transcendent novel of an alien invasions, Gary Cooper and forgotten indemnities. 

If you're new to Ed Noon "High Noon at Midnight" isn't the book to start with though it's one of the pinnacles of the series. Ed's taking a vacation when a little man comes up to him on the plane and offers him a job as an assassin. Then the little man is knifed in the back. Then the plane explodes. That's just the beginning. Ed's flung into a world of androids, impending invasions, alien abductions, evil asylums, fembots, growing old, Gary Cooper as the voice of the good in the world, socks to the jaw and the love of old friends. Ed spends a lot of the books not knowing if he's sane or not, if what is happening is ACTUALLY happening or if he just fell off the rockers. Scenes flow back and forth in time and space as Ed's broken brain (with the help of Cooper) tries to do what he does best: stick the pieces of the puzzle together. The chorus line of Don Quixote, The Three Musketeers et. all is a highlight, Ed getting a pep talk from his childhood (and adulthood, Ed never grew up) heroes to make it through is a nice touch.

Noon is different from most paperback private eyes in that he's not the ultra-tough Hammer-type, nor is he the therapist-turned-detective that Archer is. He's got a little both in there, but mostly he's just a regular joe thrown into wild situations straight out of the pulps.  Even the proposed alien invasion kind of works like one of the many invasions of "Operator 5" pulps. "High Noon at Midnight" also has echoes of Avallone's previous works the mind-controlled Noon adventure "Shoot it Again, Sam" and the spy-adventure "The Man from Avon" which tackles dem pesky aliens. Avallone surely had them in the back of his brain as he wrote what would be the final Ed Noon. Though there are rumblings about an unpublished sequel "Since Noon Yesterday" that might surface someday. I read it too early. I might have been too young and dumb, but on this second read it just struck me how it's such a wild and fittingly melancholy final chapter in the series. 

Back when Ed Noon had a red, white and blue direct line to the President to get his adventures he got sent a funky manuscript straight out of "Argosy" in "Death Dives Deep." This was one of the books that I got in first round of Ed Noon madness back when I was a teenager. I had always fondly remembered it as it was one of those books that broke me out of my reading rigidness. At the time I pretty much just wanted straight-private-eye-mysteries of the hardboiled variety. I had passed through my secret agent phase and wanted something like Mike Hammer all the time, with the occasional Shell Scott palate cleanser. I went into the Noon's thinking that they would be a little like Shell. Of course, they aren't, they're ain't nothing like an Ed Noon. Back then I still preferred the older Perma/Gold Medal/Ace Double era of Avallone's work. Now I'm all about how weird and wild it got as he crossed over into the Curtis run. Those are pure id on the page. 

"Death Dives Deep" starts out with a little manuscript that starts all the trouble. It's a wild sea-tale of adventure with gold and killer mermaids. IT'S FUCKING GREAT. You can pull it straight out of the book and run it as a short story without any trouble. Makes me wonder if that's where it started. The Prez sends it to Noon and the yarn spins from there. Some of the Spy-era Noon's read a lot like Spillane's Tiger Mann books (cockeyed of course) where a lot of the espionage takes place in the jungles of the New York City with blazing .45's. By the time we get on the way to Florida by the femme fatale-super-villainess the book is almost over, but it's a slam bang ending. Along the way we tackle The Bermuda Triangle angle, various murders, an FBI shanghai, the Communist threat, Noon's love of the one-of-a-kind Melissa Mercer and a President in critical condition. There's a lot of stuff packed in here. This is where the Noon's really start a more experimental stage. What's started here is the nugget of what "High Noon at Midnight" expanded on. It's the kind of progression that rarely happens in a long running series. It keeps the later ones just as fresh and vibrant as the early ones, just in different ways. 

I mean, I can go on and on about Michael Avallone and Ed Noon. They taught me a lot about writing, about an author's voice and series character writing. Avallone wrote a ton of books. I pretty much always get some joy out of them, but so were obviously for paychecks and that's no dig. People turn their noses down on professional pulpster/paperback writers. That's a lot of crap, it's incredibly hard to write for money AND still make it entertaining. He proved it time and time again from "Mannix" to "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." to "Friday the 13th." Will I ever get to the "Patridge Family" novels he wrote? Hell, maybe. I'm re-reading to avoid reading the final unread ones on the shelf, saving them for some mythical rainy day or sunny backyard with a cold beer read. A day with some friends between the pages.