Showing posts with label Dan Schmidt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dan Schmidt. Show all posts

Thursday, February 14, 2013

SuperBolan #98: Predator Paradise


SuperBolan #98: Predator Paradise, by Dan Schmidt
September, 2004  Gold Eagle Books

This was one of the last books Dan Schmidt published, and unfortunately it’s every bit as uninvolving as another of his latter publications, Devil's Bargain. If anything this just confirms my theory that the earlier these men’s adventure novels are published, the better, and also that authors in this genre will gradually achieve burnout. Because without question the earlier Schmidt novels I’ve read have been very enjoyable, particularly The Executioner #115: Circle Of Steel, which was damn great.

But again I wonder how much the author is to blame. Gold Eagle has clearly refashioned itself to ride on the current fame of Tom Clancy/Ops Center stuff, and this SuperBolan almost reads like a piece of military fiction. To wit, Mack “Executioner” Bolan, who by this point is a complete cipher, has been tasked (by the President no less) to infiltrate a black ops commando/Delta squad calling itself Cobra Force Twelve to ascertain whether they have ulterior, anti-US motives.

Just like the more memorable Alpha Team Six in Devil’s Bargain, Cobra is made up of hardened warriors who go about with colorful code names…just like Cobra from GI Joe, in fact. Hell, the leader, Colonel Ben Collins, even calls himself “Cobra Commander!” If only he wore a mirror-lensed faceplate. But again as in Devil’s Bargain the too-many Cobra black ops dudes run together, and all are basically clones of one another. Hence, the reader can’t tell them apart, and quickly loses interest.

Even the narrative is lifeless, which is odd given how action-heavy it is. The first 100+ plages are literally an endless action sequence, with Bolan riding shotgun as Cobra blitzes various terrorist compounds from Mogadishu on up through Africa and into the Middle East. Collins will send in three plucky Cobra bastards who will enter into a fake deal with some despot, distracting them, and then Cobra Force Twelve will descend in their bombers and gunships and M-16-toting squads and start blowing people away.

But the action scenes are plain boring, mostly because Schmidt delivers them so flatly, stuck in the heads of the characters while the action goes down. In other words, while guns are blazing, instead of detailing the carnage Schmidt will relay it all from Bolan’s point of view (or Collins, or another Cobra commando, etc), ruminating over man’s inhummanity to man and etc. The actual combat description is relegated to stuff like, “Bolan blew the guy off his feet.” And then it’s back to the ruminating.

Compare this to the gore onslaught that was Circle Of Steel, where the action kept moving and the heads kept exploding. I guess a guy can only describe a head blowing up so many ways; it seems obvious to me that a writer in the action genre is going to eventually get sick of it. Schmidt would be a prime example. Predator Paradise is a pale reflection of the man’s earlier works, offering up cardboard characters, repetitive and uninvolving action scenes, and a general sense of frustration.

Also frustrating is that Bolan is a bit slow on the uptake here. He figures from the get-go that Cobra is up to something bad, but he tags along with them anyway. They waste a few Muslim terrorists, Bolan helps them catch a few leaders, some Cobra dudes make some evil insinuations, and Bolan just decides to keep going with it. Hell, there’s even a scene where one of the Cobra guys takes a shot at Bolan – right in front of everyone – and after killing the dude, Bolan still isn’t sure if Cobra is bad!

Of course, these guys do have an overarching plan for evil, but damn if it too isn’t muddled. I honestly couldn’t figure out what they had in mind. Something about corralling a bunch of warlords from Africa and the Middle East, taking them to a military base in Iran, and then doing something, like selling WMDs to Russians or something like that. Seriously, it was like the men’s adventure equivalent of The Big Sleep, just an endlessly convoluted plot with no satisfying resoluton.

And as mentioned, it would be one thing if we had some colorful personages here, but other than one or two of the Cobra dudes, none of them are memorable. They all have interesting code names, though, and Schmidt works it out that different code names mean they are in different level of Cobra, and therefore privy to different levels of the nonsensical Cobra scheme. But as for personalities, they have none. They all basically speak the same way, make the same threats; there are only three of them in particular, the ones who go in alone to each warlord and distract them before Cobra’s main force arrives, who have any spark, and Schmidt would’ve done well to just focus on them and get rid of the rest of the faceless Cobra masses.

It’s also frustrating that there’s a lot of potential here. A rogue team of black ops raising hell in Africa has the makings of at least an interesting plot, but it’s squandered with needless wheel-spinning and repetitive action sequences. It also would appear that “black ops team gone rogue” is something of an obsession with Schmidt, as I think every book of his I’ve read has concerned the same thing. So maybe by this point he had reached the end of the road, and could no longer find a new way to tell the same old story.

Repetition is key in this novel, so it will be in this review, as well – the earlier a book is published in the men’s adventure genre, the better it will be. And after a few decades of writing about terrorists getting their faces blown off by M-16 autofire, any writer will eventually achieve burnout. Hell, even David Alexander hung up his action-fiction-writing hat, and that dude could make an exploding head read like goddamn poetry.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

The Executioner #115: Circle of Steel


The Executioner #115: Circle of Steel, by Dan Schmidt
July, 1988 Gold Eagle Books

This is a crazy, wild Doc Savage sort of yarn that goes non-stop from beginning to end. Anything ever said previously about violence in the Executioner books must be put on hold. Circle of Steel drips with gore, gore with no particular point. Brains splatter, intestines spill out, eyes are shot or gouged out – you name it, it happens in the pages of this story. -- William H. Young, A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction

Yep, that made me want to read the book, too!

And truth be told, Circle of Steel lives up to its gory promise. Not only is this the best Dan Schmidt novel I've read, it's also the best of the Gold Eagle-published Executioner books. True, it's yet another Schmidt tale about a squad of American black ops going rogue and selling weapons to terrorists, even financing them in their terrorist activities, with Mack Bolan again caught in the middle of a convoluted plot filled with way too many characters, but there's a crazed element here that elevates the tale, something that was missing in the other Schmidt novels I've read.

The gruesome madness begins on the opening pages, as a band of scimitar-wielding Islamic terrorists hack and slash a senator and his houseful of guests. This scene is almost a tribute to the gory splendor of GH Frost's Army of Devils. These terrorists are part of a faction known as The Followers of the True Way; they are financed by a mercenary who goes by the impressive title Killer Keller. Keller also controls an army of mercs, whom he considers his real soldiers; he uses the Muslim fighters as "cannon fodder," exactly like the character Crammon did in the much later Schmidt offering Devil's Bargain. (One could easily argue that each Schmidt novel is the same as the one that came before, with only the names of the villains changed.)

Keller's complex scheme is to train these terrorists (on American soil, no less!) to kill a bunch of senators and whatnot, generally sowing chaos, while also selling them arms at inflated prices. He then plans to kill them so as to get back the arms and re-sell them. There's also a scheme involving a group of peacekeepers on a mission to the Middle East which Keller plans to kidnap and sell to the Followers; it was all a bit too convoluted to keep up with, really. More interesting are the arms Keller plans to sell -- the M-40 Maneater, an assault rifle designed by an associate of Keller's which fires regular bullets but is also outfitted with "x-wings" of grenades. Keller has a few crates of these; just one M-40 will turn a soldier into a destructive force.

Bolan comes into it after interrogating a former accomplice of Keller's who wants to come clean. As usual in a Schmidt tale, it's not so simple. The CIA's involved, neither Bolan nor his contact Brognola have heard of the Maneaters, and Bolan is forever one step behind Keller and his men. In a way Schmidt's novels are like action equivalents of film noir, with Bolan the hardboiled hero lost in a murky, convoluted, and dangerous world of cutthroats and killers.

And, just as in film noir, there's a femme fatale -- Ilsa Tausen, a blond German beauty who not only resembles a valkyrie but considers herself one. Ilsa once worked with Keller and was also his lover, but eight years ago Keller left her behind to rot in a South African cell. Ilsa eventually freed herself and is now consumed with vengeance upon Keller; her plan (one of many plans in this novel) is to infiltrate his team and kill him. Ilsa's father was an SS officer and she wishes the Nazis had won the war. She loves to use her body to lure men into their deaths...after having sex with them. She relishes murder and gets off on it, going into combat in a "skin-tight leather combat blacksuit," blowing people away with a smile on her face. Oh, and she also enjoys freebasing cocaine.

Yes my friends, Ilsa Tausen is the greatest character to ever appear in an Executioner novel.

It occured to me as I read it that Circle of Steel isn't only an amped-up variation of film noir, but also of screwball comedy. It operates on the same principles, with our straight-laced hero Bolan caught up in a madcap world of bizarre characters and goofy situations. For example: midway through the book Bolan realizes he's being followed. He springs a trap on the pursuers, who turn out to be a pair of guys in suits and ties. Immediately they tell Bolan they're CIA operatives, trying to capture Keller; further, they're part of a tactical team calling itself Talon. Then they ask Bolan if he'd like to help. All this, mind you, before they even ask Bolan who he is!

More dark comedy ensues as Bolan finds himself working with the Company. Of course they're all rubes and don't heed Bolan's advice and so get wasted in vast numbers during the many ensuing battles with Keller and his men. Bolan eventually goes all the way to Greece in pursuit of Keller; meanwhile Ilsa succeeds in her infiltration and allies herself with the man, plotting his death. But sadly this plot is lost in the shuffle of schemes and counter-schemes, with Schmidt once again sullying his tale with too, too many characters.

As in previous Schmidt books, there's a whole bunch of wheel-spinning here. I lost track of the number of times Bolan would grimly survey events and determine to see the mission through, or when Keller would basically do the same thing. I've realized that one can't fault Schmidt and others for this; one reason Pendleton's original novels are so much more streamlined is because they were simply shorter. In the mid-'80s Gold Eagle boosted the page count of their books, no doubt to make them look like "real novels," but the outcome was that now the authors had to fill more pages. Every Schmidt novel I've read would have benefitted from being shorter.

As William H. Young noted in his study of the series, Circle of Steel is quite gory, spectacularly so. Heads explode like watermelons, intestines sluice out, there's even a full-on gutting courtesy Ilsa. And given the presence of the M-40 Maneaters, there's also room for people blowing up real good -- and yes, Bolan manages to get hold of one of them, of course showing everyone how to properly use them. Schmidt even works some sex into the tale, with Ilsa sleeping with a few men she later kills.

Despite the wheel-spinning, despite the fact that the plot was recycled from previous (and future) Schmidt tales, I really enjoyed Circle of Steel. Ironically this was the last novel Schmidt wrote for Gold Eagle for several years, but at least it was a great way to go out.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

The Executioner #112: Blood of the Lion


The Executioner #112: Blood of the Lion, by Dan Schmidt
April, 1988 Gold Eagle Books

This was one of Dan Schmidt's earlier Executioner novels, published nearly twenty years before his later offering Devil's Bargain. Thankfully Blood of the Lion is a lot better, proving yet again that the shorter these novels, the better. But regardless Schmidt still finds a way to jam too many plots into one book, again neutering an otherwise interesting concept.

Alchupa, a South American drug lord with plans to launch a takeover of Brazil, hires the "top assassins in the world" to kill Mack Bolan. Five dudes who have just walked out of your average '80s Cannon action film: there's the Viper, American, former CIA hitman; a Swede who goes by the name The Headhunter; a Mongol who likes to battle with bow and arrow; an Arab who relishes the idea of gutting his prey with his scimitar; and a Britisher who uses a Weatherby sniper rifle, the same rifle Bolan has been known to use. Strangely, everyone knows who Bolan is; Alchupa even has an entire wall of his place lined with newspaper clippings about the Executioner's exploits.

Alchupa has the assassins draw straws to see who goes first; he's offered a million dollar bounty for whoever kills Bolan but he's uncertain if any of them will succeed. Why he doesn't send them all out at once is glossed over; it's intimated that the five wouldn't get along. The Arab is up first and heads from Brazil up to the midwest, where Bolan has been tracked -- for in his own subplot Bolan has conveniently just learned about Alchupa.

In one of the many subplots here the regular branch of the DEA have been tracking the drug lord, suspecting something big coming up for Alchupa; also there's something about a secret branch in the DEA which is made up of former mercenaries and other of their ilk, rather than "true" DEA agents. Long story short, it all has the taste of a setup, and Bolan eventually learns that there are dirty agents in the DEA who are plotting with Alchupa to overtake Brazil.

The battle between the Arab and Bolan is well done and very much in The Most Dangerous Game mould, as the Arab hunts Bolan through the dark forests. In fact, Schmidt leaves little room to doubt this is his intention; he actually writes: "It was the most dangerous game." It's a good scene and makes one want to read more -- the idea of top assassins coming one after another to collect a bounty on Bolan's head makes for an interesting plot. Only, just as he did in Devil's Bargain, Schmidt blows it. It's as if he doesn't realize he already has a good plot, or perhaps that he gets bored with it. For the entire assassin plot is jettisoned.

The Viper, you see, is one of those DEA special agents and has his own subplot in the mire of subplots. He takes the weapons of the three other remaining assassins and informs them that they're now working for him; they're still going after Bolan, but not to kill him -- they're going to recruit him and then the four of them will join up with the Viper's DEA special team to launch their own war against Alchupa.

Bolan's captured after a running battle in which an innocent old truck-driver and a good DEA agent are killed. He goes along with the Viper and his men; Bolan is determined to kill Alchupa anyway, so why not? Also he's determined to find out who's behind the DEA corruption and bring them to justice, too. The other assassins, meanwhile, cook up their own plots; some of them still want to kill Bolan, so as to brag in the assassin's world (how exactly they'd spread the word goes unmentioned -- I gather there must be a magazine like Assassin's Weekly or something), whereas the Mongol in true B-movie "wise Oriental" fashion sees the noble character of Bolan and decides to help him.

There follows of course a huge battle scene, with everyone against everyone. Again like Devil's Bargain it all spirals out of control due to Schmidt's character-hopping. He doesn't POV-hop; Schmidt stays locked in the perspective of one character at a time, which is a good thing. It's just that he jumps from character to character to character. Too many cooks in the kitchen. After reading enough of these novels I've come to understand that they work better when they focus on just a few characters; Schmidt instead wants to deliver epics, complete with large casts of characters and various subplots. It just gets to be all too much after a while.

Other than that Schmidt is a good writer, which makes the plot-jumble such a shame. If he'd stuck with the Most Dangerous Game concept I think Blood of the Lion would've been an exceptional installment in the never-ending Executioner series.

Monday, June 13, 2011

SuperBolan #100: Devil's Bargain


SuperBolan #100: Devil's Bargain, by Dan Schmidt
January, 2005 Gold Eagle Books

This is a more recent example of the men's adventure novel; it's good to know the genre is still alive but it's obviously on life-support. Dan Schmidt may be a familiar name to some; since the mid-'80s he's ghostwritten 40-some Gold Eagle titles, and in the late '80s he wrote the Killsquad series under the psuedonymn "Frank Garrett." At the same time he also wrote the Eagle Force series under his own name.

Schmidt is usually taken to task for his "needless gore" and ultraviolence, especially amongst the die-hard Gold Eagle fans, but they just as often complain about the man's jumbled and padded narratives, with needlessly-overblown casts of characters. Reading Devil's Bargain, I can somewhat see what they mean, particularly on the latter criticism. In a way, this "SuperBolan" encapsulates why I stopped reading Gold Eagle books over two decades ago. It's almost monotonous in a way, and bores more than it entertains.

The biggest shame is that the villains of the piece have such potential: Alpha Deep Six, a deep-cover Black Ops squad so deep-cover that they've been missing for the past decade and presumed dead. These guys have the makings of awesome villains, US commandos who have gone rogue and now actually fund terrorists themselves. Each of the Six has been "reborn" with a mythical name: There's Crammon, the leader; Acheron, the second-in-command; Thor, a big guy who fights with double axes; and so on. Problem is, Schmidt does little to differentiate between them. I spent the whole novel confusing Crammon and Acheron.

In the middle of all this is Mack Bolan, the Executioner himself. I'm not sure if the guy is now like a comic book character, ageless; in reality he'd be in his sixties at least, which is hard to buy in the action genre -- but then, Sylvester Stallone proved it could be done (and damn well) in his 2008 Rambo. My guess is that these novels must occur in some time-stasis zone, as Bolan still acts like a man in his thirties...ie, just like the Bolan of the Pendleton originals or the Executioners I read back in the 1980s. To make it all the stranger, Crammon himself is a 'Nam vet, ordering around some men he considers his sons. I don't know. I guess I'm thinking about it too much, which is beside the point.

Devil's Bargain opens like an episode of 24, with a wave of terrorism slamming through the US. Bolan has been given highest clearance to stop the threat, which involves lots of bombings on commuter trains and buses. Schmidt pulls that old Gold Eagle page-filling trick I'd forgotten: opening the occasional chapter with pages and pages of the point of view of a terrorist who soon meets his end at the hands of Bolan. But then, Schmidt does that throughout; you only spend perhaps a page or two in a character's perspective before he hopscotches to the next one, leaving for a confusing and frustrating mess. The issue is not the multiple-character perspectives. It's that all of the characters sound the damn same.

While the US-attacks are going on, all of them the work of a certain Islamic group, the Alpha Deep Six guys kidnap Barbara Price, apparently a recurring character in the Bolan universe -- a lady who works for the top-secret "Stony Man" collective and occasionally sleeps with Bolan. She's kidnapped because Crammon and his men have heard of this ultra-secret commando facility which might impede their plans, and so kidnap Price as collateral. Or something. In fact this kidnapping angle only exists so that Bolan can become embroiled in the plot...and also so he has a personal reason to see the mission through. Because otherwise Price's kidnapping has nothing to do with anything, and after she's abducted she pretty much drops out of the narrative.

Once Bolan gets in the picture he begins to track down Alpha Deep Six. We gradually learn that the bastards have funded this day-long attack on the US as a sort of cover for themselves, so they could pull off a bank job. The bank they are robbing is the fictional "Bank of Islam," probably one of the more novel ideas in the book: an endless cache of dollars and gold hidden in an ancient crypt beneath Ankara, Turkey. The place is so secret that most US agencies consider it a myth, but Alpha Deep Six have learned that it truly exists. The place is heavily guarded and Alpha has recruited a team of Iraqi soldiers as well as disaffected US soldiers to raid the place.

After a few hundred pages of character-hopping the raid finally begins. It is a stirring scene, only again ruined by Schmidt's insistence upon hopping from one character to another every other page. It should be mentioned that Bolan is busy dusting his shelves while all this occurs; really, the Executioner is more of a guest star in Devil's Bargain. Though he wastes a few terrorists (as expected), he's instead always a few steps behind Alpha, trying to figure out what they're up to.

Meanwhile we have an endless but entertaining action scene as Crammon and his men wade into the booby-trapped bowls of the Bank of Islam. In a bit of dark humor they use their Iraqi soldiers as trap-bait, tossing them ahead into dark tunnels and letting them take the brunt of whatever trap has been set. It's all like Indiana Jones. Once through the traps of course they encounter armed resistance, and here Schmidt delivers heaps of ultraviolent fight scenes, but really it isn't as gory as I expected -- it's got nothing on Army of Devils, that's for sure. Along the way Alpha Deep Six suffers incredible casualties, and finally Bolan catches up with them while the battle is coming to an end. The climax of Devil's Bargain seems rushed and, well, anticlimatic, which is strange given the expanded page length of these SuperBolans.

But all the tried-and-true gimmicks you remember from Gold Eagle are still at play: endless detail about various guns and the ammo they use, right-wing philosophizing, and a protagonist more superhuman than possible. Don Pendleton was sure to give his creation a dose of hummanity, something which has obviously been lost over the past decades. I'm sure other Gold Eagle ghostwriters have attempted to keep the spirit alive, but separating the wheat from the chaff is a job for someone with a stronger will than mine -- I'll be much happier staying in the lurid and exploitative world of the Imitation Executioners, like The Sharpshooter or The Marksman.