Showing posts with label Macfadden Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Macfadden Books. Show all posts

Monday, December 7, 2020

Operation Hang Ten #9: Death Car Surfside


Operation Hang Ten #9: Death Car Surfside, by Patrick Morgan
No month stated, 1972  Macfadden Books

Well friends, this is the last volume of Operation Hang Ten I currently own; this series is grossly overpriced on the used books market, so I’ll just have to be content with what I have. And besides, it seems evident that George Snyder, again posing as “Patrick Morgan,” has run out of steam. The previous volume was a chore of a read, with “The Cartwright” falling in love. This one’s even more middling, the only difference being that “The Cartwright” is an outlaw for the majority of the tale – and a pretty unlikable one at that. 

I’ve noted from the first volume I reviewed that Bill Cartwright, “hero” of the series, is probably the biggest dick in all men’s adventuredom. But what’s become more clear with each volume I’ve read is that he’s also a pretty lame-ass “spy.” He talks a big game and thinks very highly of himself, but “Bill” (as Snyder most often refers to him…or, as ever, “The Cartwright”) really doesn’t do much of anything. He’s a grand failure, so far as a surfer turned spy goes; Jim Dana, head honcho of the Operation Hang Ten program, supposedly has taken hippies, surfers, and other assorted “youth types” from their elements, trained them to be spies, and put them back in their elements as operatives. And I believe Bill is the best one he’s got (at least according to Bill!), which is not a good indication of this particular agency’s effectiveness. 

Past volumes have featured Bill blundering his way through the latest assignment, usually getting a woman (or two) killed in the process before finally figuring out the bad guys’ plot and shooting a few people in the final pages. He’s certainly not a hero; he’s too assholic for that. I mean he’s not even an antihero, he’s just a plain jerk. Death Car Surfside takes Bill into even more jerky territory. In this one, which occurs over a single day, Bill manages to knock out a cop, steal tips off restaurant tables, carjack a Mustang, break into an innocent person’s house, and even barges in on the homeowner just as she’s stepping out of the shower. When she asks him if he’s going to rape her, Bill checks out her hot nude bod and says he’s considering it! Of course, this being a men’s adventure yarn and all – not to mention one of the more aggressively macho ones, courtesy Bill’s assholic attitude – the young lady doesn’t mind Bill too much, given that he has “good vibes.” Oh and Bill also beats the shit out of this girl’s boyfriend, tying him up in a closet…where he’ll later be discovered by the bad guys and murdered. Not that Bill feels one pang of guilt over it. 

There’s no pickup from the previous volume, just a passing mention that Bill took a lot of grief from Dana for the events that happened therein. When we meet him at the start of Death Car Surfside, Bill’s doing some pre-dawn surfing at Hermosa Beach. We’re informed this is because all the lousy tourists clutter up the beaches during the day; per the series template, the narrative is peppered with arbitrary and digressive bitch sessions on this or that. Humorously this time they are shoehorned in at the oddest places, like during car chases or when Bill’s running from someone. But while Bill is surfing in the dock he’s shocked to see a Mustang hurtle over the pier and crash spectacularly into the ocean. He barely caught a glimpse of a comatose young woman behind the wheel. 

Bill dives down to save her; this will be his only heroic act in the entire book. She’s been tied into the car and clearly was planted there to be driven to her death. Bill pulls her up to the surface and some other girl comes out of the gloom, saying she witnessed it all. Bill checks the comatose girl’s ID, and next thing he knows he’s slammed in the head, obviously knocked out by the girl who claimed to be a witness. When he comes to it’s morning and the girl from the car is still lying there, but now she’s dead, courtesy several stab wounds. Here’s where Bill’s taken in and read his rights by the cops; the muleheaded main cop won’t buy Bill’s story and comes up with an even more unbelievable one, one which of course “proves” Bill is the killer. Instead of asking to call a lawyer – or better yet Jim Dana – hotheaded Bill instead decks the cop and makes a run for it. 

He’ll operate in this capacity for the rest of the novel, trying to stay one step ahead of the law to clear his name by finding the girl’s killer. But he only makes things worse for himself, proceeding to commit even more crimes along the way – stealing, carjacking, breaking and entering. Even as mentioned unintentionally causing the death of an innocent man who has nothing to do with anything – save for being the boyfriend of the girl whose house Bill breaks into while hiding from the cops. Pretty much everything he touches turns to shit in the book, yet Bill never once questions himself or his actions. Hell, as mentioned even when running from the cops or the bad guys or whatnot, he still finds the opportunity to bitch about society or people in general. He’s almost comically unlikable, but the thing is the reader doesn’t get the impression that Snyder himself feels this way – Bill is presented as the studly and cool hero, even though he comes off like a complete prick. 

Bill’s escape from the cops is one of the few action scenes in the book. Bill runs and swims and runs some more, eventually losing them in the summer tourist crowd. Here’s where he starts stealing so he can get to a payphone and call Jim Dana – and also where Snyder starts page-filling with abandon. It starts off with a pair of old ladies finishing their lunch at an outdoor restaurant and getting into a long conversation – which takes up a few pages – over the tip amount they should leave. Bill, dressed only in a “mini-wetsuit” deal, is actually asked by the management to leave, given that he’s been standing there so long , waiting for the women to leave their table so he can steal their tip. Next he sets his sights on a few dudes who have just eaten, and he snatches their tip. However, Dana doesn’t answer the phone – and won’t answer it until the very final pages, giving the lame excuse that Bill “isn’t his only Operation Hang Ten operative” and thus has been busy with another of his spies! 

The murdered girl was named Charlene Morris, and Bill remembers her address from the ID he briefly looked at. It’s in Newport Beach, so Bill steals some poor guy’s Mustang so he can drive back to his car, “the woody.” At least this preys on Bill’s conscience, to the point where he calls a tow truck driver and offers him a bonus if he hauls the Mustang back to Hermosa with no questions asked – yet more page-filling. I forgot to mention, Bill learned from the cops that there was another corpse in Charlene’s car: her father, a rocket scientist, whose body was shoved in the trunk. Of course the cops are trying to pin both murders on Bill. So he heads to the home Charlene supposedly shares with her dad, and there finds a bunch of hippie squatters – obese Ma and two Manson lookalikes. There are also two women, one of them a willowy blonde and the other a super-stacked one named Cherry. 

Bill suspects something’s afoot, and gets confirmation when they try to attack him. This leads to yet another chase scene, with Bill running from the “family” as well as the cops. He plows through the back yards of some residences and then ditches the woody, picking out which house to break into to hide. I mean folks this is our hero. Of course, the house he settles on turns out to be occupied by a super-built blonde with long legs…and of course, she just happens to be in the shower when Bill breaks in. So he looks around her stuff, checking out her photos and her drawers and stuff…and then waits to confront her as soon as she’s stepping out of the shower! This is how he meets what will become the main female character of the novel: Sam, aka Samantha, probably the most memorable female character yet in the series given her smart comebacks. 

She’s not too shocked by Bill’s appearance, and indeed goes about getting dressed…while Bill keeps oggling her, holding his .22 Magnum on her. Again, this is our hero. As mentioned, she does wonder if he’s going to rape her, and Bill rubs his chin and says he’s thinking about it. Bill is also a dick when it comes to his verbal treatment of women; his style of coming on to them appears to be mocking and denigrating them. All very schoolyard juvenile, but again nowhere is it implied that Bill is wrong for this. Nor is it implied he’s a bad guy when Sam’s boyfriend comes over, a big lug who towers over Bill…and Bill proceeds to beat the shit out of him. And then tie him up and toss him in the closet. Sam says she’s not too crazy about the guy to begin with, plus she’s upset he failed to protect her! Oh and Bill’s such a dumbass he’s unaware “Sam” is a nickname for Samantha. I guess he’s too busy surfing and bitching to watch Bewitched

So Bill, who still can’t get hold of Jim Dana, goes back to follow Ma and her people, because he assumes they were behind the murder of Charlene and her rocket scientist dad. Now here we get an opportunity for some “secret agent” sort of stuff, but as mentioned Bill’s a joke in that regard. He has Sam drive her car and sits there as she follows Ma and her group in their school bus, Bill finding the opportunity even here to bitch about society. But of course Ma’s freaks have spotted the tail and end up crushing Sam’s car. Bill’s knocked out, and when he wakes up he’s tied up in the back of the school bus and Sam’s gone. I should mention we’re over halfway through the novel at this point. I mean it’s almost a joke, that’s how bad it is. 

Ma’s not here, and a bound Bill watches as Cherry goes out into a school, talks up some teenaged girl, and brings her back on the bus – this is how Ma’s family kidnaps people. The new girl’s tied up alongside Bill, and off they go to find Bill’s trailer. Here things get pretty dark, as the poor teen girl is raped by one of the Manson types; this, we’re to understand, is her punishment, given that she didn’t free Bill when she had the chance. The poor girl deserves it! Cherry takes Bill into his swank trailer and basically demands that he screw her on his round bed with the roller bar and the colored lights that change in tempo to the “violin music” Bill can play with the touch of a button. Here ensues one of the more explicit sex scenes in the series, as Bill manages to talk Cherry into untying his hands…then taking her and himself all the way to “completion” before knocking her out. 

Oh and meanwhile, the Manson-esque rapist has accidentally killed the poor girl he was raping. Yet another female character Bill Cartwright has failed to save. He gets his .22 Magnum and finally dishes out some payback. Here we get an almost arbitrary catering to the cover art, where a helicopter comes out of nowhere and starts dropping grenades on Bill. I almost get the impression Snyder was ordered to include such a scene by series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel, as the cover artwork had already been commissioned. Perhaps the biggest development of Death Car Surfside is that Bill’s beloved “woody” (for some reason the car is never capitalized) is destroyed, courtesy the helicopter falling on it when Bill shoots it out of the sky. 

Bill cries over it a bit, then later wonders over how much work it would take to build a new one. But ultimately he seems to cast aside this idea, feeling that a new woody would just be a recreation, a replacement for something he loved and lost. He rents a Charger, which he drives the rest of the novel, but I’m assuming in the next (and final) volume, Freaked Out Strangler, he gets himself a new car. I don’t have that volume, so we’ll have to be content with Olman’s review. Olman excerpts some narrative about Bill’s car in his review, but doesn’t state what car it is. At any rate Bill’s big problem right now is finding Sam, whom he’s been told is a captive of Ma’s. Only, Bill doesn’t know where Ma lives. All this is so far removed from a spy novel – the entire book really has nothing to do with the rest of the series, save for a last-minute development that Ma is working with some Red Chinese agents and she’s been kidnapping the children of prominent American scientists and whatnot for ransom, to give their secrets to the Chinese. 

The book’s only real action scene occurs in a big shopping mall; Bill finds out that Ma’s meeting with a secret Chinese agent who runs a restaurant inside the mall(!?), and Bill barges in there…and is immediately caught. Yes, that’s correct…Bill, who again has the opportunity to demonstrate his bad-ass secret agent skills, is immediately captured by the Chinese agents when he walks into the back room, in which Ma is meeting with her contacts. There are several men there with guns, and Bill meekly hands over his .22 and has a seat. As I say, Snyder was clearly worn out with the series at this point, as so much of the “plot stuff” is relayed via lazy exposition, as here, where the entire plot is exposited by these one-off characters. At least it culminates in a long-running action scene, with Bill, once he’s found out Ma’s address, gorily disposing of several Chinese agents with his .22, before getting in a long chase with Ma that turns into a knockdown, dragout fight. 

You’d think Sam would be a little freaked out that she’s spent the last few hours tied to a bed in a darkened, empty house, but instead she just has a few smart remarks for Bill, once he’s taken off her gag – and Bill replies with some acidic retorts of his own. At this point the entire thing is just nauseating. And of course, next chapter picks up with the couple post-boink in Bill’s swank trailer; the little fact that Sam’s boyfriend was murdered just a few hours before is brushed under the narrative carpet, with Sam pretty much shrugging and saying she never felt the same way about the guy as he did for her! Oh and here Bill finally gets a return call from Jim Dana, who as mentioned basically says he was busy with other crap, so stop your bitching. 

In his review of Freaked Out Strangler, Olman comments that, by that tenth volume, the “faux beat poetry style” Snyder employs for the series seems “almost condensed, thickened, as if it had been left on the stove too long.” This is pretty spot on. As mentioned in my review of the seventh volume, decades later Snyder was under the impression he’d only written five volumes of the series, whereas all other sources peg him for all ten volumes. Could it be that he grew so bored with the series he merely forgot he’d written five more volumes? Or maybe it’s because each volume seems like a retread of the one that came before, so he just thought he’d only written five when he really wrote ten. 

Who knows. This is all of them I have for now, so unless I spot some more for super cheap these are the only volumes of Operation Hang Ten I’ll be reviewing. I’m certainly not going to shell out the $$$ online book sellers are asking. And in fact, what with the woody being destroyed and all, Death Car Surfside makes for a fine pseudo-finale of the series.

Monday, May 18, 2020

Songbird


Songbird, by Ralph Benner
No month stated, 1970  Macfadden Books

This obscure rock novel is courtesy the guy who started TigerBeat, something I wasn’t aware of until after I’d read the novel. Throughout Songbird I kept wondering why the focus was on teenybopper performers and teenybopper fans, with a naiive teenaged protagonist acting as our guide. When I learned the TigerBeat connection it all made sense – not that Macfadden provides any sort of context or bio for our author. Presumably in 1970 more people were aware of who Jack Benner was.

Sadly, Songbird is more Patridge Family than Beatles, even though there’s a clear Beatles analogue in the book. Benner is also another of those “rock authors” who is either unwilling or incabable of actually describing rock music, usually just dropping the names of various groups and informing us of how our teen protagonist gets off on their “driving beat.” It’s more of a “the rock business is depraved and full of jaded freaks” type of novel, and one with a strange, unwieldy vibe, at that; Benner employs the tone of juvenile fiction with his innocent, doe-eyed protagonist, but will often sleaze things up with wild sex or raunchy material. Not that the novel’s very explicit or graphic, though; most of the sleaze occurs off-page.

Anyway the titular character is Linda May Loomis, sixteen years old and living with a single mother in a podunk town in Georgia when we meet her. Actually she’s 19 when we meet her, but Benner clumisly employs a flashback sequence that he never returns to. Linda has had a gift for singing since she was born, and thus acquired the nickname “Songbird.” Benner mostly refers to her as “Bird” throughout the book (luckily it’s written in third-person, as I prefer my trash fiction to be, but unfortunately Benner is a bad POV-hopper, jarringly jumping perspectives between characters with little warning). We’re only told Bird’s voice is deep and husky, and Benner at no point even attempts to describe her singing voice to us.

But then, he’s too busy telling us how ugly and flat-chested she is; the book begins with some of the most humorous character assassination I’ve ever encountered for a main protagonist. “She wasn’t pretty by anyone’s standards,” with “colorless hair,” and taller than most girls but with a spindly nature and not much in the way of breasts. In fact Benner goes to such lengths to fuglify Bird (I just coined the word “fuglify,” btw) that the reader is hard-pressed to understand why all the male rock stars want to bone her – and indeed, treat her with greater respect than their actual, you know, pretty female fans. Apparently Bird has some special quality about her – at one point it’s intimated that her husky voice does her a lot of favors – but again Benner fails to really explain it.

As I say, Benner also employs an unwieldy tone; the book establishes Bird as a rail-thin, sort of fugly sixteen year-old loser, living in a ramshackle house with a deadbeat mom, and she’s doe-eyed obsessive over the teen groups of the day. She’s incredibly naiive and innocent…yet we learn off-handedly that she’s been screwing some local boy for the heck of it. I mean I’m not judging, it’s just so unexpected given the preceding pages of character assasination we’ve witnessed, so you’re surpsised to learn she’s even managed to get lucky. Anyway Bird is particularly obsessed with British group The Red Coats, “the most popular singing group in the world,” aka the Beatles. Only there’s five of them instead of four, and Bird is especially hot for the sensitive drummer, Claude(!). The novel opens with Bird desperate to find a way to Atlanta, where the Redcoats are about to give a concert.

Bird hitches a ride with a good friend, but ends up becoming pals with Eleanor, a sort of reporter-slash-groupie who lives in Atlanta. Here we get our first understanding that Songbird isn’t a “rock novel” per se, as we’re only told of the screaming throngs of teen girls, and how the Redcoats can barely be heard over the din. It’s all more along the lines of the Beatles at Shea Stadium than, say, The Rolling Stones at Altamont – which by the way occurred a year before this novel was published, despite which Songbird exists in a more innocent rock world. I mean the Plaster Casters are presented as the most shocking thing Bird encounters, and in the entirety of the book she takes just a single LSD trip…unwillingly at that.

Eleanor has local connections so gets Bird in line to see the Red Coats as they’re leaving the stadium, and Eric Linden, their hunky young PR guy, starts handing out invitations to all the hot girls for an after party at the hotel. He sees Bird – who we’ll remember has been described as ugly, lanky, and just all-around unappealing from page one – and gives her an invitation. But it turns out Linden wants her for himself; he takes her to his room on the floor below the Red Coats, and tells her quite casually that he enjoys handing out invitations to girls he knows the Red Coats won’t be attracted to! Bird is quite world-wise for all her innocence and realizes she’ll have to screw Eric to get up to the party in the Red Coats’s suite; this she gamely does, Benner as ever not getting too explicit.

However, Bird will find herself developing feelings for Eric; she gets up to the party and finally sees her idols in the flesh, but stunningly Benner doesn’t do much to bring any of them to life, other than Claude – and he even has Bird sort of tuning out while Claude talks to her! I mean what the hell? Here also Claude expresses interest in Bird’s voice, asking if she sings. But the party comes to a quick end, and more time is spent with Eleanor, who turns out to be married, with a two-year old kid to boot. Eleanor is not in danger of winning any mother of the year awards; there are some cringe-worthy moments where she shows total disregard for her son, Jason. Like, “locking him in a car and leaving him there for a few hours” sort of cringe-worthy.

Now that Bird’s gotten her taste of the rock world, she wants more. After her mom catches her screwing herself with the water that pours from the bathtub faucet (really!), Bird decides she’s had it with this place and steals some of her mom’s secret money to get back to Atlanta. She hooks up with Eleanor again, and the pseudo-reporter takes her to a local TV show where a Troggs-esque rock group is giving a show. Again, not much detail on this, and the group is presented as a mangy, disreputable, almost proto-punk lot. They also mock Eleanor, and here Bird sees how pathetic the young girl is…she clearly wants to be a part of the rock world, but is “saddled” with a family she doesn’t really want. Luckily Eleanor soon disappears from the text; she talks Bird into immediately driving to New York to catch the upcoming Red Coats concert, and last we see of Eleanor – until the end of the novel, where we find out she’s left her kid and husband and become a full-time hippie – she’s hanging out in Greenwich Village.

Bird as I say is an unusual character; she sneaks into the hotel the Red Coats are staying in and reluctantly lets the kitchen boy screw her in a closet in exchange for a waitress uniform. This she wears as she takes a tray of tea up to the Red Coats suite. But Bird is quickly outed, however Eric Linden is happy to see her. More importantly we have a Bob Dylan riff here, with a “dwarfish” folk singer with a big mouth who holds court with the Red Coats, mocking them for their pretentions – literary Noel (aka John Lennon) in particular. Benner seems to be heading into a cliched rock orgy party sequence…then has Bird wake up in Eric’s bed next day, not remembering anything! 

Ridiculously, so much plot stuff has happened off-page; Bird, we learn, was dosed with some LSD by Noel, and she ended up acting nuts in the hotel room – and, more importantly, singing. So once again Bird’s displayed her singing talents and our author has denied us from actually witnessing it. However, she’s so impressed Eric that he wants to take Bird back to London with him and manage her…and also keep her on the side as his extramarital nookie. Bird’s even called her mom, again off-page, to tell her she’s leaving the country. And we won’t even see the mom again; throughout the novel Benner sets up all these plot points that demand resolution, but he never returns to any of them. Bird’s relationship with her mother is one of the biggest; it won’t be for a hundred or so pages that we even learn that Bird occasionally writes her mother letters.

Unfortunately Benner squanders even more promise: he picks up a month later and Bird’s basically become a secretary for Red Coats boss Bryce, with no followup on her potential singing career…nor any further information on her association with the Red Coats. The group she idolizes, has managed to meet, and has even followed to London to work for them, and they totally drop from the narrative. Save for Claude, who turns out to be gay…and there’s a goofy bit where a totally-serious Bird innocently asks Claude how gay men have sex(!). This leads to a bonkers bit where Bird goes down on Claude, the event proceeding to full-blown sex…with Claude putting his member in the part of Bird’s anatomy that he’s most familiar with! Bird appears to like it, though…leading to a secret romance between the two that eventually blows up when Claude tells Bryce (who turns out to be his lover) he’s been screwing Bird, and Bryce fires Eric Linden…and Bird’s now without a job.

Soon it becomes clear that Songbird is mostly a picaresque. Rather than a plot that develops and builds – Eric, Claude, and the rest of the Red Coats disappear from the novel at this point, and they don’t return – it’s instead composed of Bird going from one unusual character and situation to the next. So after the Red Coats she ends up with famous black American soul singer Chic Hale; she met him at a concert Eric took her to, but while Chicliked Bird, Bird didn’t like Chic – because he’s black, and she’s from Georgia, and she still has certain sentiments. But now out on the street in a foreign city with no home or paycheck, a girl has to put her discriminations in check, so she heads on over to Chic’s place…and ends up having the best sex of her young life. And by the way, Bird’s still sixteen years old throughout all this.

The stuff with Chic doesn’t last very long; soon enough Bird’s back in America, now hanging out in San Francisco with a Joni Mitchell-esque folk singer named Char Rain, whom she just met in London. This part is incredibly random, and throughout Benner fails to exploit the fact that Bird has become best buds with the rock world glitterati. Seriously, the book implies that all you need to do is sneak into a hotel room to meet your rock idols, and next thing you know you’ll be flying around the world with them. Here, instead of anything having to do with the music biz, Bird instead gets in conversations with Char’s Abbie Hoffman-esque boyfriend, who wants Char to use her “power” to fight war and such, and meanwhile distrusts Bird as an interloper. After the two try to engage Bird in a three-way, our heroine takes off for Los Angeles.

This part has nothing whatsoever to do with anything; Bird hooks up with an old lech named Papa Burl – Chic Hale randomly gave her his name back in London as a guy to look up if she was ever in LA – and rooms with one of his “girls.” This old freak is a former Hollywood photographer or somesuch, and he has a retinue of young girls who flock around him. He throws a party where a fifteen year old girl gives her virginity to some local “stud,” an event which Papa Burl throws whenever he finds willing young virgins. All very unseemly, strange, and most unforgivably arbitrary. What’s worse is that in this part we have an actual rock-type dude: Fuzzy Remo, fantastically-named singer of a local group (I imagined them having a garage punk sound, like The Seeds or something). But he’s only in the book for a couple pages – long enough to take Bird back to his place, drop some acid, and treat her like shit. Bird shows him who’s boss by biting his dick and then taking off.

The final quarter sees Bird finally achieving her dream: becoming a rock figure in her own right. But even here it’s not enough and she’s still unhappy and uncertain about everything. She meets Davey Brillini, a pudgy singer-songwriter in Los Angeles who has been on the cusp of fame for years, but who hasn’t broken through. Bird gets a shot at singing backup for him at a recording, and Davey is so impressed that he rearranges the track and brings Bird in as his co-lead. They cut a few records together, and soon enough they’ve got a pair of greasy managers who go on to position the couple as a sort of hipper, younger Sonny and Cher, with “mod” outfits and such. Inexplicably, all of this stuff is sort of rushed through, and rather than focus on the music and the experience, Benner dwells on how unhappy Bird is, how she finds this sudden fame so soul-crushing.

And what’s worse, rather than wrapping up any of the earlier stuff – like a now-famous Bird meeting Eric Linden or the Red Coats again, or maybe reuniting with her mom, who constantly told Bird she wouldn’t amount to anything – Benner instead introduces a lame eleventh hour subplot where a mainstream writer wants to do a piece on Bird and Davey, and Bird starts falling for the guy. He’s in his thirties, not part of the rock world, yadda yadda, but it’s all just so lame and dumb…I mean we finally got to a “rock novel” sort of plot, but Benner instead turns it into a soapy melodrama about Bird and Davey’s relationship fracturing and Bird looking to this new guy as her latest chance for happiness. Even lamer, it all quickly fizzles in the last few pages and Bird just decides to fake happiness with Davey if she can’t have the real thing. The end!

I went into the usual needless depth because Songbird appears to be pretty scarce. A few years later Manor reprinted the book, but this edition seems to be just as scarce. My advice is to save your money.

Monday, December 9, 2019

Operation Hang Ten #8: Beach Queen Blowout


Operation Hang Ten #8: Beach Queen Blowout, by Patrick Morgan
No month stated, 1971  Macfadden Books

Well it only took eight installments, but we now actually have a volume number on the covers of Operation Hang Ten. Unfortunately only two volumes were to follow, so one wonders if the numbering helped or hurt the series. George Snyder again serves as “Patrick Morgan,” turning in basically the same novel as the other three volumes I’ve read: egomaniac protagonist Bill Cartwright (aka “The Cartwright,” as he often thinks of himself) bumbles his way through a lurid caper in which at least one curvy young beauty is sadistically murdered, usually as a result of Bill’s own foolish actions. We also get sermonizing on the general shittiness of the world.

That being said, Beach Queen Blowout certainly promises a lot. In fact it has a setup frequent blog commenter Grant would appreciate: a gang of hotbod young women, led by a bikini-clad babe who sports a heart-shaped birthmark above her left breast, has been knocking over banks and terrorizing the business establishments around Huntington Beach, California. There’s also some stuff about oil rigs off the coast being sabotaged as part of a blackmail scheme. But Snyder takes this material – which possibly was devised by series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel – and basically ignores it, instead intent on telling the tale of how “The Cartwright” falls in love for the first time

Yes, friends, it’s a “very special episode” of Operation Hang Ten, with Bill (as Snyder usually refers to him) falling head over heels for a young beauty named Lynn he meets early in his investigation. This at the expense of the more lurid (and potentially sleazy) setup promised by the back cover copy – no lie, much is made of this mysterious criminal babe in her bikini that shows off a heart-shaped birthmark, and while Bill makes some cursory attempts at finding out who she is, ultimately her reveal is almost casually dropped on the reader and Bill doesn’t even bother taking her down himself. And the rest of her bikini-clad gang is similarly dispensed with off-page, our hero more concerned with doling out justice to a handful of people.

As usual the entire premise of “Operation Hang Ten,” as devised by chief Jim Dana, is hard to buy, especially if Bill Cartwright’s performance in the line of duty can be taken as a sign of how the other operatives fare. Regardless Dana, who appears a bit more in the narrative this time than in previous volumes, vociferously defends his organization, claiming that the young surfers, punks, and whatnot he’s hired have a better chance of squaring counterculture problems than regular secret agent types could. So Bill’s been sent to Huntington Beach to figure out who the girls are behind these crimes.

There’s no pickup from the previous volume, but John “Fast Black” Washington, the black surfer we saw in #3: Deadly Group Down Under, is again hanging out with Bill. We aren’t reminded as often that he’s black this time, no doubt because he isn’t in the narrative very much, other than to meet some local gal and fall in love with her. Love is certainly in the air in Beach Queen Blowout. Bill and John are hanging around Huntington Beach, complaining about all the lousy beaches given the recent oil spills. Bill meanwhile has been sent here specifically to find out who is damaging those offshore rigs, but instead he bitches about the “punk waves” and wonders if he’s ever going to crack this case.

We’re often told via Bill’s reflection on events that some hotbod women (along with a few “hard-core bitches” who are a bit more “Amazon” in stature) have been hitting businesses, led by the notorious birthmarked babe. Bill’s sure these girls are behind the oil rig hits – eventually we’ll learn the oil company which owns the rigs is being blackmailed for a million dollars or the rigs will be destroyed – but he doesn’t do much to investigate. Not that he needs to, as all the answers will literally fall into his lap. And I mean “literally” in the, uh, literal sense, and not in the figurative sense that most people mistakenly use it in, ie “Steam literally came out of his ears.” (A comment I’ve actually seen online.) 

Bill and John run into a pair of gals in a dune buggy, both of them “table stuff,” as Bill often reflects. He goes for the hotter of the two, Lynn, though keeps reminding us that the other one, Alice, is almost just as hot – she’s just more quiet and shy. Lynn seems to like Bill and tells him she knows of the one good beach left in Huntington, a private cove. She invites him to it, and Bill finds it inundated with women – some of them rather butch-looking – with “Beach Queens” painted all over the place. He makes cursory attempts at looking for any heart-shaped birthmarks; he’s determined Lynn doesn’t have one, thanks to her skimpy bikini, but shy and quiet Alice always covers her big ol’ boobs with a t-shirt, mysteriously enough.

The focus is more on the budding relationship between Bill and Lynn. He finds himself falling for her quick wit, and the great body doesn’t hurt. However, she has ulterior motives; she wants to hire Bill, having seen the “Private Eye” sign on his trailer. Speaking of which, we get a running tour of Bill’s swank trailer, with it’s refrigerator-sized computer that controls everything from the temperature to the drinks Bill is constantly “dialing up.” We also get a good look at his swinging bedroom, complete with mirrored ceiling, colored lighting which matches the mood and flow of the “violin” music that pipes through the speakers, and a roller bar that goes from the foot to the top of the mattress and back again. This latter element is put to memorable use when Bill and Lynn get to their inevitable tomfoolery, Snyder again not descending to outright sleaze but not fading to black, either. In fact this is the most explicit volume of the series I’ve yet read.

Next morning Lynn’s gone and Bill finds himself thinking about her all day. That’s right, folks, even “the Cartwright” can be bitten by the love bug. Meanwhile he’s accosted by Juanita, one of those “hard-core bitches” of the Beach Queen set; she demands Bill get his trailer off their cove by nightfall. While looking down Juanita’s shirt for the birthmark, Bill notices that “it’s a man, baby,” per Austin Powers (probably my favorite bit in that entire movie) – and promptly yanks off Juanita’s fake tits! Operation Hang Ten once again proves itself of a different era as Bill demeans Juanita for “soiling real women,” mocking the she-he good and proper. A dude could get hauled off to jail for shit like that in today’s enlightened era.

But seriously, Juanita’s penchant for cross-dressing is never explained…we do eventually learn “he-she” is the ringleader of the female heisters, even training them for the scuba missions to hit the oil rigs, and I was under the impression the cross-dressing was so as to fool people into thinking he was just “one of the girls.” But Snyder, even if he intended this, doesn’t follow through; he’s too intent on the Bill-Lynn subplot, which becomes the plot of Beach Queen Blowout. And speaking of Lynn, she returns that night to inform Bill she’s really the daughter of a senator, and has been working here undercover herself, helping her dad figure out who is hitting the oil rigs. Hence her interest when she saw the P.I. sign on Bill’s trailer; she feels she’s gotten in too deep and needs some help.

Well after another fairly-explicit all-night bang-o-rama, the two exchange declarations of love. Bill’s caught so off-guard by his own words that he doubts himself for a moment; later he’ll clarify that he’s never told a single woman he loves her, thus Lynn is a first. Finally Lynn gets around to telling Bill what she’s been up to on Queen Cove and how she’s helping her dad and whatnot. And folks this part is laughable because Mr. Bill Cartwright again proves himself to be a jackass of jackasses, probably the biggest dick in the entire men’s adventure universe. Without even hearing Lynn’s full story, Bill starts ranting and raving about her senator father, a guy Bill’s never met and doesn’t even know, accusing him of being dirty and only looking into the oil pollution affair because he’s in the pockets of the oil companies. A crying Lynn storms off to walk the beach and cool down, and jerkass Bill just stands there, fuming. Because Snyder knows we veteran readers understand what’s going to happen to Lynn, he decides to dig the knife in deeper, and has Lynn abruptly turn back and tell Bill he didn’t give her a kiss goodbye! This Bill does, and off Lynn trudges along the deserted beach

Then Alice comes along, asking for Lynn…and here we get more of those “earlier era sentiments” as Bill accuses Alice of being a lesbian, hot for Lynn, and launches off into another rant. But no, Alice has a thing for Bill, she’s just failed to act on it due to her best friend screwing him and all. At this point Alice slinks into Bill’s lap and info-dumps all the, you know, plot stuff we readers have been missing out on: conveniently enough, Alice’s mom runs a motel, and the leaders of the oil company blackmail scheme are all staying there! And Alice overheard their plans! Long story short, there’s some old former madam named Mamie who is plotting with a Mafioso named Eduardo, and Juanita is the hired goon who is training the Beach Queens to do the job – after which the Beach Queens will of course be set up as patsies. Oh, and Alice is worried about Lynn, because she overheard Juanita vow to kill her before storming out of the motel a few hours ago…

Friends, guess what that grisly cover image depicts? (Note even the gash in the poor girl’s throat; the uncredited cover artist is nothing if not thorough.) Yes, Lynn never makes it back from that little walk on the beach. Bill feels an icy coldness descend upon him as he discovers her corpse in the sand: the case no longer matters. His life mission is to find Juanita and kill him slowly. At this point we seem gearing up for a brutal William Crawford-esque revenge thriller, but Snyder just doesn’t have it in him – he’s still intent on doling out something more hardboiled. Thus Bill will ultimately swindle the saboteurs into turning on each other instead of killing them all himself. In this capacity he basically goes rogue from Hang Ten, keeping pertinent info from an increasingly-demanding Jim Dana, and the novel almost works as a finale for the series itself: Bill Cartwright going solo for his own purposes.

The shifting plot focus is displayed posthaste when Bill, about to go out for some vengeance, is accosted in his cabin by sexy Millie, a Beach Queen hotstuff who has been trying to get her hooks in him. She saunters in, announces they’re about to screw, and starts to undress. This was actually a well-conveyed scene because normally such a sequence would be done for titilating purposes, yet the reader is still numb from Lynn’s murder – she was just in Bill’s bed several pages before – thus the exploitation of Millie’s ample anatomy does as little for the reader as it does for Bill himself. Oh, and it’s casually dropped that as Millie doffs her top Bill notices a heart-shaped birthmark above her left breast and thus, literally as I said, the infamous heist-girl leader has fallen into Bill’s lap. So he ties her up, calls Jim Dana, and goes off on his vengeance quest.

But Bill Cartwright isn’t just a dick, he’s also a bufoon. Time and again he’s either outwitted, caught unawares, or makes some foolish mistake. For example, he gets Juanita in his sights several times but loses the “she-he” due to some goof-up on Bill’s part. Then Bill’s caught by Eduardo, the mobster who is backing the blackmail scheme. This at least leads to Bill finally killing someone; he outwits the two hoods who were ordered to kill him, has them lay side by side on a motel bed, then coldly shoots each of them in the head with his .22 Magnum, even after promising not to – and we even get a prefigure of Arnold’s famous Commando line when Bill informs one of the pleading mobsters, “I lied.”

Sadly, the cold revenge yarn Lynn’s murder promised is constantly derailed by Bill’s screwups. I wondered if this was Snyder’s commentary on Bill’s actual youth – the dude’s not even 25, I think – but instead I think our author was just desperately trying to meet his word count and didn’t know what else to do. His attempts at conveying suspense and tension actually make his protagonist seem like a foolish jackass, and this goes on for like 50 pages. And meanwhile Jim Dana’s about ready to fire Bill from the Hang Ten program, given how his “top operative” keeps hiding things. Bill does manage to get Dana to collect a million bucks from the oil company, all as part for Bill to bluff the blackmailers into killing each other – he’s swindled both Eduardo and Mamie into thinking he’ll get the money for them. Oh and meanwhile Bill’s sicced Dana on the entire Beach Queen gang, having snuck on the boat Juanita was piloting to one of those oil rigs. Bill merely waits until the girls have left, then commandeers the boat so that they’re abandoned there…and has them arrested off-page. And meanwhile Juanita escapes Bill yet a-friggin’-gain!

To make it worse, Bill watches on the sidelines as Eduardo and Mamie take each other out, the surviving Beach Queens going full-on Bacchante and tearing Eduardo apart. Then Bill finally gets to square things with Juanita – who incidentally has admitted to killing Lynn – but after shooting him in the kneecap Bill has a “what have I become?” moment and realizes torturing the bastard to death won’t help anyone. Thus Juanita is given a quick sendoff – and it’s a ripoff. I mean I was expecting some William Crawford-esque brutalism. Instead, Bill limps back to his trailer, tells a waiting Alice it’s a no-go on the sex thing (and I forgot to mention the unconfomfortable scene where Alice tries desperately to screw Bill, performing every trick she knows, but the poor grieving boy can’t get it up), because she’ll always remind him of Lynn. And then Bill goes to sit alone in his trailer in misery. “The Cartwright knew love.”

The helluva it is, Beach Queen Blowout is entertaining and sometimes gripping when you read it. At least the first half. But as the various subplots are cast aside, and as Bill constantly screws up his attempts at simple revenge, you start to notice how messy everything is. I mean it’s the second half that really undoes the novel. If only Snyder had gone through with the “cold-blooded Cartwright” plot he initially promised. Instead it’s a mire of crosses and double-crosses, of Bill constantly letting Juanita slip out of his grasp, of various hoodlums getting the advantage f our hero. However, the plot of Bill and Lynn’s romance is well handled, even if Snyder is a bit guilty of telegraphing what’s about to happen to the poor girl.

As stated this would’ve been a fine finale for the series; Bill’s relationship with Dana and Hang Ten is put to the test, almost at times reminsicent of the Timothy Dalton James Bond flick Licence To Kill. However there were two more volumes after this one, and I’m curious to see if Lynn’s even mentioned in the next one. I’ll be surprised if she is.

Thursday, September 13, 2018

The Girl In The Telltale Bikini (Operation Hang Ten #6)


The Girl in The Telltale Bikini, by Patrick Morgan
No month stated, 1971  Macfadden Books

As mentioned in my review of Topless Dancer Hangup, this is actually the sixth volume of Operation Hang Ten, whereas it’s often mistakenly listed as the seventh. The “other books in the series” list in the front makes this clear, and as stated in my previous review, Topless Dancer Hangup features a recap of hero Bill Carwright’s previous six adventures. But, as with most of these “produced by Lyle Kenyon Engel” joints, there isn’t much continuity to worry about anyway, so perhaps the point is as they say moot.

George Snyder once again serves as “Patrick Morgan,” and apparently he did so for the entire series; his style is in effect throughout, though some of the scathing comments on society and ruminations on women have been slightly toned down. But other Snyder mainstays are still here, like the strange insistence on fistfights over all other forms of action – seriously, it seems like Bill’s constantly dropping or losing his “.22 Magnum” and having to resort to his fists. That being said, there are some brutal brawls throughout, with shards of shattered skulls piercing brains and faces just generally smashed.

The plot of The Girl In The Telltale Bikini is almost surreal, most likely because Snyder was winging it or perhaps was given an outline by Engel and had a hard time capturing it. But you know something’s up when the “climax” involves the suddenly-revealed main villain expositing on the scheme and explaining what has been happening. I tend to think it was a case of Engel coming up with the plot, as it follows the old standby of Bill Cartwright having an evil clone, a story Engel previously ran in the Nick Carter: Killmaster entry Double Identity. But, just as with that earlier novel, the “evil clone” doesn’t really pan out and in fact causes more questions than anything, as just as an “evil Nick Carter” served no purpose in Double Identity, neither does the “evil Bill Cartwright” in this one.

A US spy ship has sunk near the coast of Sidney, Australia, and surprisingly this doesn’t much concern Los Angeles section chief Jim Dana of Operation Hang Ten; but when his government associate tells him that a “Bill Cartwright” has been spotted with all the other surfers making use of the phenomenal waves created by the jutting hulk of the ship, Dana perks up – he knows Bill is in California, not Australia. And so he is, enthusiastically screwing his latest girlfriend, a “top-heavy” blonde named June Blue. Bill’s trailer is even swankier this time around; we learn there’s not only a mirror above the bed, but with the touch of a button multicolored lights will flash over the bed. Another button activates rollers beneath the mattress, and June has become very excited about this particular feature.

A recurring bit is how Bill, only “pretending” to be heartless (yeah, right!) breaks it off with this latest girl so he can get on to his secret spy job. This seems to be the last we’ll see of busty June, but we might be surprised. Off Bill goes to Australia, where he goes about his usual method of espionage: loudly proclaiming himself to be Bill Cartwright and getting in frequent fistfights. Not to mention promptly getting himself some local booty; in almost no time he comes across a sexy brunette with a flat tire, and after fixing it Bill finds himself invited back to the girl’s place – and also she tells him he can keep his trailer in the parking lot of the bikini shop she owns.

Her name is Lynda Rahm and she claims to be Turkish or Greek or something; who really cares where the hell she’s from, given her “darker than tan” skin and her “small but ample breasts?” But folks ol’ Bill is pretty dumb this time around, because Lynda is clearly hiding stuff from him, but Bill just sort of goes with the flow and ignores all the red flags. Plus he takes his time about getting her in bed; that being said, when the good lovin’ happens this time, it’s more explicit than the material in the other two volumes I’ve read. In fact Bill and Lynda’s first “encounter” goes on for a few pages of hot and heavy stuff – plus it’s another of those red flags Bill ignores, ‘cause in one of his off-hand ruminations he informs us that women in their 20s and 30s can’t screw worth a damn, whereas women in their 40s and 50s will bang your brains out if you give them the chance, and Lynda’s sack skills are a lot better than her claimed age of 22 would imply.

These off-hand ruminations are a recurring series gimmick, as mentioned a bit toned down this time but still priceless for their reactionary, unacceptable-in-today’s-progressivised, “Miss America 2.0” world. In addition to random bitchery about tourists clogging up the beaches (a series mainstay, but then Bill’s a surfer so it makes sense this would bug him), we get some observations about women, in particular this doozy that would end a career if someone would have the audacity to post it on Twitter:

[Lynda’s kitchen] smelled of just-cooked bacon and coffee aroma. In America Lynda would have been considered a neatnick as a housekeeper. American womanhood was too busy striving for achievements to keep anything but a sloppy house. In Australia Lynda would have been considered an average housekeeper. The women of Australia knew their place and stayed in it.

Bill finds that his name sends young women scurrying away from him – even Lynda initially seemed taken aback when he told her his name – not that this stops him from running around the beach and bullying the sexy surf bunnies. They all run away from him when he announces himself; later he’ll learn that the fake Bill, also a blonde American surfer, is sort of a pimp for Maha Lon Caffrey, guru of a nearby cult. Bill and Lynda crash a meeting at the temple, and here Bill gets a glimpse of his double, who goes onstage preaching how Maha Lon saved him. Of course the real Bill responds with his usual brusque manner and instantly starts a brawl. But Bill has a reason for being pissed, as the previous night a couple temple freaks stomped him in yet another brawl; Bill’s apparently mangled face is only occasionally mentioned by the other characters.

Kudos to Snyder for having the two Bills sort things out in a way apropos to the series: a surfing duel! In fact there’s a bit more surfing material in this one than in the other volumes I’ve read. But just like the “fake Nick Carter” plot fizzled out without much exploitation in Double Identity, so too does it in this novel; the fake Bill is anticlimactically removed from the narrative, and later it will be vaguely explained that he was a crewman on the sunk US spy ship. Why was he posing as Bill? That’s not really explicity stated; the implication is that Bill Cartwright is sort of known on the surfing set and the fake Bill and his companions were looking to exploit his image, in particular his skills with picking up the ladies.

Why? Because Maha Lon’s temple is a cover for a sort of lair of Arabs who smoke hash while they auction off sex slaves, the young women abducted right off the beach and their minds fogged by drugs. At this point the reader can see that George Snyder is basically throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. It’s made all the worse by the laughably poor security these Arabs have; Bill pretty much just walks into the temple, finds the secret passageway, slips on a conveniently-discarded hooded robe one of the cultists left behind, and walks right in on the proceedings. This after the other temple guys beat him up, the previous night – I mean they know he’s the real Bill Cartwright and could undo all their plotting, so why don’t they kill him? Why just beat him up? But Snyder plows on, hoping we don’t think to ask these questions.

Snyder keeps it all moving with frequent fistfights and car chases, not to mention the occasional sex and surfing sequence. Lynda is Bill’s main woman this time around, save for a surprise reappearance by another female character in what is one of the novel’s many hard-to-buy plot developments. But speaking of Lynda, she’s always around when Bill’s ambushed, she has an uncle who owns a shop right beside Maha Lon’s temple, and she has “special” bikinis in her shop which she says aren’t for getting into the water with. She’s also a helluva lot better in bed than she should be, given Bill’s worldly experience, and all this should set off Bill’s warning signals, but instead he just sort of lets things play out. He’s a little muddled because Lynda’s hired him – Bill’s cover being a private eye – to find a friend of hers who is one of the abducted women.

The climax features more brawling, though for once Bill does shoot one or two people with that damn .22 Magnum he’s always dropping. But again the dude just waltzes right into the temple while an auction is going on, the Arabs too stoned to worry about something so minor as security, and starts up a riot. When the main villain is revealed, it’s so hard to buy that Snyder must spend several pages explaining everything. But it turns out that two of the crewmen on the sunk ship – one of whom was the guy who pretended to be Bill – stole a bunch of secret documents, and were sending them over to Arabian bidders via arcane means. The finale at least is fun, with Bill and boss Jim Dana sitting on the beach and watching a bunch of girls model bikinis, all to discover which one has the final coded message hidden on it – the message only revealed when the bikini is wet.

Despite the almost surreal vagaries of the plot, I think I enjoyed The Girl In The Telltale Bikini the most of the Operation Hang Ten books I’ve yet read. Too bad the series is so damned overpriced, but at least I still have a few more to read.

Monday, August 14, 2017

The Aquanauts #5: Stalkers Of The Sea


The Aquanauts #5: Stalkers Of The Sea, by Ken Stanton
No month stated, 1972  Macfadden Books

The fifth volume of The Aquanauts starts off with Manning Lee Stokes fooling you into thinking he’s actually going to write a novel about, you know “aquanaut”-type stuff. It opens right on the action, with hero Tiger Shark (aka William Martin) in his KRAB submersible deep in the Gulf of Finland on an espionage mission for his Secret Underater Service; SUS intelligence has it that the Russians are up to something in the vicinity.

Tiger (as Stokes refers to him) discovers what it is – an “experimental underwater dry dock” being built near the Estonian coast, where the Russians will be able to build and repair hunter-killer nuclear subs. There’s even a dummy nuclear vessel underwater to help with the sizing. Tiger gets spotted by a few Russian frogmen and battles them to the death; here he even fires his Sea Pistol, I believe for the first time in the series, and takes out one of them. The other two he kills in a brutal knife fight, after which he barely escapes to KRAB, his scuba tanks out of oxygen.

Then it’s a week later (the novel is stated as occuring between January and February of 1971), and all that stuff is gone and forgotten about; now portly, middleaged Captain Tom Greene, aka Tiger’s direct superior in the SUS, is moping about Amsterdam on some “bitch of an assignment” courtesy SUS head honcho Admiral Hank Coffin. Stokes is up to his old tricks now; the book settles in for the long haul, with lots of stuff of Greene simmering in his hotel room and looking around Amsterdam and griping about the mission. This is a recurring element in Stokes’s novels; each one usually features the main character confused and/or annoyed at his present job, but figuring there’s nothing to do but continue on with it. I swear this is Stokes himself bitching about his current writing job via his characters.

Even though it’s only 160 pages and thus shorter than the previous four volumes, Stalkers Of The Sea has such a measured pace that it actually feels longer. Plus the print’s really small and dense. But I do enjoy Stokes’s measured style, particularly when he as ever indulges in his penchant for oddball sleaze; while checking out the Red Light whorehouse district in Amsterdam, Greene ventures into a strange club that has “electronic whores,” ie plastic women who come to “life” when you press a button on their boobs, and who, if you press some other buttons when you rent them and take them upstairs, can actually have sex.

Not that Greene indulges; he’s more interested than disgusted, so we get a lot of info about this weird shit. Mainly though Greene’s in love with his wife to the point of prudishness. He also just wants to see the job through, which entails him meeting with American-born KGB agent Colonel Yuri Solennikof, sent here by his own superiors. Turns out the Russians have a scientist named Karl Vaganova, who has created this program that will detect every ship on the oceans of the world; it’s called REKORD. Vaganov wants to defect, and the Russians are actually willing to give him up; in return they want an SUS marine biologist named Steffi Kaldor.

We get a lot of stuff about high-roller Solennikof, who admits that he takes testosterone drops to keep it up because he’s past fifty, lording it up as he yaks with Greene. Tiger’s far gone from the action, all that stuff in the beginning clearly there so Stokes could have a little action before his customary treading of the water, so to speak. But something occurred to me this time – for a while I’ve wondered why this series was titled The Aquanauts when there’s only one Aquanaut, Tiger. My assumption is Stokes is in his way actually writing a “team book” sort of series – the titular Aquanauts being not only Tiger, but also his landlocked comrades Greene and Coffin, who engage in all the espionage and schceming while Tiger does the heavy lifting.

Anyway Greene is our main protagonist for the first half of the book, sort of like how Admiral Coffin was the star of most of the previous volume. After interminable, dense-print pages of dialog he even gets in what passes for an action scene; Solennikof is driving them back to Amsterdam when they’re chased by another car. Solennikof is certain they’re after him, not Greene, and besides he’d get in trouble if anything were to happen to Greene, so he drops him off – and Greene watches from afar as Solennikof guns down his pursuers, off-page. Later Greene finds one of them, who happens to be a woman; she’s injured, half-dead, and Greene gets her medical treatment. She turns out to be a goldmine of intel for SUS: her name is Mila Hrouda, she’s a hotstuff 26 year old, she’s Czech, and she’s a former TV reporter turned resistance fighter; she and her comrades were trying to kill Solennikof but failed.

Stokes is up to all sorts of page-filling tricks in this one. Pages 68 to 80 are comprised of a transcript of Mila’s debriefing with Greene, just endlessly digressive back-and-forth dialog that doesn’t do much to advance the plot – we already know Mila and comrades were trying to kill Solennikof, which is pretty much all we’re told (again) here. But as if that weren’t enough, pages 97-108 are given over to the rambling first-person account (in ugly italics) of Steffi Kaldor, all about his past (including random mentions of some floozie he liked to bang) and his escape from Russia and etc – all of it, to be sure, as trivial as could be. But Stokes presents all this stuff as material Tiger is given as part of his assignment dossier; Tiger is to study it, and Stokes must assume we readers too are in the Navy and must also be prepped on everything, no matter how inconsequential.

But for all that Stokes still delivers nice moments here and there, complete with the well-above-genre-norm writing style one expects of him. In particular there’s an enjoyable sequence where Tiger, in KRAB, hovers about the “pelegaic twilight” of the deep sea, mapping sea floor and testing out SYNMIR, a new “synthetic mirage” system KRAB’s been given which camoflauges it from enemy radar and sensor equipment. Here Tiger broods and looks off into the aquatic world and it’s one of the few times Stokes allows him to be more human than the macho cipher he normally is.

Also as per Stokes’s wont, things don’t pick up until the final quarter. It’s now late February and Admiral Coffin has succeeded in getting the NATO sea games held earlier than normal in the North Sea, to provide cover for the defector-swap the Russians are requesting. Also Coffin has figured out the ruse: the Russians, who have their own SUS, are jealous of the American SUS and want desperately to find out about any and all “Tiger Sharks” (of which our Tiger is, so far, the only one) as well as the mysterious KRAB. So this swap they’ve come up with is clearly a sting op to roust out Tiger Shark…yet somehow Coffin still goes along with it?

Who cares, I guess – it at least serves to bring the long-simmer plot to boil. Tiger has Steffi Kaldor in a sort of cryo chamber in KRAB, and must pull it through a few miles of zero-visibility North Sea ocean while Russian hunter-killer subs surround him. And there’s Solennikof, with a few Russian frogmen, overseeing the swap. But when Tiger gets back to KRAB with Vaganov, in his own cryo chamber, he discovers that there’s a homing beacon on him. Not only that – Tiger gradually figures out that the Russians have implanted a beacon and an explosive in the still-unconscious man’s chest cavity.

The finale is a taut affair with the Russian subs hounding KRAB and Solennikof broadcasting, via laser beam, messages that Tiger must surrender himself or KRAB, or Solennikof will blow them both up. Failing that, the bomb in Solennikof is wired to blow in 9 hours. Tiger takes his only option and again proves his bad-assery. He sends KRAB off on a round trip and goes out in his special scuba gear, taking out the Russian frogmen one by one. Solennikof is dispatched almost perfuntorily, blown apart by Tiger’s Sea Pistol – which, we learn, is a one-and-done weapon, but it’s dart actually explodes in the “second stage” of impact. Here we get one of Stokes’s gorier deaths, complete with descriptions of Solennikof’s lungs and intestines blasting out.

Only it turns out it wasn’t Solennikof; when Tiger later gets back to KRAB, there the wily Russian’s voice is again. The man Tiger killed was a decoy. Indeed, Solennikof survives the tale and, according to the proprietor of the essential Spy Guys And Gals site, he will return in the 8th volume. Tiger kills more frogmen in brutal underwater combat, stealing their air due to the slashed hoses of his tanks, yet for some odd reason Stokes leaves Tiger’s escape off-page, and picks up a few hours later with our hero safely onboard the Poseidon while a combat doctor successfully removes the bomb from Kaldor.

Stalkers Of The Sea moves pretty slow. Other that is than the opening and closing sequences with Tiger Shark. Otherwise this series has yet to really ramp up. Oh, and perhaps you’ve noted something that’s missing from this review – the sex!! Believe it or not, folks, this is the first volume in which Tiger does not get laid, and other than those “electronic whores” (which we don’t even get to see in action), Stokes for once doesn’t indulge in the bizarro sleaze we expect of him. Bummer!

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Topless Dancer Hangup (Operation Hang Ten #7)


Topless Dancer Hangup, by Patrick Morgan
No month stated, 1971 Macfadden Books

I was under the impression that George Snyder wrote all ten volumes of the Operation Hang Ten series, but then Justin Marriott kindly sent me a scan of an article Snyder published in a 2005 issue of Paperback Parade where he claimed that he had only written the first five volumes, with no knowledge of who wrote the others. Then to confuse matters even more, Snyder himself left a comment on a revew of this very novel at The Ringer Files, where he stated, “I wrote ten of them…other writers came later after I walked away from the series.”

So what the hell? Did he write five or all ten? I could see him forgetting when he wrote that 2005 article that he’d written one or two volumes, but to forget he’d written five novels? But then, so far as his comment on the Ringer Files goes…there only were ten books in this series, so what other writers could there have been? All very confusing, and all likely moot, as having read this seventh volume* of Operation Hang Ten, I have to say it’s certainly the work of Snyder – which would imply his comment on Kurt’s blog was more accurate than his 2005 article, and that Snyder did in fact write all ten of these books and not just the first five.

It has the exact same vibe as the previous volume I read, #3: Deadly Group Down Under, with a small group of characters and a hardboiled pulp sort of feel. This volume again proves that Operation Hang Ten is more “Fawcett Gold Medal” the “surfing meets spy-fy” hijinks promised by the series concept. Other than one or two sequences where surly hero Bill Cartwright surfs or races his Hemi-powered Woody, the series feels almost exactly like a grim and gritty private eye yarn. Even the cast of characters is whittled down to just a handful, something I’ve noticed is a recurring motif in hardboiled pulp, and the action is mostly comprised of brutal fistfights.

Another indication that this is the work of George Snyder is that Topless Dancer Hangup features that strange tendency of his which I have mentioned before. Whereas the action scenes in a Snyder novel are chaotic, harried, and over within a paragraph or two, the guy consistently over-details comparitively trivial acts like the hero trying to sneak into a building. Just as in The Defector, while the action scenes are over and done with in no time, we will read a couple pages of Bill (as Snyder usually refers to his hero) climbing through a window and trying to lower himself safely to the ground, etc. There are two such sequences in the book, and Snyder’s the only men’s adventure writer I know of who consistently does this – personally I’d rather read a few pages of a shootout instead of a belabored explanation of how Bill jimmies open a window, slides in, and tries to figure out where he can safely land without causing himself injury or making any noise.

Anyway, I enjoyed this one a lot more than Deadly Group Down Under. Bill’s customary opinions on this or that are a bit toned down, and Snyder focuses more on the noirish feel. But still, it’s practically the same book. It seems to me that each of these Operation Hang Ten novels are just noirsh pulp-action yarns with plots that center around a missing or murdered young woman, and Topless Dancer Hangup has Bill venturing to Hawaii to locate a missing Hang Ten operative named Sandra Denny who is the titular topless dancer; she has disappeared with ten thousand in Hang Ten cash along with a microfilm she bought from a Cuban refugee, which purports to show the locations of Red China-funded missile silos in the Cuban hinterlands.

I was unduly harsh on Deadly Group Down Under; it took Kurt’s above-referenced review to make me realize what I’d missed: that Operation Hang Ten is really just a men’s adventure variation of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels, only in third-person (though Snyder’s prose as ever feels like first-person), and with a 24 year-old surfer-spy replacing MacDonald’s “knight errant.” I wonder if this is what series creator Lyle Kenyon Engel envisioned from the start. The similarities extend even to the “wounded birds” Bill encounters each volume, many of whom meet grisly deaths as demanded from lurid ‘70s pulp.

So, while my comments in that earlier review about Bill’s “chauvanism” and “misogyny” (two grossly overused words in the victim culture that is modern American society) are for the most part still valid, Bill’s Cro-Magnon views are tempered this time by…you know, who cares? It just didn’t bug me nearly as much this time, maybe because it just didn’t get as much in the way of the narrative. This time we just get periodic musings on hot secretaries “swishing” their behinds to and from work while Bill eats burgers and watches them from inside a greasy diner (Bill only seems to eat burgers, by the way).

We also get periodic reminders that women were designed to please men. But the most venomous musings are directed more toward the increasing commercialization of Hawaiian surfing spots and how parts of Hawaii will no doubt look just like Burbank in a decade. I’ve yet to read a Travis McGee novel, but it’s my understanding they’re along the same lines – weary cynicism about the encroaching shittiness of the world mixed with ruminations on women. All the same here, if a bit more brutish.

I still don’t buy Bill Cartwright as an action hero. For one, he’s too damn young, for me at least…I wrote elsewhere that I think these men’s adventure protagonists should be grizzled Marlboro Men-types, in their thirties at least….but more importantly he’s kind of a chump. Regardless, we’re informed that Hang Ten boss Jim Dana considers Bill his best operative – which I think is less a commentary on how great Bill is and more of a commentary on how bad the other Hang Ten operatives must be.

But Bill’s called away from his latest steady lay, a good-looking 19 year old surf “bunny” who has lived in sin with Bill for the past three weeks in his high-tech trailer, which as we’ll recall is all run off a computer that mostly just whips up Scotch and sodas for Bill. But our hero is getting sick of how “the girl” is falling in love with him and clearly wanting to marry him; more damningly, she is a neat freak. So when Bill gets his summons to Hang Ten HQ, he throws a “neatnik” tantrum and the girl storms out of his life, just as Bill hoped she would.

Later Snyder softens this a bit by having Bill “sniffling” as he sits alone in his trailer, and it’s intimated that Bill really broke it off with her because he can’t get that involved with a woman; his life is dedicated to eradicating “the lice” of the world. There are parts here and there later on where Bill will mull that his trailer is now “haunted” by the girl’s ghost, but by midpoint through the novel he’s checked out more ass-swingin’ secretaries and ass-baring surf bunnies and has pretty much forgotten about her. That being said, Bill does practically fall in love with another young lady during the course of the novel.

The book is really a private eye thriller; forget any “Surfing James Bond” expectations. Bill heads to Honolulu, as ever having his Woody and his trailer shipped over as well, and goes about scoping out the scene while dealing with the smallscale cast of lowlife characters. He also kills a few pages hitting on a surf bunny named Sue in a subplot that goes absolutely nowhere, mostly so Snyder can provide a humorous scene in which the two openly discuss their intention to have sex in front of a few shocked fellow diners, but regrettably cannot as Sue has not taken her pill that day. The two make a date to screw the following day(!), but “The Cartwright” (as Snyder sometimes refers to his hero, I kid you not) forgets all about poor ol’ Sue.

Rather, the “Cartwright chick” this time around is Marie, a friend of Sandra Denny’s and a fellow topless dancer. There’s a cool late ‘60s vibe bit where Bill checks out Marie dancing in the club, with psychedelic lights playing over her half-nude form. Bill practically falls in love with her, leading to the novel’s one and only sex scene, which is fairly explicit, in particular noting a “small, circular, wonderful movement to [Marie’s] body” that just about blows Bill’s mind. Marie is the only one who knows where Sandra Denny is, and even that she’s a Hang Ten agent, and sets Bill up to meet with her.

As for Sandra Denny, she remains off-page for the duration, being hunted by various people. Bill tracks down her mom, an over-the-hill hussy who comes on strong to our disgusted hero, and also questions Don Arlen, a dark-haired lothario who claims to have been Sandra’s steady boyfriend. (“Were you getting into her?” being an example of Bill’s rather blunt questioning method.) Mostly though Bill runs afoul of three lowlifes from another local club, two of whom shadow Bill throughout the novel, leading to the few (and pretty brief) action scenes.

In fact nothing really comes to a head even though some minor characters are killed off-page. Bill mostly just bitches that he’s getting nowhere in his half-assed investigation and goes back to his trailer to make despondent calls back to HQ and have his computer whip him up some Scotch and soda. It’s only when Marie is captured and put in a sort of dungeon that the novel really kicks into gear, though to be sure it the material leading up to this moment isn’t exactly bad or anything – in fact, I enjoyed it. But I still don’t think the exorbitant prices of Operation Hang Ten on the second-hand market are justified; we aren’t talking about men’s adventure fiction gold here.

Even when Bill goes to Marie’s rescue, Snyder again indulges in his strange penchant for focusing more so on Bill’s climbing through a window and sneaking into the place than the actual action itself. And Bill proves himself again to be a klutz, dropping his .22 Magnum auto and resorting to his hands. The villain ends up blowing himself up. Once Marie’s freed, Bill basically proclaims his love to her and then gets on to the business of figuring out the plot in the last couple pages, with all of it centering around the same small group of characters we’ve been dealing with since the beginning. 

I’ve got a few more volumes of Operation Hang Ten in my collection, and hopefully they’ll be more along the lines of this one. Bill’s bitchery is toned down a bit, and while not much really happens, the tone is nice and hardboiled. It’s a shame though that Manor didn’t reprint the series in full like it did with The Aquanauts; if they had, the books might be a lot easier and cheaper to acquire.

*I was also under the impression that Topless Dancer Hangup was the sixth volume of Operation Hang Ten, as that’s how it’s listed in Brad Mengel’s Serial Vigilantes and on the Spy Guys and Gals website. However the “other titles in the Operation Hang Ten series” list at the front of the book has Girl In The Telltale Bikini, usually listed as being the seventh volume, as actually being the sixth volume. In other words, the order of the two volumes has been swapped in Brad’s book and the Spy Guys site, and Topless Dancer Hangup takes place after Girl In The Telltale Bikini. Not only that, but early in Topless Dancer Hangup Bill briefly flashes back on his previous six assignments for Hang Ten, one of which is the Girl In The Telltale Bikini.

Thursday, May 19, 2016

The Aquanauts #4: Sargasso Secret


The Aquanauts #4: Sargasso Secret, by Ken Stanton
No month stated, 1971  Macfadden Books

The fourth volume of The Aquanauts is pretty oddball; for the first hundred pages author Manning Lee Stokes appears to be under the impression that he’s writing a murder-mystery – indeed, a murder-mystery starring a septuagenarian Navy admiral! Once again one must wonder if series creator/producer Lyle Kenyon Engel figured he might’ve hired the wrong ghostwriter.

At any rate Stokes’s writing, despite the padding, stalling, and general lack of anything “aquanautical,” is still so readable, at least for me, that I find I don’t really mind the fact that not much at all is happening. Perhaps Engel felt the same, and just let Stokes do his thing. Regardless, the first half of Sargasso Secret will be hard-going for most, especially those who are eager for the Thunderball/Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea underwater action promised by the series’s concept.

For once again Stokes has taken a series about a kick-ass Navy frogman codenamed “Tiger Shark,” his billion-dollar high-tech submersible KRAB, and turned in a story that really has nothing much to do with any of it, sort of like in the first volume. As mentioned Tiger’s boss, “Old Crusty” Navy admiral Hank Coffin, is the star of the show for the first hundred pages – and my friends, this is perhaps the longest Stokes offering yet, coming in at 224 pages of small print with hardly any white space. Stokes was both prolific and industrious, you have to give him that.

Some unspecified but short time after the previous volume, Admiral Hank Coffin is flying to Hawaii under orders of the President to look into a potential solution to the growing threat of world famine. Sargasso Secret is heavy with the doom and gloom prophecies of the ‘70s, with “world starvation” at one point stated as being a certainty by the ‘80s. Coffin as we’ll recall is chief of SUS, ie the Secret Underwater Service, and he has no idea why the President would task him with this assignment. This is another hallmark of Stokes’s writing – the protagonists are constantly wondering why they’ve been given their latest mission. One wonders if this was Stokes himself bemoaning his latest ghostwriting duty through his characters.

Tiger and his immediate boss Captain Tom Greene are already here in Hawaii; Stokes as ever does well with bringing to life his trio of main protagonists, with Coffin and Greene, closer due to age, bickering and bantering, and alpha male Tiger chomping at the bit to get back into action. They’re here to meet Dr. Lee Choon, a chain-smoking marine biologist of Hawaiian-Chinese descent who, we gradually learn, has formulated a way to synthesize proteins and vegetables out of seaweed. In fact he’s called the Navy reps here to his mansion to eat “thousand dollar steaks,” ie steaks that were created by seaweed harvested at great cost from the Sargasso Sea, near Cuba.

Also here is Choon’s wonderfully-named stepdaughter, Poppy Choon, a free-spirited, vixenish “Eurasian” gal with “large-apple size breasts” who informs Tiger posthaste of her plans to screw him silly. Stokes does get to the good stuff, though per his usual wont it’s only after much dialog and narrative detailing Dr. Choon’s seaweed-harvesting. But our pal doesn’t cheat us when it comes to the sleazy goods; the books are only becoming more explicit as they go on, though Stokes is still his literary self even during all the wanton activities, with lines like, “[Tiger was] providing the phallus on which she immolated herself.”

In fact Stokes is in even more of a “literary” mood than usual in Sargasso Secret; you know for sure this isn’t The Marksman when you come across descriptions like “the soft druggets of radiance cast by the lanterns.” But Stokes is one of the few genre authors I’ve encountered who can write like this and still get appropriately sleazy and pulpy, so the high-brow narative style just adds to the charm. I’ve said before how much I enjoy the guy’s work, and an enjoyment of Manning Lee Stokes’s writing is about the only way you’ll be able to endure the first half of Sargasso Secret.

It’s all in a suspense and mystery mode as Stokes dwells on just a few characters here at Dr. Choon’s mansion. Besides those mentioned there’s also Charles Wong, Choon’s assistant who is obsessed with Poppy and thus instantly jealous of Tiger, and Hideki Sato, a “Jap” agent who has been sent here by his government in coordination with the US, as Japan too has been seeking a means of cultivating food from seaweed. Yet Coffin recognizes Sato and remembers him as a Japanese spy in the pre-WWII years, one who was kicked out of the US.

Eventually we readers see that Sato is pressuring Dr. Choon to turn over his formula to Sato personally, the man acting for himself and blackmailing Choon with his knowledge of some bad stuff Choon was once involved in. All this stuff plays out in very slow-moving prose, with the “action” happening off-page…after Sato delivers his threat to Choon, in the next chapter we learn that a post-coital Tiger took a dip in the pool, only to find Sato’s murdered corpse. One of Choon’s guards has also been killed.

More pedantic time-wasting occurs as, instead of it happening in forward-moving narrative, we’re instead treated to a lot of summarized backstory as the hapless CIA agents tasked with monitoring Choon try to figure out what happened at the doctor’s mansion. Long story short, the place was burned down and everyone disappeared. At long last we’ll learn that Coffin Tiger, Choon, et al likely escaped in a jeep, which they drove to a beach, and then perhaps got on a sub. Of course, this was all the plotting of Hank Coffin, though why he went to such extreme lengths is unstated. When the narrative switches back over to Coffin we learn that “Old Crusty” wisely suspects Choon of killing Sato and the guard.

Finally, on page 118, Stokes remembers that he’s writing a series titled The Aquanauts. Tiger Shark returns as our protagonist and mostly stays for the duration. It’s six weeks later and he’s onboard KRAB, monitoring a prototype “monster sub” named the USS Narwhale as it lurks in the Sargasso Sea. Dr. Choon, Poppy, and Charles Wong are on board the sub, “guests” of the US Navy, as they gather and harvest the Sargasso seaweed. The aqautic stuff we want from the series sporadically returns, like when Tiger gets in his special gear (a black “light metal helmet” and a black “neoprene wet suit [with] five zippers, but none in the right place”) and “fins” around the murky sea.

Admiral Coffin suspects Dr. Choon of somehow sneaking info to Chinese or Russian agents posing as Cuban fishermen in the boats that trawl the Sargasso. Tiger quickly figures out that Choon is firing messages via speargun, to be later collected by the pseudo-fishermen. Once Tiger’s had dinner onboard the Narwhale – and gotten a blowjob from Poppy – it’s time for him to suit up, stalk the area once the big sub leaves, and collect one of those errant spears before the Commies come to collect them.

All the plot threads from the first half of the book awkwardly come together as Charles Wong, on Narwhale, takes Capt. Greene captive, phoning his demands to Admiral Coffin on nearby sub Poseidon. Wong we’ll learn is a double agent, working for the “Chinese Commies” and the Russians; Dr. Choon himself is aligned with the Chinese, his assignment to use US resources to perfect his protein manufacturing before delivering the whole thing to China on a silver platter.

But Choon has escaped – oh, and Charles has accidentally killed Poppy!! Stokes flashes back so that we readers can witness the poor nympho’s sad demise as Charles Wong bashes her head to pulp with the butt of his gun; as an extra twist of the knife Stokes even informs us that Poppy has fallen in love with Tiger and fantasizes about marrying him!

For the hell of it, Stokes then throws in a new subplot – Admiral Coffin tasks Tiger with killing a new Shark (ie a junior SUS frogman, Tiger being the only Tiger Shark). The guy has the convenient name Battenkil and Coffin’s just learned he’s a Russian secret agent. Tiger is assigned to kill the spy while the two men speed in KRAB after the Cuban fishing boat Dr. Choon has escaped on, which is taking him to Havana. Now we’re getting to the material we want as Tiger, in his “special wet suit,” which has “thousands of tiny suction cups” on it, affixes himself to the bottom of the Cuban boat as it speeds through the waters and slowly pulls himself aboard, ready to kill some Chinese Commies and capture Dr. Choon.

But Choon’s already friggin’ dead!! Once again Stokes builds up a plot and dispenses with it off-page; Choon, miserable over how he had a chance to save Poppy but instead ran for his life, shoots himself in the heart with a Luger(!?) and dies as Tiger watches. The Cuban sailors proving to be pretty damn easygoing, Tiger then takes the corpse, gives it a sea burial, and returns to KRAB. Meanwhile Charles Wong has gotten onboard a Russian sub, and it’s now angling to shoot a torpedo at the Narwhale, just as Coffin suspected. Tiger’s mission is to destroy the Russian sub, and kill fellow Shark Battenkil.

The final dozen or so pages are gripping and entertaining and damn if only the rest of the book was the same. It culminates with Tiger and Battenkil in desperate battle beneath the waves, and then a trio of Russian frogmen come after Tiger. Our hero once again doesn’t get to use his “Sea Pistol,” that bizarre weapon introduced in the first volume but not used since then (I think); this time it’s knocked out of his hand before he can fire. The fight with the Russian frogmen is especialy gripping because Tiger has planted a bomb on their sub and he has to keep them from seeing it – plus Battenkil managed to cut Tiger’s oxygen supply, so there’s an extra layer of desperation as Tiger frantically swims for KRAB before he runs out of air – and before the Russian sub blows. 

Ponderous and slow-moving, more focused on mystery and suspense than Cold War aquatic thrills, Sargasso Secret is really only enjoyable for fans of the series or fans of Stokes’s work. I’ve found with this particular series to not hope for any action or lurid thrills or whatever – or if so, only hope for it in small doses – and instead just appreciate it for what it was: a skilled and capable author winging it as he bangs out his latest contract assignment.

Thursday, November 26, 2015

The Aquanauts #3: Seek, Strike And Destroy


The Aquanauts #3: Seek, Strike And Destroy, by Ken Stanton
No month stated, 1971  Macfadden Books

Manning Lee Stokes turns in his third installment of The Aquanauts , and for the most part it’s as slow-moving as his first. Boy can this guy pad out the pages, and Seek, Strike And Destroy features padding of the worst sort. You know you’re in trouble when the first chapter is given over to an endless sequence featuring a newlywed couple on their honeymoon – a couple who only appears in this opening chapter – complete with long digressions on their history together and plans for the future and etc.

They stop off for some quickie sex in a ghost town near Death Valley, Las Veagas, only for a friggin’ missile to land nearby. It doesn’t explode, lodges there in the ground, and it has Chinese writing on it. Gradually we’ll learn that this is a nuclear missile, fired from a Chinese nuclear submarine, built identically to the top-secret US Polaris sub. The Chinese sub, off the California coast, is quickly sunk (off page) and now it’s up to Admiral Coffin of the Secret Underater Service to make sure the Chinese do not discover that their nuclear sub has been sunk but also to ensure that the US public doesn’t find out a Chinese sub was right off the US coast. Also he’s to destroy whatever other Chinese nuclear subs might exist. 

Meanwhile our hero Tiger Shark is testing out the Paranauts initiative, aka Operation Deep Six, a page-filling gambit on Stokes’s part if ever there was one: another idea of Coffin’s, the “Paranauts” concept is basically parachuting a geared-up scuba diver into the sea. Why exactly this would even require a service name, or what in particular the Paranauts would do that the regular Tiger Sharks couldn’t do, is something Stokes doesn’t explain. What makes it all even more unintentionally humorous is that the Paranauts thing is just brushed under the narrative carpet and not mentioned again. And it’s not even the most action-themed entrance for our hero, if that was Stokes’s intention: all Tiger does is parachute into the ocean and swim around.

Stokes retains his usual glacial pace; it takes fifty small-print pages for Tiger to even get in his high-tech, top secret KRAB submersile and go look for the downed Chinese sub. Meanwhile we must endure so much tedium. Every few chapters breaks over, as has become customary for the series, to Admiral Coffin and his superior dressing in “mufti” and meeting secretly in motels to discuss top-secret stuff. But rather than being gripping or even revelatory, these scenes are slow as molasses, with Stokes detailing every lighting of a pipe or sipping of gin, the two old men going on and on and on about what have you, and usually it’s shit we already know!

It occurred to me that Stokes could’ve made some money on the side by offering a correspondence course on pulp paperback writing. “This month’s lesson – Padding: How to Meet (And Exceed!) Your Word Count.” I’ve said before that I do appreciate Stokes’s style, but there are times where you wish he’d put down the bottle of booze and think up a quality story instead of just banging aimlessly at the typewriter. But as it is, so much time is wasted on inconsequential things and dialog exchanges that go nowhere. And again Tiger himself (“Tiger” being the main way Stokes refers to his hero, whose real name is William Martin) is lost in the narrative quagmire.

But then, as is typical of Stokes, there will be these bizarre incidents that come out of nowhere, jolting the reader out of his stupor…like when Tiger has to knock out a sexy Communist agent by screwing her with a narcotic-laced French Tickler!! The lady is Madame Hee, but despite the name she’s actually Russian; in long backstory we learn that she was born in Russia around 1910 or thereabouts and married a Chinese officer or some such in the ‘20s. Now she lives in San Francisco and acts as the prime gatherer of spy intel for Peking; Admiral Coffin and the Feds are concerned she’ll somehow get wind of the sunk Chinese sub and let her superiors know.

And yes, Madame Hee was born around 1910, meaning she’s “pushing 60,” give or take a few years. Yet, the Feds ensure Coffin and Captain Greene (Tiger’s main contact in the SUS), Madame Hee doesn’t look a day over 40, with most men thinking she doesn’t look over 30. And she’s got a helluva nice body, “a body they could use in the Playboy centerfold.” Plus she’s a nympho who is only “interested in big cocks and staying power.” The sexually-aggressive older lady with the looks and body of a much younger woman is a recurring theme in Stokes’s work; see Gerda von Rothe in The Golden Serpent and Queen Beatta in The Bronze Axe. And like Gerda von Rothe, Madame Hee’s even a wealthy owner of a cosmetics emporium.

In one of the novel’s few intentionally-funny moments (Stokes as usual playing things straight…a little too straight), Greene insists that Tiger not be told how old Madame Hee really is; there follows a few humorous bits where a CIA agent almost slips and mentions that Hee is 60 or so. Anyway Tiger poses as a sort of country bumpkin, which we’re informed at great length is Madame Hee’s type, and saves her from a staged mugging in a park. She takes him back to her place to patch him up and the lurid hijinks ensue. First she gives him a blowjob straightaway, which nearly blows Tiger’s mind. Then she orgasms after a little dry humping(?).

Then it’s out with the ol’ French Tickler, which Stokes only now bothers to inform us is the entire key to this whole sordid puzzle; the SUS brains have coated it with a diluted extract of Puffer Fish poison(?!), and all Tiger has to do is fuck the lady with it and within fifteen minutes or so she’ll be out cold. And I should mention that Stokes gets fairly explicit here, more so than he did just a few years before in the aforementioned Golden Serpent. This is also the first sex scene in the book, nearly 100 pages in – and also, believe it or not, it’s not until here that we have our first action scene, as a muscle-bound hulk comes into Hee’s place while Tiger is searching it.

A knock-down, drag-out fight ensues, one in which Tiger is practically beaten to a pulp. He endures a beating that would faze even Gannon, yet manages to finally overcome his opponent, fracturing his skull with Hee’s telephone. But by next chapter Tiger’s good as new, about to parachute into the China sea, where KRAB waits for him in the waters below. It’s like a week later and Tiger’s been in the hospital.  Admiral Coffin has gotten in touch with some revolutionairies in China who know where the nuclear submarine pens are. Tiger’s mission now is to meet up with a member of the revolutionairies and destroy the subs.

The underwater stuff you’d expect of the series is underplayed, with only a few brief scenes of Tiger either “finning” around the sea in his high-tech scuba outfit (we learn here that he wears a self-contained helmet on his dives, by the way) or hanging out in KRAB while wearing nothing but shorts and a pair of moccasins (Tiger’s preferred KRAB attire, for some reason). He’s got time to kill before meeting with the revolutionaries (because, of course, Stokes himself has many words to kill before he meets his requirement), so he goofs off; here Stokes inserts a bit of his trademark in-jokery:

[Tiger] read a paperback until he could no longer keep his eyes open. As his jaw slackened and his head nodded he wondered where in hell the writers got their ideas. Some of them, the writers themselves, must be pretty weirdo.

More jokery ensues when Tiger swims onshore to meet his contact and has to hide in a rice paddy, fertilized with human shit, as a guard patrol walks by. One of them even takes a piss right over where Tiger is submerged in the foul murk, unseen by them. But who will be surprised when Tiger’s contact turns out to be a young and pretty Chinese woman? Her name is Mary Liu and she meets Tiger in an effectively-rendered scene in the abandoned “Temple of Dogs” which overlooks the sea.

Mary has been carrying on an affair with the General in charge of the nearby submarine complex and has gathered enough info on him and the complex to help Tiger destroy it. Much, much time is wasted on the General’s entrance and Tiger’s subterfuge, pretending he is a Russian here to buy nuclear subs from the Chinese. Finally Tiger kills the dude, and here the novel gets weird again. Stokes, perhaps having watched an episode or two of Mission: Impossible, now has Tiger pull out a latex mask fashioned after the dead General’s features and put it on, along with the General’s uniform. 

Pretending to be drunk, as was the dead General’s wont, he heads to the General’s house in the nearby sub complex, which is built into a hollowed-out volcano over the sea, Mary along with him. But when a jealous Colonel who has long sought to usurp the General comes in on them, Tiger and Mary pretend to have sex on the bed (while still clothed) while the Colonel watches them(?!), until Tiger finally rolls over and blows him away with the lady’s .25 caliber. What is there left to do but drag the bloody corpse into the shower and then have sex all day?

Stokes skips the details but he does decide, for no reason other than general sadism, to gut us readers: Mary, who Tiger finds himself falling for, has come on this mission knowing it’s suicide for her. Tiger will be escaping by the sea once he destroys the subs and he only has air tanks for himself. Mary has taken the job knowing she will die with its success. Tiger spends all day wondering how he can get her out safely, even if it isn’t part of his orders. He finally gets Mary to agree to go with him – only for her to then reveal she’s taken her suicide “L-pill.” She dies in his arms, telling him it was the right thing to do.

Tiger is devastated – but only for a sentence or two. Humorously, Mary is plain forgotten by the next chapter, which has Tiger in scuba suit and helmet sneaking around the sub complex and knifing Chinese guards. Then it’s into the drink to swim around and plant explosives on the fifteen nuclear subs in the pen. Ten pages remain in this seemingly-endless novel (which is actually only 192 pages long – but with the usual super-small print), and only now are things truly happening. But that’s Manning Lee Stokes for you. Four pages from the end we’re graced with the incident depicted on the cover: Red China frogmen in white wetsuits attack Tiger. He takes them out in a few paragraphs.

It’s funny how Stokes charges through the finale, realizing he’s about to hit his word count. The frogmen disposed of, Tiger plants his bombs and swims for KRAB. He just makes it in time for the explosion, which rockets the little sub out of the ocean. Turns out there must’ve been some live atomic warheads on one of the ships Tiger just blew, and an atomic cloud rises in the distance. But there’s only a sentence or two left so Tiger sits back in one of the KRAB’s “contoured seats” and that’s that. So then, all the good stuff was rushed through in about ten or so pages. If Stokes had spent more time on that than inessential bullshit, Seek, Strike And Destroy would’ve been a lot of fun. 

But that’s Manning Lee Stokes for you.