Seven Against Greece (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #25)

Seven Against Greece, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1967  Award Books

(Edition shown here circa 1974)

Nicholas Browne wrote four volumes of Nick Carter: Killmaster, and Seven Against Greece was his third one. It’s mainly interesting in how standard it is. This is basically a no-frills Killmaster yarn, Browne hitting just the exact bases that are expected of a series ghostwriter and not offering much in the way of innovation. I only hold him to a higher standard given that he featured an ancient Viking warrior in the last volume he wrote for the series. 

But there’s nothing crazy or outrageous aboutSeven Against Greece, other than my suspicion that the title was originally “Seven Against Thebes.” I say this because the published title has nothing to do with the story – if there are indeed “Seven against Greece” in the course of the book, I couldn’t name them – but Nick Carter makes frequent visits to a bar in Athens called Seven Against Thebes, a notorious hangout for a group of native terrorists. Well, who knows. 

Regardless of the title, Browne does indeed keep the action centered in Greece for the entirety of the novel’s 158 pages – 158 pages of incredibly small print, to the extent that I figure Seven Against Greece would at least be 250 pages if the print was a little bigger. Maybe longer. And the helluva it is, a lot of the narrative is listless, and given over to padding, so the book seems even longer. 

According to Will Murray’s incredible Killmaster research in The Armchair Detective V15 #4 (1982), Nicholas Browne was a merchant seaman who turned in a few Killmaster installments in the mid-late 1960s and then “sailed for parts unknown,” essentially disappearing from the face of the Earth. Maybe he sailed into the Bermuda Triangle. 

Murray appropriately makes it all sound eerie, but it’s only now occurred to me that the whole thing might have been a tall tale Murray was fed by series editor Lyle Kenyon Engel. Maybe there was no “Nicholas Browne.” Maybe these books were really written by Engel – who, per Murray’s article, claimed to have done extensive rewriting to “Browne’s” manuscripts. Looking at my 2015 review of The Bright Blue Death, the last of Browne’s four Killmaster novels but the first one of his I read, I see that commenter “halojones-fan” was a decade ahead of me, with his comment: “Was Nicholas Browne an actual person, or just a pseudonym for the Engels?” Good question, halojones-fan! 

At any rate, going into the book with an awareness of who Browne supposedly was, there is quite a bit of realistic detail on ports and sailing; Nick Carter hitches a few rides and there’s a lot of word painting about grungy seaside ports and whatnot, conveying a “been there, done that” verisimilitude to the narrative. So who knows, maybe there really was a Nicholas Browne who was a merchant seaman who wrote a handful of Nick Carter: Killmaster novels while sailing the seas, before vanishing. If Robert Stack was still alive, I’d beg him to do a segment on Unsolved Mysteries. While he was at it, maybe he could’ve also clreared up the mystery on who another series ghostwriter, “William Rohde,” really was. 

Another note is that Nick’s undercover pose this time is as an “able-bodied seaman,” so maybe there really was something to Nicholas Browne being a real person. But then, Nick has two guises in this one: he also pretends to be an archeologist, and even receives AXE training in the field. This dual-cover setup is not well executed in the narrative, and really just added more bloat to an already-bloated story. Nick has the archeologist guise because AXE suspects an Athens traveling agency of hooking visiting Americans up with young natives, in the hopes that marriage will ensue, and the natives will go to America with their new spouse. There seems to be something nefarious in the works, and an agent working this case is murdered at the beginning of the novel – now it’s Nick’s turn to figure out what is happening. 

Parts of Seven Against Greece are similar to the popular fiction of the era, with Nick hobknobbing with jet-setting elite in exotic locales. There’s also Princess Electra, “the most beautiful woman in the world,” with her “luxurious figure,” a former model who plays the field and sets her sights on “archeologist” Nick. Browne is not one of the more explicit writers in the field, but we do get copious mentions of the gal’s breasts. For the most part, though, Browne goes for more of a pseudo-literary style for the naughty stuff; for example, when Nick and Electra have their inevitable fun, Browne leaves it as, “[Nick] felt as if he had crashed through a boundary of the universe.” Well, sure. Okay. 

Then again, Nick’s already had his off-page way with another European beauty: Xenia, a portside whore in Athens, with her “perfect and vital young body.” She will turn out to be the main female character in the novel; Browne goes against the series mandate and “only” has Nick conquering two women in the novel, instead of the customary three. But even with Xenia our author keeps all the juicy details off page; what’s worse, Xenia starts to fall in love with Nick, even trying to get him to stay with her. 

Browne does have a gift for scene-setting. The port-side material in particular is vivid with description, and when it comes to the maritime stuff you can tell that this is an author who knows of what he writes. But still, it’s rather slow-going. Nick gets in a few fistfights here and there, but he stymies himself due to “keeping cover.” Meaning, when some hoods jump him outside of Xenia’s apartment, Nick can’t become full-on Killmaster and waste the guys, as he’s supposed to be a merchant seaman. 

There’s also a lot of suspense material. Browne has a lot of characters in the works, and there are frequent cutovers to their perspectives to fill up the runtime. I found a bit of prescience in the Obama Bin Laden-esque Gorgas, elderly leader of a Greek terrorist army. It’s his men Nick tangles with outside of Xenia’s apartment, and eventually Nick will learn that Gorgas and Princes Electra are in cahoots, working with an Onassis pastiche and a Chinese spymaster. Still, unless my math fails me, that’s only four against Greece. 

This early in the series, we are still apparently under the pretensions that Nick Carter is old enough to have fought in World War II, as established in the first volume. But even by 1967 it’s getting hard to buy. For example, Nick hooks up with an old Greek colleague he fought with during the war, a hardy old warrior who seems to have walked out of Homer, but the dude is old, and he and Nick keep talking about “the old days” and whatnot. But Nick is still young enough that he picks up young chicks like Xenia and has gobsmacking international jet-set beauties like Electra chomping at the bit to bed him. So it almost gives the impression that Nick Carter is a Highlander or something, an ageless immortal. It was a wise decision to gradually drop the whole “WWII vet” setup. 

We do still have the unintentionally goofy stuff from early volumes, though, like an axe tattoo on Nick’s arm…which designates him as a high-ranking agent of the top-secret outfit AXE, of course. I mean there’s nothing like just advertising who you are when you’re going undercover. One wonders why they even bother with giving Nick cover guises. 

When Nick does cut loose, though, Browne doesn’t disappoint. There’s a brutal fight with a couple thugs in his hotel room, which leads to some dark humor where Nick stashes their corpses in a closet…and then goes out for lunch. Browne also caters to the theme of Nick being captured and tortured; late in the tale he is tied, naked, to a pole in a grotto, one that fills with the tide, and all these fish and crabs and whatnot start nibbling on him. Things take a turn into horror when a giant octopus comes in and wraps itself around Nick, biting his chest – the finale here is particularly grisly, with Nick recalling how an old seaman once told him of being in a similar situation, and the way out was to bite the octopus in the brain. 

There’s also another good sequence where Nick and his old comrade are cornered like rats in some underground tunnels, and a guy with a flamethrower comes after them. But the finale is a bit too much like a mystery, along the lines of Browne’s previous The Chinese Paymaster, with Nick uncovering who exactly is behind the plot. Browne does have a good way of incorporating Nick’s trademark weapons, though; little gas-bomb Pierre is used twice in the novel, once when Nick throws it into the open bed of a truckful of soldiers, and in another crazy part where he uses it while he’s tied up in a plane that’s in mid-air(!). 

Overall though, the biggest takeaway from Seven Against Greece is the mystery of who Nicholas Browne was, what happened to him, and why he didn’t write any more Killmaster novels, as he did write some good ones, like Operation Starvation.

The Peking Dossier (Nick Carter: Killmaster #84)

The Peking Dossier, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1973  Award Books

The first of two Nick Carter: Killmaster by an author named Linda Stewart, The Peking Dossier is from the unfortunate era in which series packager Lyle Kenyon Engel had let go of the reins and Award Books was fully in control, turning the series over to an army of ghostwriters with none of the unity or continuity that Engel had maintained for the series. Even worse, the series is now in first-person, with “Nick himself” relaying his adventures to us. 

This is problematic enough for me; I mean Nick Carter is this super-agent who is always “on the job,” so how the hell does he have time to write books? And indeed, The Peking Dossier is a slow-as-molasses read, another of those deceptively-slim ‘70s paperbacks. This sucker has some seriously small print and, despite “only” being 188 pages, it took me forever to finish the book. This is because Linda Stewart has a tendency to draw things out a little too much at times…and also, she makes the even worse mistake of putting her tongue a little too far into her cheek. 

It's the sort of thing Engel never would have allowed: Nick will often refer to himself as a “hero” when telling us his story in The Peking Dossier, usually in a “taking the piss” sort of vibe. Like a part where he scales a wall, and Stewart has an exhausted Nick tell us, “Sorry, I know heroes aren’t supposed to get tired.” There’s other stuff, like later on where Nick knows someone’s broken into his hotel room, and Nick informs us he has his own special way of monitoring this – and it isn’t the “hair on the doorway” trick Ian Fleming wrote about in James Bond. Nick further complains that Fleming gave too much away, and Nick himself isn’t going to give away his secrets “for ninety-five cents.” Ie, the cost of a Nick Carter: Killmaster paperback in 1973. 

This breaking of the fourth wall (or whatever the literary term for it is) might be fine in something like The Destroyer, but Killmaster is supposed to be more of a “straight, no chaser” affair…or at least it was when Lyle Kenyon Engel ran it. As Engel himself noted, he did not like the first-person narrative for the series, but it was insisted on by Award Books. One can see Engel’s point, as ultimately first-person narrative will lead to this…a writer thinking himself (or herself) too clever for the material, and poking fun at it in the narrative. Also the entire “Nick Carter is also the author” conceit is ridiculous, as one must imagine super-hero Nick Carter traveling the globe as he stops villains and beds exotic babes…and yet somehow finding the time to write a 188 page book of teeny-tiny print. A book that is then published under his own name! 

Another issue is the first-person narrative makes Nick seem altogether too gabby, as Manning Lee Stokes frequently demonstrated in his own first-person offerings for the series, a la The Red Rays. Since Nick narrates the entire story for us, he comes off like a neurotic fusspot, and it’s hard to square with the image of a virile man of action. But then, it all depends on the narrative voice, and again given the army of solo ghostwriters working on the series at this point, “Nick” comes off as a different narrator every time. In the hands of Linda Stewart he suddenly sounds more like a private eye in a bad ‘50s film noir, as Nick’s “voice” is decidely hardboiled in The Peking Dossier. 

That said, Linda Stewart wins the Leigh Brackett award for “female author who can write almost exactly like a male author.” Folks, if I hadn’t known going in that a woman wrote this one, I never would’ve guessed it. Speaking of Stokes, Stewart makes her version of Nick just as aggressively macho, and there’s none of the pussyfooting around certain subjects that one gets from other female authors invading the world of men’s adventure, like for example Blood or The Peacemaker. Unlike the few other female authors in the men’s adventure genre I’ve read, Linda Stewart knows to keep things moving, with a focus on action – of the violent and sexual variety. Even more so than the previous female author on the series, Valerie Moolman. 

That said (again), Nick does fall in love in The Peking Dossier, and indeed only has sex with one girl in the book (the one he falls in love with, naturally), so there is that giveaway that our author is a woman. Otherwise, Stewart knows enough to not emasculate her Nick Carter too much; we still get the topical description of women and there’s a fair bit of action…though, again, the sex is for the most part off-page or relayed in metaphors, and the violence is not gory it all. This is one of those books where Nick tells us he “shot” someone and leaves it at that. Or even, “In ten seconds they were all dead.” 

Again like Stokes, Linda Stewart has a little fun with some in-jokery; just as Stokes would often refer to himself, his pseudonyms, or etc in his own work for the series, so too does Linda Stewart. Indeed, she does Stokes one better, introducing herself into the book. The Peking Dossier ultimately concerns Nick Carter facing off against a master assassin with a clone army who is looking to kill every US senator and ultimately the President, and early in the book Nick is told to meet with the AXE agent who will be working the assignment with him…a lovely redhead with an incredible body who gives her name as Linda Stewart. 

Nick will soon learn it’s a lie: the redhead’s name is really Tara Bennett, and she’s a scientist for AXE. But it’s interesting that Linda Stewart slipped her real name into the book…doubtless unaware that fifty years later some random reviewer would be writing about it on his blog. It’s also interesting that she made herself Nick’s dream girl, in a way; later Nick will tell us that Linda/Tara not only has the best body he’s ever seen, but she’s the best lay he’s ever had – and, as Nick himself reminds us, he’s been with more than a few women. But Stewart doesn’t dwell much on the juicy goods. In fact, the most we get is stuff like, “Tara was something else.” The reluctance to dwell on all the juicy material also comes off as humorous, given how gabby our narrator is about vitually every other subject. 

Another interesting thing, given that The Peking Dossier was written by a woman, is Nick’s insistence on asserting his dominance over Tara. Moments after meeting her, and learning that she’s an AXE scientist who will be working with him, Nick ensures that Tara is under no question of who is in charge. Again, Stewart’s Nick Carter has the same aggressive macho tendencies as Manning Lee Stokes’s, but then it could because Stewart’s goal is to show how Nick goes from being a macho boss to a guy who falls in love with Tara. 

And for an author who is brand new to the series, Linda Stewart really goes to bat to have Nick Carter explain himself and his philosophy to us. We are also told without condition that he’s not wealthy: “If you were out of work for six months last year, you probably earned more than I did.” Frequently Nick will confide such thoughts in us readers, and I have to admit I kind of appreciated Stewart’s self-confidence in such things…I mean here she was, the first female author on the series since Valerie Moolman, ten years before, and she dove right into it without any hesitancies. One could easily believe “Nick himself” really is telling the tale of The Peking Dossier, Linda Stewart’s narratorial voice is so confident. 

The only problem is, the novel is incredibly sluggish. It just seemed to take forever for me to finish it, and my assumption is Stewart’s word count came in higher than expected and Award just shrank the print instead of cutting the fat. The helluva it is, the main idea is kind of cool: there’s this group of assassins from Red China that calls itself “KAN,” and Nick tells us that no one’s ever figured out what the name means, so AXE just refers to it as “Kill Americans Now,” which is what the assassin group specializes in. As if a cabal of “A1” assassins wasn’t enough, Stewart also throws in a cloning subplot; one of the chief KAN agents has apparently cloned himself, and is sending out his duplicates to kill United States senators. 

This is how Tara Bennett comes into the picture; Hawk sends her to meet up with Nick, and it turns out she is a scientist who has guessed clones are behind the plot…given that the killers have all been Chinese men who look identical, even to the same mole in the center of their forehead. Stewart’s footing is a little off with her presentation of Hawk; she has the AXE boss withholding info from Nick, for reasons that make little sense other than plot convenience. For example, why exactly Tara goes through with the “Linda Stewart” charade is not properly explained, nor is how she is under orders – from Hawk – to not tell Nick certain things about the assignment. Regardless, Tara as mentioned will be Nick’s sole bedmate and ally throughout The Peking Dossier, first going with him to Nassau to get a lead on the KAN plot, and then later to England, and then finally to Hanoi. 

One thing Linda Stewart shares with other female authors in the men’s adventure genre is her reliance on knocking Nick out for the convenience of the plot; Nick Carter is knocked out or drugged into unconsciousness at least five times over the course of The Peking Dossier. It gets to be comical after a while, and it’s clear it’s because Stewart has painted her hero into a corner and has to resort to the easy way out and knocking Nick senseless. The funny thing is, Nick’s opponents just conveniently don’t kill him when he’s out cold! But anyway, poor Nick certainly picks up at least a few concussions in this one. 

At any rate, Stewart does pack in a bit of action throughout, but as mentioned it is spectacularly bloodless. Nick uses his three mainstay weapons – the Luger, the stiletto, the gas bomb – and even here Stewart, again brand-new to the series, has Nick explain to us the usefulness of Pierre, the gas bomb. You know, the one he hides by his balls. Stewart, with her tongue again in her cheek, has Nick tell us how men never search there, adding to the benefit of the bomb, yet at the same time he humorously tells us how hiding something behind your balls can be a little embarrassing if the wrong person sees it. Otherwise Nick doles out quick, clean kills in The Peking Dossier, but he does gas-bomb a group of KAN killers at one point. 

The plotting is pretty busy, and overly so, to the extent that fun stuff is unexplored. Like there’s a part where Nick is cornered by some KAN killers, and they end up fighting with each other over who gets to kill the infamous Killmaster, as apparently there’s a points reward system in the KAN organization. Nick wonders how many points he’d be worth, but Stewart doesn’t do much with the setup. Same goes with the clone stuff, which isn’t really dwelt on until the final pages. Essentially, a top KAN killer hopes to create a clone army to topple the west, and he also plans to clone Nick and Tara! Nick because he could have an army of Killmasters (we are told clones inherit the exact abilities of the source), and Tara because he would have a super-smart genetic scientist at his disposal. 

The finale plays out in a temple in which the KAN villain manufactures heroin (another subplot), using a group of naïve monks to do the work. We have some B-movie sci-fi stuff, like Nick and Tara seeing little jars with growing embryos in them, knowing that they are looking at clones of themselves. But a lot of it is ruined by Nick constantly getting knocked out, or dosed by drugs into oblivion. Oh, and also falling in love with Tara. After a lot of off-page lovin,’ Tara admits to Nick that she’s fallen in love with him…and Nick, after telling us that under normal circumstances he’d come up with something to tell a girl who’d fallen in love with him – basically, to get lost – tells us that instead he tells Tara he feels the same. Now, one would expect this will mean that only one thing could possibly happen to Tara, but Linda Stewart goes in an unexpected direction. 

SPOILER ALERT: Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know. But for posterity, here’s what happens with Tara. Stewart as metioned puts a lot of subplots and extranneous background detail into the book, with Nick often referring to people he knew in the past (who of course have never before been mentioned in the series). Well anyway, one such reference, which Tara randomly throws out, is to an elite AXE agent who was killed in action or lost or something (I forget). Well, despite telling Nick she’s in love with him and even that she wants to have his child…in a hasty final chapter Nick informs us that Tara, who does survive the events of the novel, is already married – indeed, to that very elite AXE agent! Turns out he's been crippled or somesuch, and Hawk at AXE is paying for his care, and Tara used the opportunity to go out in the field and briefly fall in love with Nick and let herself imagine what it would be like to be with him. But she’s staying with her crippled husband. Or something. Nick for his part doesn’t seem much fazed, telling us a married life isn’t one he thinks he’d even want. 

Overall The Peking Dossier is entertaining, though a bit ponderous at times and certainly bloated. That said, Linda Stewart proves herself a better series writer than many who worked on Nick Carter: Killmaster, and perhaps one of these days I’ll seek out her other installment, 1975’s The Jerusalem File.

The Terrible Ones (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #13)

The Terrible Ones, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1966  Award Books

I hereby take back my sexist comment that female authors can’t write men’s adventure novels – or at least I’ll amend it to that some female authors can write men’s adventure novels, and Valerie Moolman proves that she is one of those very few with this installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster. Which is ironic, because Moolman is the Killmaster author who inspired my sexist comment in the first place. 

But man, Moolman really delivers this time, with plentiful (and at times quite violent) action scenes and even a sex scene that goes on for pages in fairly explicit fashion. And sure, Nick Carter friggin’ falls in love this time around, but we’ll pass that off as maybe Valerie Moolman having her tongue in cheek, because I think practically anyone who has read a men’s adventure novel can figure out what happens to the girl Nick falls in love with. Otherwise The Terrible Ones indicates that Moolman, who wrote the initial volumes of the series, might have around this time become acquainted with the work of series newcomer Manning Lee Stokes, who delivered a much more brutal version of Nick “Killmaster” Carter than the one depicted in the first volume. 

What I mean to say is, the “Nick” (as he’s referred to in these early volumes) seen here is not much at all like the Nick in the other Moolman installments I’ve written, and seems more like a prefigure of the arrogant, sexually-baiting Nick of the later Jon Messmann installments. The latter comes to play with his acidic banter with a female guerrilla he hooks up with during the book; their venomous spatting, with Nick heavily laying on the sexual innuendo, reminded me a lot of the stuff in the almighty Sea Trap (still one of my all-time favorite men’s adventure novels ever). And Nick is more quick to fight and kill this time around…though, now that I think of it, Moolman’s Nick was always fairly brutal, like when he “jokingly” gassed to death legions of men in Hanoi. 

Well anyway, we get into it pretty quick, with Nick when we meet him scaling a cliff on a dark night in Haiti, and he’s just gotten here on a new mission with very vague explanation from boss Hawk, the briefing only shown in flashback. The more important thing here is that Nick’s scaling the cliff with “metal claws” on his hands and feet, and turns into a proto-Wolverine when he gets up top and is discovered by a Cuban. Here’s where I realized this wasn’t the typical Valerie Moolman installment, as Nick hacks the dude up good and proper (“The fellow’s guts were dribbling out”), not to mention a guard dog he later encounters. In fact these metal claws are so focused on in the book that the copywriters at Award even noted them in the first-page preview, “the man with the claws.” 

There’s a definite fun factor throughout as Nick is chagrined to learn that his local contact isn’t “Paolo;” due to a communications snafu it’s actually Paula, a hotblooded (and, naturally, hotstuff) blonde who takes an immediate dislike to Nick. This is where the acidic banter comes into play, as the two constantly try to one-up each other in the putdown stakes, or match their fighting skills. Paula is a member of the titular “Terrible Ones;” the title has you expecting some legion of cruel Chicom sadists (ie the mandatory villains in the eary Killmaster years), but in reality the name is more of an intentionally misleading one, as the Terrible Ones are all…beautiful young women from the Dominican Republic. Or, rather, beautiful young widows, their husbands having been executed for plotting against former Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo. The novel is very much of its time here, as Trujillo is constantly mentioned with no explanation or setup; his name likely resonated much better with readers in 1966 than it does in 2023. 

To clarify, the Chicoms do factor into this one, too; a subplot concerns Dr. Tsing-fu Shu, here in Haiti for something called “Operation Blast,” and also leading a secret operation to find a cache of $100 million in gold that Trujillo supposedly hid here in Haiti – the same thing the Terrible Ones have come to Haiti to find. Indeed, the plot is rather busy, and given that Nick is thrown into it with little preparation or setup, discovering things as he goes along, one can almost figure this is a sign of Valerie Moolman herself winging her way through the plot. I have to admit, though, that the sections with Dr. Shu and his minion Tom Kee were a bit trying, mostly because they took away from the Nick-Paula sequences. 

And these, as mentioned, are pretty great. Moolman does a great job developing the relationship; it is clear as day to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the series that Nick will have sex with Paula. I mean given that we are informed how pretty and busty she is in her intro, it’s really only a matter of when the Killmaster will have her. The fun of it is how it develops. As mentioned there are a lot of fireworks between the two, and Moolman delivers some humorous banter. But when Paula sees the Killmaster in action, her feelings start to change – indeed, to the point of “love!” Yes, folks, the blonde beauty (she explains why she’s blonde even though she’s from the DR, by the way) tells Nick she loves him when she gives herself to him…and, crazily enough, Nick starts to feel the same way about her during the several-page boink that ensues! 

Like I said, you don’t need a master’s degree in men’s adventure to see where all this is going. The important note here is that Moolman ignores the series requirement that Nick enjoy the company of three different women per volume; Paula is his only conquest in the book, but boy does Moolman make it count. It does go on and on, and as mentioned it’s fairly explicit. Nothing to the outrageous levels as seen on later Lyle Kenyon Engel productions like The Baroness, but still more risque than any of the sex scenes I’ve yet read in a contemporary Killmaster. 

Nick, by the way, loves Paula because she is so much like himself – a resourceful, hardy individual who is caring for others but who can kill when necessary. Moolman does strive to make Paula Nick’s soul mate, but the veteran series reader can’t help but remember Julie Baron, a recurring character in the earliest volumes who was also put across as Nick’s equal, soul mate, star-crossed lover, or what have you. Given that she’s only just been introduced with this volume, and Julie (sometimes “Julia”) Baron had already been in a few volumes at this point – and would be in several more – Paula doesn’t really match up. But man, Nick even talks about being with her “after” the mission and whatnot…it’s like the dude is basically declaring her death sentence. 

Yet at the same time, it’s absolutely without sentiment. This book is such a harbinger of a lost time that Paula is multiple times referred to as a “bitch,” ie “This bitch of a girl,” and at the end of the book (after they’ve declared their love for one another, btw), when Paula taunts Nick that he’ll have to take her and the other Terrible Ones along with him on his climactic assault, we’re informed, “The bitch was smiling at him.” It’s humorous that a female author is able to dole out such misogyny, so again I can only congratulate Ms. Moolman – I was thoroughly impressed. Stuff like this is almost like a slap to the face in our thoroughly domesticated and emasculated era of “strong empowered women” who must never, ever, but ever be questioned or criticized.  Not to mention once-masculine heroes who have been neutered by the adherents of a runaway ideology. 

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention something interesting. The cover art for The Terrible Ones was later recycled for The Black Death, a Manning Lee Stokes installment that also took place in Haiti…and included a part where Nick pretended to be a zombie so as to scare some superstitious native soldiers. Early in The Terrible Ones Nick, still with those claws, pretends to be some sort of mountain demon or something, lurking in the shadows and emitting all these unearthly howls and growls to the increasing dismay of the native soldiers who are hunting for him. It’s all pretty goofy but at the same time another harbinger of an early time, as Nick hacks to friggin’ pieces the guard dog the soldiers send into the cave after him. So we have here a “hero” who calls his “one true love” a “bitch” and kills dogs…this is clearly not a hero who would much resonate in 2023, but as mentioned I loved it just because it was so different. 

Action wise the novel’s good but it operates on more of a suspense and tension tip. There’s a great part where Nick and Paula are captured by a trio of Cuban soldiers and Nick undergoes the torture that was mandatory in the earliest volumes; this part sees yet another memorable appearance of Pierre, the tiny gas bomb Nick keeps hidden by his balls. The finale is also pretty cool, with Nick and some of the Terrible Ones congregating on “the temple of the blacks,” which is an old monastery populated by monks in face-covering black cowls. Again Moolman here delivers a bit more violence than in the previous installments of hers I’ve read – and also she attempts (and mostly succeeds) in giving the end of the book much more of an emotional impact than the series norm. 

Overall I really enjoyed The Terrible Ones, and I was happy to be reminded that a series ghostwriter can throw a curveball and turn in something not at all like what you expected.

The Cobra Kill (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #47)

The Cobra Kill, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1969

Within a few pages of this installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster, written by series veteran Manning Lee Stokes, I realized that it was actually sort of a sequel to an earlier Stokes yarn, possibly The Red Guard (1967). I am assuming that earlier volume, which I haven’t yet read, features Nick (as he was referred to in these earlier volumes) in Hong Kong, up against the Red Chinese and some Chinese tongs. The Cobra Kill opens with Nick once again in Hong Kong, this time on vacation, but his cover’s been blown and he’s on the run from various Tongs and Commies who are out to get him – as revenge for the incidents in that previous volume.  Or maybe it was another Stokes volume...maybe even one I’ve read but have forgotten! 

After this establishing setup, though, The Cobra Kill becomes its own novel, with no further references to the events of The Red Guard. In fact the reader doesn’t even need to have read the earlier book; it’s not like the plot of this one hinges on anything that happened in it. Nick will be out of Hong Kong and on into Indonesia and Malaysia for the majority of the novel. But actually it’s not even “Nick” this time…sadly, friends, we’ve now moved into the first-person years of Nick Carter: Killmaster, which would last until the mid 1980s. Nick Carter himself tells us the story, and thankfully he doesn’t prove to be as much of a bore as he was in the other first-person Killmaster novels I’ve read by Manning Lee Stokes, The Red Rays and The Black Death. The action pretty much keeps moving, with Nick not slowing down the proceedings with his incessant asides like he did in those other two books. But then we do get a fair bit of jungle travelogue in the novel, which gives The Cobra Kill more the vibe of something like Joaquin Hawks. 

Before I get into it though I wanted to note some things I’ve belatedly noticed about Stokes’s take on Nick. For one, Stokes doesn’t refer to Nick’s customary trio of weapons by their goofy nicknames: Wilhelmina the Luger is just “the Luger,” Hugo the stiletto is just “the stiletto,” and Pierre the gas bomb…actually the gas bomb isn’t even mentioned in The Cobra Kill. I can’t recall if Stokes used the weapons nicknames in the third-person Killmaster novels he wrote. Another thing is that Stokes’s take on Nick is that he’s purely an assassin; Stokes takes the “Killmaster” title literally, in that Nick Carter is only ever sent out on assignments that require someone to be killed. So this is sort of like the 007 setup of James Bond, but whereas “007” just means Bond has the approval to kill, Nick Carter is straight-up an assassin…something Manning Lee Stokes makes quite clear in The Cobra Kill. 

In fact Nick is certain that the fact he’s a professional assassin scares a particular AXE contact this time out. As mentioned though when we meet Nick he’s on vacation in Hong Kong, but it’s as if we’ve missed another story entirely, as we’re informed that within the past few hours Nick has run afoul of Tongs, Commies, and the cops, and he’s hiding in a US embassy…just as a call comes in from his boss David Hawk. Nick is to leave Hong Kong and proceed to Indonesia, where he’ll eventually go to Malaysia; the Malaysian government has worked out a secret deal with AXE for Nick, top AXE Killmaster, to kill commie rabble-rouser Lim Yang, aka The Red Cobra. This Mao-type leader has put together a guerrilla army of red insurgents in the Malaysian government, and since the government has never acknowledged him, they want him quietly killed by an outside party. It’s a bit of a belabored setup, but it’s Nick’s job, so he’s on the case – again, he is a professional assassin, and his job isn’t saving the world, it’s killing a communist leader. (I wonder if Nick has a celll phone number where I can reach him?) 

Seriously though, the anti-communist invective is strong throughout The Cobra Kill; Nick even notes in reluctant admiration how the Red Cobra has gone after college kids in Malaysia, knowing they’d be susceptible to his message, given how they’d want to go against their parents. But Nick, AXE, the Malaysian government, and practically everyone else realizes that communism is a bad idea, so there are no niceties in play; the job calls for the Red Cobra’s death, which would kill off the movement. Nick pays an expat – a former newsman who killed his wife and moved to Hong Kong, we’re informed randomly enough – to safely get out of Hong Kong. Once Nick’s in Indonesia the plot kicks in…the major portion of The Cobra Kill is Nick trying to find the Red Cobra, and most of it takes place in the jungles of Malaysia. The short sequence in Indonesia is pretty much the only part of the novel where Nick’s in civizliation. 

Nick, posing as a boisterous vacationer in a plush hotel, gets a gander at his AXE contact…who of course is a hotstuff babe. Indeed, a sultry “Malay-Chinese” who really turns on the Killmaster. Nick delivers a paean to this girl’s legs that I just had to share: 

The quota for Nick Carter: Killmaster was that Nick would bang at least three broads per book. Stokes as we know would often veer from templates – per Will Murray in his 1982 article on Killmaster, Stokes often went off-course from the setups series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel provided. But of course this leggy Malay-Chinese contact, whose name turns out to be Mora, will be our narrator’s first conquest in The Cobra Kill. Stokes isn’t very explicit this time; again, Stokes’s first-person installments are altogether more tame than his third-person ones, both in the sex and the violence departments. While there isn’t much sleaze, we do learn after the fact that Mora is sort of a nympho…I mean, not a full one, at least per Nick’s post-boink assessment, given that Mora can at least achieve orgasm. She’s just cock crazy is all…not that Nick uses those exact words, being a gentleman and all. Humorously enough, Nick offers to set Mora up with “Doc Saxe, the AXE headshrinker!” 

Nick heads to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Stokes clearly did his research on the flora and fauna of the country – and he wants you to know it. Have I mentioned before that my wife is from Malaysia? I thought about showing her The Cobra Kill to have her vet the details, but then figured the hell with it. One thing I noticed though was that Stokes seems to imply that everyone in Malaysia is Muslim, and this certainly is not true. But then again it could just be the characters Nick encounters. Otherwise Stokes really brings to life the humid green hell of the country, particularly when Nick gets into the jungle with its chittering monkeys, crops of durian, and random cloudbursts. Stokes really did his research on durian, a local fruit which, per Nick, “smells like a sewer” but tastes like heaven. I’d never even heard of durian until I met my wife – she and her family went on about how it was notorious for its bad smell but good taste, but honestly I didn’t think it smelled that bad. 

Actually, Stokes makes one goof: he has Nick flying into Kuala Lumpur Airport. I learned from my own research years ago, during a project I was working on, that there was no major airport in Kuala Lumpur (or “KL,” as the locals call it) until the 1990s – until then all flights went to an airport in Subang, a nearby city. So Stokes, despite his voluminous research, must’ve just winged it (lame pun not intended) when it came to the aiport. But then his intent is to get Nick into the jungle asap. The stuff in KL is over quickly; Nick finds that a colleague has been murdered, and the Killmaster makes his own first kill on page 61 when he bashes the assassin’s head in with the butt of his Luger. This leads to a brutal fight with another assassin, in which Nick “blinds” the guy by jabbing his fingers into the guy’s eyes – though Stokes apparently forgets this incidental detail, as when Nick takes the unconscious assassin off to be interrogated, the guy wakes up and starts “look[ing] around.” 

From here The Cobra Kill gets into the jungle, and will stay there for the duration. Stokes really excels at capturing the vibe of the locale, and as usual he serves up very evocative sequences – like when Nick comes across an abandoned village during a sudden squall, and soon discovers that he’s not alone. But Manning Lee Stokes as ever understands exactly what we expect from the genre: the mysterious figure darting around the ghostly village is a hotstuff native jungle girl named Siti who will serve as Nick’s partner for the remainder of the tale. And of course also per the template, they’ll ultimately get down to some jungle love – with jungle girl Siti (who refers to herself in third-person) insisting that Nick take her from the rear for their first boink: “This way, my way, Siti is comfortable and have all of you, Tuan. All!” 

A curious thing about Stokes’s first-person Killmaster novels is that Nick Carter comes off as a bit obsessive in them. Obsessive about some very unsettling things. In The Red Rays, for example, narrator Nick was obsessed with the fact that, early in the novel, he’d had sex with a triple agent who had been condemned to death; that Nick had, essentially, “screwed a corpse.” This led to periodic asides in the text where Nick ruminated over his bout of necrophilia…even wondering at times if the poor girl was dead yet. Indeed Nick came off as quite the creep in that one. So screwing corpses was his obsession in The Red Rays; in The Cobra Kill his obsession is latrines, and shit. Literal shit. “I went into the latrine and looked at the turds” is an actual line from the book, and in fact I was going to start off the review with that quote but thought it might be a little too off-putting for the more sensitive readers of the blog. 

And why is Nick so obsessed with shit this time? Because he’s tracking the Red Cobra’s guerrilla army through the dense jungles of Malaysia, and by “checking the latrines” of the recently-vacated campsites Nick can get a gauge of how recently the Red Cobra’s army has been in the area. At one point he even goes into a latrine to poke “the feces” with a stick to judge the freshness! He’s also quite interested in how the Red Cobra puts lime on his latrines to cut down the stench. It gets to be a bit much, and honestly made me miss the days when Nick would obsess over screwing a corpse. But this sort of thing makes up a large portion of The Cobra Kill; I mean it’s a lot of jungle travelogue, but Stokes capably captures the setting and brings it to life. Anyway this “latrine checking” is how Nick gradually closes in on the Red Cobra, who despite his colorful name is actually a bland character, an older Malay Chinese with a professorial air. 

But even though he looks harmless, the Red Cobra is truly sadistic, known for wiping out entire villages. Another hallmark of Stokes’s Nick Carter is that he’s a professional, a calm and cool killer, but this time he is driven to hate his target, and for the first time (so Nick tells us), he can’t wait to carry out his assassination. Another hallmark of Stokes’s Killmaster novels is that he’ll take Nick through the wringer, and he certainly does here. Given that the Red Cobra is Chinese, he’s “naturally devious,” and isn’t content to just shoot Nick in the head. Instead, Nick is outfitted with a scuba tank that only has an hour of air in it, and is sent down to a sunken “Jap” sub from WWII (“Jap” is used repeatedly throughout the novel); if Nick can find his way out of the sub, he can live. But of course all avenues of escape from the sub are closed off due to the wreckage, and the Red Cobra has scuba-suited men patrolling the water with spearguns. This is one of the most tense climaxes Stokes has ever delivered for the series, to the extent that the reader himself feels as if he’s running out of air. 

Other than this thrilling climax, there’s nothing really noteworthy about The Cobra Kill, and it almost appears that Stokes pushed himself through the writing by doing a lot of research on Malaysia and jungle survival. Again per Will Murray, it’s quite clear that Stokes was burned out with the series at this point. Whether or not this is true, The Cobra Kill turned out to be Manning Lee Stokes’s penultimate volume of Killmaster. The following year he turned in the aforementioned The Black Death, and that was it for him on the series. It’s easy to see why, as at this point he was also writing Richard Blade and The Aquanauts for Lyle Kenyon Engel. And one can see the kernels of both series in The Cobra Kill: simple jungle sexpot Siti could be any number of the simple barbarian sexpots in Dimension X, and the tense climax with the sunken sub and the empty scuba tank could’ve just as easily featured Tiger Shark as Nick Carter.

The Chinese Paymaster (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #18)

The Chinese Paymaster, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1967  Award Books

The mysterious Nicholas Browne, who per Will Murray in his 1982 article for The Armchair Detective was a merchant seaman, turns in what has to be the most slow-moving installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster I’ve yet read. I mean this one’s sluggish, folks, and gives Amsterdam a run for its money as the most boring volume of the series. This is strange, as the other two Browne novels I’ve read (he only wrote four of them), Operation Starvation and The Bright Blue Death, were pretty good, and featured such far-out stuff as unfrozen viking warriors(!). 

There’s no far-out stuff in The Chinese Paymaster, that’s for sure. And also this one wins the award for “most deceptively slim paperback” ever – this book’s a mere 157 pages, but boy does it have some seriously small, dense print. The thrill-lacking plot doesn’t help much with the forward momentum, either. Personally I’m surprised a merchant seaman had the time to turn out such a long book. Maybe he wrote it while bored at sea, who knows. Looking at my review for The Bright Blue Death, I see that I mentioned that book somewhat had the “realistic” vibe of later Killmaster novels, like Blood Red. Well The Chinese Paymaster is very much in that same realm, very similar to the sub-Robert Ludlum novels Jack Canon would write in the final years of the series…only with even less sex and violence. 

I kind of suspected something was up with The Chinese Paymaster when I noticed that the back cover copy didn’t give a firm understanding of what the plot was even about. We’re told about three separate incidents across the globe (a doctor being killed in China, a Green Beret squad being wiped out in Laos, and a dignitary dropping dead in a New York restaurant) and that Nick “Killmaster” Carter will be put on the case. My assumption is the poor editor at Award couldn’t figure out how to make Browne’s sluggish book sound exciting. Actually what the plot turns out to be about is Nick flies around the world as part of a charter flight, trying to figure out which of his fellow travelers is the titular “chinese paymaster.” 

Oh and misleading title alert – the paymaster isn’t even Chinese. All Hawk, Nick’s boss at AXE, is sure of is that the paymaster is getting around the world and illicitly spreading money to fund Red Chinese nefariousness. In that 1982 article Will Murray mentioned how the earliest Killmasters featured Red China in a villanous capacity, something that was gradually filtered out of the series due to the thawing of relations. Well, things have come full circle, haven’t they! Anyway we open with a long chapter in which we see those back-cover incidents play out, and then Nick’s called into Hawk’s office and apprised of the situation. Per Hawk, “The Chicom paymaster is a greater threat to Western Society than The Beatles.” But he has nothing real for Nick to go on, other than that the Chicoms have come up with the idea of shuttling their paymaster around on a charter flight…and AXE believes they’ve figured out which charter. Now it’s up to Nick to figure out who among the passengers – or crew – is his target. 

We’re in for the long haul as Nick settles into the plane – which is total ‘60s with a cocktail lounge and all the other stuff that’s been removed so they can pack in more passengers like sardines – and begins his flight around the world. We do get the pretense of action early on, as when boarding the plane at Kennedy Nick is accosted by an attacker. Nick chases him, Luger drawn, but the guy ends up getting chopped to pieces by the propellers of a plane that’s about to take off. Nick gets on board, takes his seat by an old blowhard named Pecos, and it’s off to London. Pecos blathers away – as he will for the majority of the novel, Browne almost desperately padding out the pages – and Nick fumes that his cover has already been blown. Per tradition, two of the passengers are hotstuff women, and Nick wonders if either of them could be his target: first there’s blonde bombshell Tracy Vanderlake, a jet-setting heiress, and also there’s Li Valery, a Eurasian model. 

The veteran reader of the series will immediately know that Nick will ultimately have his way with both women, and of course the veteran reader will be proven correct. But whereas Operation Starvation and The Bright Blue Death had at least some hanky-panky in them, the sexual material in The Chinese Paymaster all occurs off-page. Seriously, this is the men’s adventure novel Agatha Christie never wrote; it’s a cozy mystery in which Nick acts more like a detective, trying to figure out who among his fellow passengers is guilty. It has nothing in common with most other volumes in the series, and likely was only published because Award was determined to get several volumes out per year. It really has more in common with a mystery novel, one featuring a plane filled with red herrings. 

Our first stop is London, where Nick follows Tracy to a jam-packed club where a mod band plays. Here too Nick is shot at by an unseen assailant, and this leads to a long sequence in which he’s chased by some “teddy boys” along the docks. Tracy is abducted, but the charter flight continues on(!?), next stop Paris. Here we have another red herring bit where Nick deduces that Eurasian beauty Li is the paymaster, and indeed she is smuggling money for some commies. However as it turns out it’s against her will, and has nothing to do with the plot Nick’s trying to stop. But boy does Browne fill up a lot of pages about it. Unfortunately he doesn’t have nearly as much to say about the inevitable Nick-Li sex scene, which while inexplicit would still upset sensitive readers of today, given that Li’s one of those girls who can’t make up her mind. “Nick took her triumphantly” should tell you all you need to know about who comes out on, er, top of this particular struggle. 

We’re on page 70 and this is Nick’s first “conquest.” His first real action scene follows immediately after, as another would-be assassin slips into the room and tries to kill him. Killmaster of course turns the tables, leading to another curiously overpadded sequence where Nick sneaks the body away, dragging it along the streets as if it were a drunk friend he was helping home. Oh and have I mentioned that blonde beauty Tracy is back at this point, delivering a hard-to-buy story about slipping away from her captors, whom she assumes were just people out to ransom her for her family’s money? She is yet another red herring in a book filled with them. She becomes the sort-of female lead after this, the expected shenanigans between her and Nick also kept off-page, but she does take part in some of the action scenes. 

The flight moves on to Rome, where we have another action sequence as more would-be killers come after Nick, and then on into North Africa. Here follows a safari, in which a character is suprisingly killed off, followed by a random bit where Nick is captured by Arabs in the desert…and then is randomly saved by his plane pal Pecos…who randomly carries the shrunken head of his dead friend in his luggage(!?). With all the globetrotting in The Chinese Paymaster it occurred to me that maybe Browne did write it at sea; maybe these are all his ports of call during a particularly long voyage. We also even learn of off-page visits to Greece, and later on we’re told of another off-page visit to Japan. The narrative picks back up on the return flight to New York, where Browne clumsily stages the climactic action scene in which the paymaster is finally uncovered – an action scene where Nick doesn’t come off very well, having to go borrow a fellow passenger’s gun because he gave his up! 

But Browne’s not even done spinning his wheels; we have a second climax in which Nick deduces that someone else was really the paymaster, the brains behind it all, and this leads to a confrontation on the aiport tarmac which comes off like a retread of the earlier scene where Nick chased his would-be killer directly into the spinning blades of an airplane. About the only clever thing here is that Nick decides on a staycation at novel’s end; not that Browne uses that term, but still Nick and Li decide that it would be more enjoyable to spend a few days in Nick’s penthouse after their nigh-endless trip around the world. 

With that The Chinese Paymaster mercifully comes to a close. I had to force myself to keep reading this one. I know this is the second negative review I’ve posted this week, and I apologize for that. I mean I wanted it to be all sweetness and light on this week before Christmas, but the book was a chore to read. And pulp fiction should never be a chore to read. There’s only one Browne Killmaster left for me to read, Seven Against Greece, so here’s hoping it’s more like his other two and less like The Chinese Paymaster.

The Weapon Of Night (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #19)

The Weapon Of Night, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1967  Award Books

The final Nick Carter: Killmaster by Valerie Moolman, The Weapon Of Night taps into the Northeast blackout of November 1965, with UFOs and LSD also somehow figuring into the plot. Sounds like a bonkers installment, but Moolman doesn’t really exploit any of this stuff, and for the most part the novel features Nick Carter running around various nuclear plants. Even the novel’s villain, the series regular Mr. Judas, is given short-shrift, and comes off as pretty boring. This I’ve found is typical of Moolman’s work on the series in general, and given that she was the sole writer of Nick Carter: Killmaster for its first few years, I’m surprised the series lasted long enough for other ghostwriters to come aboard. Maybe readers were just desperate for any spy fiction at the time. 

I suspect Moolman knew this would be her final venture, as she brings back characters from her previous installments; we’re even informed which volumes they appeared in on the first-page preview. She also does something unique in that the novel opens with Nick finishing up an assignment in progress; chasing an old Nazi across the rooftop of a Chicago skyscraper. A blackout occurs during the melee and the Nazi plummets to his death. Nick hops aboard a plane and heads back to his New York penthouse, figuring that he’s wrapped up the case…not realizing of course that the blackout presages a case he’ll be working on posthaste. 

We have a lot of sequences with one-off characters experiencing weird stuff across the US: UFO sightings, blood-red water coming out of faucets, “grubby” atmospheres, and another blackout – this one hitting the airport as Nick’s plane comes in to land. There’s this strange, almost casual vibe to Moolman’s Killmaster books; Nick finds a letter waiting in his mailbox from Hakim Sadek, a “cross-eyed criminologist” in Cairo Nick worked with in Safari For Spies. Something about a plot Hakim has uncovered, in which people are having their faces changed and somesuch. Shortly thereafter another previous Moolman character returns: Nick’s boss Hawk tells Nick that his next assignment is to escort a Russian VIP on a tour of a US nuclear plant, and that Russian VIP is Valentina Sichikova, who appeared in The 13th Spy. 

“Now there is one dame I really love!” Nick says when informed that Valentina will be his guest. But as it turns out, she is “one of Russia’s biggest women,” and is morbidly obese and whatnot. Ostensibly here to tour a plant for vague reasons, Valentina’s real purpose is to discuss the blackouts that are also occuring in Russia; she tells Nick and Hawk that the USSR suspects some Chinese are behind the plot. Ultimately this will tie in with the letter Hakim sent. Valentina, Nick, and Hawk sit around in AXE HQ in DC and talk – there’s a lot of talking in the The Weapon Of Night – and it all has more the vibe of a mystery than an action novel. Once again Moolman gives the impression that AXE is a massive organization like U.N.C.L.E., with tons of employees going around, each of them with different numbers and security clearances. 

Another character returns: Julia Baron (sometimes referred to as “Julie,” though Moolman doesn’t here), hotstuff AXE agent with “slightly slanting, catlike eyes” and black hair. She appeared in the first volume (as did Mr. Judas) and then in several others, before being removed from the series in Time Clock Of Death. In each instance she was presented as the perfect match for Nick Carter, the love of his life and whatnot. But here the two have more of a contentious relationship, with Julia snipping at Nick and constantly questioning him. This was annoying and brought to mind the vibe of modern thrillers, in which the heroic male characters are constantly mocked and second-guessed by the lead female characters. Ironically this doesn’t prevent Nick and Julia from getting in bed – she’s his only conquest in the novel – for some vaguely-described shenanigans (ie “She accepted him again and he plunged into warmth and softness.”). 

But the problem is, Moolman clearly likes these characters she’s created, and spends too much time with them instead of on action or suspense. In particular she spends way too much narrative on Valentina and her earthy proclamations and sentiments, and Hakim too gets too much print. What makes this an issue is that it’s all written in this highfalutin style, ie “American officialdom gave [Hakim] a pain in the traditional place.” Lame stuff, and very similar to the lifeless style “Bill Rohde” brought to Nick Carter: Killmaster in his (their?) installments, a la The Judas Spy and Amsterdam. In fact, I wonder if the Rohde style was influenced by Moolman; in Rohde too AXE is a vast organization akin to U.N.C.L.E., with an army of technicians and planners and etc, and an overall “safe” approach to the proceedings where hardly anyone ever gets hurt, let alone killed. In this regard the volumes of Manning Lee Stokes, when he came onto the scene with The Eyes Of The Tiger, must’ve been like a bucket of cold water to those who had grown familiar with the vibe of the preceding Moolman novels. 

Even the action scenes are lifeless, not to mention bloodless. And Nick doesn’t come off nearly as badass as he would in later books, particularly the ones by Stokes. I mean Nick is knocked out three times by page 114. He also uses more gadgets than in the Stokes novels (just as he does in the Rohde books – another similarity), including a “pocket-sized laser gun” which he uses at one point to get himself and Julia out of danger. A curious thing is that there’s no tension in Moolman’s action scenes; there’s such a safe, casual air that you know even the supporting characters will be safe. There’s a part, for example, where Valentina is abducted, and never once is her fate in doubt. Instead, more entertainment comes from the strange bitterness between Julia and Nick in these action scenes; Julia second-guesses and mocks Nick at every turn, a la “Why aren’t you out there doing something?” It’s strange and makes me wonder if Moolman had built up this resentment in her earlier volumes. 

But as mentioned the bickering nature doesn’t prevent the bedroom action, and the novel’s climax features Nick and Julia…watching TV. I mean nothing says “action novel” like your hero sacked out in front of the television in the final pages. Judas you see has orchestrated various blackouts, but AXE – using various high-tech tracking methods – has been unable to locate him. The blackouts have gotten worse, to the point that the President addresses the nation on television, and Nick and Julia watch this from their hotel room. The President’s name is never given, but he’s clearly LBJ (not to be confused with FJB). A blackout occurs at that moment, knocking out the TV screen, and Nick deduces where Judas is. This leads to a climax where he faces off against Judas overtop Niagra falls, trying to cut the supervillain’s line so he will plummet to his doom – a nice callback to the plummeting Nazi of the beginning. 

The novel mercifully ends here, but there was a pseudo-sequel many years later: Vatican Vendetta. The climactic events of The Weapon Of Night are referred to throughout that later installment, which also happened to be the last one “produced” by Lyle Kenyon Engel. And per my review, it’s my assumption that Vatican Vendetta was written shortly after The Weapon Of Night and just went unpublished for a few years. Overall I didn’t much enjoy The Weapon Of Night, and I haven’t really enjoyed Moolman’s work on the series. Not that she’s a bad author, I just feel that she doesn’t bring much bite to her novels, which come off more like cozy mysteries.

The Filthy Five (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #27)

The Filthy Five, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1967  Award Books

One of the things I dig about Nick Carter: Killmaster is that you can take the work of the various authors who wrote for the series and excise their individual volumes into a standalone series. So then the eighteen volumes by Manning Lee Stokes, who wrote The Filthy Five, could be seen as its own series, separate from the installments by the other ghostwriters. Other than the recurring setup of Nick, his weapons and gadgets, AXE, and boss David Hawk, the ghostwriters were free to do their own thing, and I doubt many of them were reading each other’s work. In this regard, then, you could break out individual series runs from the overal series itself to make up various mini-series. 

Look, even I doubt that opening paragraph made any sense, so let me start over. The Filthy Five was written by my man Manning Lee Stokes, and it is of a piece with his other volumes of the series, though in this case it’s among the better ones. It’s also in the much preferable third-person of the early Nick Carter years. But what makes The Filthy Five so interesting is that it is a trial run for Stokes’s later Aquanauts series. I mean it is so similar that you could go through the text and change “Nick Carter” to “Tiger Shark” and “David Hawk” to “Admiral Coffin” and you’d have what could be passed off as a volume of The Aquanauts. 

To whit, each volume of that later series, which was also “produced” by Lyle Kenyon Engel, follows the same template: there’s some “water” action, usually involving scuba, there are a lot of scenes with “crusty” old Admiral Coffin handling the strategy, there’s a villain with some nefarious plan involving the water in some fashion, and generally there will be an obnoxious drunkard who either serves as a henchman or acts as a villain in some other capacity. All of that is present in The Filthy Five, to the extent that I wondered if Stokes just looked back to this Killmaster for inspiration when he started writing The Aquanauts, or if Engel himself liked this one a lot and decided to spin a series off of it. 

The only thing lacking from the usual Stokes template, shockingly enough, is the typically-mandatory sex scene. Just to drop the bomb here at the start, let me inform you that Nick Carter does not, I repeat does not have sex in the course of The Filthy Five! The book doesn’t even close with him about to get busy! In fact the novel ends with a bald and flame-scarred Nick recuperating in the hospital. This is I think the only volume of the series I’ve yet read where Nick Carter does not get his mandatory booty. So far as I know, Engel established a “three women” standard for each volume, so he must’ve really appreciated Stokes’s work; I know from Will Murray’s 1981 study of Nick Carter: Killmaster that Stokes would often diverge from the outlines Engel provided, and that’s certainly the case here…and I’m not even just talking about the lack of sex. 

If you read the back cover synopsis, you’ll be under the impression that The Filthy Five concerns a plot to assassinate “the new President.” And, judging from the title, “five” people must be behind this plot. Presumably this is the idea Engel came up with. What Stokes actually writes is something wholly different. While the assassination angle is gradually worked into the plot – before being quickly dropped – the plot of the book actually concerns a madman billionaire who wants to fund his own army, conquer Haiti with it, and start up his own country. Stokes so awkwardly works in the assassination angle that it’s clear he was only doing so because he was trying to cater to an outline he’d been given. The same goes for the title, which must’ve been something else Engel (or maybe Award Books) came up with; the reader must do some serious lifting to figure out who the “filthy five” might be. 

First of all, to answer the question I’m sure many of you are asking – no, Pok doesn’t appear in this one!! I am of course referring to the Vietnamese “houseboy” introduced in Stokes’s earlier The Devil’s Cockpit. But then, we don’t see Nick at home in this one; when we meet him, at novel’s start, he’s already on assignment in Puerto Rico, posing as a beach bum along a stretch of beachside land owned by the mysterious Sir Malcolm Drake. And, I should note, The Filthy Five occurs over just a few days, so there’s no point where Nick does go home; he stays in Puerto Rico throughout. This stretch of land, with the wonderful name Gallows Cay, is Drake’s private fiefdom, and is patrolled by armed guards. Nick confronts two of them in the novel’s suspenseful opening. 

The chief guard here is the obnoxious drunkard type who would factor so heavily in later Aquanauts novels. This time the character is named Harry Crabtree; he’s a loudmouthed Australian brute who most brings to mind the similar character Neil “The Walrus” McCreary (who was also a drunken Australian lout) in The Aquanauts #6. When he’s on form, Stokes is one of my favorites, if not my very favorite, and he’s on form throughout the majority of The Filthy Five. This opening, in which Nick tests out how far he can push Crabtree, while still pretending to be a meek drifter, is very effective. And, unlike some of Stokes’s other material, it actually has repercussions later in the novel. 

As mentioned The Filthy Five takes place over a day or two, so Stokes keeps the narrative moving at a steady pace. After the confrontation with Crabtree (in which the sadist shoots at Nick – who is still playing the hapless beach bum – to run him off the beach), Nick goes back to his hiding spot, breaks out the high-tech AXE underwater gear, and scuba dives to a sunken galleon. This is a very effective scene, and again incredibly similar to material that would come in The Aquanauts. Here Nick is to meet Monica Drake, forty-something wife of Sir Malcolm; still hot despite “breasts too large for beauty” and a “tire of fat” around her midsection. There’s actually more underwater action here than the average Aquanauts yarn, complete with Nick fighting a frogman and a pack of blood-hungry sharks descending on the scene. This sequence is one of the highlights of the novel, and here again Stokes demonstrates that his Nick Carter is more “macho” (per Will Murray) than other series ghostwriters. 

Surprisingly, it keeps going; Nick returns topside, slips back to his hideout car (a half-dead heap from the ‘40s, per his beach bum cover), and starts driving off to safety. Stokes seemingly borrows from Kiss Me Deadly, as a naked and screaming woman runs into the path of Nick’s car. This will turn out to be hotstuff native babe Dona, and Stokes settles into a long-simmer sequence in which the girl claims some men were trying to rape her, but Nick certain that she’s lying and really just another agent of Sir Malcolm’s sent to suss out whether Nick’s really a beach bum or not…and soon Dona herself knowing that Nick isn’t just a regular beach bum but continuing the charade regardless. Stokes plays out the entire ridiculous nature of Cold War espionage here, with the two rival agents both aware of who one another really is, but acting on as if they’re just regular folks; of course there’s a sexual angle as well, with Dona trying to put her wiles on Nick, but as mentioned “the AXEman” goes celibate this time. 

The novel gets even more like The Aquanauts when Nick’s boss David Hawk shows up and starts featuring in his own chapters; he’s not deskbound like the character is when other ghostwriters handle the series, but out on the field directing strategy. And yes, it is all identical to the stuff with crusty old Admiral Coffin in The Aquanauts, with Hawk here a cagey silver fox who hides the fact that he wears dentures. And here’s where the “assasination” plot comes in, as Hawk ultimately figures out that Sir Malcolm’s been paid a billion dollars in gold by the Red Chinese to assassinate the newly-elected US President. Sir Malcolm’s hired four Cuban criminals to be his assassins; presumably them plus Sir Malcolm equals the “filthy five” of the title, but that’s really stretching it. As it is, the Cuban criminals never even appear in the text, and the entire assassination scheme is so much red herring. 

Indeed, Nick will determine that Sir Malcolm’s taken the money to finance his scheme to conquer Haiti and instill himself as a new political force, somehow orchestrating WWIII in the process so that the US, USSR, and Red China wipe each other out. Hawk then sends Nick back into Gallows Cay, and this bit is very Aquanauts-esque, with Nick parachuting into the place in the dead of night. He’s painted black head to toe and wears a pair of swim trunks that are “little more than a jock strap,” which is the same curious “outfit” Tiger Shark would often wear in The Aquanauts. This part promises an action spectacle, but instead Nick is captured, true to series template, but escapes in a sequence in which Stokes deftly ties up all his loose ends – Crabtree’s comeuppance and Dona’s determination to kill the man who killed her lover (ie Nick – the frogram he killed earlier being Dona’s beloved). 

Stokes has a knack for taking Nick through the ringer and demonstrating that he’s made of very tough stuff; see for example the finale of Istanbul, where Nick escapes after torture and returns to dish out bloody payback. Here Nick is blasted by a flamethrower, managing to use someone else as a bodyshield. Regardless he suffers serious burns and loses “all of his hair.” But the Killmaster doesn’t stop – Stokes has this pulpish conceit that Nick “becomes Killmaster,” with the concept that when he does he’s basically unstoppable – and instead he goes on the offense. But even here it’s relatively realistic, Stokes not so much dishing out the action but instead having Nick swim onto one of Sir Malcolm’s ships and hiding away to figure out what the madman’s up to. Even the finale takes place on a personal level, with Nick squaring off against Sir Malcolm – who despite being the supervillain of the plot is still quite capable of using his own brawn, even if he’s lost the use of his legs. 

Overall, The Filthy Five was one of the best volumes of Nick Carter: Killmaster I’ve yet read, and certainly one of the best I’ve read by Stokes. He was definitely on form this time, keeping the story tight and reigning in his usual tendency to pad out the pages. He also doles out his usual brace of ten-dollar words: desuetude, incunabula, etc. He also takes the time to flesh out the world of AXE; here we learn of “Mike Henry, second-ranking Killmaster to Nick Carter,” a sort of spare Killmaster Hawk keeps on the side. However the two men, we’re told, have never met. (And Henry contributes nothing to the tale, only appearing in one scene as he’s briefed by Hawk.) An interesting thing about Stokes’s work on the series is that he tones down the usage of gadgets (the only one Nick uses this time is a device that pulls him along underwater), in general going for more of the brutal action vibe of the men’s adventure novels of the ‘70s. 

So again, I definitely enjoyed The Filthy Five, and in fact I was sorry to see it end – though true to the Stokes norm, it’s a lot more dense than its otherwise brief 160 pages might imply. It’s also highly recommended to anyone out there who enjoys The Aquanauts, as it’s clearly where Stokes got his inspiration for that later series.

Thunderstrike In Syria (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #125)

Thunderstrike In Syria, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1979  Charter Books

According to his 1981 interview with Will Murray, this was the only volume of Nick Carter: Killmaster Joseph Rosenberger ever wrote, for the following reasons: “the advances are low, because I don’t have the time, and, mainly, because there isn’t a byline.” Despite the latter, Rosenberger’s stamp is all over Thunderstrike In Syria, complete with even a character named “Josef Risenberg.” The novel comes off like the first-person installment of Death Merchant that never was. 

I really mean it; throughout I had a hard time remembering that narrator Nick Carter wasn’t really Richard Camellion. And, other than an early meeting with his AXE boss David Hawk and occasional references to his trademark weapons, our protagonist does come off more like the Death Merchant. There are a lot of opionated asides, random bursts of arcane trivia, and detailings of various weapons and vehicles which seemed to me outside the typical Nick Carter realm. In short, the “Nick Carter” who narrates this book seems more like a roving one-man army than the secret agent of the other books. There’s also a ton of martial arts stuff, very reminiscent of Rosenberger’s earlier Mace series. 

It’s clear though that Rosenberger reigned in his usual impulses and catered to the series style guide. The narrative is a little more tame than the average Death Merchant, with none of Rosenberger’s typical “the goof woke up and found himself in hell” sort of phrases. Also there are no footnotes nor any mentions of the Cosmic Lord of Death. Rather, Rosenberger hits the bases required by all the series ghostwriters, with Nick scoring with two women (I believe the series guideline was three per book, though) and sticking to his trio of weapons: Wilhelmina the Luger, Hugo the stiletto, and Pierre the gas bomb. Rosenberger even referes to the AXE tattoo on Nick’s forearm, something which I believe had been phased out by this time and was really only present in the earliest books. 

But Thunderstrike In Syria can in no way be confused with the novels in the Lyle Kenyon Engel years. It’s not even similar to the Nick Carter installments that came later in the ‘80s, which for the most part went for a Ludlum-esque “realistic” espionage angle. What it is like is…you guessed it, a Death Merchant novel. Ever been reading one of those and thought to yourself, “Man, it would be great if Richard Camellion himself was telling this story?” Then you owe it to yourself to read Thunderstrike In Syria. And heck, here you’ll even find Rosenberger writing a first-person sex scene, and if that doesn’t raise your hackles, nothing will. 

And as mentioned, Rosenberger certainly attempts to cater to the series mandate in this regard, as within the first pages Nick’s telling us about his colleague Leah’s awesome bod: “breasts full and round, that always seemed to be struggling for release.” Often throughout Nick will remind us of the ample charms of various women he encounters, which again is much different than the typically-asexual Richard Camellion. Leah is an Israeli agent and the two are in Jerusalem to probe a suspected SLA front. Nick informs us he’s already been briefed by Hawk: intel has it that the SLA plans to unleash nerve gas in New York and somehow blame it on the Israelis, so that the US will stop sending money to Israel. Boy, Thunderstrike In Syria is certainly from a different era – today supposed elected leaders cry on the House floor when they vote to fund Israel! (But on the other hand, uh, speaking of “struggling for release…”)  

Rosenberger wrote a pro-smoking book in the ‘60s, and he’s still a proud inhaler: when Leah mentions that the Surgeon General has stated that smoking is dangerous to one’s health, Nick responds, “The Surgeon General [is] dangerous to the health of smokers.” Rosenberger brings another Death Merchant gimmick here in that Nick and Leah are dressed up like old people, complete with heavy makeup…and will be in this guise in the coming firefight. Rosenberger did this frequently, I believe, most notably in The Cosmic Reality Kill, which was published this same year. And of course the action scene, as Nick and Leah wipe out the SLA terrorists – their front being a store that sells religious trinkets – is along the lines of anything in Death Merchant, heavy on the firearms and ammunition detail, but the gore is toned down. 

Not so with the ensuing sex scene, as Nick and Leah, out of their old person disguises and back in Nick’s hotel, get cozy in explicit fashion: “I felt her tightening in that lubricious haven to which I constantly strove with all my might.” A sentence like that takes talent – I personally never would’ve thought of pairing the words “lubricious” and “haven.” But that’s it for Leah, as Nick is sent on to Damascus, where he’s to hook up with a double-spy named Miriam. An SLA agent, Miriam approached AXE with info on the plot and claims to be driven more for money than ideology. And speaking of which Thunderstrike From Syria is from an earlier era in another regard: the Muslim terrorists here are presented as mercurial, driven by money, and the thought of them dying for their beliefs in suicide missions is hard for Nick to understand. 

“I couldn’t help but have erotic thoughts about her,” Nick tells us, as sure enough Miriam’s a hotstuff Arabic babe with a killer bod. And she doesn’t stand on ceremony, either, basically insisting that she and Nick do the deed posthaste: “I…push[ed] the lance full-length into her begging orifice.” Humorously though, this sex scene, which occurs shortly after the one with Leah, will prove to be the novel’s last, as if Rosenberger decided to hit his quota early and be done with it. In fact, from here on out Miriam is no longer treated as a sex object, but as a potential traitor; Nick’s uncertain how true her story is, and wonders if she’s leading him into a trap. Miriam has a van with food, two beds, guns, and other gear, and proposes to drive it through the desert to the secret SLA camp, which is running by a mysterious terrorist known as “The Hawk.” Yes, the exact same name as Nick Carter’s boss! No one even mentions this. 

And yep, that’s two beds – Rosenberger’s over and done with the naughty stuff, and Nick doesn’t even much mention Miriam’s looks or body anymore, even when the two have to strip down due to the desert’s heat. As I say, the focus is now on unrelenting action. Sure enough a posse of outlaws hits the van, leading to a cool action scene where Nick grabs various guns from the van’s arsenal and goes out to deal with them one by one. From this point on the novel is essentially a Death Merchant, only in first-person. There’s a ton of gun detail…Nick apparently knows the make of every gun in the world, the type of ammo fired, and etc…up to and including artillery. He’s more commando than secret agent here. 

The Hawk isn’t even an interesting villain; he’s just a basic terrorist type who doesn’t seem to believe his own hype. Nick of course is captured and has an argument with the villain, then Nick’s thrown in the prison camp. Here he meets a few captured Israeli soldiers, among them a guy named Josef Risenberg. What the reader doesn’t know is that this sets the course for the rest of the novel: Nick gets into the confidence of the Israelis, orchestrates their escape…and they all get in an endless battle with the Hawk’s SLA terrorists as they try to make their escape across the desert. I mean folks, that’s the rest of the novel, over half of the book – a seemingly-neverending desert battle sequence. All careful plotting is lost, there’s no attempt to bring the Hawk to life, nor any changing of the locale. 

The action is fast, furious, and exhausting as Nick shoots, kicks, knifes, and blows up various stooges. At one point he and the Israelis commandeer a tank, which brings to mind a sequence in Super Death Merchant. Of course Nick knows how to drive and operate a tank. Later they get into an armored personnel carrier and continue to make their way across the desert, blasting away at their captors. Finally Nick talks the Israelis into launching an assault on the Hawk’s camp, which leads to the novel’s climax. The action here (and throughout) could come from any single installment of Death Merchant: 

And true to Richard Camellion, this version of Nick Carter could care less if he’s shooting at a man or woman. There’s an off-putting part at the end where a female character begs Nick for mercy, asking for her safety in exchange for info on more SLA plots. Nick tells her no deal – her SLA team’s all dead, so there are no secrets for her to give…and then he guts her with his stiletto! This sort of leaves a bad taste in the reader’s mouth…I mean I get it that the woman’s bad and all, but the hero doesn’t have to be that cold about it. Anyway this was the only Killmaster Rosenberger wrote, and while it wasn’t terrible Thunderstrike In Syria certainly wouldn’t rank high in my list of favorite volumes of the series. It’s mostly interesting for the novelty value, in that it’s a pseudo-Death Merchant in first-person.