Maneaters

Maneaters, edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle

No month stated, 2021  New Texture

A big thanks to Bob Deis for sending me this copy of Maneaters some years back, and apologies it took me so long to get to it! Compiling a selection of shark-centric tales from the men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s through the 1970s, Maneaters comes highly recommended, and as usual Wyatt Doyle’s presentation of the art is both eye-catching and, more importantly, respectful of its sources. 

 

Unfortunately the same can’t be said about a particular modern interpolation that Maneaters has been saddled with, but more on that anon; I want to focus on the good stuff first. I wasn’t sure what to think about an entire book featuring shark stories, as other than Shark Fighter it’s a genre I’ve never cared much about; indeed, to this day I still haven’t seen (or read) Jaws, but I did see Jaws 3-D in the theater when it came out, when I was 9 years old, and for some unfathomable reason I had Jaws 4 on VHS several years ago…I think I bought it at a resale store for a quarter, and I watched it repeatedly; I came to the conclusion that it was so terrible that it actually achieved a sort of greatness. That said, I have the tie-in novels (by Hank Searls) of Jaws 2 and Jaws 4, and I keep meaning to read them… 

Well anyway, there are a lot of stories in Maneaters, ranging from ones that are only a page or two that ones that run a handful of pages. There are no “Booklength Extra” tales here; as any vintage men’s mag reader will know, the “Diamond Line” in particular would often publish epic-length stories, especially in the 1960s, and I wonder if any such shark stories exist. But I guess Bob wouldn’t want to devote much space to those, as they’d fill up practically the entire book; at least this way there’s more variety. 

Or at least, as much variety as several shark stories can provide. Because really, they all share the same setup: virile yank “skin divers” take on sharks all over the globe. What I found most interesting about the stores here was that the ones from the ‘70s were actually the best; usually the men’s mag stories from the ’50s and ‘60s are superior, before the mags descended into total sleaze and porn, with editors who were more concerned with telling good stories than in just showing bare breasts. Now personally, I like both (as my kid once angrily declared when he was around 3 or so after I kept pressing him on who he thought made the better French fry: Chic Fil A or McDonalds). But what’s interesting here is that these ‘70s tales are just as good as the earlier ones…no doubt because Jaws was such a big hit, and the anonymous authors were trying to compete with Peter Benchley’s big seller. 

Oh and one minor point of contention: Bob refers to these stories as “MAMs,” ie “Men’s Adventure Magazines.” I personally do not like this term; it is much too estrogenic for the virile men’s mags of mid 20th century. But then maybe Bob is just “taking the piss” as the British say, or at least they said in the few British sitcoms I’ve watched. 

For once I won’t focus on every story, because as mentioned some of them are very short, more so punch lines than actual yarns, like for example the story about the shark that “delivered the mail” to a particular ship. Indeed, the earliest stories are pretty short, indicating that shark tales were relegated to the back pages, and doubtless few and far between in the ‘50s. 

“The Shark Who Hated Women” is the first really good one; it’s by S.P. Free (a relative of I.P. Freely, perhaps?) and from the August 1960 Peril. This one’s narrated by a guy who worked as a marine biologist and then one day said to hell with it all, bought a boat, and sailed off to an island, which alone is a story in itself, of the sort collected in the vintage men’s mag anthology Yankee King Of The Islands. But the shark’s the focus, here; our narrator informs us of a “black shark” that has a mysterious fondness for women, and our stubborn narrator doesn’t believe it…leading to a horrific sequence where not only does this guy’s native bride suffer, but he too is wounded woefully in the climactic fight with the shark. 

“The Giant Shark That Guarded Rommel’s Treasure,” by Peter Fall and from the January 1961 Fury, is interesting in that the shark actually gets in the way of the otherwise good story. This third-person tale relates how a WWII frogman, a few years after the war, is hired by a scar-faced Austrian to recover gold from the bottom of the ocean, gold that was dropped there by Rommell when he was retreating from the Allies. Of course, the Austrian will turn out to be an old Nazi, but author Fall skips all that as he focuses on a great white shark that attacks the protagonist as he’s retrieving the gold. 

“E Mao Ariki” is by Robert Edmond Alter and from the July 1968 Argosy. Alter was a crime author of the day and as expected his yarn is of a different caliber than the men’s mag average, with a lot of word-painting and characterization. That said, Argosy was unlike the average men’s mag in that it was up front that many of its stories were fiction, and not fiction gussied up as nonfiction. (Back in 2000 I met a girl named Gussie at a wedding in Tampa, Florida, a beautiful blonde-haired girl who for some inexplicable reason seemed to be interested in me, and to this day I think of her when I write the word “gussied;” isn’t that strange and sad?) This third-person narrative focuses on a scuba diver who’s been hired by a wanna be director who wants to get footage of a massive shark (the titular E Mao Ariki) that reportedly attacks the natives during a weird “get pearls from the ocean” test of manhood. The modern reader will easily detect that Alter implies the director is gay, but that aside, this is a good story, with the protagonist becoming a hero despite himself as he goes after the huge shark with his spear gun. Yet at the same time the yarn is inferior to many of the others here because Alter is too focused on word-painting and introspection, thus his narrative misses the weird fire typically found in men’s mag stories. 

“A Man-Eating Shark Pack Against Scuba Divers,” by Walther Sturm and from the January 1975 Action For Men, is my favorite story in Maneaters. As mentioned above, these later stores are superior to the earlier ones, as post-Jaws the authors were more focused on exploiting the sharks. This one’s cool because a shark is randomly attacking people along the New Jersey coast and the president of a scuba club puts all the various “scuba teams” together into a sort of shark attack squad, and they wage war on the sharks along the coast. Then a marine biologist comes along to get in the way, but really he just wants the killer shark alive to study its brain. I liked this one, particularly the off-hand revelation that the protagonist was a plumber by day; even the heroes of men’s mag stories were blue collar, same as the readers. 

“The Headhunting Shark That Destroyed A Texas Family,” by Bob Trotter and from the January 1976 For Men Only, was my second favorite story. It’s another fast-moving third-person narrative that could easily have been expanded into novel length, featuring a trio of Texas brothers who take on the same shark: the surfer, the ‘Nam vet, and finally the “cattle rassler.” Trotter writes the yarn with a style uncommon for the men’s mags, focusing on the unusual Texan diction in his narrative. But otherwise it’s a cool story, however the character I thought would be the main hero, the ‘Nam vet, is dispensed with quickly – even though he has the most typical men’s mag story setup, jumping into the drink with nothing more than a knife and the will for vengeance. 

“The Madman Who Ruled A Killer-Shark Pack” by Brett Harper and from the January 1976 Man’s World is the last story here, and another good one. It’s also the only one in Maneaters that follows the traditional men’s mag setup: an opening incident (usually depicted by the splash page art), then a flashback to how the opening incident came to pass, and then a harried resolution. In this case the third-person yarn opens with a guy and a girl (“one lovely breast” exposed due to her torn shirt) being towed by a boat through shark-filled waters, the girl’s insane husband laughing madly at the prow. The backstory doesn’t really meet the craziness, but then they rarely do: the girl’s husband is a nutjob marine biologist obsessed with sharks, and insists on catching sight of some great whites. Unfortunately his wife likes to come on to the various men the biologist employs; she sleeps with one of the men, who later “accidentally” falls off the boat and is eaten by sharks. Then our hero is merely suspected of having an affair with the girl, and next thing you know they’re both bound and being dragged in the water…a harried climax in which some other guy saves them and the nutjob villain receives the exact fate you expected he would. 

Now, the one thing I don’t like about Maneaters is that each story is given a “Biting Back” postscript in which modern marine biologists, scuba divers, and other assorted pearl-clutchers have been invited to point out all the errors in the stories. The concept alone is baffling; men’s mag stories are fiction, and should be treated as such. But what’s worse is the insufferable condescending tone of many of these postscripts; I kid you not, one of them literally begins with the comment, “The racism and sexism aside…” One can almost imagine the snowflake crying softly in his soy latte. But after each story the vintage fun is buzzkilled by modern virtue-signallers who tell us what the men’s mag authors got wrong about sharks in their stories. Well, who cares? Even worse, many of them try to mock or poke fun at the stories. I mean, if I wanted smarmy attempts at comedy from an unfunny pearl-clutcher, I’d watch Jimmy Kimmel. 

Fortunately, you can do what I did, and just skip the “Biting Back” stuff entirely. I do want to note that one or two of them are written by Bob Deis himself, and these as expected are worlds better than the others, showing a true appreciation for the genre and being respectful to the authors. 

But honestly, that’s my only criticism. Overall Maneaters is another excellent publication in the Men’s Adventure Library, and I highly recommend it. With summer coming up it’s the perfect beach read, though like James Reasoner said, you might want to read it far away from the water. 

Deceit And Deadly Lies (Kevin MacInnes #1)

Deceit And Deadly Lies, by Franklin Bandy

No month stated, 1978  Charter Books

I picked up this fat paperback original many years ago, excited to read it, and typically it took me all this time to get to it. Running over 400 pages, Deceit And Deadly Lies won the Edgar Award and was the first of two novels featuring protagonist Kevin MacInnes, a former Army Intelligence officer who now makes his living as “The Lie King,” going around the world with a lie detector and working for high pay. 

I believe it was the 1980 Mystery Fancier review for the second MacInnes novel, The Blackstock Affair, that made me aware of this book several years ago; it’s hosted at Mystery*File.  (The reviewer mentions an earlier review for this first MacInnes novel, but I don’t think that one has ever been uploaded.) Anyway what got my interest was the note that author Franklin Bandy (real name Eugene Franklin) included “all the sex and violence modern readers want,” which of course set my sleaze instincts a-tingling. 

Well, folks, maybe that’s true for The Blackstock Affair. As for this first book, Deceit And Deadly Lies, both the sex and the violence are nil. Indeed, I ultimately found the novel a chore to read, wondering why a few hundred pages hadn’t been cut from it. More than anything else I got the impression that Bandy was another contemporary author influenced by Lawrence Sanders; there is the same clinical prose style, the same meshing of the crime genre with the trappings of the standard “airport fiction” of the day, and of course there’s the bloated page length. The big difference is that Sanders’s novels are, judging from the ones I’ve read, entertaining and fast-moving. (And also I’ve come to rank The Tomorrow File as my favorite novel ever.) 

What makes it most egregious is that the potential is there. MacInnes, in his 40s and wealthy, goes about the world with his mistress, a stacked blonde named Vanessa. There is not a single sex scene between the two, and Vanessa is not exploited at all; the most we get is that she’s beautiful. This is acceptable, but where the problem arises is that Bandy spends the narrative having MacInnes wonder if Vanessa is in love with him. There are entire chapters where he will sit around and ponder whether Vanessa truly loves him; he even secretly records their conversations and plays the tapes back on his Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), trying to gauge whether or not Vanessa is lying to him. Lame!! 

Bandy works a host of “crime novel stuff” around this main story – MacInnes figuring out if his mistress loves him, because he loves her – and none of it is compelling enough to save the book. One big demerit is that a lot of it takes place in Mexico, with MacInnes talking to a lot of Spanish people with easily-confused names who speak in the polite, formal diction that Spanish people use in novels of this type. The main “crime” plot has to do with MacInnes stumbling on to a plot to assassinate a major political figure, but the setup for this plot – a taxi driver overhearing two guys discuss the plan in a Bowery bar – is so ludicrous that the believability factor is ruined. 

Well anyway, MacInnes is incredibly wealthy; he rents out his services to all and sundry, and his prices are high. Probably the highlight of the book is the first sequence, where we see MacInnes at work; a group of businessmen have hired him to find out the rock-bottom price they can pay for some land they want for development, land that is owned by a man who claims he wants ten million dollars. Here we see that MacInnes doesn’t parse truth from lies, per se, but uses his machine to detect stress levels, allowing his instincts to figure out whether the person is lying or not. In this way it is made clear that the PSE is more so an instrument, and how well it performs relies on the skill of the user. 

It doesn’t sound like the setup for an action-packed novel, and Deceit And Deadly Lies certainly is not. MacInnes carries around a .45 and we are reminded of his Army background, but the action scenes are usually over and done with quickly, and more time is spent on introspection and pondering. Folks I kid you not, there’s a part in the final quarter of the novel where MacInnes is bored and he’s suffering from inexplicable impotence, and it goes on and on and on. I mean if you’re writing a 400+ page crime thriller, never have a part where your protagonist is bored…it’s like even the character himself is letting you know your novel is too long. 

After dealing with the land-buying job – and later on MacInnes reads in the paper that the dude selling it has killed himself, and MacInnes brushes off any sense of responsibility – we get to the main crime plot, the assassination. An Assistant DA in New York calls MacInnes and brings a taxi driver over to his hotel, and there the guy tells a ludicrous story about hearing two men discuss killing someone “big” in a bar. MacInnes judges the cab driver to be telling the truth, and ultimately this will take us into a storyline involving a “Hitler” of a third-party candidate who is the target of assassins. 

But this is not the only lie detecting work MacInnes does. There’s also an overlong sequence where he goes to Mexico to find out whether a man in prison killed the son of an influential crime boss, or if it was an accident, or whatever. Bandy works in the assassination plot with MacInnes also tracking down one of the men the cab driver saw in the bar, an Australian who serves as the novel’s main villain, even though most of his appearances feature him slipping into wherever MacInnes is staying, trading banter with him, and then slipping off. Truly the novel is nothing but 400 pages of stalling. 

Action is infrequent but at least handled well, like a part where one of the Mexican gangs adbucts MacInnes and takes him out to the countryside, where they’ve dug him a fresh grave. Working with the CIA on this caper, MacInnes has been given a bunch of spy tech out of a Eurospy flick, like for example a pen that fires projectiles. What’s interesting is that the action scenes are over and done with quickly, and Bandy will spend more time on MacInnes brooding over whether his mistress Vanessa really cares about him. 

Even more ridiculous, MacInnes finds out that Vanessa is a best-selling author, and indeed has been publishing books the entire time she’s been with MacInnes, but “The Lie King” was oblivious to all this, just thinking of her as his deluxe mistress. I mean WTF?? And then there are all these parts where he sits around wondering if Vanessa is writing about him in her books, and then he goes out and buys one of them, reading it to see if there are any parts that seem to be about himself(!). 

This is the sort of thing I mean when I say Deceit And Deadly Lies is such a misfire. It’s stuff like this that takes the center stage, and MacInnes’ lie detector work is not interesting enough to salvage the novel. I mean for that part, Bandy even repeats himself with the setups; there are two different jobs MacInnes is hired for that concern a murdered child. And there are a lot of sequences of him just talking to cops, feds, CIA agents, or district attorneys. 

The climax plays out in Madison Square Garden, where MacInnes has discovered the assassination attempt on the third-party candidate will occur. MacInnes at least is personally involved in the finale, blowing away one of the main villains, but a curious note is that MacInnes himself is shot in the chest at the end of the book, and the novel ends with Vanessa appearing there, crying over him (yes, friends, she does truly love him!!), and telling him to keep breathing. Bandy ends the novel by informing us that MacInnes does exactly that, but it could in fact be taken the other way: that MacInnes does not keep breathing. 

But the dangling cliffhanger is moot, as MacInnes returned two years later in another papberback original, also published by Charter Books. I have that one too, and here’s hoping it’s better than Deceit And Deadly Lies.

The Specialist #11: American Vengeance

The Specialist #11: American Vengeance, by John Cutter

November, 1985  Signet Books

Boy, I forgot all about The Specialist, didn’t I? The first volume was one of the first reviews I posted on this blog, back in the summer of 2010; I bought the entire series from a single seller back then, and at the time I had no idea it would take me sixteen years to read all eleven books. 

It’s been over six years since I read the previous volume, and unfortunately American Vengeance serves as a direct sequel. I’d pretty much forgotten the entire story, but John Shirley (aka “John Cutter”) does a good job of catching up readers who missed the previous book – or, like me, who just plain forgot it. Long story short, Jack “The Specialist” Sullivan is all fired up to take down Hassan the Red, an Iranian terrorist who was responsible for every Iranian attack on American citizens. 

Yes, this was a timely read. But in a way it was a refreshing reminder of how once upon a time America understood that the terrorist-supporting regime of Iran was evil, something our leadership has forgotten in the ensuing decades...with such notable “progress” as sending Iran billions of dollars and even helpfully putting them on the path to attaining nuclear arms. Gee, what could go wrong? 

Indeed, author Shirley dedicates American Vengeance to “the resistance fighting for freedom in Iran.” One wonders if he still supports the Iranian resistance, or if TDS has rotted away his brain (as it has for so, so many others). Some years ago I attempted to read Shirley’s Eclipse trilogy from the ‘80s – I dutifully picked up the original paperback printings many years ago – and as I was reading it I happened to come across a recent interview with Shirley (I think this was around 2019 or so). Eclipse is about characters in a cyberpunk future fighting a fascist government, and folks if you think Shirley in the 2019 interview compared his fictional future fascist government to the Trump administration, you win a no-prize. He even did the old leftist trick of comparing populism with fascism, when the two are altogether different (but then people today conveniently forget that the Nazis themselves were socialists…“Socialist” was even in their damn name!!). 

Does the Iranian resistance get any love today? We get stories and stories about the people suffering in Ukraine, even the friggin’ king of England proclaiming we must defend Ukraine to the US Congress(?!!), and yet not a peep about the countless thousands who have been butchered in Iran. It’s curious, isn’t it. Back in the late ‘90s I dated a girl from Iran, and for several years her dad had been a prisoner of the regime, kept in a cell and beaten. Somehow he’d managed to get free and immigrated to the US with the rest of his family. What was most curious was how blasé they were about it: “That’s my dad. He was a prisoner in Iran for a couple years. Hey, you wanna watch The Nanny?” But anyway even then, as a non-political idiot in my 20s, I wondered why the US still hadn’t taken that goddamn tyrannical regime down. 

Anyway I digress. It just makes me sad when smart people say stupid things, and Shirley’s TDS comments were enough to make me drop reading the Eclipse books. (Plus I found the first volume ponderous and lacking any of the spark Shirley brought to the men’s adventure novels he was writing at the time, so there’s that.) But this political digression has a point: there was a time when the despotic government of Iran was seen for what it was. It’s unfortunate it has taken so many years – and so many presidents – to finally address the situation. And I’m curious if the people who felt so strongly about stopping Iran back in the ‘80s have become so brainwashed by their own leftist bullshit that they no longer feel that way today. I mean, it’s not like the Iranian regime has become a kinder and gentler government, is it? How many protesters did they butcher last year alone? Then again, we live in a country where losers can stand beside a Starbucks with a “No Kings” sign for a couple hours and declare themselves heroes of democracy, so clearly we’ve lost all sense of what heroic struggle actually means. 

So since nothing was being done then, Shirley has his hero Jack Sullivan taking on the brunt of “American vengeance,” squaring things away with an almost mythical Iranian terrorist leader called Hassan the Red. Sullivan’s been chasing the bastard since the previous volume, and as American Vengeance opens he’s busting into the hotel room of a pair of Hassan’s followers, a scene artist Mel Crair depicts on the cover. 

Hassan’s army is called the Warriors of Islam, and a lot of them are in France; the majority of the novel plays out in Paris. It seems to be not too long after the previous volume – merc Merlin is still in the hospital, we’re told – yet it’s long enough that a little time seems to have passed. Sullivan’s colleagues this time are a group of Israeli Mossad agents (yet more timely material! One wonders if you’d encounter heroic characters from Israel in today’s woke publishing landscape…). 

I wonder if Shirley knew this would be the final volume. There isn’t much indication he did, other than a random part where Sullivan calls Bonnie, his hotstuff girlfriend back in the States…and tells her he loves her. This is usually a bad sign for things, either for the series overall or just for that particular character. Also, we are informed the two have “unofficially adopted” the little orphan girl Sullivan saved a few volumes ago. One wonders if, had there been another volume of The Specialist, either of these characters would have encountered a rough time. 

Humorously, just a few pages after telling Bonnie he loves her, Sullivan is having somewhat-explicit sex with a beautiful Israeli secret agent named Sabra. While reserved when compared to the overdone sex scenes of earlier volumes, it still has such humorous lines as, “Sullivan slowly lowered her onto his prong.” Which of course made me think of the metal band. 

The problem with American Vengeance is that it lacks the pulpy fun of earlier volumes; this one is a standard “terrorist of the week” yarn, similar to innumerable other Gold Eagle publications of the day. In fact I wonder if Shirley wasn’t given orders from the publisher to cut back on the weird stuff and do what Gold Eagle was doing. 

Thus, a lot of the book is repetitive; Sullivan will track down Hassan in Paris and just miss him, lending everything the unintentional (or not) vibe of a Looney Tunes cartoon. It happens over and over in American Vengeance, with the wily terrorist bastard setting bombs in the places he was staying, resulting in several innocent bystanders getting killed. And each scene caps off with Sullivan becoming even angrier and more determined to kill Hassan. 

The climax takes place in Iran, where Hassan has managed to get a nuclear bomb. Again working with Mossad, Sullivan is able to slip into Hassan’s base and prevent nuclear Armageddon, and the bomb actually goes off, but humorously Shirley quickly retcons everything that “it wasn’t a big bomb” and thus the damage is only relegated to Hassan’s patch of Iran – in other words, the poetic justice of the terrorist blowing up his own country. But again, American Vengeance was written in the days before Muslim terrorists strapped bombs to their own children, so the finale doesn’t have the impact today that it likely did then. 

The last we see of Jack Sullivan, he’s on an airplane, looking down at the nuclear blast, affirming to himself that America has been avenged. And this is the last we’ll ever see of him, as no future volumes of The Specialist were forthcoming. The book does not promote itself as the final volume, so I’ll wager that low sells quietly killed the series; the question is whether Shirley wrote any further volumes that went unpublished. 

Overall The Specialist was mostly entertaining, particularly the middle of the run, when Shirley had fun with various crazy things like Sullivan achieving “Hulk power” or fighting Satanic subway mutants. But as the series progressed it appears that he was asked to write more “standard” fare, and the series suffered as a result, coming off like too many of its contemporaries.

Richard Blade #38: Les Aeriens De K’Tar (The Aerials Of K'Tar)

Richard Blade #38: Les Ariens De K’Tar, by Jeffrey Lord

1983  Plon Books

Recently I did a post on the French series of Richard Blade, and shortly afterwards I received an email from an anonymous reader of the blog. This wonderful person sent me the entire French series fan-translated into English, for which I am truly grateful. Boy, I had no idea how many of them there are – 168 whopping volumes, running from 1983 to 2012! 

So as we all know, Richard Blade ended in 1983, at least in the United States. A collective gasp of “Mon Dieu! must have echoed across France, and it was quickly determined that Richard Blade’s adventures would continue, in France alone. The books all carry a “copyright Lyle Kenyon Engel” note on the title page, but I’d love to know how aware Engel was of the actual books. My guess is he sold the rights but had no visibility into the storylines or plots. At any rate Engel died in 1986, while the French Richard Blade was just getting started. 

The last English volume was #37; appropriately, this first French volume is #38. I love how the French editors just continued the series instead of starting a whole new series specifically for their own market. According to the ISFDB, this first French novel was written by an author named Richard D. Nolane, who seems to have written a great many volumes of the series. 

The translation I have is titled The Aerials Of K’Tar. I should note that there is absolutely no information provided on who did these translations; the books are epub files with the entire contents translated into English, with no information on who did the translating. 

For the most part, the translation is good, though there are occasional mistakes – most notably gender transitions (how very modern!), which usually occur midway through a sentence. I wonder if this is some sort of intentional dark humor from the translator, as the gender switch will usually occur during a sex scene(!)…ie, Richard Blade will be conjugating with some Dimension X babe, and we’ll suddenly get a line like, “Blade kissed him,” when it should be “kissed her,” and this happens so frequently – and always in the sex scenes – that I think the anonymous translator was having a little devious fun. 

Writing wise, Nolane hews closer to second Richard Blade author Roland Green than he does to original series author Manning Lee Stokes. There is a prosaic style to Nolane’s narrative and there’s not a hint of the brutal spark Stokes brought to his original books. But the big difference is that, unlike Green, Nolane injects a lot of explicit sex in the tale…which of course is slightly undermined by the gender mistakes in the translation! And also Blade is not the wussified loser he was in the Green books. 

It’s hard to gauge an author’s work when you are reading a translation, but overall Nolane’s style is very humdrum, with Richard Blade coming off even more like a cipher than he did in the English series. There’s no attempt at giving him any internal drive and his motivation is nonexistent. Characters are minimally described as are situations and characters. This lends the book more of a fairy tale vibe than the original US series had, but again it could be due to the translation. 

Regardless, the editors strived to make this seem like a legit continnuation of the original Richard Blade, which technically it was, of course, but still I thought it was interesting that early in the book some of the most recent volumes of the series are mentioned. We learn, at least from this first volume, that the French editors are not going to rock the boat, storywise, and everything is the same as in the English series: Richard Blade is a British secret agent and the only person who can travel to Dimension X. He reports to J and the architect of the DX program is Lord Leighton. 

Only one minor change is made: in his very brief appearance, Leighton explains that an upgrade has been made to the machine that sends Blade to DX, and now he can arrive with at least some clothes on: a coat of chain mail, and we’re told the armor is from “Englor’s alloys,” which per a note Blade discovered in the Green-written #24: The Dragons Of Englor. Also, Blade can take along a sword, or “saber” as it is most frequently referred to in the translation. 

Posthaste – there is zero in the way of introducing Blade in his “regular life” in London – Blade is sent to a strange planet that seems to be an endless desert. The first part of The Aerials Of K’Tar is slow-going desert survival fiction, with Blade trying to find water and then fighting a massive lobster-like monster called a “ther.” The fight goes on and on and here is where I realized Nolane’s prose style might be a bit tedious. 

Things pick up with the appearance of an aerial ship that sweeps over the desert, and Blade is able to wave to it for help. The people on the ship are Viking types, with chainmail, long beards, and battle axes. But there is a tall “Amazonian” woman in charge of them: Nagra, with her black hair tied in a bun and claiming to be the daughter of the “tyrant” who rules her particular air city; Blade soon deduces that this planet, K’Tar, is comprised of aerial city-states that are similar to the city-states of Ancient Greece. 

Like practically every other Richard Blade novel, our hero will be caught between warring and scheming kingoms, and will find a way to either unite them or have one of them defeat the others. But Blade’s personal impetus is even more remote than usual; he literally floats around on various aerial boats as he’s shuffled from one incident to another. 

The plot, then, is as uninvolving as a typical Roland Green installment, with one glaring exception: unlike Green, Richard D. Nolane is sure to include a few explicit sex scenes. He also dutifully follows the pulp mandate of exploiting his female characters: 

Not sure if “cum like hell” was in the original French! But otherwise in the second sgreengrab you can see a glaring example of the gender switch I mentioned: “Nagra’s tongue had begun a stunning ballet while his hands continued to caress [Blade’s] body like a bow.” So obviously “his hands” should be “her hands,” and this gender switchup happens so frequently, and particularly during the sex scenes, that it has to be a weird joke courtesy the anonymous translator, but truth be told it’s a surefire way to take us sleazehounds right out of a down-and-dirty sequence! 

Nolane has a lot of exposition in the book, and fortunately we get a handy overview of the exact makeup of this world and the plotting Blade will find himself in the middle of: 

Nolane does provide a little gore in the battle scenes: 

And also some cool imagery, like a brute in a skull mask who turns out to have a deformed head once Blade decapitates him with his sword: 

Oh, and back to the dirty stuff: not sure if it’s a French thing, or once again courtesy the translator, but sexual pleasure is often described in relation to the stomach, which I thought was strange. Like for example, check this out, where the twenty year-old prisoner Jirel, daughter of a slain rebel leader, is forced to give Blade a bj (she ends up being his second of two conquests in the book, btw): 

“Blade…cursed the pleasure which quickly invaded his stomach.” We’re often told something like this in the sex scenes, and I thought this was unusual and wondered if it was some sort of French saying that I was unaware of. Also there is a lot of focus on Nagra’s “thick pubic hair,” which must be a French thing, or at least a ‘70s French pulp thing, as thick bushes were also frequently mentioned in the sleazy French sci-fi novel Yolanda: The Girl From Erosphere. 

The plot follows the usual course, with Blade uniting various factions on land and air against the kingdom of sea pirates, but it’s all told so nonchalantly that, again, I was reminded of the Roland Green books. That said, Nolane pulls some unexpected emotional content out of nowhere in the finale; SPOILER ALERT, but Blade tells Nagra he is from another world, and in the climactic battle Nagra is fatally wounded. Blade grabs hold of her as he is zapped home, the first time he’s brought someone from DX to home dimension. Nagra lives long enough to see this new world, and then we are told Blade refuses any further missions if the project scientists attempt to dissect Nagra (so as to study a DX specimen), and he drops her corpse in the Thames. The end! 

All told, The Aerials Of K’Tar was very fast moving; apparently the original paperback was 200 pages long, but I blew through this thing in no time. As mentioned Nolane wrote a bunch of the ensuing volumes, and I’ll be reading those soon. 

Thanks again to the contributor who sent me these!! 

Cyborg (The Six Million Dollar Man)

Cyborg, by Martin Caidin

March, 1974  Warner Paperback Library

(original hardcover edition 1972)

The beginning of the Six Million Dollar Man saga is a novel made up of many parts, as if Martin Caidin were running a theme around the bionic parts that make up his hero Steve Austin, the titular Cyborg of this novel. The first part of the 318-page book with its tiny print is like something out of Caidin’s Space Race novels, then the book becomes a Michael Crichton-esque sci-fi medical shocker…then it becomes a wild pulp yarn, then it becomes a Cold War thriller, and finally it settles in for an overlong “desert survival” climax that leaves the reader more exhausted than thrilled. 

The main thing, though, is how little Cyborg resembles the family-friendly Six Million Dollar Man. Only the original telefilm, which I reviewed ten years ago, comes closest to resembling this source novel, but having read the book I can see that a lot of it was changed, no doubt for budget reasons. Cyborg would have benefitted from a big screen treatment, but then if it had it might not have made as much of an impact on 1970s pop culture…there might not even have been a Steve Austin doll! And man, I still wish I had mine…the fake skin on his arm was so cool! Not to mention the red rubber Adidas sneakers that would always fall off and you’d have to search for them! 

Actually, I was wrong – Lee Majors’ portrayal of Steve Austin is the closest thing the series ever came to resembling Martin Caidin’s source material. Majors nails the character, which is to say he comes off like the distillation of every astronaut of the Space Race, from Mercury to Apollo: laconic to the point of being terse, so calm under pressure he could be comatose. And we are informed here that Steve Austin was indeed an Apollo astronaut, the youngest one in the program and the last to walk on the moon, in Apollo 17. 

As in his earlier The Cape, Caidin again unwittingly prefigures Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff in his detailing of Steve’s current job: test pilot for NASA. And yes, Caidin mainly refers to his character as “Steve,” unlike Michael Jahn, who called him “Austin” in the later Wine, Women, And War. Here Caidin gives us a lot of background detail on NASA and missions once the moon shots had been scrapped. 

I have to say that at this point I can safely state that I’m not a fan of Martin Caidin’s writing. He constantly tells instead of shows; his novels come off like lectures, given the wealth of detail and minutiae. Forward momentum is constantly stalled as Caidin eagerly dives into the weeds, usually with no consideration to what he’s doing to the narrative. It happens constantly throughout, and if this material had been gutted Cyborg would be a much smoother and more entertaining read, because as it was I really found it a chore. 

We all know the story, so I’ll skip all the details. Steve crashes out and is completely destroyed – both legs and his left arm are gone, as is his left eye, and a bunch of other stuff is wrecked. Enter OSO (which became OSI in the series), headed up by Oscar Goldman…much closer here to Darren McGavin’s portrayal in the original telefilm than the easy-going nice guy Richard Anderson would deliver in the ensuing series. Goldman is a figure of the shadow world, clearly duplicitous and not feeling the need to explain himself to others. 

Given his fame and his background – athletic and karate expertise, his service as a combat pilot in ‘Nam, etc – OSO wants to invest in Steve Austin…though, humorously enough given the famous name of the ensuing show, we are never told the exact amount they are willing to pay. Steve’s good buddy-slash doctor, Rudy Wells, helps talk Steve into the offer…and here, as in the telefilm, there’s a lot of grim stuff as Steve isn’t sure if he even wants to live. 

A little over a quarter of the way in, we get into the nitty-gritty of bionics, courtesy endless blocks of exposition. Interesting to note, the majority of the work is done by a character who did not exist in the series: Dr. Killian. Martin Caidin shows absolutely no understanding that he is writing a novel, with Killian and the other characters gabbing about bionic parts and how they work, even down to minor details the average reader wouldn’t care about. I mean Caidin’s grip on dramatic fiction is so loose that there’s a part where someone makes a minor comment about red blood cells, and Steve – confined to a hospital bed without either leg, his left arm, and missing his left eye – asks for more information about red blood cells, like how exactly they work and what they do and whatever. I mean, just put the bionic limbs on him and have him go crush someone, already! 

Boy, does Caidin really take his time here. Let it never be said that he rushes into the story. It goes on and on, with each and every part Steve gets being relentlessly detailed for the reader, usually via bald exposition. But he’s given bionic legs that allow him to run at incredible speeds (we’re just told he brakes all Olympics records), and a left arm that is equally superhuman (changed to his right arm in the TV series). Also, we are told ad naseum that Steve cannot see out of his bionic left eye – I mean this is hammered home repeatedly – but he can take photos with it. 

Caidin displays an unexpected pulpy flair with the augmentations to these bionic limbs, things that did not make it to the show. For one, there’s a compartment in Steve’s left leg with an oxygen tank for underwater missions, and also with a few changes Steve can turn his feet into fins. There are also handy little compartments on his feet for storing things. His left arm can fire poisonous darts from the middle finger – I’m assuming Caidin was showing subtle humor here by having us imagine Steve Austin giving people the finger as he kills them. He also has a steel skull plate and a radio transmitter in his rib. 

The bionics finally added and Steve having proven himself by saving some children from a burning bus, the novel suddenly turns into a pulpy sci-fi thriller as Steve is dropped into the ocean by the South American country of Surinam, to make a daunting underwater swim and take photos of some submarines the damned Russians have stashed somewhere. And for company Steve has a pair of cybernetic dolphins, one of which is an automated decoy and the other that Steve pilots, like his own one-man sub, and all this is presented to us on the level, as if it were of a piece with the grim, incessantly-detailed “medical science” tone of the first half of the book. 

Not that I was complaining, it was just so wild. But even here Caidin’s “tell don’t show” instincts conflict with the pulp, with our author bogging us down with hyper detail on ocean currents and whatnot. That said, when I started reading Cyborg I never expected to read about Steve Austin decked out like an underwater commando and piloting a robot dolphin. There’s even a bit of action as the Russians start dropping bombs – they’re in the middle of a battle, which has been staged as a diversion for Steve – and then frogmen come at him, but the action is more so relayed as chaotic than thrilling. We learn here that the Steve Austin of the novel – much like the Steve Austin of the first television season – is quite willing to kill if he has to. 

Sadly this is the only part of Cyborg that goes full pulp, and only if the entire novel were the same. Truly, it’s like something book packager/producer Lyle Kenyon Engel might have come up with – and I have a suspicion that both his Attar The Merman and John Eagle Expeditor were inspired by Cyborg, from the “dolphin commando” of the former series to the “look at my cool gadgets, dart gun, and my atomic one-man sub, which by the way is actually named The Dolphin!” of the latter. 

Clearly this entire sequence was too costly for a network budget, so it was removed. But for me it was the highlight of Cyborg, like a pleasant reward for us pulp-inclined readers for having made it through the previous slow-going half. True, Caidin’s fussiness prevents the sequence from achieving its full pulp potential, but overall it’s still entertaining, which can’t be said about the sequence that takes us through the final quarter of the novel. 

OSO used the sub photo mission as a warmup; now Steve is sent to the Middle East, where he is to slip into fictional country Asfir, teamed up with the beautiful but hard-bitten Israeli soldier Tamara. Caidin skirts with more pulpish material by introducing Tamara as she’s stripping casually in front of Steve, but nothing ever happens here; Caidin is much more focused on exploiting his own knowledge than he is in exploiting his female characters. 

The idea here is that Tamara, who is fluent in Russian – just like Steve is, somehow courtesy his time in the space race – is to pose as Steve’s wife, and they must be completely at ease with each other. Personally I thought she was trying to give Steve a hint, but as mentioned Steve Austin is very laconic and almost comatose, so nothing happens – indeed, there is only one sex scene in the novel, Steve finally giving in to the romantic wiles of his nurse, Jean Manners, but the sexual tomfoolery occurs completely off page. 

Steve and Tamara are here to steal the new Russian jet fighter, a MiG-27, so just like he unwittingly prefigured The Right Stuff, here Caidin unwittingly prefigures Firefox. It’s a taut Cold War thriller, but the only problem was that I had no idea why Steve Austin was needed for the mission. That is the central problem with the second half of Cyborg; it’s as if the first “bionic surgery” part has nothing to do with the second part, and Steve Austin could have been replaced by any generic Cold Warrior. 

I mean, at least in the underwater South America sequence it was believable that OSO needed a cyborg; Steve’s oxygen tank augmentations allow him to go underwater and sneak around a lot better than an ordinary scuba diver could. But here in the Asfir sequence, the bionics are almost completely forgotten. Only belatedly are they used, when Steve uses his bionic left arm to snap a guy’s collarbone while he’s in the process of torturing a captured Steve. There’s also a part where Steve uses that bionic left hand to smash some skulls, and I’m happy to report the dart finger is used a few times in the book. But still, any of this stuff could’ve been replaced by a standard spy gadget; why exactly a cyborg is needed is something Caidin can never fully explain. And why would OSO risk losing their huge investment on a suicide mission to steal a jet fighter? 

Even worse, the actual climax of the book is an endless trawl in which Steve and Tamara are trapped in the desert, trying to survive the elements and get to freedom. Good grief, friends, but it goes on and on. Again Caidin resorts to his “tell, don’t show” policy, making the turgid pace of the narrative seem even slower. It’s all grim and gritty, complete with Tamara’s instruction that their urine must be saved so they can wipe their lips with it to stave off complete dehydration, etc. 

Here, more than anywhere, it seems evident that Martin Caidin is shoehorning some other novel into Cyborg, as the desert trek has nothing to do with the rest of the book. That said, Caidin somehow uses it as an excuse for Steve Austin to realize he wants to live, even though he already came to that decision a few hundred pages ago. Also, it is stated at the end of the novel that Steve and Tamara have “found each other” – humorously, poor nurse Jean is just forgotten – and I’m curious to see if Tamara appears in Caidin’s follow-up, Operation Nuke, which was published the following year. 

Overall, Cyborg is a slow-going affair that only occasionally brightens up, and also there are flashes where Caidin will demonstrate emotional investment in his characters and they stop being expository automatons and show actual spark. These sequences indicate the novel Cyborg could have been, and I have to say the TV producers did a better job of uncovering the potential of the material than Caidin himself did.

The Times Square Connection (The Marksman #22)

The Times Square Connection, by Frank Scarpetta

May, 1976  Belmont-Tower 

In a way this is sort of the end of The Marksman, even though there were two more volumes left. But The Times Square Connection was the last volume of the 1970s and also the last volume to carry the house name “Frank Scarpetta.” It was also the last volume to be written by series creator/editor Peter McCurtin. 

Published in 1976, The Times Square Connection is stated as taking place in July 1974…at least early in the book. Later in the book we come across the off-hand mention that a character is driving a “1976 model” car, which leads me to conclude that the manuscript got lost in the shuffle, perhaps due to the flurry of Marksman novels that were published in such a short span of time, and then rediscovered by McCurtin and given a final polish by him or someone else. 

To me, the entire book reads like McCurtin, with its hardboiled vibe and its frequent mentions of movies and old movie stars. There’s also a great part where Philip “The Marskman” Magellan goes to Forty-Second Street and notes how most of the “third-run theaters ha[ve] gone to straight porn,” a very cool bit of period flair for us 42nd Street Forever junkies. 

Speaking of “straight porn,” The Times Square Connection is yet another Belmot-Tower publication where the back cover copy doesn’t much relate to the actual book. The back cover promises a lurid tale of the mob moving in to the porno business in Times Square, and the reader can expect a bunch of sleazy shenanigans. Instead, McCurtin uses the “porno” angle as the framework; the mob could just as easily be moving in on the stamp-collecting or baseball card-collecting markets, and the story would not be impacted. 

Only the opening hints at what the back cover promises, when an old porno shop owner in Times Square is accosted outside of a bar and whacked by a couple mobsters. Then Magellan shows up, giving us a brief glimpse of how sleazy and depraved Forty-second Street has become as he walks through it, along Eighth Avenue, but after that McCurtin spends more time with Magellan sitting in the cramped office of an old carny acquaintance and getting info on who was behind the killing of the porno shop owner – who turns out to have been another of Magellan’s old carny acquaintances. 

This “carny” stuff is another indication of McCurtin being behind the typewriter; as we will recall, his original version of Magellan was a trickshot artist who worked the carny circuit, and McCurtin used this background in the prototype Assassin series and also his volumes of The Marskman, even if the other “Frank Scarpettas” seldom mentioned it. McCurtin also reminds us that Magellan got into the mob-busting game because of the murder of his wife and son, something documented in The Assassin #1, but interestingly we are told here that Magellan is “no longer in a hurry” to kill his prey, and now he is more methodical in his war of vengeance. We’re also told that his war has been going on for three years, perhaps more indication that McCurtin handled the final manuscript, as this book was published three years after that first Assassin. 

There seems to have been a story McCurtin was working on, but humorously The Times Square Connection soon loses the plot, gets involved in a lot of digressive banter between one-off mobster characters, and then in the final stretch focuses on a newly-introduced plot where a dirty New York cop who works for the mob comes up with the plan to kill a “retarded kid” and frame Magellan for the murder! (More on which anon.) The porno angle is completely lost – and McCurtin fails to exploit other material, as well. Early in the book we are told of Salerno, a ‘Nam Green Beret who has brought a group of fellow vets to the city to act as a mob army…a storyline lifted directly from The Executioner…but McCurtin forgets all about this setup and Salerno doesn’t even appear in the text until the final few pages. 

Even more humorously, there’s an entire chapter devoted to Magellan taking a newly-purchased submachine gun from his artillery case, a prototype made by British outfit Sterling around the end of WWII but never officially rolled out, and Magellan has gotten one at great expense. We’re given a lot of details about the gun and told that Magellan has never used it…and folks, by the end of the novel he still hasn’t used it! The gun literally only appears in this one chapter, with Magellan taking it out of the case, looking at it, and then putting it back in the case; in the hasty climax, Magellan uses an Uzi, and the Sterling isn’t even mentioned! 

Perhaps this is why The Times Square Connection is so choppy, and seems to occur in both July 1974 and sometime in 1976; maybe McCurtin started the book, set it aside, and then hastily went back to it when he needed to get out yet another Marksman installment. Or, as Lynn Munroe speculates, maybe another author did this later polish; if so, the style is very similar to McCurtin’s. I did not detect any wild stylistic changes as I read the book, and it all seemed to be courtesy a single writer. 

McCurtin is also one of the few “Scarpettas” who focuses on Magellan’s emotional makeup. We’re told he is “a big, wide-shouldered man with [a] hard, tired face,” and periodically in the book we are reminded that Magellan is “big.” This kind of goes against how I’ve always pictured the guy – thin, wearing a suit with hat, per many of the cover illustrations…well, sort of like the cover illustration of this volume (apparently courtesy an artist named “Hankins,” if I’m reading the signature hidden on the ledge correctly), with the important note that no scene like this occurs in the actual novel. And also, maybe the guy hanging from the ledge is intended to be Magellan. But also again, maybe the artwork wasn’t even commissioned for The Marksman in the first place and just got put on here by an indifferent editor with a publishing schedule to meet. 

McCurtin lived in the city and grungy mid-‘70s New York is very much brought to life, with Magellan ranging from Times Square to Brooklyn. There’s a lot of topical detailing and “directions around the city” stuff here, likely a page-filling gambit, but cool because it gives the book that period vibe. It’s just a shame that the plot promised on the back cover never materializes in the actual narrative. 

So anyway, the opening bit of the porno shop owner being killed sets up Magellan’s return to New York; there’s a bit of detail here that he has not been in the city for a while. An old carny friend tells Magellan who was supposedly behind the killing, and this leads to a hard-edged sequence in a slummy bar. McCurtin has a very clipped, hardboiled style, and Magellan takes no shit; there is no softness about him, either, as evidenced when he pays a street hooker to walk into the bar with him to act as cover. He shoves her out of the place before the shooting starts – humorously, McCurtin notes that a drunk sailor on leave chases her out of the bar, presumably to rent her services – and she’s never mentioned again. She is also the only female character in the book, other than the mother of the murdered child, who appears at the end to drunkenly argue with Magellan. 

Now here is a fascinating little rabbit hole: the “framing Magellan for the murder of a retarded child” scenario appeared in an installment of The Sharpshooter: A Dirty Way To Die, and not only that, but it was the exact same plot: a dirty New York cop worked with a Mafia don to kill a kid and frame Magellan. That volume was also written by Peter McCurtin…or at least, the first chapter was. The rest of the book was written by Russell Smith, and in that one the stylistic difference between the two authors was very evident. It seems then that Peter McCurtin, who edited both The Marksman and The Sharpshooter, wanted to get double bang for his “Magellan gets framed for a child’s murder” buck. McCurtin’s first attempt featured a male victim and was finished by Russell Smith, and there “Magellan” was turned into “Johnny Rock” and the manuscript was published as a Sharpshooter. McCurtin’s second attempt featured a female victim and must have been stuck in limbo for a while, then McCurtin himself went in and finished it up, and it was published as a Marksman. 

What’s humourous is that if I’m correct, in the first attempt the “child murder” setup was clunkily added to the beginning of a completely-unrelated plot (namely, Russell Smith’s wacky tale about the scientist in California), and in the second attempt it was added to the end of the book…meaning, The Times Square Connection starts off being about the mob moving into the New York porno racket, but ends up being about the mob running a child-killing frame on Magellan. One almost expects to see a trenchoated Robert Stack emerging from the mist to introduce this very special segment of Unsolved Mysteries. 

This is very much a man’s world, and McCurtin proceeds to waste a lot of pages on the bullshit digressions of a bunch of New York mobsters, arguing about the problem that is Magellan – yes, exactly like in Chapter 1 of A Dirty Way To Die, but the names are different. It’s just longer here, going on for a few chapters instead of just one, and there’s a lot of stuff featuring the dirty Irish cop who comes up with the entire frame. 

As with A Dirty Way To Die, the actual killing is left off-page, but here we are told it will be “vicious sex stuff,” and the victim will be the “retarded kid” of a dead mafioso…one whose last name, curiously, was Rossi. As in “Bruno Rossi,” the housename for the Sharpshooter? I want to believe McCurtin did this intentionally. 

Even when the mob dispenses with the child-killer, a sicko who exists on the bottom rungs of the mob world, this too is ignored and McCurtin spends more time focusing on Magellan harassing the guy who whacked the killer for the mob – a ridiculously overdone scene where Magellan blows away the other guys in the guy’s car, takes the guy captive and drives him to Brooklyn, to a cemetery where Magellan finds a fresh grave and threatens to throw the guy in it. It just goes on and on and on, and at this point the “Times Square” setup is completely gone…but then it barely existed in the first place. 

McCurtin spins his wheels to such an extent that the “climax” is the most harried three pages you’ll ever read. It all literally is relayed in summary in the epilogue; Magellan manages to get all of his enemies conveniently rounded up in one spot – a staple of this series – and then he casually blows ‘em all away with his Uzi in a page or two. Salerno, the big bad ‘Nam Green Beret who is set up at much page expense early in the book and then disappears, only shows up here, for a page or two, to be quickly blown away. To say the entire thing is unsatisfying would be an understatement. 

The book ends with Magellan about to fly to Miami to get revenge on the don who planned it all. That clearly never happened, but then The Marksman was filled with one-off volumes by one-off authors that never got followed up on; personally I’m still waiting to read about Magellan getting revenge on The Professor. 

After The Times Square Connection, The Marksman disappeared for four years, not returning until 1980’s The Card Game, which was credited to Aaron Fletcher (whether or not he actually wrote it). At that point McCurtin was gone – per Len Levinson, McCurtin got out of being an editor in the later ‘70s so he could focus more on writing – and also the “Frank Scarpetta” house name was dropped. This is why I say The Times Square Connection almost comes off like a finale for the series. It’s just a shame that the book doesn’t deliver what the back cover promises.

Gannon #1: Blood For Breakfast (second review)

Gannon #1: Blood For Breakfast, by Dean Ballenger

October, 1973  Manor Books

I’ve been meaning to re-read this first volume of Gannon for many years; my original review of Gannon #1: Blood For Breakfast was one of the first posts on the blog, way back in July of 2010. Sixteen years later, I can only say that Blood For Breakfast, aka Meet Gannon per the cover, no longer seems as outrageous to me. This is yet another testament to how reading men’s adventure novels will eventually rot your brain. 

For one, I don’t think it registered on me last time that hero Mike Gannon, most often referred to as a “tiger,” never even kills anyone in the book…save for one guy at the very end, but given that Gannon and the guy are struggling for possession of a gun, it could be that the other guy shoots himself accidentally. Instead, Gannon “merely” beats and maims his opponents…and here indeed is where the book is still outrageous, if only for the dark humor Dean Ballenger brings to the gore. 

Speaking of Ballenger, an interesting thing about the Gannon books is how little they come across like his previous work. Many years ago I also reviewed a few men’s adventure magazine stories Ballenger published in the 1960s; the narrative style in Blood For Breakfast is not at all like them…it’s more of a perverted, funhouse take on Spillane, or hardboiled pulp in general. 

Perhaps the biggest difference between this reading and my first back in 2010 is that I now see how similar Blood For Breakfast is to the early volumes of The Butcher, particularly those written by James Dockery. My favorite recurring bit in The Butcher is the opening of each volume, in which a memorably-colorful Mafia goon tries to kill Bucher and finds out Bucher is impossible to kill. Well, the entirety of Blood For Breakfast reads almost exactly like one of those sequences. 

There is no question in my mind that Dean Ballenger was inspired by The Butcher. Everything, from the goofy syntax his underworld characters speak in to their bizarre names, like for example “Rhino Rogers,” could come right out of a James Dockery novel. But whereas The Butcher ultimately heads off into a globe-trotting adventure each volume, Gannon is a proud working-class stiff and stays in the gutters of Cleveland. And by the way, this similarity with The Butcher is something James Reasoner noted in his 2008 review of Gannon #1, so he was way ahead of me! 

Another book Blood For Breakfast has much in common with is the superior (and equally rare) Bronson: Blind Rage. That novel too featured a hero pushed to sadistic lengths to avenge a loved one who had been wronged by the rich and powerful. Both Gannon and Bronson find themselves up against wealthy miscreants who literally get away with murder due to their fancy lawyers, and thus the two men must take gory justice into their own hands. 

Manor Books leaned hard into this setup, with future volumes dubbing Mike Gannon a “Robin Hood” who looked out for the poor. Ballenger, who even writes the third-person narrative in the same gutter-view syntax that his underworld figures speak in, takes rich people to the coals often and frequently in Blood For Breakfast, likely envisioning how his blue-collar readers will pump their fists in agreement. In other words the class divide is very much played up, and it’s very black and white: the average stiff must suffer and follow the law, while the rich get away with rape and murder and own the law. 

I still think it’s interesting that we are specifically told that Mike Gannon did not serve in a war, which goes against the grain of the typical men’s adventure protagonist of the era. While Gannon did serve in the military, it was between Korea and Vietnam, though we’re told he “saw some action” in off-the-books operations. His military background isn’t much dwelt on. Rather, Gannon’s current job is: despite only being 31, Gannon has worked his way up to being the chief security officer at a shipyards in Seattle, where he’s really learned to kick some shit; another thing I’d fogotten in the past 16 years since I last read this book is that Gannon’s colleague at the shipyards is the person who gives Gannon his “spiked knucks,” even warning Gannon that the things are so sharp that they can “shear off ears.” Gannon will prove this a few times in the course of the book. 

Gannon was born and raised in Cleveland, which is where the entirety of Blood For Breakfast occurs. Those from the area looking for a topical view of the city in the early ‘70s won’t find much; Gannon #1 takes place in dingy bars (or, in the weird vernacular of the book, “happy stores”), dingy restaurants, and dingy houses, plus a long sequence where Gannon strangely enough finds himself trapped on a boat as it drifts along Lake Erie. 

Ballenger begins with an action scene – Gannon coming back to his motel to find a trio of hoods waiting for him – and then goes back to tell the story. Long story short, Gannon is back in Cleveland due to “poor little raped Sandra,” ie Gannon’s 15 year-old sister, who was raped by a pair of college-age punks named Reese and Hobbs. A few witnesses came across the raped and bleeding girl on the roadside where the punks dropped her after raping her, and thus Reese and Hobbs for sure looked to be serving time in the upcoming trial…but now suddenly the witnesses have changed their stories, and Gannon suspects foul play. 

He leaves Seattle to go back home, and Blood For Breakfast is also unusual for a men’s adventure novel in that Gannon’s father factors into the story, but Bud Gannon doesn’t have much in the way of dialog or narrative space. Mostly he just argues with his son, thinking that Mike is imagining things. Gannon’s mother is also present, but humorously she doesn’t have any dialog. Same goes, surprisingly enough, for Sandra, who says nothing for the majority of the novel, Ballenger treating her like the Maguffin she is, even though she is the one who was raped and beaten by the punks. 

No, the focus is squarely on Gannon, who slips on his spiked knucks and goes around Cleveland beating and maiming the goons hired by Reese’s father, a wealthy bigshot who is running for Governor. Gannon, trying not to skirt the law, refrains from killing anyone, even though he carries a .38 with him. But instead of killing, he beats, and sadistically so; there is a ton of wonderfully dark humor throughout Blood For Breakfast, particularly the snappy rapport between Gannon and the grizzled cop who always comes around to “clean up Gannon’s mess.” 

The violence is raw and brutal, but Ballenger doesn’t dwell on the maimings. The back cover warns off squeamish readers, and Ballenger certainly lives up to expectations: Gannon “wrecks faces” with his spiked brass knuckles, lopping off ears and noses and disfiguring the goons who try to get the better of him. He also has a fondness for “stomping in the pumps,” ie kicking someone in the balls; there is a bizarre vernacular throughout the novel that almost attains the level a grimy American cousin of Anthony Burgess. 

But while the violence is colorfully and gorily described in a handful of sentences, the same cannot be said of the surprisingly-frequent sex scenes; all of them occur off-page, and Ballenger doesn’t even exploit the ample charms of the female characters. Gannon picks up three women in the course of the novel, but in each case we are only told how Gannon feels the morning after, or we get off-hand mentions that the girl “knew how to screw.” 

Gannon also isn’t very bright, but then his is a cunning street wisdom. Two of the girls try to get the better of him; the first selling him out and the second being a “pussy trap” that Gannon quickly falls for. Not to worry, though, as Gannon will eventually get his girl. Humorously, we are frequently told that the third girl, a waitress in a dive, is not pretty, but she’s there for the taking, so Gannon humps her a few times because he doesn’t feel like scoring a new chick! 

There is a surprising amount of padding for a book that runs only 190 big-print pages. There are also a lot of plot errors that are expected of Manor Books. The main one being: Gannon (which is to say Ballenger) focuses solely on bigshot Reese, the father of one of the rapists…but the other rapist, Hobbs, doesn’t even factor into the book, and nor does his father – even though it’s established from the beginning that both families are wealthy and connected. No, Hobbs is completely forgotten…there’s a part toward the very end, where Gannon is getting his final revenge on the elder Reese, and only then does Gannon think of Hobbs, but he basically says to hell with it. One suspects this is Ballenger himself explaining the error to his readers…but then one also wonders why Ballenger had it as two rapists. He could’ve just removed Hobbs entirely and the book wouldn’t have changed. 

What makes it even odder is that there’s a long, but certainly memorable, part in the final third where Gannon hires a pair of thugs to beat and maim the rich lawyers who got the two rapists off in court. (Okay, the last half of that sentence sounded strange.) While it is darkly humorous – and certainly violent, with ears getting ripped off and testicles getting smashed in as the two thugs trade maiming techniques – the scene could have easily been replaced with Gannon getting revenge on Hobbs. As it is, these two thugs have nothing to do with the rest of the book. 

There’s also a puzzling and long part where Gannon gets trapped on a yacht with one of his female conquests, a pair of maimed goons tied up below decks. Neither Gannon nor the girl know how to handle a yacht, so they are trapped on it as it lazily goes down the river. Ballenger does this for the sake of the plot, so Gannon can’t be there when the trial happens and “poor little raped Sandra” is fed to the wolves by witnesses who have been bought out, but still it comes off as a puzzling interlude that makes his hero seem incompetent. 

Otherwise, Blood For Breakfast moves at a rapid clip, and Ballenger doesn’t waste our time with a lot of subplot or subtext. It’s not that kind of book. Mike Gannon is a “Tiger,” a 5 foot 8 scrapper who “look[s] like Burt Reynolds with a little early-day Mickey Rooney mixed in,” who quickly figures out that Reese has bought off witnesses and has hired goons to prevent his son from going to prison. There are a handful of parts where Gannon confronts the elder Reese in his office – indeed, the rapist kid himself barely factors into the novel – which includes more of Ballenger’s dark humor, particularly courtesy “the lesbian” who serves as Reese’s secretary. 

But Gannon’s chief foe in the novel is Rhino Rogers, a hulking stooge who first appears cradling a Thomspon submachine gun, which he accidentally blows away one of his own goons with, thanks to Gannon’s fast moving. Rhino keeps showing up to get the better of Gannon – Ballenger has his hero being caught unawares too many times for my liking – and it is not until the finale that he is permanently dealt with. 

It’s funny when you re-read a novel after a long interim and you see the stuff that stuck with you over the years. For me it was the guy who got blown up under the car in Blood For Breakfast. This is Spider, and his appearance occurs early in the book; Gannon catches him in the act of planting a bomb beneath his rental, and after a long dialog exchange – in which Spider lies that he was simply trying to break into Gannon’s car – Gannon orders Spider at gunpoint to get under there and take the bomb off. The explosion leaves a “gore-trail” of Spider’s brains on the pavement, and also seems to have inspired the uncredited cover art. 

In conclusion, Blood For Breakfast is more “sleazy hardboiled pulp for the ‘70s” than it is men’s adventure; the debt to Mickey Spillane is clear, even if Gannon isn’t a private eye. But with its focus on maiming and mutilation, it is more of a grindhouse take on ‘50s pulp, with an added layer concerning the class divide. As mentioned Manor played up on this, with the next two volumes featuring Gannon avenging more unfortunates against the wealthy…but still not getting his revenge on Hobbs! In fact, Blood For Breakfast ends so haphazardly that I wondered if Manor cut down Ballenger’s manuscript; Gannon goes off to “roll” the ugly waitress once he’s dealt with Reese, and the book hurriedly ends! 

So yes, I certainly enjoyed Gannon #1: Blood For Breakfast on this second reading, with the caveat that it didn’t seem as outlandish to me now that I’ve read a steady diet of ‘70s pulp over the past several years. The biggest takeaway this time – which I didn’t realize the first time I read it – was how similar it was to The Butcher, with the difference being that Gannon doesn’t kill anyone. At least in this one. I can’t recall if he does in the next two volumes, but I will gradually find out, as I will be reading them again next.