Hitler's Legacy

Hitler's Legacy, by David Alexander

June, 1989  Leisure Books

While he was writing Phoenix and Z-Comm, David Alexander also published this one-shot paperback original, which is one of the most deceptively thick books I’ve ever seen. Even though it’s 281 pages long, the print is super large and the novel’s really about the length of the average men’s adventure novel. I guess Leisure just wanted to push it as a “real novel” for the crowd who likes those extra-long suspense thrillers. Maybe they were going for the Tom Clancy audience, who knows. But Hitler’s Legacy instead comes off like the first volume of an action series that never was. 

At first I was hoping this would be David Alexander’s take on Dirty Harry, as the protagonist is a cop “with a chip on his shoulder.” But the cop setup is barely explored, and in reality protagonist Matthew Kells is a highly-experienced commando who was in various special forces, worked for the CIA, and only recently became a cop in New York so as to “give back to the community.” He has little in common with Dirty Harry or even Joe Ryker; this is not a police procedural, and in fact Kells acts more like your standard action-series hero, even wielding the same machine gun as Magnus Trench in Phoenix (a Minimi). The Alexander novel Hitler’s Legacy most reminds me of is Nomad #1, with the same pseudo-James Bond setup, lots of globetrotting, and an endless supply of international terrorists for our hero to kill. 

Actually, there’s less of an action onslaught in Hitler’s Legacy than in that first Nomad installment. It seems that David Alexander was trying to rein it in a bit; even the gore isn’t nearly as spectacular as Phoenix, and all the sex is off-page. So maybe this really was an attempt at a suspense-thriller type of mainstream novel, one that features a reborn Nazi menace as the threat. And Alexander spends more time scene-setting than he does in one of his series novels. The situation begins with a series of murders across the globe; the victims are all old German men. The mystery moves to America when a group of terrorists open fire at the Times Square subway station, mowing down a horde of innocents – and apparently using the massacre to mask the fact that their real target is yet another old German man. 

Meanwhile hero cop Matthew Kells isn’t even active on the force; he’s been put on unpaid suspension due to blowing away a rapist. Even though the rapist had just murdered someone and was coming after Kells, it doesn’t matter – the usual goddamn liberal lawyers got him off and the Internal Affairs guys managed to get Kells suspended. When we meet him he’s working on some stockyard or somesuch, and gets in a fight with some thug. Alexander uses a crude tone throughout the novel, with Kells delivering R-rated retorts. In fact it’s pretty easy to see someone like Bruce Willis in the role, and what with the globe-spanning action and frequent one-liners you get the feeling that Alexander is writing the novelization of a movie that never was. 

Due to his convoluted backstory Kells has some serious anti-terrorism experience, and thus he’s called in by his chief to look into the Times Square Massacre. The NYPD Anti-Terrorism squad is mostly staffed with guys who have only studied terrorism, and have no first-hand experience with it. Kells is needed due to his expertise, even if he’s been suspended. Within a few hours of studying the crime scene photos, Kells deduces that the “terrorists” pulled off the massacre as a cover for an assassination, and the old man was their real target. He breaks into the dead man’s apartment and finds an old photo of Nazis, with a cryptic message written on it. Gradually Kells will learn that the old man was part of a special Nazi squad that was active in the last days of the war. 

At this point the cop setup is dropped. Kells is sent over to Europe as a “representative” of the NYPD, not even carrying a gun. But of course he has no problem arming himself, giving his familiarity with the territory and the various gun-runners who operate there. He also suddenly gets a partner: Sidney, a smokin’ hot blonde who has intelligence-world connections and will serve as Kells’s partner (and occasional bedmate) for the rest of the novel. This further lends Hitler’s Legacy a proto-Nomad vibe, as I recall the hero of that novel jet-setting around Europe with his own beautiful babe in tow. However as mentioned Alexander keeps all the sex off-page; even an earlier scene, where Kells manages to score with a bar floozy, is an immediate fade to black. Again it gives the impression that he was writing the book with more of a mainstream market in mind. 

There’s no sleaze, but Alexander does use the term “fellatrix” to describe that bar floozy. This made me chuckle, as the only other time I’ve seen that word was in Richard Blade #1, by one of my favorite writers, Manning Lee Stokes. It’s a rather highfalutin word that describes a woman who has superior oral skills. Alexander’s usage of the term really threw me for a loop, as it’s not in his usual style. It’s a fun word, and one I think we should see a whole lot more often. Otherwise Alexander keeps the exploitative stuff to a minimum, barely even describing Sidney’s apparently-incredible bod. Instead, the crudity is in the tone of the narrative itself; Alexander peppers his word-painting with coarse, off-hand comments, a la “…the hands of the French were as dirty as a well-digger’s asshole.” That doesn’t even make any sense, but it certainly paints a picture. 

Kells and Sidney venture around Europe, tracking down leads. The story eventually unfolds that these old men being assassinated were part of a last-ditch Nazi gambit, and “Bloodstar” is the name of the mission they were on. Kells will soon learn that the mission never ended; Bloodstar was planned as an endless series of terrorist attacks and assassinations to keep the Nazi flame burning. He’ll even learn that “the murder of the Kennedy brothers” was a Bloodstar initiative. Kells will also learn that the CIA has well been aware of this Nazi menace, and indeed has been working right alongside it. Kells has a few run-ins with the Agency, and at one point even gets captured by them…a bit that’s very men’s adventure-esque, as despite being chained and beaten Kells is still able to get the drop on his tormentors, appropriating a gun. 

Even Kells’s arsenal is straight out of men’s adventure. Through his underworld contacts in Zurich he gets himself a Mini-Uzi, a Beretta 93R (favored by Mack Bolan around this time), and a SPAS-15 auto shotgun. He engages in frequent firefights, and his main nemesis in the novel is a blond giant with the codename Polaris. Giving the book even more of a “novelization of a film that never was” vibe, Polaris clearly seems to be inspired by Dolph Lundgren. Alexander’s Phoenix novels were filled with outlandish gore, but the gunfights here are mostly bloodless. Speaking of Mack Bolan, I just realized that the entire plot of Hitler’s Legacy, which concerns an old Nazi menace that still has repercussions today (complete with an entire neo-Nazi army), is very similar to Gerald Montgomery’s COMCON trilogy…only that later Executioner series was more in the vein of men’s adventure pulp, with superpowered soldiers and demons(!). 

But as mentioned Alexander gets closer to the vibe of men’s adventure himself as the novel gets into the final quarter. Here in the climax Kells finds himself in a Bavarian castle; it’s the headquarters of this neo-Nazi movement, and Kells gets hold of that Minimi machine gun and raises hell. There are also various revelations around who is really on Kells’s side and who is his enemy. The (uncredited) cover depicts the White House with Hitler’s crazy eyes overtop it; Kells discovers by novel’s end that the upper levels of the US government might be aligned with this Nazi menace. In the climax Kells pulls a disappearing trick – even disappearing from the narrative itself, a la Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow – to hide from the US government. (Maybe Kells should go to Switzerland!) 

The following year Alexander published another thick paperback original with Leisure: Angel Of Death. It too has a “Nazis in the modern day” plot, but I’m too lazy to check my copy to see if it’s a sequel to Hitler’s Legacy. I guess I’ll find out someday.

Nomad #1

Nomad, by David Alexander
March, 1992  Gold Eagle Books

After writing the almighty Phoenix, the slightly-less almighty Z-Comm, and finishing off the C.A.D.S. series (still haven’t read his volumes yet, though), David Alexander briefly served at Gold Eagle, where he turned out this 4-volume series which is now available for free download at his website. Nomad takes place in the then-future of 2010, and while unsurprisingly some of Alexander’s predictions didn’t pan out into the real 2010, it’s pretty crazy how much he did predict correctly.

If this first volume is any indication, then the series is basically Neuromancer if William Gibson had been influenced by The Executioner instead of hardboiled crime. The plot of this one even follows Neuromancer, climaxing on a space station. However, there’s a lot more action than anything you’ll find in Gibson; in fact, Nomad #1 (Alexander’s original title being The Skyfire Kills) suffers from an onslaught of action, coming off as one action scene after another. This would be fine, but these scenes lack the spectacular gore and dark humor of similar scenes in Phoenix; one might say Nomad is “Casual Friday” David Alexander whereas Phoenix is “bedecked in the blood and guts of my enemies” David Alexander.

The hero of the series is Quinn, no first name, a former CIA badass in a special unit, where his codename was Nomad – a name he rejects now. This makes it humorous, then, because Alexander arbitrarily refers to Quinn as “Nomad” throughout. It’s pretty damn bad when you can’t even catch a break from your creator. Anyway we meet Quinn in action – stashing a mini-atom bomb in an installation as part of a test for his one-man security company. We see here that Quinn’s action suit is along the lines of that Metal Gear Solid video game: a blacksuit with night vision goggles and Virtual Reality headgear.

Meanwhile, the specialists who worked on the Star Wars-esque (ie the orbital missile platform, not the movie) Skyfire project are committing suicide in spectacular ways, their faces blank when doing so. Early on in Nomad #1 it becomes very clear that Alexander is attempting to write a James Bond-esque thriller, complete with scene-setting across the globe, lots of spytrade lingo, and even a secret terrorist organization with Nazi roots that’s looking to take over the world – an organization which, by the way, is run by a dude whose face is never seen. So that even the most dense of readers will get it, Alexander names one of this organization’s special machine guns a “Spectre.” For those readers who still don’t get it, the name of this evil organization turns out to be “Scepter.” Hell, there’s even a Thunderball riff where a Scepter agent who failed is killed in front of the others as an example. The only thing missing is a white cat.

Quinn is contacted by his former boss in that special unit, Bruckner, who still works in the shadowy intelligence realm and who keeps referring to Quinn as “kemo sabe.” Quinn’s skills are needed because he helped program the Skyfire tech, and even designed the “automatic kill zone” perimeter defenses which guard the Skyfire control plant. Now various technicians who worked on the secret project are killing themselves – we get to witness several of these suicides, which take place around the world, further giving the novel a sort of blockbuster vibe – and Bruckner wants Quinn to find out what’s going on. In particular, Bruckner wants to ensure the head honcho on the project, William Koenig, a famous pacifist, doesn’t end up offing himself.

A funny thing about Nomad #1 is that it starts off relatively quiet on the action front; indeed, it occurred to me that Alexander was writing for the most part a modern-day thriller, the sort of thing you’d see on the shelves at Wal-Mart with a bland Photoshop cover and way too many pages. This though turns out to be a ruse; while Quinn is in investigator mode for the first quarter, after this the novel goes hard into “nonstop action” territory, to the point that you almost wanna wave a white flag. The book also picks up an unintentional (or perhaps it's intentional) comedic vibe, in that Quinn and his female companion keep coming upon Skyfire techs after they’ve just been killed. If only the duo had left like ten seconds earlier!

As for that female companion, her name is Ramsey and she’s a comrade in the spycraft trade, one of Bruckner’s minions and a hotstuff blonde with a kickass bod. Quinn’s first stop is Rome, and here he meets Ramsey, whom he initially sees as cold and aloof – not that this prevents them from having the expected (yet mostly off-page, this being Gold Eagle and all) sex. Here begins the protracted comedy-esque action scenes, with Ramsey and Quinn constantly one step behind the Zodiac-named mercenary squads employed by the shadowy organization which is killing the Skyfire techs, an organization which is run by a never-seen individual who goes by the name Alpha.

The first big action sequence takes place on the nighttime streets of Rome, which are humorlously empty at the time; Quinn and Ramsey are hounded by a group of mercs in night vision goggles in a game of cat and mouse. Luckily Quinn just happened to bring along his handy submachine gun: don’t leave home without it, folks. Alexander sort of treads the line between straight-up men’s adventure pulp and tech-savy military fiction, with copious firearms and VR tech details; acronyms run rampant. While the action is nonstop and the bullets seldom stop flying, it must be said again that the outrageous gore of Phoenix is sorely missed. This isn’t to say that Alexander doesn’t occasionally throw us a bone:

Quinn never gave [the merc] the chance to pull the trigger. 

This time Quinn’s accurate fire tattooed a jagged pattern of bloody red tatters across the Scorpio merc’s upper chest. Pulverized bone and organ tissue spewed in dark crimson pulses from the exit wounds punched in the merc’s back. Reflex action triggered a panic burst that went wild and high, hammering holes in the ceiling. 

Badly shot up by the Spectre fire, the merc did a spastic two-step and crashed into the wall behind him. His knees buckled and he slid slowly down the wall to a praying position before keeling over to one side. Hitting bottom with a thunk he shuddered for a few seconds then gave up the ghost. 

Grabbing a funeral wreath that said “Rest In Piece” he’d noticed nearby, Quinn dropped it on top of the dusted merc as he and Ramsey pushed past him toward the alleyway.

So as you see, there’s not only a gun called a “Spectre,” but Quinn himself is prone to Bond-esque quips and actions; I mean the bit with the wreath could come right out of a Roger Moore picture. The action moves across Europe, with a protracted stopover in Brussels in which another extended action scene occurs during a bizarre-sounding local parade. Each stop follows the same template: a hit squad is already here and has just taken out the latest Skyfire tech, and Quinn and Ramsey come upon the scene too late. A massive firefight ensues. By the time the action moves to Hong Kong you already know where it’s headed when Quinn and Ramsey get on a boat and Alexander notes the heavy weaponry onboard. Sure enough, yet another Zodiac-named strike force is on the way, this one garbed in “black tactical face masks.” A massive firefight ensues.

But Quinn isn’t just the typical meatheaded action hero. Despite being a hulking bulk of muscle, he’s computer savy too, which of course brings to mind the current crop of action protagonists, just as home behind a computer as a machine gun. So we get lots of “computer stuff” as Quinn tries to access various databanks in his quest to find out who is behind this plot. Along the way he finds out about something called “Castle.” When the action repairs to Germany and Quinn meets Skyfire director Koening, the plot is almost unveiled; Koenig starts at Quinn’s mention of “Castle,” implying that he has much to speak with Quinn about in private. But wouldn’t you guess it – a shadowy assassin appears at just that moment and takes Koenig out.

“Castle” turns out to be the codename of an experimental space station which is hidden in Earth’s orbit; so experimental that even the President is unaware that it’s operational. It’s been taken over by Alpha and his minions, and in the final stretch Nomad #1 continues with the Bond vibe, coming off like a gorier take on Moonraker (the film, not the book!). This is the highlight of the novel, if really it’s just yet another endless action scene. Quinn heads up there – this after various turnarounds and reveals, including Quinn faking his own death – and we finally meet the mysterious Alpha.

While he doesn’t have a bald head, scarred face, or white cat, he does at least wear a black jumpsuit (his minions wear gray ones so there can be no question who’s in charge, I guess). Most interestingly he has this “neural disrupter chip under his skin” that “distort[s] visual and audial perception of his face and voice.” This means that Alpha’s face is a blur, his voice scrambled. It’s a cool mental image, and Alexander does make the big villain pretty memorable, if Quinn is for the most part more focused on taking out Alpha’s chief henchman (whose identity is supposed to be a surprise, but really isn’t). Alexander takes advantage of the space station setting, with Quinn about to be sucked out of an air dock into space (like Bond, the villains can’t just friggin’ shoot the guy), but thanks to a special shirt that hides explosives, he escapes. A massive firefight ensues. There’s also an Aliens-esque finale in which Quinn takes on that chief henchman, who happens to be wearing powered armor. 

After all this, the actual climax is kinda bland. Quinn sets off a nuclear explosion on Castle, just managing to escape back to earth (and it’s heavily implied Alpha has survived – as well as that annoying Energizer Bunny of a henchman). But whereas the novel should end here, Quinn still has to deactivate the Skyfire program, which is about to run amok thanks to a worm Alpha has implanted in it. This necessitates Quinn suiting up and taking on the automatic kill zone of machine gun implacements he himself arranged in the central command center. So it’s mostly Quinn blowing up robots and automated weapons.

The novel ends with Quinn now apparently reporting directly to the President, and as mentioned the reveal that the henchman is still alive and gunning for Quinn’s blood. A glance at future volumes shows that he doesn’t appear again until the third volume. Overall I enjoyed Nomad #1, but the constant action got a bit repetitive and wearying. However the Scepter villains were cool, Alpha in particular, and it was kind of neat to see “the Phoenix guy” writing James Bond.  

Z-Comm #4: Blood Storm

Z-Comm #4: Blood Storm, by Kyle Maning
No month stated, 1990  BMI/Leisure Books

One immediately notices a few differences about this fourth and final installment of David Alexander's Z-Comm series; not only are both the series title and volume numbering gone, but so is the inner cover artwork which graced the previous three volumes. Also, Blood Storm is published by BMI,* whereas the previous books bore the Leisure imprint.

Other than a brief reference late in the novel to the events that occurred in #2: Killpoint, there’s really no continuity at all to worry about in Blood Storm; like the other books in the series, this one appears to take place at some random point in the hectic lives of the five titular mercenaries. In fact as we meet them they’re on another mission, parachuting into Libya and blowing away a faction of the Apocalypse Battalion, a coalition of Muslim terrorists which operates out of “Colonel Daffy” Qaddafi’s country.

Alexander must’ve learned a new acronym shortly before penning this one: SLAM, which is repeated throughout, and which stands for Search, Locate, and Annihalate Missions. This has become Z-Comm’s new modus operandi and indeed Alexander must’ve liked the term so much that he even used it for a later series he published through Gold Eagle Books. But anyway, Z-Comm is here to “SLAM” some terrorists, and they do so with the trademark gore you expect of Alexander, though it’s not to the extent of his almighty Phoenix series.

While the reader might expect that the Apocalypse Battalion will be the central villains this time, they really don’t appear much; instead, the villains turn out to be Nazis! So then Z-Comm ends where it began, for just as in #1: Swastika they go up against a bunch of “vomit Vikings.” But whereas Deacon Johncock’s minions in that first volume were neo-Nazis, the ones in Blood Storm are the original issue, former Werewolf SS commandos who were mere teenagers in the waning days of WWII.

They’re lead by a sadist named Hans Kleist, known as “The Ghoul.” Decades ago Kleist hid the Proteus Chain, a Nazi-created chemical-biological weapon (or CBW; as is usual with Alexander the novel is filled with acronyms) that he’s now sold to the highest bidder – namely, Colonel Qaddafi, who plans to use the nerve gas on America posthaste. Z-Comm, who is tasked by their contact, Peter Quartermaine, will of course have to destroy both the CBW and Kleists’s Nazi underlings.

Before they can get to that, though, Z-Comm themselves are under attack. Here Alexander gives us brief glimpses into the private lives of each member of the team, something he did to greater extent in Swastika. First we have Sam Proffit, the lethal weapon of the squad, unveiling his artwork in a museum in Portland; we learn that Proffit is now a famous artist, known for his sculptures of scrap metal. The museum is attacked and Proffit uses his deadly hands and feet to take out a squad of Arab attackers.

Meanwhile Domino, the female member of the team (who does not, despite the cover art on each volume of the series, wear an eyepatch) is taking a vacation in Paris. In a subplot that is never again mentioned in the novel, Domino we learn is having second thoughts about her life as a mercenary, and wonders if she should quit. Here we finally learn about the woman’s background: once married to a Miami cop whom she had a daugter with, Domino lost her family to “savages.” Domino then went undercover, eventually becoming the mistress of the drug kingpin who had killed her husband and child. She killed the guy with her bare hands, and from there hooked up with Z-Comm.

But now Domino is “tormented by memories of the bloody tasks she had performed,” in particular the devastated look in the eyes of a Battalion terrorist she blew away in the opening sequence of the novel. Zabriskie, Z-Comm’s tech guru, surprises the gal before she can ruminate much more; they’re both here in Paris for a weapons convention, and Zabriskie wants Domino to go with him. Throughout the series Alexander has snuck in implications that these two might be an item, but he never elaborates. Anyway, they too are attacked, by terrorists who storm the convention in “duck masks!”

Finally there’s Logan Cage, the leader of the team, and Bear MacBeth, getting drunk and oggling the local gals down in Rio De Janeiro during Mardi Gras. They too are attacked, by a group of “scum sheiks” in masks who are no doubt part of the same network that’s attempting to waste the rest of Z-Comm. We learn later that this is a vengeance scheme initiated by “Colonel Daffy” himself, though Alexander doesn’t do much with it; instead, more focus is placed on the fact that the Libyans, via Hans Kleist, will soon get hold of the Proteus Chain.

Alexander provides his trademarked running action sequences as the members of Z-Comm take on their attackers. This part includes many memorable moments, like Zabriskie and Domino escaping the weapons convention ambush in a commandeered HUMVEE. But after the dust settles the team gets back together in Paris, where Quartermaine tells them about the Nazi germ warfare. Somehow they already know where it’s being held in Paris, but instead of sending in the Marines it’s up to Z-Comm alone, who hope to capture the CBW material before it can be transported to Libya.

Another action sequence ensues, as Z-Comm first blows away a ton of former Werewolf SS Nazis before they themselves are caught. In this volume Alexander inserts lots of horror-novel stuff, in particular through the guise of “soul-suckers,” ie the psycho-pharmacological experts of the intelligence world. In other words, the guys who drug you up to get the truth out of you. The opening section features a few CIA “doctors” on the job (one of whom we’re informed was a former Nazi himself), but here Kleist calls in one of his own, a sadist who shows up and immediately choses Domino as his first victim.

Meanwhile Sam Proffit, who not only appears to be Alexander’s favorite character but also appears to be the most capable member of the team, acts as a one-man rescue squad as he gets an M-60 from the Z-Comm van and goes in blasting. This scene features the debut of Kleist’s henchman, a hulking Nazi brute called “The Hook” due to his prosthetic right arm, which has a razor-sharp claw on it. He and Bear are of equal size and take an instant hatred toward one another, Alexander delivering several knock-down, drag-out fights between the two.

But despite their best efforts, including a long chase sequence in which they go after the escaping semi with the Proteus Chain on it, Z-Comm fails, and the CBW ends up making it to Libya after all. Now it’s time for Plan B: going undercover. Just as in the first volume, Cage takes the point, pretending to be an arms smuggler; he goes to Libya to sell missiles to Miles O’Bannion, Qaddafi’s top weapons buyer and a former US intelligence agent who has gone turncoat. Domino goes along as Cage’s escort, vamping it up, though she doesn’t engage in any sexual shenanigans like she did in Killpoint. In fact, there’s no sex at all in Blood Storm. Bummer!

Meanwhile, Proffit goes undercover as a globe-wandering Canadian, eventually getting a job as a dishwasher near the government mansion in which Cage and Domino are staying as valued VIPs. Macbeth and Zabriskie bide their time over in Chad, where they wait with some of that country’s military personnel for the green light to go in and kill. Speaking of which, these two characters don’t get much print in Blood Storm, but then again Alexander has focused on different members in each volume.

In addition to lurid sex, another thing lacking this time is Alexander’s patented over-the-top gore. While many, many characters die spectacularly, Alexander doesn’t dwell on the splashing brains and exploding guts as he did in the insane Phoenix books, nor does he deliver any of his goofy “vicious prick to Moby Dick” type of death descriptions. There is though a heavy sardonic vibe throughout the novel, with the dark humor extending even to Alexander’s narrative. There is also a total disdain for anything remotely politically correct, with all Libyans, even innocent bystanders, referred to as “ragheads” or “camel-fuckers.”

And just like in that first volume, Cage is of course uncovered, but Proffit shows up just in time to once again save him and Domino. Seriously, Proffit should’ve been the star of his own series; he’s very much in the Mel “Lethal Weapon” Gibson mode. After another running chase, this time over the desert surrounding Tripoli, Z-Comm escapes to Chad, where they then launch a full-scale attack on the base Cage suspects of holding the Proteus Chain.

Handily enough, all of the villains have congregated here, save for Miles O’Bannion, who turns out to be a plot thread Alexander fails to tie up (Cage swears to kill the turncoat, but it never happens, and O’Bannion isn’t mentioned again once Cage and Domino escape Tripoli). However both Kleist and The Hook are there, the former suffering an entertaining if expected end when he himself is subjected to the full effects of the Proteus Chain. Another horror-esque moment, which sees the flesh melting off the bastard’s face and body, until he’s a ravening, skull-faced freak who dies screaming!

Alexander might’ve shirked on the Cage/O’Bannion payoff, but he doesn’t on the final Bear/Hook matchup, with the two going mano e mano in a brutal handfight. Guess who wins? We get another movie-esque sendoff for a villain as The Hook is crushed by ten thousand pounds of rubble, his prosthetic arm popping off from the impact. From here it’s just a bunch of Libyan soldiers getting gunned down as Z-Comm again attempts to make their escape before the air strike comes in.

And that’s that – the team looks back at the conflagration that was once a military base and then hops back into their HUMVEE and heads over for Chad, riding off into the dawn and never seen again…in print, at least. Here endeth the saga of Z-Comm, and while it wasn’t nearly the equal of Phoenix, it was still a gory thriller of a series that I’ll miss. It looks like after this Alexander wrote a pair of standalone novels for Leisure (Hitler’s Legacy and Angel Of Death), and I’ll be checking those out next.

*I’d like to know more about BMI. Yet another variant of Leisure Books (aka Dorchester Publishing), my assumption is that BMI (Book Margins International, I believe?) is the imprint through which the publisher got rid of books that had been in the pipeline for some time. I say this because I have a few BMI books, and all of them seem to have been hastily published, Bood Storm no different, with grammatical errors even on the back cover copy.

More curiously, while the book is copyright 1990 (by David Alexander), the last page of the book features an advertisement for a new Leisure Romance books hotline which will go live in June, 1995. This is five years after the copyright date, and I can find no indication of any other printing of Blood Storm other than this one. So…was it written in 1990 and not published until 1995, when Leisure chucked it out under the BMI imprint?

Z-Comm #3: MIA

Z-Comm #3: MIA, by Kyle Maning
No month stated, 1989  Leisure Books

If you’ve ever woken up in the middle of the night and asked yourself, “Hey, what if David Alexander had written a volume of MIA Hunter??”, then wonder no more, as this third installment of Z-Comm answers that very question. Unexpectedly though in MIA Alexander (once again posing as “Kyle Maning”) cuts back on the crazed tone of the previous two books of the series and attempts to craft a more restrained narrative.

In fact, action is sporadic for the first half of the novel, and when it does occur it lacks the OTT spirit typical of Alexander’s ‘80s work. It came to me that this is because the subject of MIA is a bit more personal to Alexander, who apparently was a soldier in Vietnam. The novel is filled with reflections on the war and its effects on the soldiers who fought in it, to the extent that Alexander’s patented action onslaught is for the most part subdued.

Already on the job in Bangkok, Z-Comm leader Logan Cage gets in a running battle with some Asian goons; after blowing a few away Cage discovers the goons have been sent here by General Quan, a drug kingpin who arranged the meeting in the first place. Quan has killed a competitor in the drug business as a sign of good faith – it was said competitor Cage was here to eliminate. And to further get in the good graces of the US, Quan provides Cage with intel on a possible MIA camp in Laos.

Cage takes the intel back to the CIA, who decides at great length to send someone in…but who? Uh, Z-Comm..the guys who brought in the intel in the first place! To be honest, this bit sort of lost me, especially when Alexander goes on to deliver the antagonist of the piece – the CIA! Yes, the organization that decides to fund this MIA rescue is in fact the same organization that’s trying to keep the existence of the MIAs under wraps.

Rather than the entire company it’s really just the Laos faction that’s apparently behind the MIA conspiracy, as the spooks are getting rich off the heroin trade, and the American POWs are used as slave labor! Bonham is the name of the Laos CIA chief, and at length it develops that he’s set up Z-Comm as they go into the jungle to first determine if the MIA camp exists, and if so, to free the POWs.

The five-person Z-Comm force heads into the bush, and this time out they’re even less explored than before. I think Domino, the Smurfette of the group, gets maybe two lines of dialog. But as Alexander often reminds us, all of the team save Domino are ‘Nam vets, and thus feel as if they are “returning home” now that they’re back in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The most colorful character isn’t even in Z-Comm, a former ‘Nam pilot named Moondog who now makes his living flying contraband.

A father-son pair of Montagnard guides lead Z-Comm into Laos, taking them to the suspected camp. But of course it’s empty, and it’s all a setup, Vietnamese soldiers ambushing them. Cage is shot in the thigh and taken captive and Moondog is blown up, along with his Huey. Now Z-Comm is alone in the jungle and their leader himself has become a POW.

Alexander continues to hold off on the action blitz as Z-Comm splits into two groups, one to rescue Cage and the POWs (who are being held in the Long Dragon Prison Camp in Vietnam, under the sadistic command of Colonel Vinh), the other to commandeer a helicopter for escape. Meanwhile Cage recuperates from his wound and runs afoul of Vinh, who we learn gets off on having his American prisoners beaten.

When Alexander does deliver action scenes, they lack the crazed nature of his other books – in other words, no "vicious prick to Moby Dick" sort of stuff. That’s not to say a lot of Vietnamese soldiers don’t get shot to hell or blown up real good, and as expected Alexander doles out his customary gore, but it’s just a lot more restrained. In fact the lurid element is pretty much missing – let’s all recall the sadistic excesses of Swastika and Killpoint, with the rape-and-pillage sequence in the first and the terrorist-night-on-the-town in the second. There’s nothing remotely like that in MIA.

Instead, Alexander keeps forestalling the climatic action scene, with lots of repetitive moments of the members of Z-Comm gearing themselves up to do this or that. For example, when Bear and Domino attempt to steal a helicopter from a Vietnamese fort, we have several moments where each of them will think to themselves how the mission could quickly go to hell if either of them were to screw up or if one minor thing were to go wrong. It all just comes off like page-filling, and given the undue length of MIA I’m betting that’s exactly what it is.

And sadly after all of the stalling the climatic battle itself doesn’t deliver the OTT David Alexander action we expect. The POWs, ie the entire reason behind the novel, are given short shrift; Cage sees them while a prisoner at Long Dragon camp, but they have zip to do with the narrative, other than cursory mentions during the final battle of picking up weapons and blasting away at their former captors. Even Bonham’s comeuppance is anticlimatic, with Cage beating the CIA chief to a pulp instead of killing him in some inventive way.

All in all, MIA was pretty standard so far as men’s adventure novels go, and not up to the crazed heights of its predecessors. Here’s hoping the next (and final) installment picks things up.

Z-Comm #2: Killpoint

Z-Comm #2: Killpoint, by Kyle Maning
February, 1989  Leisure Books

I’m not sure why it took me so long to get back to this series, which was courtesy the fevered imagination of David Alexander, posing under the psuedonym “Kyle Maning.” Whereas Z-Comm #1 was a bit too padded and uneventful until the final third, Killpoint fires on all cylinders from the first page, racking up a gory deathcount that rivals anything Alexander delivered in the Phoenix series.

One thing missing though is the characterization from the first volume. Whereas previously Alexander spent a lot of time introducing the five members of Z-Comm, particularly the “living weapon” Sam Profitt, here all of them are reduced to ciphers, even Profitt himself, who barely has any dialog. This isn’t a criticism, just an observation. Normally I complain about “too much action” in an action novel, but when the action’s being written by David Alexander, there can never be too much.

And make no mistake, Killpoint is an action onslaught, as action-heavy as Phoenix #3. Alexander piles on his customary gore and over-the-top descriptions, but for the most part plays it straight with the blood and guts. To be sure, there’s a ton of ultra-detailed sadism and violence here, but very little of the goofy death descriptions you’d find in the Phoenix novels, or even Z-Comm #1. In fact it seems Alexander here tried to play up more of a “realistic” portrayal of violence – still taken to outrageous extremes, mind you – showcasing the horrors of terrorism in an almost absurdly overblown way.

This time Z-Comm is called in to handle a possible terrorist action in Venice, during a highly-publicized meeting between the US president and the Soviet premiere. Intel has it that the infamous Vulture, a Middle Eastern terrorist leader known for his horrific torture methods, has put together an army and is already holed up on one of the innumerable islands which surround Venice, planning his attack.

Of course, everyone else is too incompetent to track down the Vulture and stop him. Enter Z-Comm, who arrive on the scene and immediately begin kicking “scum sheik” ass; Alexander doesn’t even bother with a mission prep this time, and introduces Z-Comm leader Logan Cage while he’s en route to Italy on the Orient Express – on the same train, of course, as a pair of would-be robbers, whom Cage deals with in bloody fashion.

But Alexander is only getting started; immediately after this we have an ultra sick scene where a trio of terrorists have their gruesome way with a hooker before engaging in a suicide attack on Venice, complete with one of them blasting away at tourists with an Ultimax machine gun with explosive-tipped bullets. The scene with the hooker rivals the infamously gross denoument of Phoenix #2, and will either have you running for the hills or laughing (like I was) at the incredibly dark and violent humor Alexander excels at.

Cage and his four comrades (Bear, Sam Profitt, Zabriskie, and Domino, the Smurfette of the group) basically waltz around Venice, tracking down clues, getting in frequent firefights, and beating information out of known Vulture accomplices, one of them being an exiled American mafioso. Each of them gets their share of the action spotlight, and for Domino there’s even action of the sexual variety – whereas it’s customary in the genre for female operatives to flaunt their wiles in order to distract a mark, but never going all the way with them, Alexander instead has it that Domino really gets into this aspect of her job, and therefore screws an Arabic terrorist supporter in uber-explicit detail while the rest of Z-Comm listens in on their radios.

The novel soon appropriates the feel of Invasion USA, with the Vulture’s followers launching catastrophic attacks on the citizens of Venice, who blithely go about their daily lives. By the climax of the novel the terrorists have apparently wasted half of the populace in surprise attacks on commercial areas or tourist venues, but regardless when the Vulture launches a full-on assault on the city, people are still sitting around in movie theaters or going to the mall, easy pickings for the terrorist kill crews. Again, it’s all so goofy and overdone that you can’t help but laugh…sort of like Invasion USA, in fact.

The action scenes are plentiful, but they’re also varied, from hand-to-hand combat to even fullscale military stuff, like when the Vulture wages a naval war on the wharves of Venice. And as in the previous volume it quickly appropriates a comic book feel, with each member of Z-Comm the equal to an entire army of terrorists, blowing away hordes of them with nary a scratch. But all of the plentiful action scenes are fun (and insane), especially one where Z-Comm launches a "hard probe" on a diplomatic function, a mission which of course quickly devolves into massive bloodshed and destruction.

Alexander also excels in scenes of outrageous sadism, and in addition to the aforementioned hooker-murdering there are extended bits where we see the Vulture’s infamous torture techniques, as well as another incredibly gruesome scene where Z-Comm discovers the mutilated corpses of a couple who worked as informants for the terrorists. (Humorously, Alexander has the Z-Commandos unfazed by the horrific sight.)

As you’ll note, I haven’t really gotten into the plot much. That’s because there isn’t much of one. It’s just Z-Comm following leads, getting in firefights, killing tons of terrorists, and moving on to the next attack, with an occasional topical detail about Venice on the side. There really is no plot other than that. But come on. It’s David Alexander. It’s great!

Interview with David Alexander, Part 2

As promised, here’s the second half of my interview with David Alexander. Hope you enjoy!


You also worked on the C.A.D.S. series, published by Zebra Books under the name John Sievert, correct? How did you become involved with that series, and which volumes did you write?

I wrote the last few of these. My interest at the time wasn't in writing the series but in finding a new publisher, as I'd moved on from Leisure, and wanted to contract with a house that would give me broader scope for new and advanced projects. C.A.D.S. was, first, last and always, a "foot in the door" job that, as the description implies, would hopefully lead to bigger and better things. Unfortunately I learned before long that I’d blundered. When a writer accepts a project like C.A.D.S. with only vague promises of "being taken along," and similar catchphrases, that writer will more often than not wind up being typecast as something lower than a Johnny pump before the ink has dried on the first advance check.

Curiously, though, I'm frequently asked by readers about whether I'm planning a C.A.D.S. sequel. I seem to have inherited the mantle of C.A.D.S. authorship purely by being the last man standing, as the first two chroniclers of Dean Sturgis and company seem to have vanished without a trace.

C.A.D.S. was, like Phoenix, a post-nuke action series, only the series was created by someone else (authors Ryder Stacy). Did you approach it differently than Phoenix?

As the foregoing should indicate I approached it in a manner that was in many if not most ways diametrically opposite to how I approached Phoenix. Also, in complete candor, I don't consider C.A.D.S. as part of the cannon of my work. It was work for hire, conceived by others. I was just basically mopping up.

There’s a part in Z-Comm #1 where the hero assumes the covername “Coltray,” which happens to be the title of a three-volume series you later published under your own name. What’s the story behind that series?

Coltray was a specialist operative who worked solo but had ties to official law and intelligence agencies. Coltray was in some ways a one-man Z-Comm, although he generally assembled a team before going into action. The reason that the Coltray series had my byline was because I wasn't putting up with any more of the same house-name nonsense of the sort that had already given the world "Kyle May-ning."

I’m also curious about your work with Gold Eagle, for example the Nomad and Slam series. What was it like working with Gold Eagle? You mention on your site that they edited your manuscripts for Nomad (which you offer in the original forms on your site); what all did GE change, and why?

The Nomad ebooks I've made available on my website for free download are based on the original manuscripts of the four-book Nomad Miniseries that I proofread and lightly edited a few years ago. I plan to revise them in the near future to make downloads more compatible with tablet readers and whatever else is currently the latest and greatest. Working with Gold Eagle is the subject of mixed emotions, but there were some positives.

At any rate, the edits referred to seemed to reflect an attempt not only to Bowdlerize anything even remotely suggestive, but also to grind down any and all the edginess of the writing, wherever edginess was to be found. Beyond this there were totally off-the-wall and gratuitous emendations that seemed to have no rhyme or reason for having been made.

I countered each hatchet job on my Nomad manuscripts with faxed lists of stuff I demanded be changed back to the way I'd originally written it. Comparing those lists against the published books, I found that although some of my demands had been met, others had not.

Were there any other series you worked on, under your own name or a pseudonym?

Possibly. Fortunately or otherwise, I seem to have forgotten them like Nixon forgot the Plumbers in the basement.

In your Writing The Action Scene article, you mention performing an overview of the action-series genre before you began writing Phoenix. You further mention, correctly, that none of them were like Phoenix; which series did you read, and were there any you enjoyed? Did you maintain any interest in what was going on in the world of action-series fiction while you were working on Phoenix and your other series titles?

I enjoyed a number of things in the course of planning and writing the Phoenix series, but not all of them were action series. Other sources of inspiration were fiction and nonfiction books of many types, as well as movies. I liked Rolling Thunder, the '70s movie that they're still blogging about in which actor William Devane returns home as a Vietnam vet and discovers, somewhat like Ulysses at the conclusion of the Iliad and Odyssey cycles, that home base ain’t what it used to be, and needs some serious cleaning up.

The great line in that movie is, "You learn to love the rope." You can Google that and it still gets a zillion hits, just like for, "Say hello to my little friend." In many ways I thought of Phoenix as a character who also had to learn to "love the rope" in order to survive in post-nuclear hell.

I also found inspiration in Mad Max, which had some memorable lines among its riffs and hooks, such as, "He goes to water over a dummy," and, “Perhaps it was a result of anxiety,” which I still quote at times.

I know you have moved on from action-series fiction. What projects are you currently working on? How has your experience been in the world of eBooks?

In fiction I'm currently working on several things, including a project I'd put away some time ago and had believed, until I sought to read it again, that it was only a short proposal. It was, in fact, a fair-sized manuscript. I'd always liked its concept and still do. It seemed to cry out to be completed. As to ebooks, I think they’re obviously the future of publishing, but I also think that printed books will continue to play a significant role in it.

Which of your own books are your favorites, and why?

I've favored Machine Breakers. I wrote it as literary fiction that I hoped would also appeal to a more commercially oriented audience. Despite or because of the different approaches to narrative I took, including an invented language and casting aside conventional sentence structure, as well as using some techniques I devised such as one I call "chaosing," (which, as the term implies, is the deliberate introduction of chaos or noise into the prose narrative slipstream), the book has been remarkably accessible to a wide range of readers, despite my belief that it would appeal only to small number of them.

I'll go so far as to say that I've always considered it an alternative Phoenix story insofar as it's set in a dystopian universe, as well as in the immediate aftermath of a series of apocalyptic events, and the characters that strut and fret their hour upon the stage have also been warped and disfigured by war and technological innovation run amok.

Ultimately I try not to adore any of my efforts either from the past or those on which I'm currently working. I'm too oriented toward scrutinizing them for faults and defects. As Swift observes by way of Gulliver in the land of the Brobdingnagians, even the most seemingly flawless human beings show massive imperfections when an observer the size of a fly crawls across their bodies. That's also something like my point of reference to my own writing, and I think (at least hope) it helps me overcome my limitations and develop beyond them.

Still and all, I have to admit to holding Phoenix in a special place, though I probably couldn't say exactly why this happens to be so.

Interview with David Alexander, Part 1

Anyone who has read my reviews will know that I place the Phoenix series by David Alexander in the highest echelon of action series fiction. As I’ve mentioned before, the Phoenix series is available in one complete eBook edition, and Alexander also has many other books and novels available on Amazon as eBooks.

He also has a website, and a few months ago I wrote to tell him how much I enjoyed his work. After exchanging some emails, I realized Dave would make for excellent interview material, and so was very happy that he agreed to one.

Here’s the first part of the interview; in this one Dave focuses on his start in the writing world and the Phoenix series.


Tell us about yourself – how did you get into writing, and what were you doing before?

As a child I began writing spontaneously. I’m sure it’s a common development; just as children often like to draw, they also like to write. At any rate, when I was seven I was mentioned in a newspaper article for having written some poetic verse. I don't know if it was actually any good, but I can say that unlike others I was never coached or was the product of efforts to mold me into something my elders, instead of I myself, wanted. Just the opposite, in fact. I come from a working class family background where letters weren't and still aren't held in particular esteem.

What was your first published work?

Probably the poem that sparked the newspaper item, and certainly the poetry that followed which found its way into miscellaneous publications before I reached my teens. Truthfully, I had no desire to write prose fiction until later on. Prior to that my only aim was to write poetry. I still compose from time to time, but only when my muse speaks, or when, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, "the fit is on me." I haven't felt compelled to compose for some years, but awhile back I did manage to write a considerable number of poems.

How did the Phoenix series come about?

Phoenix originated as a convergence between my early aspirations to write booklength thriller fiction and Leisure Books' interest in expanding into that market. I hadn’t set out to write a series, per se; that’s just what was offered. They'd previously had a success with a series whose title I forget and wanted to increase their presence in the marketplace.

The first Phoenix title sold well enough for the house to sign me for another two or three series installments. In the end I wrote five in all, with a sixth and final installment planned which never materialized.

Was Phoenix planned as an ongoing series, or did you envision it with a definite end in mind?

I certainly envisioned the sixth book as the series conclusion, but I hadn't envisioned a final book when I'd begun writing the series. At that time I hadn't a clear-cut sense of how far I'd be able to grow the concept and characters, as Leisure had originally committed to a single book only. I turned in an outline for the planned sixth but it never materialized. At this stage I may have already been in the process of writing the Z-Comm series.

The Phoenix series is more over-the-top than anything I’ve read. What were some of your thoughts while you worked on each volume – were you just constantly trying to top yourself, to see how far you could go? What scenes/volumes stand out most in your mind?

I approached writing the Phoenix books in a deliberate manner. Principally, I set out to create what might be called a post-nuclear apocalypse noir series, and tried to work out how the elements of noir might function in this context.

To address the second part of your question, I don’t really have permanent favorite parts of anything I’ve written. I might find myself idly reflecting on this scene or that, or this paragraph or that, from time to time, with appreciation or odium, or I might like or dislike some parts as I re-read an earlier effort, but that’s pretty much the extent of it.

What was the relationship like with Leisure Books? Did they play much of a factor in each book, or request any changes? Did you receive any feedback from readers?

As far as my words went, I had text approval, and I tried to insure that it was honored.

As to feedback from readers, there was its share, and I think mainly more positive than negative. One fan offered several hundred dollars for the set of original Phoenix manuscripts. I never sold it, though.

Phoenix #5 ends on a cliffhanger, with Magnus Trench still searching for his family. Why did the series end with this volume? Have you considered wrapping it up with a final installment?

As I've said, I'd done an outline for what would have been a final story in which Trench and his family were (in some way, shape or form) reunited (probably with some wicked twist, such as wife and child having become contams by this point, or Luther Enoch or John Tallon appearing to do a "Luke, I am your father" number on Trench junior, etc.).

But as I may have also mentioned, I've from time to time over the years considered precisely that – ending the series in earnest. The most recent "Phoenix moment" was a few months ago when, on pondering the phenomenon of doomsday bunker building and the warped mentalities of survivalists who actually seem to relish the prospect of apocalyptic catastrophe striking the United States, I jotted down some notes for a story where Trench and a group of good guys pit themselves against the last of post-apocalypse America's bunker cities, and the bad-asses who are dug in there.

One of my biggest personal "Phoenix moments," by the way, took place on September 11th, 2001, when I happened to find myself caught in the vicinity of the World Trade Center when the two planes struck. Throughout the ensuing chaos, I recall saying to myself, "What is this? – ‘Dark Messiah East,’ chapter one?" or "What would Trench do at a time like this?"

I'll add that reflecting on Phoenix number five's (Reap the Whirlwind) subway scenes kept me from attempting to take the trains, which turned out to be a smart move on that dismal day. Should I have had thoughts like these on 911? I don't know. But think them I did.

One thing it does point up is the way a character, or group of characters, once created, can tend to powerfully and lastingly root themselves to an author's consciousness. It's a phenomenon that's been commented on by writers other than myself, too, I believe.

While writing Phoenix, I see you also worked on some other series. One of them was Z-Comm, also for Leisure Books, published under the name Kyle Maning. What’s the story behind that one?

I wanted to do a more contemporary action series, which is how Z-Comm got going. The title stood for Z-Command, a unit of last resorts that took on missions too impossible for anybody else, and which of course always brought home the bacon. I was told, though, that I had to provide a house name for the series byline, as for some unfathomable reason I couldn’t still be just plain old me.

Now, if this were today, I'd have taken out a laundry marker and scrawled “David Alexander” on the editor's desk by way of response, but in those days I suppose I was more … temperate. So I gave Leisure the byline "Kyle Manning."

Note that the surname, as might be expected, is spelled with two n's, not one. The reason the series' book covers bear the surname spelled with a single n was revealed to me when -- on one of my visits to the Leisure office, during which I was shown the cover of the first Z-Comm book -- I noticed that one of the n's was missing.

"It should be Manning, with two n's," I’d pointed out to the editor, who apparently had thought I might miss this disparity.

To this he replied, "Oh, we can't afford the AA (which stands for author's addition or author’s alteration, requiring a second run through the printing presses) so from now on your name is May-ning."

Once again, were it today, I would have carved that extra n into the editorial desk, but that was then, not now, and "Maning" it remained.


In the second part of the interview, Dave talks about his contributions to the C.A.D.S. series, his work with Gold Eagle, and his current projects – posting here next week!

Z-Comm #1: Swastika

Z-Comm #1: Swastika, by Kyle Maning
No month stated, 1988 Leisure Books

This was the start of a 4-volume series by Kyle Maning, who is none other than our pal David Alexander. I'm not sure why Alexander (or Leisure Books) even bothered with the psuedonym, as the book is quite obviously the product of Alexander's fevered imagination. This series began as he was nearly finished with the ultra-awesome Phoenix saga, and though it isn't a post-nuke pulp, Alexander still finds a way to bring that same level of chaotic madness to the tale. Even if we have to wait a bit to get to it.

Z-Comm is short for "Z-Commando," a 5-man team of bad-ass commandos, each of whom is basically the same as the next (except for the female member, but she's just as tough as the rest of them). Their names alone are proof of their bad-assness (while at the same time sounding like the names of characters in the old Rambo cartoon): Logan Cage, the leader, who "killed more than 500 men in Vietnam;" Sam Proffitt, living lethal weapon and Cage's right-hand man; Frank "Bear" MacBeth, "part-time wrestler, part-time construction worker, full-time bastard;" Domino, the aforementioned female member of the team, who as expected is incredibly beautiful as well as deadly; and finally Zabriskie, electronics and tech wiz who despite his nerdishness is just as skilled and deadly as the others.

Alexander saves the best name however for the villain of the piece: Deacon Johncock (!), a grassroots preacher of Nazi superiority who has carved out his own little slice of Aryan rule in a desolate patch of Middle America. Dressing his endless legions of goons in Nazi uniform, Johncock has taken over the hamlet of Ketchum, Idaho (famed for a visit by Ernest Hemingway years before).

The majority of the populace has fallen sway to Johncock's virulent, anti-Semitic garbage; these sections, of course, where Johncock makes his speeches, gives Alexander ample opportunity to attempt to offend basically every race. Again though, it comes off more funny than offensive, as there's no way any reasonable person could take it all seriously. It all just proves once again that Alexander was one of the few 1980s men's adventure authors who kept alive the over-the-top spirit of the '70s.

For some reason the government has failed to officially do anything about Johncock's takeover. I kept trying to figure out why, but then realized I was thinking about it too much. Let it just be said that it all comes down to Z-Comm, who must band together again and go kill some neo-Nazis. After getting the mission from his handler, Peter Quartermaine (another impressive name), Cage goes about the chore of rounding together the other four members of Z-Comm. This proves to take up a large portion of the novel, as Alexander introduces each of the characters. However it's a bit slow-going as the characters are so alike, save for Proffitt, who has a bit of a tortured soul. He easily stands out from the rest of the team, and I wonder if Alexander didn't base the character a little on himself.

Swastika runs to nearly 300 pages, and this proves to be its undoing. It looks as if Leisure Books was trying to do the same thing as Gold Eagle was at the time -- making their books longer so they'd appear to be "real novels." Instead it just bogs the book down, and Swastika spins its wheels for the first third. Indeed it isn't until around page 170 or so that Alexander finally unleashes his trademark OTT violence and gore. It doesn't quite reach the absurd levels of Phoenix, but it comes close:

The guy closest to him caught both bursts right in his heart. A gaping red crater appeared in his brown shirt as his heart and most of his left lung and a couple of ground-up ribs erupted from the massive exit wound in the blitzed Nazi's back.

Hot steel fragments whizzed around in the body cavity like angry demon hornets, creaming internal organs to soupy vomit. The Nazi pulled some moves that would put Nureyev to shame as he spun away from the HUMVEE and hit the blacktop, skidding on his face.

Alexander also delivers on the expected gun-porn; the final half of the novel is an endless sequence of military acronyms and names of assault weapons. He also serves up more of his wacky descriptive phrases: "vomit Vikings" being one of his favorite terms for Johncock's Nazi goons. And he even manages to include some of the sadism of Phoenix, especially in a grossly hilarious sequence where Johncock lets his Nazis run rampant over Ketchum, killing and raping and pillaging, Alexander documenting each horrible act in gruesome detail.

The length of the book also hampers the finale. Once Z-Comm has arrived and done some research, Cage posing as a terrorist with KGB ties (his undercover name, interestingly, is "Coltray," which was the title of a 3-volume series Alexander published soon after this), they decide to just waste Johncock and his Nazis. Lots of great action scenes ensue, but again it all comes off like that Rambo cartoon, with Johncock escaping, coming back with more men, capturing some members of Z-Comm, the other members freeing them, Johncock escaping again, and etc etc. While it's fun, it's also obvious that Alexander had a large page count to fill and was having a hard time of it.

But who am I kidding? This is David Alexander, after all, and his books are always enjoyable. I've got the rest of this series and look forward to continuing with it; it's not as jawdropping as Phoenix (but then what is?), but how can you go wrong with a series that has villains with names like "Deacon Johncock??"

Phoenix #5: Whirlwind

Phoenix #5: Whirlwind, by David Alexander
No month stated, 1988 Leisure Books

Here endeth the grisly, gruesome, gore-tatstic Phoenix saga, the OTT chronicle of Magnus "Phoenix" Trench's quest across the nuked US. The previous three novels progressively derailed from the overriding plot as established in the first volume, Dark Messiah -- namely, that Trench was rabid to get from San Francisco to New York City to determine if his wife and son survived the nuclear holocaust -- but happily this final volume gets things back on track.

And just as happily, David Alexander is back to form in this final outing. Whirlwind is nearly as violent and demented as its predecessors; not all the way up there with the first installment and Ground Zero, but close. But on the positive side this volume features more of a focus on the major plot: after being absent for too long, Trench's archnemeses John Tallon and Luther "Dark Messiah" Enoch finally return to the fray.

Whirlwind opens with another of those crazed Alexander action scenes; Trench and his companions from the previous novel, Raven and DeLaCour, arrive in NYC and must brave a guantlet of heavy weaponry and government soldiers to get into the city. Raven and DeLaCour by the way are pale reflections of their previous selves. Raven's ballyhooed psychic skills go unmentioned -- as indeed does her ESP link with Trench, as established in the final pages of Metalstorm -- and there's no indication that she and Trench were once involved. I think she has maybe five lines in this entire novel. DeLaCour isn't much better. The hulking, steel-plated character comes off more like Trench's familiar, there to save the guy and battle alongside him. Hell, even the wolf Blue from the previous novel is gone and doesn't get mentioned.

Trench is caught, and Tallon shows him that his wife and son are held prisoner, hooked to life-support machinery, inside the Statue of Liberty. This scene, so long built up in the series, is glossed over in a paragraph. The intimation is both Trench's wife and son suffer from the Plague that has affected the rest of the country, product of the biochemicals in the Soviet nukes that hit the US; the Plague Trench himself is immune to. But Alexander leaves this vague. Tallon informs Trench that a mutant has been born in NYC that can heal the Plague. Trench must find it and bring it back, and in exchange he and his family can go free.

So like a regular Snake Plissken Trench crosses alone into the no-man's land of Manhattan. Here follows another great setpiece which comes off like a more gory variation on the famous scene from Stephen King's The Stand, where Trench puts on night-vision goggles and ventures through an abandoned subway station. Alexander certainly has a gift for dark humor; after building up Trench's shock that no "Contam" mutants have yet attacked him -- Trench realizing of course that the mutants dwell underground, just like the C.H.U.D.s -- about a million of them come out of nowhwere and attack him.

The action scenes are as expected OTT and like super-violent cartoons. Leather-clad gangs rule Manhattan -- every city Trench has visited has been run by a leather-clad biker gang -- and Alexander really comes to life when Trench blows them away:

The burst caught Badass One high on the chest, stitching a diagonal line of ragged punctures from his left shoulder to lower jawline that changed him from vicious prick to Moby Dick as he spurted a dozen whale spouts of blood.

As death reflexes made the muscles twitch and jerk, the crude dude went into a terminal breakdance that ended when his legs kicked out from under him and he slid down the side of the mountainous pile of wreckage on his face, splattering his pard with intestinal guacamole.

Again Alexander takes a cue from the ancient world: Trench is captured by Abraxas, ruler of NYC and basically a clone of Lord Humongous from The Road Warrior. Abraxas has set up the Clone, a death-trap constructed in "Blastroland" from an old Ferris Wheel and roller coaster. Trench is strapped in and must survive all manner of booby traps, pursuing killers, and guys with flamethrowers. And if he lives, Abraxas will take him to "The Child," ie the mutant with the Plague-stopping powers.

The nihilism of previous volumes is brought to the fore here. As in the past Trench muses to himself about man's inhummanity and etc. But also it's been clear from the get-go that there could be no happy end to the Phoenix saga. How could there be, given the nonstop gore and carnage? But what's most unfortunate is we realize in the last pages that, though this was the last published volume of the series, it sure isn't the end. For nothing is resolved. Trench's wife and son are still the prisoners of Luther Enoch and John Tallon, both of whom escape, once again leaving Trench a lone man consumed with vengeance.

So yes, the series ends on a cliffhanger, with Trench standing in the head of the Statue of Liberty and looking out at the ruins of NYC, knowing that he will pursue Enoch and Tallon to the ends of the earth. I have many questions about this -- either Alexander chose to end the series on a vague note, or Leisure Books just cancelled it due to low sales and Alexander never had a chance to compose a proper finale.

As mentioned in my review of Dark Messiah, Alexander recently e-published all five volumes of the series as a single e-book, Phoenix Rising, but unfortunately he didn't take the opportunity to write a new and closing volume for the series. Who knows, though; maybe if enough fans pester him he just might write one.

Even though this is the end of the Phoenix reviews, I'm not yet done with Alexander -- the guy wrote several other men's adventure series under his own name and psuedonyms, and I will be getting to them soon.

Phoenix #4: Metalstorm

Phoenix #4: Metalstorm, by David Alexander
No month stated, 1988 Leisure Books

I get the feeling that David Alexander was growing weary of his Phoenix saga; this penultimate volume, while occasionally heavy on the gory and spectacular violence we've come to expect from the series, is a hodge-podge of various plots and ideas. Metalstorm constantly changes direction from beginning to end, so the reader has no idea what's in store -- usually a good thing, but here it's more of a sign that the author is trying to keep himself entertained.

And can you blame him? The first volume alone was already the most OTT blast of carnage-fueled post-nuclear action ever published; how in the hell could David Alexander top it? The answer is he couldn't. Once you've written a few volumes which feature Magnus "Phoenix" Trench blasting away punks in violent and novel ways you obviously have to stretch things to keep it all original, or at least somewhat fresh. So what Alexander has done here is basically just toss in several ideas that have stricken his fancy.

For one, Metalstorm opens with a flashback to Nazi friggin' Germany, strange enough given that the series so far has occurred in the post-nuke USA of 1989. It takes a while, but this prologue eventually pans out. From there it's to our hero Trench, who still hasn't made it to NYC to find out if his wife and son survived the nuclear blast. In fact, Trench has had to go far out of his way, down through Louisana and on through Texas, to get to New York -- the new government's military is blocking his path, and they of course want Trench dead or alive. So Trench is now working his way through the mutant-filled swamps of Louisiana. After a near-death experience Trench hooks up with Raven, a dark-haired beauty with psychic powers, and her pet wolf Blue.

The three head on into Houston, where Raven wants to find a guy named DeLaCour; Raven explains that as part of her CIA-funded psychic "remote viewing" activities she's learned that a gold-carrying ship crashed somewhere in the gulf. She wants to scrounge up the gold and make off to a place undamaged by the nukes. Phoenix agrees to help but he and Raven are separated by a freak sandstorm moments after entering Houston. Alone again, Trench decides to find Raven -- why he doesn't just head on for NYC is glossed over; he has of course slept with Raven a few times and wants to save her if possible.

From here the novel becomes more like the series we have enjoyed, with Trench blowing away various punks in gory fashion. Houston is run by the fabulously-named Runamok, a gangbanger who has installed VCR technology into the heads of his underlings; with the press of a button Runamok can make people follow his commands, go crazy, or even kill themselves. DeLaCour is one of these sufferers -- it turns out DeLaCour is a big guy with metal plates sewn into half his chest and half his face -- and for new sport Runamok has Trench and DeLaCour fight in "Metalstorm," Runamok's variation on the gladiatorial combats of Imperial Rome.

The novel changes direction again in an ultraviolent sequence in which Trench and his new comrade first must kill legions of attackers with their bare hands, then employ submachine guns on a second batch who come at them on motorcycles. After setting up Runamok Trench and DeLaCour are able to go free -- Runamok has sold Raven to a Gulf-raiding pirate named Havock. With the wolf Blue in tow, the two men head down to Galveston, where Alexander takes the time to rip-off/pay tribute to the famous scene in The Road Warrior where Mad Max handcuffs a dude to a car that's about to blow and hands him a hacksaw.

Plot #3 features Trench and DeLaCour now posing as new members of Havock's nuclear-sub riding pirate crew. Not once, mind you, has Trench even asked DeLaCour how he knows Raven; Alexander just pushes his pawns along the board and makes them follow his orders without question. At length Trench frees Raven and all three of them, along with the wolf, make their escape.

Now plot #4 comes along: Raven admits she was lying all along. The plane that crashed was actually a Nazi ship (aha! the prolouge!) that was transporting an "Atlantean crystal" of supernatural power. Here the novel takes on the fashionings of a survival tale as, while scuba-diving for the wreckage of the Nazi plane, Trench and Raven are attacked by a giant squid and some sharks. At length they find the crystal, which as Raven explains was created in a time before history, furnished as it is with more power than a nuclear arsenal. We are well beyond the gory post-nuke world of the previous novels by this point.

But the pulp sci-fi continues. Havock gets hold of the crystal and, like some sort of Fu Manchu, harnesses its power and starts firing lightning bolts from his fingers and eyes and whatever. But it's anticlimatic because the battle just sort of fizzles and Trench is caught, taken back onto Havock's sub. Havock decides, apropos of nothing yet revealed in the novel, to nuke a city, any city; he decides upon NYC. Trench then finds himself chained Gravity's Rainbow style to a missile about to be launched. But there's Raven, employing her psychic link with Trench at the last moment...

Yeah, this is one slipshod novel. Even the insane gun-porn and inventive gore of the previous installments is mostly absent; it's there to be sure, but toned down. I get the suspicion that Alexander didn't intend this to be an ongoing series. Perhaps Leisure Books talked him into it, who knows. But at any rate the next novel was the last: Metalstorm ends with Trench finally vowing to get to New York City, where he will find his family and square his accounts with Luther Enoch and his sadistic new government. To say I look forward to this finale would be an understatement.

Phoenix #3: Death Quest

Phoenix #3: Death Quest, by David Alexander
No month stated, 1988 Leisure Books

The post-nuke carnage continues in volume #3 of the Phoenix saga, the most action-packed installment yet. Which is really saying something, because they've all been action-packed. And in fact Death Quest, while occasionally as insane, graphic, and lurid as its predecessors, kind of wears thin after a while, being nothing more than one protracted action sequence after another.

When last we saw our hero Magnus "Phoenix" Trench in Ground Zero, he'd been captured by the mercenary forces of "Dark Messiah" Luther Enoch, aka the guy who caused the end of the world. Enoch's head honcho John Tallon trapped our hero, and that novel ended with Trench being escorted away -- Trench is an "Alpha Immune," possibly the only one in existence; he is completely immune to the radiation and biochemical-induced contaminations which plague the rest of mankind. Luther Enoch himself is one step away from becoming a full-on "Contam," kept human only by a biosurvival suit. Enoch wants Trench dead or alive, so he can create vaccines from his immune blood.

But little need to worry about our hero. When we meet Trench in Death Quest he's already got his hands wrapped around the throat of an orderly who is about to cut him up. Killing the man, Trench stumbles about in a "purple haze" of drugs that have been put into his system over the past few weeks of captivity.

Trench then makes his escape from this enemy base: he kills a few merc soldiers, takes the uniform of one of them, sneaks onto a departing cargo plane filled with mercs and weapons, gets discovered halfway through the flight, kills a ton of mercs in a firefight which results in a hole blasted into the plane, jumps out with an M-60, some Uzis, and no parachute, gets in an airborne fight with the one man who escaped the downed plane in a parachute, kills the guy and takes his 'chute, lands in the middle of a pockmarked expanse of Middle America, and is instantly attacked by a group of chopper-riding thugs whom he blasts apart with the M-60. It all goes on for about 40 pages, and it's the best running battle yet in the series, all of it of the caliber one would encounter in a ramped-up '80s action movie. The only problem is, nothing else in Death Quest can match it.

Finding himself in St Louis, Missouri, Trench wastes a few more motorcycle-riding punks before meeting up with an underground group of resistance fighters. Led by Mason Bragdon, a one-time politican whose bid for the presidency was crushed by Luther Enoch years before WWIII, these people are trying to free a technician named Reinhart from a government concentration camp which operates beneath St. Louis's fallen Gateway Arch. Enoch's new government is planning to kill off what remains of the rabble of the American populace, destroying the scum and freaks who live in the "Urban Containment Zones." Bombs, designed by Reinhart, will nuke all of the living organisms from these areas but leave the real estate intact. The operation is codenamed "Cocked Pistol."

Reinhart it develops became sickened with the idea and turned against Enoch. Now he's in this camp, subject to constant torture. The camp honcho is a sadist named Mekkannik, who is identical to Trench's archnemesis John Tallon from the previous two books. (Tallon for whatever reason sits this volume of the series out.) In exchange for his help in freeing Reinhart, Mason Bragdon promises to get Trench to NYC as quickly as possible. Bragdon claims to know underground channels which will make the trip easy for our hero; Trench, remember, is still red-hot to get to NYC to determine if his wife and son are still alive.

What follows is battle scene after battle scene, as Trench leads Bragdon's men on various assaults against Mekkannik and his forces. Death Quest is more of your "typical" post-nuke pulp, with more of a focus on action than the lurid insanity we got in the previous books. To be sure, Trench still kills a ton of people -- in fact he kills more people here than in any of the previous books -- but they're dashed off kills (for Alexander at least), with little of the "he shit his pants and died" schadenfreude of the first two novels.

But then, when Alexander does go to those previous lengths, he does so with relish:

The kill was beautiful in its perfect symmetry. The exploding hollownosed bullets struck in a tight cluster pattern which knocked the SCORF cowboy off his feet with his arms and legs spread and a gaping, bloody hole where his heart, lungs and pancreas used to be.

The corpse landed on the electrified perimeter fence surrounding the Cocked Pistol secure cordon. What had been a vicious killer named Bullock jerked spastically as the high-voltage current cooked the blood in its veins and jolted every muscle into convulsive fibrillations.

The eyes popped out of the sockets, followed by spouts of red vein juice from the flailing, gesticulating thing's ears. The bowels emptied, spurting from the snuffed merc's rectum. Then the body sagged to the ground and lay there smoking.

All of that, three paragraphs worth, for a character we only met one page before. A sick delight of the previous books was the occasional appearance of a Contam, ie mutants very much in the C.H.U.D. mold. Even these things don't appear much in Death Quest, save for one brief but grisly scene where Trench and his team must navigate through an abandoned subway station.

One new thing Alexander adds to the series is a sense of nihilism. Sure, the previous books were nihilistic -- this is a post-nuke pulp, after all -- but here the cynicism and weariness is much more apparent. The entire book is action sequence after action sequence; the only break we get is the occasional bit where Trench will mull over man's inhummanity and sickness. There is an air of futility to the whole novel. However during one of these mulling bits we get a priceless moment where Trench, holding his gun and fantasizing over the vengeance he will get, takes gun-porn to its logical conclusion:

Yes, Phoenix ached to spurt hot, cleansing fire from the muzzle of righteous vengeance held erect and potent at his thigh.

He's talking about his MINIMI M249, of course! It's things like this that place Phoenix above and beyond others of its ilk, the obvious fact that Alexander is having just as much fun writing it as we are having reading it. And again this time out we're of course still treated to tons of gun fetishizing, goofy puns, and rock references -- beyond the "purple haze" bit there's also a Grace Jones-type Amazon who fights Trench to the death while she sings ? and the Mysterians's "96 Tears."

So even though Death Quest lacks a certain something that its predecessors had, it still opens with one hell of a protracted action sequence, and it still has that same gleeful sadism about it, just to a lesser extent.