Death Merchant #23: The Budapest Action

Death Merchant #23: The Budapest Action, by Joseph Rosenberger

July, 1977  Pinnacle Books

Friends, like The Ninja, this is a read that has been years in the making. How many years? Nearly forty years. Was it worth the wait? Of course it wasn’t, it’s a Death Merchant novel by Joseph Rosenberger! 

To quote The Jimmy Castor Bunch, “What we’re gonna do right here is go back, way back, back into time.” Back to the mid-late 1980s, to be exact, when yours truly was first caught up in the world of men’s adventure. It was probably around 1987, but not much later, and not much earlier. This would have been the height of my men’s adventure fandom, around when I wrote a letter to Gar Wilson. In fact, I no doubt looked very much like this. 

Back then I did my shopping for new men’s adventure paperbacks at the WaldenBooks in the Country Club Mall, in LaVale, Maryland. I have not been in that store in over thirty years – I haven’t even been to Maryland in over twenty years – and the store has been gone at least since 2011, when WaldenBooks folded, if not before. But I went to that store so many times that even now, as a fifty year-old “adult,” I can close my eyes and see the exact layout of that bookstore, and I can walk through it in my mind. 

The men’s adventure paperbacks were along the left wall of the store, almost all the way in the back. Probably a fitting place for them, the cynic might observe. Actually, sci-fi was all the way in the back; it was when heading for the science fiction paperback section in October of 1985 that I finally stopped to look at the action paperbacks that were placed on a shelf right before it. This was how I discovered Phoenix Force, specifically Night Of The Thuggee, which was my gateway drug into the world of men’s adventure. (I really should get a copy of that book and re-read it someday.) 

But for older men’s adventure novels, like earlier installments of Phoenix Force or the other older Gold Eagle stuff, I went to a used bookstore near the mall: The Paperback Exchange. This place was run by a lady who seemed “old” to me, but I’m probably older now than she was then. It had pretty much everything a prepubescent geek like me could want: a robust selection of second-hand books, particularly paperbacks (as you might guess), plus a large assortment of comics, new and old. Indeed, in my teen years, when I moved out of men’s adventure and more so into comics (though I had always liked comics), I would only go to Paperback Exchange for my comics shopping. 

Today I can only imagine what great stuff that lady had in her Paperback Exchange in the mid-to-late ‘80s. Back then, though, the older stuff – ie the stuff from only ten years before, the ‘70s – wasn’t as highly valued, at least by me. I remember going through her “old” copies of The Executioner, which as I recall were half off the cover price, and buying one or two of them out of obligation – #3: Battle Mask in particular I recall buying. But they just seemed so old to me, so outdated, and I had no interest in them – at the time, I just wanted the ‘80s terrorist of the week stuff, specifically the Gold Eagle stuff, and if you could throw that ninja guy John Trent in there, so much the better. I had no interest in reading about Mack Bolan’s Mafia war, which seemed like ancient history. 

But one day at the Paperback Exchange I saw this particular copy of Death Merchant in the men’s adventure paperbacks section, and the cover grabbed me, even though the book seemed so old. As mentioned above, I was already a comic book fan, and I was a sci-fi fan, so this cover – credited on the copyright page to an artist named Dean Cate – fired my imagination good and proper. It looked so cool! A dude in a red jumpsuit with a facemask, a mad scientist on the top of the cover, a lot of uniformed goons getting blown away…it had the potential to even be better than Phoenix Force (though not one of the ones with John Trent, of course). 

I snatched up the book and took it to my mom and she bought it for me; my mom, as a single mother on a teacher’s assistant salary, didn’t have much money, but she always bought me books. And looking back on it now, I never even valued it at the time that she would buy me books that she clearly knew were written for adults, but she bought them for me anyway because she knew I loved to read. I never had to make a sales pitch or anything. I’d just run with the book over to my mom and ask her if she’d buy it for me, and she’d buy it for me. 

So, I can say I was pretty excited to read this one. I’m not sure if I knew about the Death Merchant at the time. I want to say I didn’t. As mentioned, I was squarely into the new stuff. It’s funny that I thought these ‘70s books were so old at the time, but even looking at them today I can see why I thought this – the ‘70s paperbacks were taller, the paper was pulpier, and overall they were less glossy than the ‘80s men’s adventure paperbacks. They just seemed to be from a different, altogether rougher time. 

But regardless, Death Merchant 23: The Budapest Action grabbed my attention, what with its cover promising some guy in a red jumpsuit with a visor over his face blowing away a bunch of uniformed guys with a Luger. Whoever this Death Merchant was, he clearly had “incredible adventures,” at least per the cover. 

Then I went home and tried to read the book. 

No, this was not Phoenix Force, not by a long shot. This was just weird. And it was almost indecipherable, at least for a twelve year-old like me. Who this Death Merchant, aka Richard Camellion, really was, I couldn’t figure out – it just opened with him in action, and he stayed in action for the rest of the densely-written, small-print 202 pages of the book. After some dogged reading, I finally gave up and tried to root through the book for the scene depicted on the cover, before failing on this as well. Ultimately The Budapest Action went on my bookshelf, neatly arranged with all my other men’s adventure paperbacks…but continnuing to loom in my imagination. For nearly four decades. 

A long time ago I picked up another copy of the book – I guess all of my old men’s adventure novels are boxed up at my mom’s place, and I’d love to get them all someday – but it too sat unread in a box with a bunch of other books. I’m not sure why I didn’t try to read it sooner, opting instead for other Death Merchant novels. I guess I just didn’t want to finally read it and get verification of what I knew as a twelve year-old: that the book wasn’t very good. But I finally decided to read the damn thing, which was a curious experience – not the least because, even as a fifty year-old, I still found The Budapest Action nearly indecipherable. 

But first of all, and really a note to the twelve-year-old me: the cover does not illustrate anything that happens in the novel. At no point – at least no point that I caught – does Richard “Death Merchant” Camellion put on a red jumpsuit with a clear visor, arm himself with a Luger, and shoot up a bunch of uniformed guards. Presumably artist Dean Cate was given his assignment by the editors at Pinnacle – who probably didn’t read Rosenberger’s manuscript, either, I mean life’s just too short – and proceeded to illustrate what he thought would be a scene in the novel. 

It’s funny when you think of it; that cover image has stayed with me for decades. I’ve even subtly referred to it in some of my own writing. And now I finally discover that the scene isn’t even in the book! Actually this makes me think of a quote from none other than Rosenberger himself, I think from one of his Mace books, something to the effect of, “As surprised as a kid who went downstairs on Christmas morning to discover that Santa Claus was really a child molester,” or something like that. 

While Dean Cate’s cover art might be misleading, the title itself sure as hell isn’t: this one’s nothing but “action.” I don’t exaggerate when I say that the vast majority of the 202 pages concerns Camellion fighting his way into a castle in Budapest in which a special psychedelic gas is being stored. The entire novel is focused on him trying to get into this place, and he doesn’t even get there until the final pages. 

I determined long ago that there are two kinds of Death Merchant novels: the ones where Joseph Rosenberger bothers to achieve his own potential and the ones where he doesn’t give a shit. The Budapest Action is one of the latter. Examples of the former are rare, but they exist; see, for example, The Cosmic Reality Kill or The Burning Blue Death. Both of these actually live up to the outrageous premise Rosenberger creates. But more likely you get something like Hell In Hindu Land, where the outrageous concept – friggin’ ancient aliens – is nothing more than a Maguffin that Rosenberger uses to tie together several action scenes that seemingly go on forever. 

The back cover, which also did a great job of luring the twelve-year-old me in, has it that Richard Camellion must go to Budapest to destroy a new psychedelic gas that has been developed by a Commie scientist; to be used, of course, to conquer the world. I mean, surely that wild-eyed, vaguely Slavic-looking, lab-coated and beaker-toting sub-Lenin on the cover is supposed to be this mad doctor. Too bad, then, that we don’t even meet him, but spend more time in go-nowhere chapters devoted to General Barthory, who is in charge of security for the remote castle in which the experimental psychedelic gas is being stored. 

I’m not sure if it’s the take I got as a kid in 1987, and it probably wasn’t, but reading the setup now, as an “adult,” I can only think of scenes where the gas is let loose, and people start freaking out, and we see their delusions and the madness that ensues. Sort of like, now that I think of it, The Deadly Spring. But as I mentioned above, this is one of the volumes where Rosenberger doesn’t give a shit; the setup is just there to allow him to lazily tie together several action scenes. 

The novel opens with Camellion breaking into a government building in Budapest to find the plans for the psychedelic gas, only to discover the safe is impossible to break into. This leads to a near-endless action scene, after which Camellion hooks up with his contacts in Hungary, a group of resistance fighters. They are hiding out with some monks, and throughout Camellion disguises himself as a visiting cleric, wearing makeup to make himself look like he’s in his late forties – which we’re told is ten years older than Camellion’s actual age – with a splotchy face and a bald head. Presumably this is how Camellion looks throughout the interminable action scene that takes up the final half of the novel. 

There’s a big annual festival in which the faithful climb the nearby mountains upon which is perched the castle that has the psychedelic gas. So Camellion and his group – one of whom is an American CIA agent – go along with the faithful, secretly toting weapons. Camellion doesn’t bait the monks as much as you’d think, but we do get a little of Rosenberger’s bizarre “Fate Magazine” type stuff, like a random assertion from Camellion that the ages of man are determined by the weather, and we’re heading into a “heat” phase, and etc. It’s goofy, but really not much different from the proclamations of the average climate change “expert” of today. 

But the bizarre stuff too is a Maguffin. The focus is solely on action. That’s really all it is. There’s a lot of stuff devoted to Camellion and team, in the mountains, commandeering a Hound helicopter. Also, before this sequence, there’s another endless action scene that prefigures the later Super Death Merchant, where Camellion commandeers an Armored Personnel Carrier and drives it through the streets of Budapest. But with the Hound, it’s used to fly them over the walls of the castle – and folks, this scene goes on forever. 

Like a fool, I kept waiting for the part where Camellion would pull on his red jumpsuit, don his clear visor, and go charging with Luger raised into the swirling mists of psychedlic gas, blasting away uniformed soldiers. It never happened. As the final page got closer and closer, and more and more time was spent on Barthory freaking out that his defenses had been penetrated, or Camellion landing the Hound where it could easily be gotten into again, I realized that the entire novel was nothing more than getting into the castle. The stuff I wanted – the stuff Dean Cate illustrated on his cover – only happened in my imagination. 

In fact, the psychedelic gas is such a Maguffin that more time is spent on how to destroy it than seeing its effects. Granted, destroying it is Camellion’s entire mission, but still…the reader deserves more. The reader deserves more than just page after page of Camellion and his friends gunning down “AVO” soldiers, ie the Hungarian version of the KGB. Seriously, “AVO” is repeated so much in The Budapest Action that you could make a drinking game out of it. 

As the final slap in the face, Rosenberger is so checked out that he rushes through the finale…and on the very last sentence, apropos of nothing, Camellion is thinking about how he’ll be on his next mission “in less than a month!” It’s like even the friggin’ Death Merchant himself just wants it all to be over, so he can get on to the next one. I can only assume this is how his creator felt. I mean Joseph Rosenberger, of course, not the Cosmic Lord of Death. 

I’m sure it wasn’t fun turning out so many of these books a year, every year, and we know from the Joseph Rosenberger letter that Stephen Mertz sent me many years ago that Rosenberger wasn’t even getting paid very much. So I try not to be too hard on these men’s adventure writers of old. To be honest, I envy them. I mean, Joseph Rosenberger might have been paid squat, and he might have turned out turgid, soul-crushing banalities (though not always)…but at least he was creating something, something that I’m here reviewing nearly five decades after he wrote it. Today, at my work, I wrote the creative brief for a piece of email marketing I’m going to send out in a month. Who’s going to remember that in fifty years? Who’s going to remember it five minutes after opening it? 

So, this is one to mark off my “bucket list,” if that phrase is even still used. It took me nearly forty years, but I finally got around to reading The Budapest Action. I’ll prefer to remember it as the story I originally envisioned, all those years ago. And I’ll hope the next Death Merchant is better. But I won’t count on it.

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast, by Warren Murphy

October, 1979  Pinnacle Books

I’ve never been the biggest fan of The Destroyer, but I’ve been aware of this particular installment for years, as it features Remo and Chiun taking on spoofy parodies of the protagonists of other Pinnacle series: namely, The Executioner, The Butcher, and Death Merchant. But as ever Warren Murphy (writing solo this time, without early series co-writer Richard Sapir) is more focused on the “spoofy” nature, with hardly any focus on action. Despite the trappings, The Destroyer is a comedy series, and one must admit that Bay City Blast is occasionally very funny, even if it isn’t the “Pinnacle All-Stars” novel one might have preferred. (It still surprises me that Pinnacle editor Andy Ettinger never conceived of a one-shot that would’ve united all of the series protagonists in a big story, like a prefigure of Gold Eagle’s later Stony Man books.) 

First of all, I want to note that the long-limbed black beauty in a bikini with the submachine gun on Hector Garrido’s cover art does not exist in the actual novel. This of course is a bummer. But then, girls don’t much exist in The Destroyer. They are for the most part cipher-like, and never exploited as they would be in the typical men’s adventure novel, due to the sad fact that hero Remo Williams has zero in the way of a sex drive. As I’ve complained before, Remo’s more robot than man; Bay City Blast even features a “pretty” secretary (“pretty” being the extent of what Warren Murphy gives you in the exploitative goods) who constantly throws herself at Remo, and he remains disinterested – and also Remo goes without a woman for the entire book. Some men’s adventure progatonist! 

My assumption is the gal with the gun on the cover might be Garrido’s interpretation of Ruby Gonzales, who appears briefly in Bay City Blast and reports to Smitty, the boss of CURE. But she is fully clothed throughout and for the most part breaks into a building to check its security level; I get the impression Ruby has been in other volumes, but I’m by no means an expert on The Destroyer. So I could be wrong, but it just seemed to me that Ruby was an already-established character, and all told she’s only in the book for a few pages. 

I always rant and rave about The Destroyer and what I wish it was, but truth be told Warren Murphy is a good writer, and clearly has a good sense of humor – one that he’s able to convey via the narrative. We already know Bay City Blast will be funny from the start, when a mobbed-up “businessman” named Rocco Nobile moves into slummy Bay City, New Jersey, and promptly takes it over by blackmailing various dirty politicians. The humor comes in the recurring image of Rocco’s bodyguard constantly putting his hand in his pocket, and the dialog throughout is, as ever, pretty humorous. 

The biggest humor comes via The Eraser and The Rubout Squad, a subplot that comes out of nowhere but ultimately overtakes the narrative: this is the name of Murphy’s pseudo-Pinnacle squad. First there’s Sam Gregory, a gun manufacturer with dreams of taking on the Mafia and wiping it out with his own squad. To this end he recruits three men: Mark Tolan, a psychopath who was court martialed in ‘Nam for gunning down a village of women and children (the Mack Bolan parody); Al Baker, a guy with delusions of being a torpedo who has decided to go against the Syndicate, but in reality is just some loser who’s seen The Godfather too many times (the Butcher parody); and finally Nicholas Lizzard, a six-foot-five failed actor who is now a full-time drunk and whose biggest talent is dressing up in drag so that he can make himself look like “a six-foot-four woman” (the Richard Camellion parody, and the one Murphy seems to have the most fun with). 

Meanwhile Sam Gregory dubs himself “The Eraser,” and it is he who has the trademark bit of dropping broken pencils at scenes, a la Bolan’s marksman medals or The Penetrator’s arrow heads. My assumption is Gregory is intended as Murphy’s spoof of The Penetrator Mark Hardin, but other than the name and the broken pencils bit…the character seems to more be a parody of Don Pendleton. This is mostly because he is the one who plans the hits and also comes up with alliterative titles for them: first is “Bay City Blast,” and later the Eraser plans on others with similar, Pendleton-esque titles, like “Salinas Slaughter.” 

Murphy also has a lot of fun spoofing Mack Bolan via his psycho duplicate Mark Tolan; in Tolan’s scenes, Murphy recreates Don Pendleton’s style, down to the recurring “Yeahs” that punctuate the narrative. He even gets double bang for his spoofing buck with Tolan often vowing to “Live Huge,” parodying Bolan’s “Live Large.” I seem to recall Warren Murphy saying years ago in a Paperback Fanatic interview that he felt Pendleton’s ego was getting a little too large at the time, hence he had some fun mocking him in Bay City Blast. One can well imagine Don Pendleton being unsettled at how psychopathic his character is made to seem: Tolan, who names himself “The Exeterminator,” is a nutjob who is ready to explode at any moment, and indeed gleefully guns down children in Bay City Blast. 

But as mentioned it’s Nicholas Lizzard, the Richard Camellion spoof, who draws the most laughs. Curiously, Lizzard is presented as a roaring drunk who lives off vodka, making one wonder if Murphy was making any insinuations about Camellion’s creator, Joseph Rosenberger. Speaking of whom, Murphy does not mimic Rosenberger’s style in the Lizzard sections (but then, not many could), but he certainly makes Lizzard just as psycho as Tolan. The recurring humor here is very un-PC in today’s era, as Lizzard often dresses like a woman, but isn’t fooling anyone. This though is the extent of Lizzard’s schtick, other than the heavy drinking, so he isn’t a “cosmic lord of death” or whatever Richard Camellion was. 

As for The Baker, he’s nothing at all like the character he’s spoofing. Whereas Bucher the Butcher is a terse, cipher-like death machine, Al Baker is at heart a good-natured sort who is only in it for the money, and in fact harbors a lot of concern about the increasingly-violent nature of the Rubout Squad. Not that this subplot goes anywhere. Baker still takes part in the Squads raids on Bay City’s “underworld,” ie gunning down innocent men, women, and children. The latter I think is where Murphy goes a little too far in his black humor; the Rubout Squad shooting down prepubescent Chinese children in a “heroin factor” (really a fortune cookie bakery) doesn’t really elicit many chuckles. 

Remo and Chiun are often lost in the shuffle, but on the positive side Remo is treated with less scorn in this one. His opening sequence is pretty cool, and another indication of the comedy nature of the series, as he takes out a house filled with recently-freed criminals, killers and rapists who’d been put away but released by shady lawyers; humorously, all of them have hyphenated, Joe-Bob type names. But unlike The Executioner or any other Pinnacle series, it’s all played for laughs, with Remo easily and casually killing each of them off one by one, and becoming more concerned with where to put their cars after killing them. 

And that again brings me to my central issue with The Destroyer. Everything is so easy for Remo and Chiun that there’s no tension or drama or anything. Killing is simple for Remo. Along with the lack of sex drive, this makes Remo Williams an altogether poor men’s adventure protagonist, because you can’t really feel anything for him. Perhaps this is why Murphy and Sapir grafted on the “treat Remo like a fool” subtext, to try to make Remo more relatable. And also again the action scenes are not presented the way I prefer; as ever they are relayed via the impressions of the person about to be killed by Remo, with the reader never getting a good idea of what Remo is actually doing. 

So it’s the comedy that carries the story, with every sequence always devolving into satire or parody. Like when Remo and Chiun go fishing for vacation, and a great white shark chases them – Remo even referring to Jaws while it happens – and Chiun merely “calls” the shark with his fingers in the water and then kills it with a single blow. The climactic faceoff with the Rubout Squad is also fairly anticlimactic, with Murphy again returning to his standard trick of killing villains off-page, which is a big letdown. And even here Remo dispatches his enemies with such ease that the reader who actually wanted to see a pseudo “Pinnacle All-Stars” square-off will be mightily underwhelmed. Only Tolan really goes face-to-face with Remo, Murphy apparently wise enough to know his readers would expect a little more from him for his Bolan parody, at least. But even here it’s more for laughs, with Remo almost like a god up against Tolan. 

As for the plot, it moves quickly, and Murphy spends more time with the Rubout Squad bickering and bantering with each other before gunning down innocents in their war to “cleanse” Bay City. Meanwhile Remo and Chiun are called into act as bodyguards for Mayor Rocco Nobile, the mobbed-up bigwig who showed up in the opening pages; this subplot I thought was pretty cool, ie Nobile’s real intent in Bay City, but again Murphy sort of loses site of it as the book progresses. Even here it’s comedy, with Remo and Chiun just happening to get a hotel room right next door to the Rubout Squad, but neither party realizing it. There’s also comedy in the Eraser’s growing anger that the newspapers, for some mysterious reason, never report on the Rubout Squad’s hits. 

The ”climax” is on us before we realize it, and while it might not be the action spectacular you’d get in a more “straight” men’s adventure novel, it does feature the Eraser in a tank going down Main Street in Bay City. But the confrontation with the Rubout Squad is quick, anticlimactic, and mostly off-page, so I wouldn’t use Bay City Blast as an indication of how Remo Williams would fare against the Death Merchant, the Butcher, or the Executioner. But then, Warren Murphy presents Remo as so omnipotent that he’d probably handle the real deals just as easily as he does the spoofs. 

Murphy does score huge points for somehow seeing through the mists of time and describing what passes for a “journalist” in our miserable modern era. Murphy’s intent apparently is to spoof the hiring standards of The New York Post (this is during the section in which the Rubout Squad is incensed that their hits aren’t making it into the news), but little does Murphy realize that he’s describing what will be the required background for a “journalist” in a few decades: 

Overall though, Bay City Blast is fast-moving and fun, but again The Destroyer just isn’t my kind of men’s adventure series.

Death Merchant #34: Operation Mind-Murder

Death Merchant #34: Operation Mind-Murder, by Joseph Rosenberger

June, 1979  Pinnacle Books

This 34th installment of Death Merchant is another one that promises a helluva lot more than it ultmately delivers. That is, if you’re expecting the plot that’s outlined on the back cover. But if you’re expecting an endless series of action scenes, then that’s exactly what you’ll get. Personally, I was hoping for the story promised on the back cover…that Richard “Death Merchant” Camellion would venture into a desolate Soviet experimental station where people are tortured via mind-control means, some of the prisoners holdovers from WWII. Instead, the entire friggin’ novel is Camellion battling his way to the station, just so he can take photos of it and vamoose. 

It's clear Joseph Rosenberger was interested in mind control and fringe science in general, so it’s surprising he didn’t elaborate more on his own setup here. I guess mostly he just used his interests as a framework for the series-mandatory action setpieces. I’m not sure why Rosenberger did this so often. In the Death Merchant novels where he relaxed a little from the action onslaught, like for example The Burning Blue Death and The Cosmic Reality Kill, he delivered novels that were actually enjoyable to read. But with ones like this or Hell In Hindu Land, it’s like he had these cool setups but just didn’t have the fortitude to commit to them and instead went for a knee-jerk “action” approach. But then maybe there are readers who prefer that. I would’ve preferred an entire novel with Camellion stuck in a mind control facility. 

But at the very least Rosenberger is commited to delivering copious amounts of battle sequences. To the extent that we meet Camellion once he’s already on location, holed up with a few Chinese-American CIA agents on Wrangel Island, eighty miles from Siberia. This white hell is a real place, as Rosenberger informs us via footnote. There are a ton of footnotes throughout Operation Mind-Murder, to the point that it comes off like fastidousness on Rosenberger’s part. But basically Rosenberger read in some publication that here on Wrangel the Soviets installed a facility in which subjects – traitors, criminals, and even WWII prisoners – undergo harsh mind-conditioning torture. 

Camellion is purely in cipher mode this time; there was even more emotional makeup to Philip Magellan in one of Russell Smith’s instllaments of The Marksman. The three Chinese agents have no idea who Camellion even is; as usual, our hero has been put in charge of a strike force with no explanation of who he is to the underlings. Rosenberger indulges in his usual penchant for disguises with the off-hand note that Camellion is “fixed up to look like an Oriental,” so as to blend in with his compatriots (one of whom is named Dionysius Woo!). But other than this initial mention, nothing more will be made of Camellion’s disguise; for that matter, Rosenberger seems to forget it, mentioning Camellion’s blue eyes later in the book. (Or whatever color they are, I can’t remember – they just aren’t brown, which they should be if the guy’s truly been “fixed up to look like an Oriental.”) 

One thing I do like is that Rosenberger again brings in that bizarre “Cosmic Lord of Death” stuff. It’s not explicitly mentioned, but there’s a random part where Camellion tells one of his colleagues “you’re a long way from dying;” when the guy asks how Camellion can be sure, the Death Merchant just looks at him. Veteran readers will know that Camellion is seeing the guy’s aura, of course, and apparently it’s not in the color that denotes upcoming death or whatever. Camellion also makes cryptic comments about being on the side of the “Sons of Light” or somesuch. In other words he comes off like a total nutjob once again, and you kind of feel bad for these three agents who have been partnered up with an obvious psychopath in the middle of a snowswept hellhole. 

Camellion’s a lot more verbal about his psychotic hatred of Russians, though. Or “pig farmers,” as he typically refers to them. There are various roving bands of Soviet troops on Wrangel Island, the fodder for the endless action scenes Rosenberger bores us with, almost from the very beginning of the novel to the very end. And as ever they are no match for Camellion, even though they vastly outnumber him. He runs roughshod over them, mocking them as “commie pieces of trash” as he easily blows them away. It was a little interesting reading this, what with the real-world situation in Ukraine at the moment. But given the level of psyops and outright lies about that situation I’ll refrain from saying anything. (Well, maybe just one thing.) 

And Camellion does make it look easy to blow away pig-farmers. Rosenberger tries to inject some suspense into the tale; Camellion and crew are holed up in a cave on the island, the goal to loacate the mind-muder facility and take photos of it. There are various roving bands of Soviet soldiers all over the island, from foot patrols that stay out for a week to helicopter patrols and such. But man it’s basically a cakewalk for the Death Merchant and his newest toy, a .357 Automag made for him by Lee Jurras, an apparently real-life gun manufacturer who has been referenced frequently in this series. This is the weapon Camellion uses most in Operation Mind-Murder, even shooting down one of those Soviet helicopters with it. 

So here’s the plot of Operation Mind-Muder: Richard Camellion gets in a series of endless fights with an endless series of roving Russian army patrols. I mean it just goes on and on for 180+ pages, Rosenberger as ever overwriting to the point of tedium, to the extent that the reader is soon benumbed. And as ever he hops in and out of the perspectives of Camellion’s victims, one-off Russian characters for whom we are given full names, ages, backstories, and the like – moments, that is, before their brains are blasted out by our hero’s Automag. There are also periodic chapters where we get a glimpse of the action from the Russian side of things, with even more one-off Soviets arguing among themselves about the bloody developments on Wrangel Island. At no point anywhere do we get to see the material promised on the back cover. 

The festivities begin when Camellion makes a lone sortie onto the island, getting into a skirmish with a patrol. From there it just escalates with more and more skirmishes, with Camellion at one point even gunning down a bear. There are explosions, avalanches, the expected loss of some of Camellion’s colleagues, and etc. Here is a random example of what is in store for the reader, complete with footnote: 

The absolute slap to the face is that Rosenberger teases us with what could have been a better tale at the very end of the novel. On page 182 we learn that there is something called a “cosmic generator” on the island, but no one can figure out what it does, and they’ll need to grill the captured Soviets for more info. Meanwhile Camellion’s all fired up because he just got a message concerning his next assignment, which no doubt will entail yet more endless action sequences in the next installment. So in other words, he spends the entirety of Operation Mind-Murder fighting to get to this bizarre installation, only gets there at the very end, and then leaves, learning about the strange contraptions within via dialog in the final chapter of the book! 

As ever the most entertaining thing about Death Merchant is how bonkers its creator is. Rosenberger attempts to inject some humor this time, but it just further conveys his own strangeness. For one, Camellion calls people “turtle butts” (as usual he won’t curse), and also there are weird asides like, “Oh, gee whiz and all that sort of worried stuff.” We also get a comedic exchange between Camellion’s Chinese colleagues, during a firefight, about beer making you stupid, to which one of them jokingly responds, “Beer makes you smart…it made Bud Wiser.” Just weird, wild stuff, as Johnny Carson would say…but overall this was not an installment I enjoyed.

Death Merchant #37: The Bermuda Triangle Action

Death Merchant #37: The Bermuda Triangle Action, by Joseph Rosenberger
February, 1980  Pinnacle Books

The 37th volume of Death Merchant treads familiar territory, as Joseph Rosenberger turns in an installment that seems much indebted to the plots of #17: The Zemlya Expedition and #30: The Shambhala Strike – this time nutjob Richard “Death Merchant” Camellion again visits a massive underwater Russian complex, and again (sort of) meets some aliens (of the outer space sort). However he’s more worked up about people who talk while eating. 

Rosenberger as ever goes full out with his manuscript – the book comes in at a whopping 177 pages of small, dense print; a whole heaping ton of it could’ve been cut for a more streamlined (and less taxing) read. For example, we know from chapter one that those wily Russians (aka “pig farmers” and “ivans”) are up to no good on the floor of the ocean, near Jamaica; drilling into the tectonic plates or somesuch to trigger massive earthquakes and other destruction across the United States. Oh, and while they’re down there, they might as well look into all those “UAOs” everyone’s been talking about (aka Unidentified Aquatic Objects).

Then when we cut over to Camellion, here in Kingston, Jamaica with the usual group of easily-confused comrades, we endure a long, long chapter where everyone exposits on what the Russians might be up to down there. As ever, Camellion’s the only one who gets it; everyone else doubts those damn pig farmers could be that evil. The fools! Meanwhile Camellion munches on figs from a box and insists on waiting until he’s finished chewing to talk – he becomes “annoyed” with those who talk while eating. And that’s pretty much the entire glimpse we get into our hero’s personality (such as it is). As ever, Richard Camellion is a total cipher, more of an android than a man.

He’s also the Walking Encyclopedia we know from other volumes; a US nuclear sub disappeared here three months ago, and Camellion’s certain that his own theory is the correct one – that the notorious Bermuda Triangle of this area is in reality a rift in the space-time continuum, and the ship has merely slipped over into another dimension! We get lots of exposition about the Triangle, as ever Camellion expositing from his encyclopediac memory. But unfortunately none of it will ever progress into full-blown sci-fi (despite the arbitrary appearance of aliens later on), and instead will devolve into the usual endless gunfights the series is known for.

Camellion’s main comrade here is Josh Forran, a Navy Intelligence operative stationed in Kingston for years. As usual, the supporting characters have more personality than Rosenberger allows for Camellion, even if the personalities manifest themselves at the most arbitrary of times, like for example during the climactic battle: “Forran was still fighting the nostalgia he felt over having been forced to leave Kingston, Jamaica. All his Dvorak records were still in Kingston.” This mind you is while he’s dodging Russian bullets. There’s also Billy Coopbird hanging around, a Jamaican with an Ivy League education who enjoys speaking like the cliched native for tourists.

But Forran is Camellion’s main teammate for the most part; together they board a mini sub that has fancy “invisibility” gear and head into the depths. On the way they, with the crew of the mother ship, see an actual UAO – a massive underwater craft that defies reality. They watch in shock as it sits there on the ocean floor, then takes off at an impossible speed. Camellion, who refers to the thing as a “OINT,” ie an “Other Intelligence,” takes it all with the same sort of casualness he displayed for the aliens he met back in The Shambhala Strike. And for that matter, Camellion never even once pauses to reflect to himself about those earlier aliens.

Nope, Camellion’s more like, “Okay, that’s that – on with the mission.” To me, this represents probably one of the main sources of frustration about the Death Merchant series. It has all this fringe science and supernatural stuff, but all of it’s just used as window dressing. What does it matter that you have aliens, UFOs, spontaneously-combusting people, and myriad other weird things, when your protagonst clearly couldn’t give two shits about any of it?? Even later, when after the mission the Navy dudes find an object of alien metal mysteriously deposited in their ship, clearly left (somehow) by those aliens, Camellion basically shrugs and forgets about it.

But anyway Camellion and Forran make their way to the massive underwater Soviet complex, which of course brings to mind the similar one in The Zemlya Expedition. Not that Camellion even once reflects back on that, either. It’s sad when the reader actually knows more about Camellion’s past assignments than Camellion himself does. About the only bit of continuity in the book is an arbitrary bit where Camellion thinks of “the coming horrors” of the 1980s, in particular those having to do with spontaneous human combustion – clumsy foreshadowing, I suppose, of the next volume. 

They infiltrate the place and sneak around, Forran “feeling as uncomfortable as an armless poker player.” Soon enough they’re spotted and engaged in a firefight with KGB guards, a bit where we see Camellion’s insanity, as he literally laughs in the face of death. To Rosenberger’s credit, Camellion’s comrades almost always realize that the dude’s a psychopath. After this we’re back to the exposition, as Camellion again faces off with the dumbass intelligence bigwigs who bicker over what the Russians might do, now that Camellion’s gotten visual sighting of their massive underwater drills. Once again, only Camellion insists that those damn ivans might nuke everyone.

One expects a Thunderball-esque underwater battle at the complex, but instead The Bermuda Triangle Action plays out in an overlong (way overlong) battle aboard the ship Camellion and crew are on, which is attacked by Cubans and KGB soldiers. The underwater complex is almost casually destroyed by submarines. Camellion leads a crew of Navy SEALS, armed with grenade-bearing crossbows(!), against the Cubans, leading into another mostly-boring Rosenberger action scene that seems to never end. But at least Rosenberger has a sense of humor, for after shedding copious amounts of blood, Camellion tells Billy Coopbird at the end: “I hate violence.” WTF?? Even Billy is thrown by that one, thinking to himself how there is something “alien” about Camellion, “another kind of presence staring out through his eyes.”

This volume does have a lot of underwater action in it, and I’ve always been a sucker for that stuff, having seen Thunderball at an impressionable age. Or was it the underwater part in For Your Eyes Only that hooked me? In fact it might’ve been, as I saw that one in ’82, or whenever it debuted on HBO, when I was seven or so. But anyway we get a lot of that in The Bermuda Triangle Action, which despite the title and (brief) appearance of an underwater flying object, is really just the same old, so far as the Death Merchant goes. 

Here’s Allan’s review. 

Death Merchant: An Insider's View

A big thanks to Allan Wood of the World of Joseph Rosenberger blog for transcribing this and emailing it to me, for publication here – this is the Death Merchant writeup by Joseph Rosenberger that ran in the back of some Pinnacle books in the early ‘80s. It was originally written for a free flyer Pinnacle gave out in bookstores in the late ‘70s (hence the “1978” reference toward the end of the piece).

 Anyway, please enjoy this “insider’s view” into the Death Merchant, courtesy the fevered imagination of its (possibly insane) creator!

An insider's view of the Death Merchant— A master of disguise, deception, and destruction . . . and his job is death. 

DEATH MERCHANT 

by Joseph Rosenberger 

One of Pinnacle's best-selling action series is the Death Merchant, which tells the story of an unusual man who is a master of disguise and an expert in exotic and unusual firearms: Richard Camellion. Dedicated to eliminating injustice from the world, whether on a personal, national, or international level, possessed of a coldly logical mind, totally fearless, he has become over the years an unofficial, unrecognized, but absolutely essential arm of the CIA. He takes on the dirty jobs, the impossible missions, the operations that cannot be handled by the legal or extralegal forces of this or other sympathetic countries. He is a man without a face, without a single identifying characteristic. He is known as the master of the three Ds—Death, Destruction, and Disguise. He is, in fact and in theory, the Death Merchant. 

The conception of the "Death Merchant" did not involve any instant parthenogenesis, but a parentage whose partnership is more ancient than recorded history. The father of Richard Camellion was Logic. The mother, Realism. 

Logic involved the realization that people who read fiction want to be entertained and that real-life truth is often stranger and more fantastic than the most imaginative kind of fiction. Realism embraced the truth that any human being, having both emotional and physical weaknesses, is prone to mistakes and can accomplish only so much in any given situation. 

We are born into a world in which we find ourselves surrounded by physical objects. There seems to be still another—a subjective—world within us, capable of receiving and retaining impressions from the outside world. Each one is a world of its own, with a relation to space different from that of the other. Collectively, these impressions and how they are perceived on the individual level make each human being a distinct person, an entity with his own views and opinions, his own likes and dislikes, his own personal strengths and weaknesses.

As applied to the real world, this means that the average human is actually a complex personality, a bundle of traits that very often are in conflict with each other, traits that are both good and bad. In fiction this means that the writer must show his chief character to be "human," i.e., to give the hero a multiplicity of traits, some good, some bad.

At the same time, Logic demands that in action-adventure the hero cannot be a literal superman and achieve the impossible. Our hero cannot jump into a crowd of fifty villains and flatten them with his bare hands—even if he is the best karate expert in the world! Sheer weight of numbers would bring him to his knees.

Accordingly, the marriage between Logic and Realism had to be, out of necessity, a practical union, one that would have to live in two worlds: the world of actuality and the world of fiction. This partnership would have to take the best from these two worlds to conceive a lead character who, while incredible in his deeds, could have a counterpart in the very real world of the living.

Conception was achieved. The Death Merchant was born in February of 1971, in the first book of the series, Death Merchant.

This genesis was not without the elements that would shape the future accomplishments of Richard J. Camellion. Just as a real human being is the product of his gene-ancestry and, to a certain extent, of his environment during his formative years, so the fictional Richard Camellion also has a history, although one will have to read the entire series to glean his background and training.

There are other continuities and constants within the general structure of the series. For example, it might seem that the Death Merchant tackles the absurd and the inconceivable. He doesn't. He succeeds in his missions because of his training and experience, with emphasis on the former—training in the arts and sciences, particularly in the various disciplines that deal not only with the physical violence and self-defense, but with the various tricks of how to stay alive—self-preservation!

There are many other cornerstones that form the foundation of the general story line:

 Richard Camellion abhors boredom, loves danger and adventure, and feels that he may as well derive a good income from these qualities. The fact that he often has to take a human life does not make him brutal and cruel.

 Richard Camellion works for money; he's a modern mercenary. Nevertheless, he is a man with moral convictions and deeply rooted loyalties. He will not take on any job if its success might harm the United States.

 The Death Merchant usually works for the CIA or some other U.S. government agency. The reason is very simple. Richard Camellion handles only the most dangerous projects and/or the biggest threats. In today's world the biggest battles involve the silent but very real war being waged between the various intelligence communities of the world. This war is basically between freedom and tyranny, between Democracy and Communism. 

(The Death Merchant has worked for non-government agencies, but he has seldom worked for individuals because few can pay his opening fee: $100,000. Usually, those individuals who could and would pay his fee, such as members of organized crime, couldn't buy his special talents for ten times that, cash in advance.)

 The Death Merchant is a pragmatic realist. He is not a hypocrite and readily admits that he works mainly for money. In his words, "While money doesn't bring happiness, if you have a lot of the green stuff you can be unhappy in maximum comfort." Yet he has been known to give his entire fee—one hundred grand—to charity!

 Richard Camellion did not originate the title "Death Merchant." He hates the title, considering it both silly and incongruous. But he can't deny it. He does deal in death. The nickname came about because of his deadly proficiency with firearms and other devices of the quick-kill. (All men die, and Camellion knows that it is only a question of when. He has never feared death, "Which is maybe one reason why I have lived as long as I have.")

 The weapons and equipment used in the series do exist. (Not only does the author strive for realism and authenticity, but technical advice is constantly being furnished by Lee E. Jurras, the noted ballistician and author.)

Another support of the general plot is that Camellion is a master of disguise and makeup, and a superb actor as well. 

It can be said that Richard Camellion, the Death Merchant, is the heart of the series; but action—fast-paced, violent, often bloody—is the life's blood that keeps the heart pumping. This is not merely a conceptual device of the author; it is based on realistic considerations. The real world is violent. Evil does exist. The world of adventure and of espionage is especially violent. 

The Death Merchant of 1971 is not necessarily the same Death Merchant of 1978. In organizing the series, we did use various concepts in constructing the background and the character of Richard Camellion. 

Have any of these concepts changed? 

The only way to answer the question is to say that while these concepts are still there and have not changed as such, many of them have not matured and are still in the limbo of "adolescence." For example: 

We have not elaborated on several phases of his early background, or given any reasons why Camellion decided to follow a life of danger. He loves danger? An oversimplification. Who first called him the Death Merchant? What kind of training did he have? At times he will murmur, "Dominus Lucis vobiscum." What do the words "The Lord of Life be with you" mean to Camellion? 

All the answers, and more, will be found in future books in the series. 

Camellion's role is obvious. He's the "good guy" fighting on the side of justice. He's a man of action who is very sure of himself in anything he undertakes; a ruthless, cold-blooded cynic who doesn't care if he lives or dies; an expert killing machine whose mind runs in only one groove: getting the job done. One thing is certain: he is not a Knight on a White Horse! He has all the flaws and faults that any human being can have. 

Camellion is a firm believer in law, order, and justice, but he doesn't think twice about bending any law and, if necessary, breaking it. He's an individualist, honest in his beliefs, a nonconformist. 

He also seems to be a health nut. He doesn't smoke, indulges very lightly in alcohol, is forever munching on "natural" snacks (raisins, nuts, etc.), and uses Yoga methods of breathing and exercise. 

Richard Camellion is not the average champion/hero. He never makes a move unless the odds are on his side. He may seem reckless, but he isn't. 

Richard Camellion wouldn't turn down a relationship with a woman, but he doesn't go out of his way to find one. The great love of his life is weapons, particularly his precious Auto Mags. 

As a whole, readers' reactions are very favorable to the series. It is they who keep Richard Camellion alive and healthy. 

The real father and mother of Richard Camellion is Joseph Rosenberger. A professional writer since the age of 21, when he sold an article, he worked at various jobs before turning to fulltime writing in 1961. Rosenberger is the author of almost 2,000 published short stories and articles and 150 books, both fiction and nonfiction, writing in his own name and several pseudonyms. He originated the first kung fu fiction books, under the name of "Lee Chang." Among other things, he has been a circus pitchman, an instructor in "Korean karate," a private detective, and a free-lance journalist. 

Unlike the Death Merchant, the author is not interested in firearms, and does not like to travel. He is the father of a 23-year-old daughter, lives and writes in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, and is currently hard at work on the latest adventure of Richard Camellion, the Death Merchant.

Death Merchant #38: The Burning Blue Death

Death Merchant #38: The Burning Blue Death, by Joseph Rosenberger
April, 1980  Pinnacle Books

The 38th installment of Death Merchant sees Richard Camellion venturing from Holland to DC to West Germany, in a borderline sci-fi adventure that spans about three months. At this point in the series Joseph Rosenberger was freely indulging in his fringe science interests, to the point that, for once, we have here one of the rare installments that is more composed of dialog and plot rather than action sequence after action sequence. Indeed, there are only a handful of action scenes throughout The Burning Blue Death.

We get the impression from the outset that this won’t be a typical installment, with an opening missive from the Death Merchant himself:

It’s quite strange reading such words from a fictional character whose business is death and who has killed, by a rough estimate, perhaps a thousand or so people by the time of this novel’s events. But The Burning Blue Death is High Rosenberger for sure, overwritten to the point of insanity (183 pages of super-small print), littered with egregious footnotes, filled with metaphysical stuff like auras, Krillian photography, and Spontaneous Human Combustion (or SHC). For a while it’s occurred to me that there are some points of similarity between Death Merchant and The Mind Masters; both series seem to come from authors with rather twisted imaginations, and Rosenberger and Rossmann/Ross clearly share the same interests – even the writing styles are somewhat similar, with both authors prone to having their characters baldly exposit on esoteric subjects, even referencing specific magazines and articles verbatim.

But whereas The Mind Masters put more focus on sleazy sex and less on action (at least in the first three volumes), Rosenberger as we know could be guilty of turning in a book that was really just one overlong action scene after another. The problem with that is, at least for me, Rosenberger’s no David Alexander. I mean, that guy could write a 183-page action scene that would probably be a blast to read, so to speak, but Rosenberger’s action scenes can be turgid and repetitive. This is why installments like Burning Blue Death are so special – a rare instance of Joseph Rosenberger putting more focus on the story and the latest weird assignment Camellion has undertaken. I’ve only read a few other Death Merchant novels I could say the same of (for which reason they’re still my favorites): The Cosmic Reality Kill would definitely be one, as would be Blueprint Invisibility.

When we meet Camellion he’s in Holland, having just appeared the previous night on a late night TV show starring “the Johnny Carson of the Netherlands.” As ever Camellion is in one of his disguises, this time looking like a Dutchman in his 60s. He’s put a bunch of ads in various newspapers asking about SHC, which is what he discussed on the TV program the night before. Gradually we’ll learn that a few US notables, including a Senator, have literally gone up in flames recently, imploding with blue flame. Camellion, like his creator, is enamored with esoteric subjects, thus is so handedly familiar with Sponataneous Human Combustion that he can easily pose as a scientist specializing in it – even speaking in pristine Dutch. Unfortunately we don’t see the TV bit. Rather, the focus is more on the goons Camellion is certain will be coming for him, given that he pointedly revealed some info that would surely come across the attention of whover is behind these SHC attacks.

Sure enough some goons come a-calling late that night, but have no fear – Camellion is armed with some cool-sounding modified .45s that have elongated barrels and pistol grips in front of the trigger guards. (Dean Cate has illustrated one of them in his typically-wonderful cover art.) There follows the standard Rosenberger action scene, complete with rampant POV-hopping where we are suddenly informed the names and backgrounds of the one-off gunmen who show up briefly enough to shoot at Camellion, miss, and get killed. Throughout Camellion has on “old man” makeup and a half-bald wig and wears very sci-fi-sounding night vision goggles, which Rosenberger must’ve thought were so cool that he actually describes them twice; Camellion wears them again in the novel’s final action sequence, and Rosenberger tells us all about them as if forgetting he already did so a hundred pages earlier.

Thirteen days later and Camellion, in another disguise, is over in London, having tracked down the man who hired the thugs who failed in the hit on him in Holland. As ever working with the CIA (with whose local director, Harvey Spare, Camellion engages in page-filling arguments about everything from SHC to gun control), Camellion puts together a team and raids the tobacco shop of his target, a man named Marmis. Here Rosenberger gets positively poetic about the variety of expensive tobacco to be found in Marmis’s shop, only to finally inform us that Camellion doesn’t smoke(!). And speaking of our hero, his latest disguise has him as a “crippled up” old man, complete with a cast on his arm.

There follows another Rosenberger action scene, more tedious than exciting, which again culminates with everyone dead, including Marmis – killed by a fatal drug accidentally given him by a junior agent. But Marmis’s place is really a hideout for a branch of the IRA, and once everyone’s dead Camellion finds coded documents written in the Labanotation method – humorously, Camellion instantly knows they are written thusly, given that he is an expert on every subject known to man. Finally the SHC angle returns – I was afraid at first that The Burning Blue Death would be another Death Merchant that squandered its fringe science plot with random shootouts and whatnot – and Rosenberger muses on the subject via several pages of case studies.

A whopping six weeks later, Camellion’s back in the US, working with usual CIA contact Courtland Grojean, and the CIA specialists have finally broken the code. Marmis’s uncoded documents hide illustrations of men in weird-looking suits, complete with metal rods sticking out of “skullcap”-type helmets; Dean Cate also attempted to illustrate this, at the top of his cover art, but it looks like he misread Rosenberger’s description, or perhaps the Pinnacle editor didn’t properly convey it, as the dude in the drawing looks more like the grand dragon of some sci-fi KKK branch. Courtesy more bald exposition with CIA science contact Dr. Russell Courtier, a biophysicist from an unsepcified New York university, we learn that SHC might be induced artificially, and indeed the Nazis were working on such a weapon.

Mention of “The Brotherhood” in those coded documents has Camellion figuring a neo-Nazi group is behind the plot. After a brief firefight with thugs who try to take him out on the way to his apartment in the DC suburbs – after which he spends a week, off-page, in jail – Camellion hops a plane to Germany. Twenty-three days later, he’s now working with a group of West German agents and researching the SHC developments made by the Nazis in WWII, under the guidance of a scientist named Helmut Koerber. We learn that the SHC device was called the Transmutationizer, and we see one in use, as a group of Brotherhood gunmen attack Camellion and crew, two of them wearing portable SHC devices which are powered by a trailer truck. Some of Camellion’s comrades go up in weird blue flames.

It seems that just about every Death Merchant climaxes with an assault on a fortress, and such is the case with The Burning Blue Death. Having determined that an old SS sadist named Baron Hammerstein is behind the Brotherhood and the plot to use SHC to kill off his enemies, Camellion teams up with a crew of West German agents and British SIS commandoes and storms the Baron’s Gothic castle. Here Rosenberger again tells us all about Camellion’s new-fangled night vision goggles, apparently forgetting he already told us about them before, and also we’re informed that Camellion makes use of a Sidewinder submachine gun, which us Pinnacle diehards know was a gun also favored by fellow imprint hero The Penetrator.

The ensuing action scene is heavy on the carnage – as ever Rosenberger injects just the right amount of gore in his action scenes, with heads blowing off and whatnot – but is a bit unsatisfying in that the villains of the piece, Koerber and Baron Hammerstein, are quickly introduced and dispensed of within just a few pages. However we do get to see more usage of the SHC device, with friend and foe imploding with blue flame. Camellion, realizing this would just be yet another device used to terrorize mankind, ends up destroying the Transmutationizer. The designs for building one are also lost, what with the massacre of the people behind it.

As usual the highlight of this Death Merchant is the arbitrary ranting of Camellion, which is to say Rosenberger. He bitches about religion, anti-smoking (ie warnings not to smoke), and Jimmy Carter, among many other things, though to be honest his Carter-bashing is perfectly understandable. The highlight though is Camellion’s theory on the “level of incompetence,” which he discusses with Grojean:

“The principle is very simple. In every organization, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. That is, if people do well in one job, they are promoted to another higher up the ladder, and so on until they reach a job they can’t do well. As soon as people reach jobs they can’t do, they tend to make mistakes because they’ve reached their level of incompetence. Understand?” 

“Certainly. The cream rises until it sours.”

I planned to put a Hillary Clinton joke here, but decided not to, so as not to offend anyone who might be planning (for whatever reason) to vote for her.  Plus the joke wouldn’t have worked anyway, because Hillary Clinton has never done well in any job.

Finally, here’s a review by Allan.

Death Merchant #17: The Zemlya Expedition

Death Merchant #17: The Zemlya Expedition
July, 1976  Pinnacle Books

The Death Merchant veers again into sci-fi with a plot that could come out of John Eagle Expeditor (or one of Roger Moore’s Bond movies), as “pig farmer”-hating hero Richard Camellion heads to a massive high-tech city beneath the sea. However any hopes that this will be an interesting installment are quickly dashed, as for the most part The Zemlya Expedition is about 130 endless pages of densely-detailed gun battles, and, like most other books in the series, quickly becomes a chore to read.

Not to come off too negatively; as ever, Joseph Rosenberger injects enough of his patented bizarro diatribes to brighten the occasional spot. We’ll get random arguments about religion, mind control, and even doomsday prophecizing straight out of one of those faux-“documentary” type end of the world movies that were so big in the late ‘70s. But to get there you have to read like twenty pages describing in minute detail a gunfight between Camellion and legions of “Stalin saps” and whatnot.

The Zemlya Expedition starts off strongly enough. When we meet him Richard Camellion has snuck onto a Soviet research ship in the freezing desolation of the Arctic Ocean. He’s the only American in a few hundred miles and he’s surrounded by KGB and Russian soldiers. We learn that, for the past eleven weeks, Camellion has been working on project “Saddlesoap – Two Bars” for the NSA. Apparently there is a Russian doctor who is a contact for the US government and who has gotten in touch with her handlers about something major going on, for which she needs to be exfiltrated immediately.

The only problem is, this doctor, a climatologist named Raya Dubanova, is deep down in Zemyla II, a high-tech underwater complex built by the Russians in the Barents Sea of the Arctic circle. In the first few chapters Rosenberger occasionally hops back to Camellion’s briefing with the NSA and CIA several weeks before, shoehorning as customary tons of exposition about the Zemyla experiment as well as other odds and ends that don’t have much to do with anything. But we have to read tons and tons of stuff about ocean research, deep currents, and the dangers of weather being used as a weapon. Indeed the novel ends with a warning of the earth’s upcoming destruction.

The first of many, many fights ensues as Camellion is promptly discovered on the ship. He beats three men to death and assumes the identity of one of them – as we’ll recall, Camellion lives up to his surname by being able to disguise himself. Indeed he considers himself “the Rembrandt of plastic putty.” He now goes about the ship as “Valentin Prisk,” arrogantly confident that “even Prisk’s mother” wouldn’t realize that he is an imposter. And yet Camellion’s discovered in just a few pages, as he’s overlooked the fact that the real Prisk was missing a finger. Confronted by the KGB man in charge of the ship’s security, Camellion gets in the first of endless gunbattles that take up the brunt of the novel. It goes on and on and on, but Camellion is uninjured thanks to his “Kevlar-Thermacoacytl longjohns” which are bulletproof and even absorb impact.

However Camellion is caught, and here we have a bit of human depth from him, as he’s photographed and fingerprinted by the Reds, and this burns him to the core, as this has never been done to him before. Now Moscow will know what the legendary “Death Merchant” really looks like. For reasons of plot contrivance the KGB leader decides to take Camellion down to Zemyla instead of sending his ass posthaste to Moscow; he wants to show off how far advanced the USSR is in underwater technology. Thus Camellion is escorted to the “underground pig pen” on Weise Island in the Arctic, where the Russians have hidden their SPECTRE-style massive underwater fortress. 

Zemyla II is straight out of science fiction. It’s composed of five transparent domes deep in the ocean, each about 75 feet high, with sodium lights illuminating the crushing depths above them. Even Camellion has to admit the Russians are far advanced in this regard, and KGB leader General Vershensky gloats over it. “Too bad Jesus Christ and all the wild-eyed prophets didn’t have to deal with these Russian pig farmers,” Camellion thinks to himself. While this sci-fi underwater vibe sounds like a fascinating premise for an entertaining novel, Rosenberger basically just uses it as the framework for 130 or so pages of Camellion shooting at people.

First though we have more bald exposition, as Camellion, Vershensky, and a host of other Soviet bigwigs argue about brainwashing, with Vershensky even reading verbatim from a handy copy of Argosy magazine! Just like the blatant exposition in The Mind Masters, Camellion even argues back, citing sources with apparent photographic memory. It’s interesting but stupid, if you know what I mean – they’re on the bottom of the ocean in a high-tech fortress and they’re arguing over whether America uses Russian brainwashing techniques!

But we haven’t even gotten to the religion-bashing yet. Camellion, imprisoned, meets Dr. Raya Dubanova, a two-hundred pound lady in her mid-40s (forget about the blonde on the cover; she doesn’t exist in the novel). When Raya makes the mistake of mentioning God to Camellion, he goes off on a ranting diatribe that would even befuddle Archie Bunker. He does get in a good line, though: “One man’s religion can be another man’s hell.” But anyway, given her off-hand mention of God, Camellion promptly regards Raya as “a Commie Christian crackpot” and rants against her beliefs – mind you, while they’re in the middle of an escape!

Raya you see totally saves Camellion’s bacon, coming into his cell and killing the two guards. After arguing about Christianity for several pages (another rant of Camellion’s: “Christianity denies man his right to reason, makes him a moral slave”), the two finally escape the cell. Here we are given lots of technical detail about Zemyla. It’s made up of five domes but only a few of them have anyone in them. Rather than bring the place to life Camellion just fills up several pages with bald technical detail. Camellion and Raya two split up – Raya confident that her cover will protect her from suspicion in Camellion’s escape – and Camellion gets in yet another protracted battle.

Here Rosenberger as ever lightens up the overbearing grimness with bizarro phrases like “he took a one-way trip to stiff-city.” Coming across a cache of “nitrostarch” explosive, Camellion is able to blow up the dome he’s currently in – that is, after another endless gun battle. Seriously, this novel is like Die Hard for 150 pages, but without any of the fun or charm. It’s really just dire and endlessly detailed, and again the helluva it is the book is so densely written with small print and hardly any white space. If Rosenberger had just loosened up and had fun with it, he might’ve had something more along the lines of The Cosmic Reality Kill and less along the lines of Hell In Hindu Land. Why not skip the gunfights and have Camellion shown around Zemyla II, perhaps even meeting a sexy but duplicitous female KGB agent who tries to sway him? But fun pulp like this does not exist in the world of the Death Merchant.

As is customary for the series we get a lot of cutovers to arbitrary Russian characters who worry over Camellion’s swathe of destruction and wonder how they can stop him. But they are uniformly stupid, like a group of KGB soldiers who buy Camellion’s story for mercy and get in a diving bell and are then all blown up by a few RPG blasts. (Camellion even briefly feels sorry for them, a rare moment of sympathy from Camellion for the “pig farmers”). Oh and meanwhile Raya is in the process of being beaten and tortured; turns out the Russians aren’t total morons and quickly learned she was the one who freed Camellion, mostly because she didn’t ensure her kills when she shot the two guards. 

But Raya’s able to free herself (she’s no damsel in distress, which is admirable on Rosenberger’s part) and reconnects with Camellion, who all by his lonesome, surrounded by about a thousand Red soldiers, has managed to blow up most of Zemyla II. They escape on a “little boat” (the apostrophes constantly and annoyingly used to describe them), aka a small submarine, and escape into the freezing ocean. Camellion suits up in a high-tech deep diving suit and takes on some Russian frogmen just for the hell of it, but this too just comes off as more endlessly-detailed action. He plants some more nitrostarch on the last few domes and that’s all she wrote for Zemyla II, though we learn General Vershensky has escaped.

The novel wraps up in a several-page “Addendum” in which we learn why Raya so desperately wanted to be pulled out of Zemyla. She has learned that earth has entered a “magnetic null zone” and that, due to the earth’s core about to be ripped apart or somesuch, the world will end “within twenty years.” More doomsaying straight out of a late ‘70s faux-documentary ensues, with rampant description of how the earth will be destroyed by chaotic weather and earthquakes and this and that. 

But does Camellion give a damn? Of course not…he’s more concerned that his next mission will be taking him to…Algeria! And that’s that, and we readers need a breather even if Camellion himself doesn’t appear to. Or Rosenberger, for that matter. While his writing doesn’t do much for me I still have to respect this guy; I mean he never took a shortcut with his writing. The books just go on and on and you just want to go back in time and tell him to cut some stuff out and worry less about the endless gun detail and, you know, have a little more fun with it.

Finally, here are reviews by Marty McKee and Allan Wood.

Death Merchant #40: Blueprint Invisibility

Death Merchant #40: Blueprint Invisibility, by Joseph Rosenberger
August, 1980  Pinnacle Books

Sporting an awesome cover (I think the Death Merchant covers, courtesy Dean Cate, were the best in the entire Pinnacle line), Blueprint Invisibility features psychotic protagonist Richard Camellion taking on a mission that involves the Philadelphia Experiment hoax, MKUltra-style mind control, the Red Chinese, and, uh, New York City escort services.

But man, how about that cover? You’ve got bizarre, Ken Strickfaden-style gizmos, what appears to be a pair of teleporting people, and a nattily-attired Richard Camellion pulling himself out of a gurney or something while almost casually firing his submachine gun. Best of all, the top of the cover features a muscular dwarf with an eyepatch and robotic arms! I’ve been hopping around this series with no concern about reading it in order, so I decided to check out this volume, just given the cover alone.

And while most of this stuff’s in the actual novel, it isn’t featured as much as you wish it would be. Instead, Joseph Rosenberger is more concerned with pointlessly-detailed gun battles and lots of material which was obviously lifted from various encyclopedias or copies of National Geographic, as well as the odd issue of Fate. The Philadelphia Experiment stuff is basically just the framework Rosenberger uses to get Camellion in a host of fights with the Red Chinese, and ultimately it’s a complete McGuffin.

Anyway, Rosenberger opens the novel as if we’ve missed something; at first I thought it was a direct lead-in from the previous installment, which I don’t have, but it isn’t. Camellion’s in DC, leading a group of Navy Intelligence operatives as they tail Mason Shiptonn, a Navy Intelligence staffer who, Camellion is certain, has been turned into a mind-controlled sleeper agent by the Red Chinese. Shiptonn was one of the few people with access to the ultra-classified Philadelphia Experiment papers, and apparently three months ago he took photos of them and gave them to the Chinese – all without his conscious knowledge.

Rather than the Philadelphia Experiment’s “hyperspace quality and/or factor” stuff, Camellion is more concerned over how the Chinese comrpomised Shiptonn…and how they did it so quickly, like in just a few hours. Because, as we are reminded at length, there’s no surefire way to completely control a person’s mind in such a short time. I should mention here that more, much more, attention is placed on mind control/MKUltra stuff rather than the more-interesting Philadelphia Experiment stuff, which Rosenberger almost blithely documents and then moves on to other things.

When they lock down Shiptonn after a firefight with some Chinese agents, Camellion is briefed by his CIA handler Grojean, and decides to move on to New York City to figure out how exactly Shiptonn was brainwashed. No one’s much concerned about the leaked Philadelphia Experiment stuff; they’re more worried over other sleeper agents. Anyway, Shiptonn spent one night with a high-class hooker from the Olympia Escort Service in Manhattan, and at great length Camellion learns that it’s run by a gorgeous former escort named Soraya Duncan, who is involved with a Mafia boss named Charley Franzese.

Rosenberger fills the middle quarter of the novel with material almost lifted verbatim from various guides to New York. Reading Blueprint Invisibility, I had to laugh, recalling what Donald “Dr. Rock” Schnell mentioned in his memories of Rosenberger – namely, how Rosenberger’s study was lined with National Geographic magazines and maps of US cities. One can easily tell, reading this novel, that Rosenberger had each of these things by his side as he pecked away at his typewriter.

The escort service material actually gets more print than both the Philadelphia Experiment and the brainwashing stuff combined. My guess is Rosenberger also must’ve been leaning on the various “sex expose” paperbacks that had been printed at the time – but then, the dude himself penned some, back in the ‘60s, a few of which I’ll get around to reviewing someday. Anyway the Olympia service has never been busted, due to the curious fact that no client has ever managed to score with one of the escorts!

Camellion suspects Soraya Duncan and mobster Farenzese are involved with the Red Chinese somehow, and that the escort programmed Shiptonn that night. Camellion canvases Manhattan, doing his research, working with his CIA contact – a man named William Fieldhouse!  Stephen Mertz has told me that Fieldhouse was friends with Rosenberger, and indeed was part of what Mertz calls “the Rosenberger Circle.” So this character, a tough ‘Nam vet who is described as “well-muscled and nice-looking,” is clearly a reference to the actual William Fieldhouse, whom Camellion starts to like so much that he soon just calls him “Bill!”

Soraya Duncan is a mega-babe redhead who despite being involved with Farenzese will still go out with the occasional client. Camellion uses a dandy named Ewart Gremmill, a CIA contractor marked for death by the Agency, to set him up with her. We get lots of background detail on Soraya, none of which matters much in the grand scheme of things. So shoehorned is all of this that the dwarf on the cover, who turns out to be a former wrestler named Gregory Gof (and who has steel fingers, instead of the friggin’ cooler robotic arms of the cover painting), is not only Soraya’s assistant but also her brother – and this tidbit is not fleshed out in the least. In fact, Gof amounts to zilch in the novel, appearing for maybe three pages.

The Camellion-Soraya date is the most interesting moment in the novel, as Camellion finds himself taken by the gorgeous beauty, despite his concern that she might be a traitor. And she’s my dream girl, too, casually discussing P. D. Ouspensky on a first date!! But still, Camellion senses “a strong negative thought-field around her.” They go back to her posh apartment, where the lady makes clear her intention to screw Camellion senseless. I figured she’d instead lead him into a trap, or some out-of-nowhere and pointlessly-detailed fight scene would ensue, but nope – Rosenberger writes an actual sex scene, my friends.

Spanning four pages, the Camellion-Soraya encounter is a lot more explicit than I expected it to be, given the author. But just after their mutual whopping orgasms the two are surprised by the sudden entrance of Soraya’s mobster partner, Charley Franzese, with a few of his goons. Camellion, who is playing a Texan enterpreneur named “Jefferson Davis Hafferton,” busts out his kung-fu skills and beats them all senseless. He then leaves Soraya there with them, having come to the decision that she isn’t the best woman he’s had sex with, even though he lies to her that she is(?).

So far there hasn’t been much of the tedious action Rosenberger is known for, but he makes up for it posthaste. Launching a soft probe in the middle of the night on the building which houses the Olympia Escort Service, Camellion and Fieldhouse (the former who wears a Frankenstein mask, the latter a Wolfman mask) get in a huge battle with Franzense’s stooges. It goes on and on, and culminates with the two making an aiborne escape on a helicopter, with the NYPD helicopter patrol in pursuit.

It should be mentioned that Camellion goes out of his way to kill cops this time around – in fact, several times he tells his associates that they too had better be ready to kill any police officers that get in the way! So here he casually oversees the destruction of a few NYPD helicopters, marking up the policeman’s deaths as just par for the course. But then, Camellion is more psychotic than usual this time out; even Rosenberger seems to understand this, as toward the end he informs us that “in eleven years [Camellion] had killed literally thousands of people.”

Another mostly-tedious action scene follows, as Camellion, Fieldhouse, and more CIA agents attack a “Red Chinese fortress” in the affluential 160s section of Manhattan. In this sequence Camellion et al are themselves disguised as Chinese, thanks to Camellion’s usual wizardry with makeup; also notable is this tongue-twister of a line, which is delivered just before Camellion’s new buddy guns down a few Red Chinese: “Go screw a sapsucker, you slant-eyed slobs,” snarled Fieldhouse.

In the homestretch it’s learned that the Red Chinese who stole the Philadelphia Experiment stuff are on Chelsworth Island, off of Maine’s coast. Also the Chinese agents who have perfected the mind-control are there, not to mention Soraya Duncan, the three of her escorts who were in on it with her, and Farenzese. I mean, they’re all just conveniently gathered together. Camellion, his stalwart Agency pals, and a handful of SEALs stage an ambush, Camellion informing them that everyone on the island is to be killed – and indeed, if any of the men have problems with shooting women, they’d better leave now!

As if to prove how heartless and sick he is, Camellion soon after blows away a Chinese whore in cold blood, just some innocent hooker brought in to entertain the Chinese officers. Then, dressed in a “sky blue jumpsuit,” Camellion proceeds to lead his team on a gore-soaked assault on the island, in the third and final of the novel’s incredibly-boring action scenes. It’s all just like Rosenberger’s earlier Mace junk, with a barrage of Chinese names and obscure martial arts terms thrown at us.

Rosenberger himself relishes in describing the gruesome deaths of Soraya Duncan and her three girls, documenting thoroughly the path of each bullet through Soraya’s “once-beautiful body.” It’s dark, disquieting stuff, and off-putting as well – Rosenberger writes that one of the poor girls is even given “a free hysterectomy” thanks to a SEAL-fired bullet, and it’s all just depressing because it’s our supposed heroes who are shooting these unarmed girls, and it’s all presented to us as a sterling victory against the dark forces of Communism.

All of the Philadelphia Experiment stuff is rendered moot in the melee; we learn that the Chinese have built a “space bending machine,” but Camellion has no interest whatsoever in learning what it does. And Rosenberger has no interest in telling us. Instead, Camellion oversees the death of everyone, save for a few captured Chinese scientists, and then wires the entire compound to blow, including the space-bender. And now he’s all excited because Grojean just told him that his next mission will be in…North Ireland! The End!!

So yeah, none of the cool shit depicted on the cover actually happens in the novel. But in exchange you at least get to witness the Death Merchant scoring with a woman. Plus, we learn the usual random and bizarre tidbits about Camellion, like that “one of his favorite drinks” is two parts Scotch and one part Perrier over two ice cubes. Also that he enjoys eating kumquats while drinking cocoa. Oh, and that not only does he need just four hours of sleep a night, but that his typical breakfast is “black coffee, a small cup of honey, and two vitamin pills.”

Finally, the super-bizarre shit is in full effect, so far as the “Cosmic Lord of Death” goes, with Camellion apparently knowing when he’s going to die (“but not today!”), the aforementioned sensing of “negative thought-fields,” and occasional lines like, “The Cosmic Lord of Death was always on [Camellion’s] side, but Time hated his guts and was forever his main enemy.” Best of all is Camellion’s apparent unwillingness to curse, the harshest line he delivers being, “Ostritch crap!”

Which, sadly, pretty much sums up Blueprint Invisibility.

Finally, be sure to check out the Sharp Pencil blog, where Alan has been reviewing every single volume of the Death Merchant series!  Now that is commitment!