Moscow At High Noon Is The Target (Hot Line #3)

Moscow At High Noon Is The Target, by Paul Richards
No month stated, 1973  Award Books

Curiously the final volume of Hot Line isn’t copyright Lyle Kenyon Engel, like the first two were, which makes me suspect this short-lived series suffered the same fate as the Engel-produced Nick Carter: Killmaster: total control eventually went over to Award Books. But anyway Hot Line never really got off the ground, only managing three volumes.

Thanks to Spy Guys And Gals we know this one was a collaboration between Chet Cunningham and Dan Streib. Streib co-wrote the previous volume, and his stamp is frequently evident here, particularly when protagonist Grant Fowler whines about how tough his life is and desperately wishes to quit and get married. Streib’s action protagonists usually lack any balls, as most notably demonstrated in the Engel-produced Chopper Cop series. Like “tough cop” Terry Bunker, Streib’s Grant Fowler is a worry wart who is determined to quit the spy game asap and find some woman to marry. This is a far cry from the grizzled asshole who starred in the first volume.

There’s no pickup from either earlier volume, though we are informed Fowler has only been the President’s man for a few “months.” Fowler when we meet him is in Copenhagen, still successfully perpetrating his wealthy gadabout cover. Now he’s hawking a new business venture called Antique Aircraft Inc, which specializes in rebuilding exact replicas of WWI airplanes and staging mock aerial combat around the globe. There’s a lot of flying material in this one, about as much as you’d encounter in the average William Crawford novel, and it gets to be boring after a while.

This is too bad because the opening of the novel’s pretty cool, promising more thrills than what is ultimately delivered: a group of commandos, possibly American, stage daring, bloody heists behind the Iron Curtain. They’ll hit armored trucks, banks, whatever, taking out guards and innocent bystanders with subguns and explosives. The commie powers at be are convinced America is behind these attacks, and tensions have escalated to the point of WWIII. The President of course decides to call in his sole Hot Line man, Grant Fowler.

It seems to me that Cunningham handled the brunt of the writing duties; the book reads very similarly to his work. But it might be Streib who writes the occasional cutovers to the President and his secretary, who deal with their own somewhat-boring subplots in DC while Fowler handles the action overseas. I say this because these scenes are page-fillers with fretting, worried protagonists wondering what might happen next; there’s a lot of stalling and repetition. Personally I think some of the opening heists could’ve been more fleshed out.

More info on the heisters would’ve been wise, too; as it is, we only get to read about “The Commander,” who leads these American servicemen turned criminals. They operate out of Berlin and use surplus military gear in their raids. It’s dangled as a mystery who the Commander is, but gradually the puzzle pieces together until we realize it’s one of two characters, both of whom happen to work with Fowler on the assignment. This group calls itself The Brigadiers, and their next heist will be particularly audacious: the theft of Lenin’s embalmed corpse, on display in Moscow.

Fowler only knows that something’s going to be stolen in Moscow, so must get over there without blowing his cover. Luckily Antique Aircraft is scheduled to take part in a mock WWI battle in that very commie city, so Fowler’s able to get himself in the show due to the fact that he’s a pilot and he’s the owner of the company. He heads over to Frankfort, Germany (and yes, it’s spelled “Frankfort” throughout) to take over the preparation for the mock combat, and finds time for some shenanigans with Elaine Katz, the hot brunette pilot who runs the European branch of Antique Aircraft – and I can’t believe I forgot to mention that Fowler’s already had some off-page shenanigans with a blonde babe in Copenhagen.

Here in “Frankfort” Fowler meets two men who will add the mystery to the narrative, as one of them is the Commander of the Brigadiers: first there’s Okie Bob Arnold, a CIA man with “mod clothing” and a flashy moustache who has been sent to help Fowler on his assignment, and next there’s General Sloane, an older retired military man who is flying one of the planes in the mock combat. Cunningham kills the mystery posthaste, as one of these men makes a phone call and next chapter Fowler finds out Elaine’s been killed in an airport “accident,” chopped up by prop blades. Cunningham tells us which of the two men made the call, totally blowing any chance at mystery. I couldn’t believe he was so brazen about it. Particularly given that the rest of the narrative tries to play the reader along over which of the two men is really Fowler’s enemy.

Fowler’s bummed over Elaine’s death – which occurs like an hour after they sleep together – but soon enough he’s checking out bikini-clad Maria at the General’s place. She’s been sent along from Moscow as a sort of state rep to ensure everything goes well. There’s also some flatfooted suspense about whether Fowler can trust her or not, and honestly all this stuff comes off like the work of Streib, with a suddenly-wimpy Fowler moaning how hard it is for him to open his heart to a woman, due to how she could be an enemy just waiting to stab his back.

There isn’t much action. In Moscow Fowler and Okie Bob go to a bar frequented by circus freaks, a surreal setting that’s handled in Cunningham’s trademark meat and potatoes narrative style. Fowler’s deduced that the Brigadiers are using an old tunnel beneath the bar to sneak in and out of Moscow, paying the midget bar owner a fee for the benefit. Fowler slaps around the midget and then goes down the tunnel, promptly getting in a shootout with some unseen Brigadiers. He kills one with his .357.

He’s also found the time to get busy with Maria, and again I have to point the finger at Streib because here Fowler becomes a lovey-dovey sap. This is going to be his last job, no matter what, he’s done with the spy game and all the death and all that, and what’s more he’s going to bring Maria back to America and marry her and start a family. The authors basically telegraph what’s going to happen to Maria and don’t even try to be subtle about it. But then this was the last volume of the series, so hell, they could’ve just had the two go off for a happily ever after.

The Lenin corpse heist isn’t even the climax of the novel; the title comes into play because it’s learned that the Brigadiers will steal the body at noon, and Fowler manages to get in the viewing line at the right moment. He causes a scene and Moscow police intervene, stopping the ambush that would’ve caught them unawares had it not been for Fowler. After this we have the belabored mock aerial combat, with planes again factoring into the actual finale: Fowler versus the Commander, who plans to steal the Russian royal jewels or somesuch and fly away with them. His true identity is officially revealed in the final pages.

Overall Moscow At High Noon Is The Target was pretty lackluster. Grant Fowler never did manage to make himself memorable to the reader, with even his occasional gadgets coming off as lame, like the “deadline clock” wristwatch he wears which ticks away a time set by the President. I was more interested to find out if Engel just dumped the series on Award, disinterested in Hot Line himself. Readers certainly weren’t interested, and this was it for the series.

The President Has Been Kidnapped! (Hot Line #2)

The President Has Been Kidnapped!, by Paul Richards
No month stated, 1971  Award Books

The second volume of Hot Line perhaps indicates why this series never got beyond three volumes. For one, the entire series concept is dropped – that hero Grant Fowler has a “hot line” to the President thanks to a two-way communicator hidden in his cigarette lighter. There’s zero reference to the previous volume and it seems evident the author isn’t even aware of what happened in it.

Again thanks to the Spy Guys And Gals site we know this one was courtesy George Snyder and Dan Streib; while Snyder was also credited for the first volume, his stamp isn’t as evident on this one. Mainly because Fowler isn’t a bossy, arrogant ass; rather, this time he’s prone to fretting and constantly worries over his safety. That is, when he isn’t wondering if he’s fallen in love and should just quit the entire “President’s Agent” game. This stuff is a hallmark of Streib’s work, though, as is inordinate padding and uneventful plotting, all of which runs rampant in The President Has Been Kidnapped. The writing is slightly better than the other stuff I’ve read of Streib’s, so maybe Snyder did some polishing or something, who knows.

Anyway Folwer is re-introduced to us as a 39 year-old with receding brown hair who often considers himself “getting too old for this” and contemplating retirement, yet another recurring Streib staple. He goes to great lengths to pose as an “international wheeler dealer,” and when we meet him he’s negotiating the purchase of an airline. It occurred to me that this novel might’ve been written at the same time as the first one, or maybe Streib just didn’t even read the first one, but anyway it seems great effort is made at introducing Fowler and setting up his character, whereas we already met him in the previous book.

Fowler also now has an assistant, Matthew Lemon, who handles his finance matters; “Grant hated the frail man and his bookkeeper mind.” As if that weren’t enough vitriol, Lemon is later referred to as a “sissyish little accountant.” But Lemon seemingly blows the airline deal, barging in on the conference with news Fowler doesn’t want shared, and thus he’s left with an airline it turns out he didn’t even want to buy – it was all a show, part of his carefully-maintained cover. Turns out the government is going to handle the cost, as Fowler’s services are needed pronto, no time for fancy wheeling-dealing; that Fowler is the “President’s Agent” (his recurring title throughout the book, which makes me suspect this was perhaps the planned series title) is a secret no one knows save for three people, one of whom is the President.

So Fowler puts on his shoulder holster with its .357 Magnum (because nothing says “secret agent” like a bulky hand cannon beneath your left arm) and heads for the White House, where he eventually learns from Secretary of State Michael Kremky – one of the three people who know who Folwer really is, with the President’s matronly secretary being the third – that not only has Air Force One been skyjacked and taken to the banana republic of Conduras (which is between Cuba and Panama, we’re informed), but that the President himself happened to be onboard at the time; something known only to Kremky.

Fowler’s job is to head to Conduras on one of his newly-acquired airliners, posing as a businessman looking to branch out into this new market, and somehow orchestrate the President’s release. Conduras, described by Fowler as a “voodoo den,” is run by a despot named Juan Bahia, who keeps the people in tow; the island is comrpised of “Creoles, Caribs, and blacks.” Fowler puts together a crew on one of his new planes, including arbitrarily enough some dude who used to go adventuring with Fowler in the old days, and a couple busty stews. The Conduras air force shoots them down upon entering Conduran air space.

Here’s another thing about Grant Fowler – he comes off like a complete idiot. Maintaining his playboy cover by all means, he insists the plane keep approaching Conduras, despite repeated warnings from ground control. This results in the airliner crashing, his old pal getting killed (again, one helluva an arbitrary “plot point”), and even the stews getting horrendously injured. Only mousy Matthew Lemon emerges unscathed, but he too will suffer misfortune, as if Streib relishes in occasionally putting him through hell before delivering an almost perfunctorily coup de grace in the final pages. But Fowler of course isn’t injured at all in the crash, and emerges to find Conduras on the verge of revolution.

The novel trades off on “tense” scenes of Fowler hopscotching between the tyrannical forces of Bahia and the native rebels, led by a voodoo priest named El Vicera. It just sort of goes on and on in a permanent spin cycle. We’ll go from the rioting voodoo worshippers to the debauchery of Bahia’s circle. In each instance Fowler finds himself involved with a woman – for the voodoo folks, it’s an “olive skinned” babe with blue eyes named Angela who has an instant lust with Fowler as soon as they see each other, culminating in one of the novel’s few memorable scenes as the two have sex in the middle of the jungle as Bahia’s soldiers hunt for them. The sex scenes by the way aren’t very graphic at all; “She pulled him in to the hilt” and the like.

The other babe is Consuela, Bahia’s incredibly depraved teenage daughter. She’s the type of whip-wielding villainness I like so much; moments after meeting Fowler she’s trying to screw him, and when he turns her down for being a “kid” she’s begging her dad to have him killed. Humorously, Fowler and Consuela have sex, though Streib forgets to inform us of the event until several chapters later – this happens after an elaborate feast Fowler attends, Bahia treating him as an honored guest, given Fowler’s cover as a wealthy businessman looking to branch out into Conduras. After a serving girl is nearly raped for the eager crowd – something Fowler prevents from happening – Consuela leads him off to his room, and only much later does Streib bother to inform us what happened there.

Really though it’s because Fowler has fallen in love with Angela, who is a sort of white goddess for the voodoo-practicing rebels. Fowler is saved by her in their first meeting – which leads to that immediate boink in the jungle – but Angela says Fowler will be considered an enemy if he tries to meet with Bahia. But this Fowler must do, so as to get aboard Air Force One, which, by the way, is sitting on the Conduras Airport tarmac under heavy guard. We’ll eventually learn that Bahia orchestrated the skyjacking, abducting the child of a crew member to ensure complicity. Bahia’s goal is to get the US to turn over control of a supply ship which carries atomic weapons. Bahia however doesn’t know that the President is actually onboard the plane; in fact, no one knows save for Fowler and Kremky back at the White House, but despite this Bahia’s men have wired Air Force One to blow by a certain deadline if his demands aren’t met.

Streib attempts to broaden the action with cutaways to Kremky back in Washington, dealing with various politicians and military officials who want to nuke Conduras. We also have some scenes with the President, fretting aboard his plane. But it’s all just sort of bland and uneventful. Even the occasional action scene is harried and boring, mostly comprised of Fowler trying to run away and hide. Again, he’s lost a lot of the bad-assery he displayed in the previous book, and this is certainly the work of Streib, who is notorious for wussified protagonists. Otherwise there are a few oddballl touches here and there, like Bahia’s personal guard, in black uniforms modeled after the SS; all of them, Fowler notices, have “long, slender fingers, perfectly manicured…the hands of classic homosexuals.”

Even the rebels do the heavy lifting in the finale; Fowler has promised Bahia that supply ship – on orders from the President – but he’ll give the weapons to the rebels. This he promises Angela after another jungle boink. Oh, and Fowler loves her for sure, even begging her to come back to the US with him and get married! This is Streib for sure, folks, and even a newbie to the genre will know what happens to Angela by novel’s end. The finale is pure chaos, with the rebels storming the tarmac before the explosives can go off, and Fowler just managing to get aboard – here Streib pulls Matthew Lemon back into the narrative long enough to kill him off!

Fowler exceeds in freeing the President and Air Force One and preventing Bahia from getting the atomic weapons, but at great price, yadda yadda yadda. No surprise, poor old Angela didn’t make it out on the plane – but another female character did. Given that we’ve learned this particular gal can do “special things with her mouth,” you wonder why Fowler’s so upset. (Okay, spoiler alert – it’s Consuela.) But really it’s the reader who benefits, ultimately, because here the novel ends.

Only one more volume was to follow, courtesy Streib and Chet Cunningham, and here’s hoping it’s better than the others. But given the two authors I’m not holding my breath.

Our Spacecraft Is Missing! (Hot Line #1)

Our Spacecraft Is Missing!, by Paul Richards
No month stated, 1970  Award Books

Yet another series “produced” by book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel, Hot Line was also published by Award, who had met such success with Engel’s earlier series Nick Carter: Killmaster. But Hot Line clearly failed to strike a chord with readers, only amounting to three measly volumes over just as many years.

First of all, a big thanks to the essential Spy Guys and Gals website for the info on who wrote this series, as information is scant. According to that site, this first volume was a collaboration between George Snyder and Jon Messmann, two authors who around this time were also working for Engel on the Killmaster books. But if I had to guess, I’d say Snyder was more responsible for Our Spacecraft Is Missing!, given one key piece of evidence: the “hero” of the tale, secret agent Grant Fowler, is an asshole of the first order.

Snyder as we’ll recall excels at delivering assholic protagonists – the hero of his Operation Hang Ten series (another Engel joint) is a complete prick, as was Snyder’s version of Nick Carter in Moscow. So then Grant Fowler is cut from the same cloth: a bossy, arrogant, smart-assed loudmouth, and it would be one thing if the dude could back it all up, but honestly he proves himself to be a buffoon in Our Spacecraft Is Missing!, about as ineffectual a hero as you could get. Shit, the dude’s almost dead by the final pages, shot to pieces, and you couldn’t care less.

Anyway, Fowler’s bit is that he’s the top agent for the Presidential Service, not to be confused with the regular ol’ Secret Service. He answers directly to the president and is the man’s go-to guy for dangerous international missions. So in other words the series very much has that Lyle Kenyon Engel flavor, with the lone wolf-type reporting to the older, powerful male who sends him off around the world for this or that. The “Hot Line” of the series title is in reference to Fowler’s direct line to the president, courtesy his portable scrambler set, and Fowler also has another hot line: a special cigarette lighter which opens a direct audio channel link to the president. 

Only two other people know of Fowler: Margaret, the president’s motherly private secretary, and Secretary of State Mike Kremsky, who doesn’t get along with Folwer very well. (But then, not many people do.) Fowler himself is somewhere in his 30s and has a scar that runs from the center of his forehead down to his right eyebrow. He has a busy backstory of warfaring and adventuring, but came to the president’s attention two years ago, due to the action in Nigeria, where Fowler managed to drop a shipment of food on a children’s orphanage. Also here an injured Fowler tried to put the moves on an attractive redheaded nurse named Kelsey Bowen, but she turned him down. 

Fowler’s worked as the president’s troubleshooter for two years, but this current assignment is his biggest one yet: in a riff on the Bond film You Only Live Twice (which has nothing in common with the original Fleming novel, really), both US and Soviet spacecraft has been disappearing from the sky. Three US craft and three Russian craft have been apparently vaporized, and the countries are blaming each other – the Russians think the Americans are shooting down the Russian craft and lying that they’re also losing craft of their own. 

Fowler is tasked with finding out what the hell’s going on. After lots of research he ends up in the Australian outback, which is where he suspects the crafts were being shot down from. Many pages are given over to Fowler interviewing one-off characters. However Fowler is a complete ass throughout; there’s a laugh-out-loud moment where, when he first meets the scientists at a tracking station in Houston, he snaps at them for lying around and drinking coffee, when meanwhile they’ve been working several-hour shifts and are finally taking a well-deserved break.

While roaming about the outback Fowler bumps into a familiar face – would you believe Kelsey Bowen, the nurse he put the moves on two years ago? She’s carried a torch for Fowler ever since reading about that food-for-the-orphanage stunt he pulled in Nigeria, which she wasn’t aware of back then. But Fowler succeeds in pissing her off, too, particularly when he starts bossing around the young doctor she now works for as part of a sort of roaming doctor service for the outback – if someone here in the hinterlands gets hurt or sick, they make a call and then Kelsey and the doc hop on an airplane and head there. 

Many pages are given over to Fowler flying around with these two. Snyder is as ever unconcerned with much action, and when he does get around to it, it’s generally of the fistfight variety. Along the way Fowler keeps hassling Kelsey for sex…she apparently enjoys leading men on and then backing down, something for which Fowler calls her out in a scene that would make many readers uncomfortable in our current era. For after being shot at by an unseen assailant during a sandstorm in the outback, Fowler and Kelsey hole up in a remote shack and there Fowler basically forces the girl into having sex with him!

“All right! Take me! And make me love it!” The girl finally screams after Fowler has successfully bullied her for several pages; he’s not going to take no for answer like he did on that hospital bed in Nigeria way back when. The ensuin’ screwin’ is fairly explicit for the time, but nothing too major, though we get enough detail to know the lady does in fact enjoy it. Afterwards Fowler basically sees Kelsey off and gets on with the investigation. Turns out he winged his unseen assailant, due to the blood trails all over the place; Fowler’s gun by the way is a .357 Magnum, which he carries in a special shoulder holster. Surely there are better, more compact handguns for a secret agent?

Along the way Fowler’s also gotten in a fight with an “Oriental,” one Fowler suspects is a Red Chinese agent, but after a brutal fistfight the man takes a cyanide pill and kills himself, so there’s another lead that goes nowhere. There isn’t much action at all for the majority of the book; even after the shootout with the mystery man in the sandstorm, which turns out to be a muscular KGB agent, the book sort of plods along more so on a suspense angle. Fowler finds himself at the sprawling ranch of the Graftons, in the middle of the outback wasteland, a secretive place with armed guards.

The Graftons are Ebert and Annalise; the former reclusive and unseen by Fowler, the latter an ugly, mentally-retarded woman who takes an instant shine to Fowler and pleads with Ebert to let him stay, so she can have sex with him. Fowler leads the horse-faced girl along while Ebert’s out, and it’s all very hard to buy. Annalise practically just lets Fowler roam around the ranch, looking for clues. Anyway, he discovers a massive rocket, and deduces that Ebert Grafton is shooting down the spacecraft.

Ebert and Annalise are the children, Fowler learns, of Graf von Tohn, aka Count von Tohn, a Nazi sadist who fled to Australia after the war. “Graf” plus “Tohn” has become “Grafton,” and now son Ebert (the old count long since dead) plans to win the war that Hitler lost. Here in the final pages it all becomes, too late, like a Bond movie: Ebert, the mad genius, not only has a headquarters built in a mine shaft, but also has an army of aboriginies, “biochemical experiments” who will serve him as “an army of violent cannibals.” Where the hell have they been for the past 140 pages??

The “cannibal” nature is displayed posthaste, as the aboriginies eat the poor KGB agent, Fowler unable to stop them in time. Here in the final pages Fowler finally lets loose with his Magnum, shooting cannibals down left and right, but unfortunately Snyder isn’t one for the gory details. It’s more along the lines of “Fowler shot two of them down,” and such. The sendoff for Ebert is also pretty anticlimactic, with a perennially-incompetent Fowler just standing there while the madman rants and raves about how his latest rocket is certain to initiate WWIII. When Fowler finally acts it’s too late and the damn rocket is launched, headed for a fatal meeting with a manned Soviet craft. 

Fowler, gutshot and dying, by the way(!), forces himself into action and initiates a call to the president via his lighter gizmo. WWIII is averted and meanwhile Annalise sets herself on fire(!?). And Fowler is nearly dead, shot in the arm and the stomach in the course of the book, leaking blood badly. (Don’t worry, though; Kelsey shows up and gives him some “broth” to drink – some nursing skills she has, huh?)

Fowler must’ve been badly hurt, too, as it was another year until the second volume of the series was published. Let’s hope that one will be beter. But at least, at 156 pages of big print, Our Spacecraft Is Missing! is a quick read.