Mafia: Operation Hijack

Mafia: Operation Hijack, by Don Romano
August, 1974  Pyramid Books

“Attention Mafia hijackers: Richard Dawson has had enough of your shit!”*

The penultimate volume of Mafia: Operation is courtesy Paul Eiden, the first of two books he wrote for the series; he also wrote Operation Loan Shark, which happened to be the last volume of the series. But again as I’ve mentioned in every single review, Mafia: Operation isn’t really a series, per se, and instead is a set of unrelated, standalone novels focusing on the world of the mob. This time the plot is hijacking, obviously, and my only assumption is that Eiden, like most other ghostwriters for series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel, was given the title and synopsis and told to cater a novel to it – only he had a helluva time figuring out how to write about hijacking trucks for 190 pages.

The end result is that there’s precious little hijacking in Operation Hijack, with the focus more on inter-family Mafia rivalries, a complex heist involving freight shipments from Europe, and finally the seduction-via-subjugation of a couple cold-fish beauties – an Eiden staple, and a clear indication that he was indeed the author who wrote another Engel production, Crooked Cop. There’s a subplot here that’s almost identical to the one in that earlier, superior novel, where the titular crooked cop went out of his way to subjugate a beautiful high-society whore…and she ended up falling in love with him. Eiden is in some ways in an even more macho, misogynist realm than Manning Lee Stokes: Operation Hijack states often that most women want to be treated like shit or generally abused, and it’s the surest way to get them to love you – and when they love you they’ll do anything for you. Actually there are “tips” throughout on how to get women in line and to do your bidding. (None of these tips seem to work on wives, btw; in fact, it turns out they have the complete opposite effect.)

Another hallmark of Eiden’s work is that his books are basically tragedies, featuring an arrogant alpha male protagonist who is clearly headed for misfortune – misfortune he could easily prevent if he was more aware of what was going on around him and not so much wrapped up in his own ego. There are a lot of similarities to Crooked Cop, so far as the protagonist goes: the “hero” of this one is Ralph Borden, aka Rafael Bardini, a muscular former boxer who still runs a couple miles a day and hits the weights first thing in the morning, working out in his penthouse apartment in Manhattan. He’s 29, sports a moustache, moves through women with ease, and runs the “hijacking scheme” for Don Carlo Renati. Ralph was plucked from the streets by Don Carlo, taken out of his successful Golden Gloves career and put on the fast-track to Mafia success. He was sent to college and put his business ideas to work in refashioning the mob, immediately making the family tons of money through various legal and illegal schemes.

The main plot actually has more to do with Ralph scheming to become the youngest Don in the Mafia. Don Carlo is in his 70s and frail and Ralph worries that he might be going senile. The other families are closing in on them, and Ralph’s afraid a mob war is brewing, and their little family will be wiped out – unless Don Carlo can “make” more soldiers (ie giving them kill contracts so they can become full-fledged Mafia members) and put himself together a proper army. So there’s a lot of plotting and scheming in this one, more of a “peek inside the Mafia world” than in Operation Loan Shark, so be prepared for a barrage of Italian names and histories on the various fictional families at play. I found it all a little boring, but at the very least it is a “Mafia novel,” more so than any others in the series, most of which focused on characters who orbited around the Mafia. Operation Hijack is different from the other four books in the “series” in that the protagonist is a full Mafia member, wholly part of the mob life.

The opening had me thinking we were going to get something similar to Operation Porno (the best volume of the series by far!), as we meet Ralph while he’s planning the financing of a “black action flick with white money behind it.” Eiden was certainly aware of the urban action movies of the day, with the characters specifically referencing Blaxploitation, and Ralph telling the young black director of the movie that he could be “the next Melvin van Peebles.” Or as one of the black characters says, “People who put down so-called blaxploitation films are mistaken.” Central to this group of filmmakers is a six-foot black beauty named Camille Caine, who is to star in the movie Ralph is financing: “Black Motor Cycle Girl.” The title sucks, but the plot sounds promising (what little we learn of it)…a biker/Blaxploitation hybrid. But sadly friends this will be all we hear about the movie!

Instead, the focus is on Ralph getting his “pound of flesh.” Haughty Ciarra, a model, is pissed that she’s getting such low pay, and Ralph goes out of his way to talk down to her, to make it clear she’s easily replaced – just total prig stuff, like referring only to “the girl” when speaking of the main actress, even though Ciarra’s sitting right there. This will just be our first glimpse of how Ralph must subjugate his female prey before he dominates them…and the more they dislike him, the more enjoyment he gets out of it. The guys leave, and Ralph makes it clear that Camille has “the classic decision” all aspiring actresses face: anonymity or the producer’s bed. Camille of course choses the latter, trying to get some digs in on Ralph for being a “wop.” He responds that “to be Italian is beautiful,” and further makes a compelling case that all black women secretly lust for a white lover! 

As with other Eiden novels I’ve read, Ralph’s poor treatment of the woman works to his advantage, with her soon pleading for sex in his swank penthouse. And promptly falling in love with him afterward! Indeed Ralph has to threaten to throw her out a few days later, as she refuses to leave him – and she needs to fly out to California to get started on the movie. In other words she’s willing to throw away her potential career for this guy she just met, this guy she hated at first sight. This sort of alpha male dominance is of course unacceptable in today’s entertainment, but as mentioned Eiden doles it out so casually that you almost forget Ralph’s supposed to be an anti-hero. He’ll go on to subjugate and dominate two more women in the novel, and unfortunately this is the last we see of Camille, or even hear about the movie.

The only hijacking stuff in the novel occurs early on. Ralph’s lieutenant, a former street soldier named Mickey, oversees a trucking hijacking scheme, where they rip off some poor trucker, stuff him in the trunk (eventually letting him go), and take the wares to a secret location to sell later. We see one of the hijacks go down, then learn later that the hijackers themselves were hijacked – some guys with shotguns and lead pipes ran the truck off the road and beat the drivers so unmerciful that one of them dies and the other loses an eye. Mickey is simmering for revenge, as is Ralph, but Don Carlo finds out from the Mafia commission that they’re to let it slide – longtime rivals the Palucci family were behind the counter-hijack, lying that they didn’t know Don Carlo’s men had already hijacked the truck. The Don sees something Ralph missed: there must be a traitor in their family who let the Paluccis know about the truck.

Ralph succeeds into talking the Don into vengeance, so an elaborate scheme is set up where they can foil the hijackers…and figure out who the mole is in their own organization. The cover painting comes into play here, with Ralph and Mickey waiting in a decoy truck with shotguns; when they’re hit by hijackers they come out blasting, wiping out would-be hijackers in gory splendor. This will be the only action scene in the novel. After which it’s more into the “Mafia drama suspense” mode, with a lot of stuff centered on the elaborate revenge on the capo who set them up in the first place…a revenge which has another of Ralph’s men, Joey, making his bones by carrying out the hit. Later the Paluccis will approach Ralph, basically offering him the role of a minor don if he himself will kill Don Carlo. Ralph will of course refuse the offer, which sets off the climactic events, but honestly the Mafia subplot also disappears for long stretches.

Instead, Eiden is more focused on Ralph’s breaking down the icy demeanor of a “full-breasted” Dutch beauty named Holly, who is such a cold fish she wonders if she’s a “Lez.” Actually she doesn’t even wonder; she reveals later she’s had sex with “many” women, in addition to men…it’s just that no one’s able to get her off. This is the subplot that is so reminiscent of Crooked Cop. Holly works for Dutch airline KLM, and Ralph’s had this complex heist scheme in mind for a long time…basically, from what little we learn of it, involving Holly using her contacts in the freight departments of various airlines in Europe to hijack shipments by changing the shipping addresses. But first he’ll need to seduce Holly, so we have a lot of stuff of him breaking down her icy reserve, despite her reservations and hesitations and constant reminders that nothing turns her on. Of course Ralph succeeds, quite easily it seems, by merely going down on her…after which he has her calling him “Lord Ralph” and literally begging for sex.

I should mention that despite all the focus on seduction and foreplay, there really isn’t much hardcore material in Operation Hijack, certainly not as much as there was in the first three volumes by Alan Nixon and Robert Turner. Also Eiden’s recurring “widely-separated breasts” line doesn’t appear here, so maybe it’s something he only used occasionally as his literary calling card. We are often reminded of Holly’s “heavy breasts,” but even this boobsploitation is nowhere on the level of later Eiden offerings like Operation Weatherkill. So focused is Eiden on the subjugation and dominance of Holly that the actual Heist material is over and done with in a few pages; we’re told Ralph and Holly venture around Europe for “two months” to set up the complex scheme, after which Ralph thankfully deposits Holly in Zurich and hurries back to New York – she has, of course, fallen completely in love with him, hoping for marriage.

Ralph’s third conquest happens immediately after and isn’t as much explored as the previous two. It’s a redheaded beauty named Eilen, and he meets her at his country club, where she rides horses and enjoys the highfalutin life of the jet-set rich. She’s a stewardess, and Ralph doesn’t have to do much in the way of subjugation or domination for her, but Eiden does cleverly work it in when the first time Eileen sees Ralph, he’s screaming at some poor stable hand for failing to take proper care of Ralph’s horse. In other words she’s glimpsed his alpha male dominance from afar. So we get stuff of them romancing, and meanwhile Eiden occasionally reminds us that Ralph’s in the Mafia and there’s a war brewing between his family and the Paluccis.

As is typical with most of Eiden’s work, things come to a sudden head after so many, many pages of stalling and padding. Holly comes back without warning, to catch Eileen in Ralph’s bed, and literally tears her face apart in a shocking scene. Things fly to a conclusion after this, as Holly claims to have been sent back due to a cable she received from Ralph…however Ralph never sent a cable. It’s a setup from the Paluccis, and the finale is almost hamfistedly rushed; major characters are killed off-page, and Ralph assembles the remaining family to discuss going to the matresses…while a squad of Palucci hitmen with Browning Automatic Rifles converge on the scene. It’s memorable at least, and definitely the ending we’ve been expecting since page one, but man if Eiden had only spent more time developing the Mafia subplot instead of hopscotching around so much other incidental stuff. In other words he’s squandered the plot’s potential, something he did – even more drastically – in The Ice Queen.

That said, Eiden’s writing is fine as ever; he has a definite literary touch, same as most other writers in Engel’s stable, yet never lets it get in the way of the narrative flow. But he had a tendency to pad and stall, same as Stokes. Perhaps not as bad as Stokes, but then Stokes was capable of more memorable plots and sequences, whereas a sort of blandness often settles over Eiden’s books. But when he was on form, he could knock them out of the park, as with Crooked Cop. Maybe he just took a while to warm up to the series he was hired for, as Operation Loan Shark was much better than this one.

*In the tradition of Zwolf’s hilarious takes on celebrity lookalikes on cover artwork

Mafia: Operation Loan Shark

Mafia: Operation Loan Shark, by Don Romano
November, 1974  Pyramid Books

This was the last published volume of Mafia: Operation, and the second one to be written by Paul Eiden. His first was Operation: Hijack, published before Operation: Hit Man, but I haven’t read it yet. That’s no big deal, as there’s no continuity or recurring characters in this “series.” What’s important is that Eiden here delivers the sleazy crime novel we expect of him, featuring one of the most unlikable prick protagonists ever.

I really wasn’t looking forward to this volume. Loan sharking just didn’t sound like a compelling enough topic to dwell on for 190 pages of smallish print. Luckily Eiden isn’t as much interested in the mechanics of loan sharkery as he is in the sleazy vileness of his protagonist, a hulking mountain of muscle named Mickey Di Angelo. In many ways Operation: Loan Shark harkens back to the BCI Crime Paperback Eiden wrote for producer Lyle Kenyon Engel the year before, Crooked Cop (still one of my favorite novels I’ve ever reviewed on the blog). Just like the “hero” of that earlier novel, Mickey Di Angelo is a sadistic bastard who has gotten wealthy from crime and will do anything possible to get himself a bigger piece of the pie. To do so he’ll trample anyone in his path, even going as far as setting up elaborate murder triangles. Plus he enjoys forcing the occasional innocent young woman into prostitution.

The back cover has it that the plot concerns Mickey trying to wrest full control of his loan shark operations from his boss, Dominic Zinna, and in this effort Mickey retains a willing young woman to cater to Zinna’s depraved interests. Well, that’s sort of what happens…towards the very end of the novel. For the most part, Operation: Loan Shark is a slice-of-sleazy-life yarn more concerned with Mickey’s lurid daily activities, without the hassle of a plot getting in the way. In fact Zinna barely figures into anything; Mickey’s the true star of the show, and as mentioned he’s a major bastard. 

Mickey’s more focused on his long-vanished father, a drunk who knocked up Mickey’s mom thirty-one years ago and only came around long enough to beat little Mickey around. In fact the bridge of Mickey’s nose lacks any cartilege because Mickey’s dad, in a drunken rage, smashed Mickey in the face with a broomstick. This happened when Mickey was ten years old. He mentions this often in the text and Eiden works in a nicely-done undercurrent of Daddy Issues which isn’t nearly as overdone and melodramatic as it would be in today’s cliche-ridden entertainment, while at the same time being a lot more over the top.

However Mickey disdains any sympathy and despises any sign of weakness in others. Very much like the protagonist of Crooked Cop he is the personification of the Nietzschean superman, unburdened by morals or emotions. His prime motivator is the accrual of power and wealth. He doesn’t even care about sex (a big difference from the Crooked Cop character), despite which he keeps no less than three women around Manhattan. The dude seems busy as hell in this regard, constantly shuttling around in his El Dorado to hook up with one or another of his mistresses: from Louise, the busty barmaid at one of Mickey’s legitimate establishments, to Joanne, a haughty doctorate student who gives Mickey a bit more lip than the others. Finally there’s Rosa, an Hispanic mother of three girls who serves more as Mickey’s accountant.

The female character who takes up the most of the text is Gerry St. John, a blonde actress who starts trailing Mickey around in the opening quarter of the novel, which introduces us to Mickey as he rushes around Manhattan on various business interests. One of Mickey’s concerns is a punk who owes money but can’t or won’t pay back, so Mickey’s already had one of his stooges, a muscular Sicilian named Grieco, break both his legs. Turns out Gerry is the punk’s brother and, after following Mickey around all night, hopes she can offer her body in exchange for her brother’s debt.

Mickey of course gets a good laugh out of this – he even laughs when Gerry reminds him that he had her brother’s legs broken – not that this stops him from screwing her. There are a few sex scenes throughout but nothing overly raunchy. But what’s crazier is that Mickey decides that Gerry can earn the money for her brother – by becoming a hooker! He drops her ass off at the whorehouse of a madame he knows and tells Gerry she can pay off the debt in no time on her back. Surprisingly Gerry’s game for it, realzing that if she can have sex with Mickey she can have sex with anyone. 

There isn’t much in the way of gun-blazing action, though. Later in the novel Mickey’s almost gunned down by two would-be assassins, obvious heroin-addicts in grungy army fatigues, but he just ducks and covers and spends a few pages wondering who sent them before forgetting about the situation. He passes it off as one of the dangers of his profession. He also rubs out a “client” who has been unable to pay back his hefty loan. Mickey talks the guy, Corkell, into driving Mickey and another stooge into Central Park on some b.s. assignment, and Corkell agrees because he’s eager to do anything to get back in Mickey’s good graces. Mickey, in the backseat and casually giving driving directions, puts a gun to the back of Corkell’s head and blows him away. I found this scene reminiscent of the finale of The Friends Of Eddie Coyle.

Eiden saves most of the action for the super-sick climax. Zinna we’re told is a thorn in Mickey’s side, despite being the guy who set Mickey up as one of the prime loaners and collectors in Manhattan. The way the pyramid works is that a Mafia don retains Zinna, who himself retains a few loan sharks, one of them being Mickey. So while Mickey does all the work, Zinna gets ten percent of his profits, all while doing nothing but sitting around. This is what really grinds Mickey’s gears; that, and fifty year-old Zinna’ growing interests in very young girls. Early in the book Mickey encounters a husband-and-wife acrobat team, Carlos and Carmen, and Mickey comes up with the idea of using nubile Carmen in his plot against Zinna. She’s got the build of a young girl, and quickly proves to Mickey that she’ll do anything he asks if he pays her.

This plays out over the last quarter of the novel, with Eiden never informing us of Mickey’s plans. He hires Carmen as a secretary in the office of another of his legit firms and Carlos as a gofer, constantly sending him off on assignments. Mickey plays on Carmen’s obvious interest in him – she’ll do anything for the money and lifestyle Carlos can’t provide for her – and even rents an apartment in the city “just for them.” But Mickey always passes off on her offer of sex. Then he starts whoring her out to random guys, with Zinna being the top job. Mickey’s twisted plot is revealed in the final pages, and any hopes that he will find come kind of salvation or redemption are quickly dashed. This is one of the most shocking climaxes I’ve read in a while, with Mickey setting up an elaborate murder scene.

From the first page it’s evident what kind of ending Mickey himself is headed for; it’s almost a prefigure of Training Day, with Mickey becoming increasingly deranged and unhinged as the narrative proceeds. Longtime friends even start to turn on him, much to Mickey’s confusion; he can only learn things the hard way, and the only comeuppance he could ever receive would have to be fatal. The conclusion of the book’s almost as shocking as Mickey’s plot against Zinna, if for no other reason than how abruptly it happens – it seems clear Eiden was up on his word count.

Overall I enjoyed Operation: Loan Shark a lot more than I thought I would. Like the other three books in the series I’ve read it was a great example of sleazy ‘70s pulp crime. Maybe not as good as those other three volumes, but good enough. Eiden really keeps the narrative moving, with the first half almost coming off like a breathless rush, occuring over just a few days in Mickey’s harried life. I also appreciate how he delivers such a zero-morals bastard of a protagonist with little of the niceties or maudlin cliches of today. Eiden even finds the time to render chilling fates for minor characters.

As mentioned this was the last volume of Mafia: Operation, and I can only assume it was low sales that killed the series, as there was plenty of opportunity for more novels. I for one would’ve enjoyed reading something like Operation: Hooker. At any rate I’ve still got the third-published volume, Eiden’s Operation: Hijack, to look forward to. Here’s hoping it’s as entertaining as the others.

Crooked Cop

Crooked Cop, by Bob Parker
No month stated, 1973  Manor Books

Here we have another BCI crime paperback courtesy book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel and boy, is this one friggin’ fantastic – a lurid, sleazy, sex-filled yarn featuring one stone-cold bastard for a protagonist. And as with The Strangler, I’m fairly certain this one was the work of Paul Eiden; while Crooked Cop, unlike The Strangler, is filled with action and sex, it still has the same quality writing, strong characterization, and, most tellingly, that “widely separated breasts” line which Eiden uses in each of his novels.

The cover is a bit misleading, as it makes you think the titular cop is a uniformed policeman. Rather, “hero” Bill Fitzjohn is a plainclothes detective with the NYPD, at 30 the youngest detective on the force. Fitzjohn is almost a protagonist in search of his own men’s adventure series. More accurately, he’s basically a Nietzschean Superman – a towering mass of muscle and cunning guile, who looks down on his fellow mortals (particularly women), makes no excuses for his corrupt nature, and has arrogance to spare. He’s so obsessed with sex that he has especially developed his lower back and quad muscles to give him an extra “boost” in the sack, if you will; indeed, to the point that he is “a formidable sexual gladiator.”

The main plot has to do with Fitzjohn launching a one-man war against a Mafia family for having the gall to try to sell heroin on the streets of New York – heroin is the one thing Fitzjohn won’t abide. Really though the majority of the novel is given over to Fitzjohn’s taming of a veritable shrew: the “top madam” of New York, a smokin’ hot blonde German babe who is not only the top madam but the youngest one to boot; Fitzjohn has dreamed since adolescence of banging the number one whore in the world, and if this babe is the best in New York, then she’s the best there is period.

But whereas The Strangler was a studied, probing sort of police procedural, Crooked Cop is more along the lines of a drive-in exploitation movie. It moves quickly and doesn’t waste time with arbitrary “cop world” stuff. To be sure, Eiden again displays his knowledge of the NYPD (and New York itself), dropping police details almost casually, but while The Strangler was almost a true crime yarn with its bird’s eye view of real-world police detecting, Crooked Cop just uses this material to provide the backdrop for Bill Fitzjohn’s sex-and-violence filled life.

Anyway, Fitzjohn is in the NYPD’s anti-vice unit which is responsible for all the illicit gambling profits in the city; we’re informed this department is “traditionally corrupt” and that many cops spend their careers hoping for an assignment to it. Fitzjohn’s been with the department for a while, starting off as a medal-winning plaintclothes detective before getting this assignment, where he lives off “clean graft;” ie, Fitzjohn is happy to take any of the syndicate’s money, as long as it isn’t from drugs in general and heroin in particular. He has no actual grudge against heroin; he just hates it because he “needs something to hate.”

He has a posh penthouse in Manhattan with a Porsche and a Mustang in a private garage, as well as a hundred thousand or so in the bank, all of it under various cover names; his “real” home is a place in Queens which he hasn’t been to in years. He carries a .357 Magnum and, in addition to his physique (courtesy an “obsession” with weight-lifting he’s had since adolescence), he runs 11 miles a day. (Even after an all-night tussle with the latest one-night stand!) He also has no problem with snorting the occasional line of coke. His ego is only matched by his arrogance; Fitzjohn makes Denzell Washington’s character in Training Day look like Mr. Rogers.

The novel opens with Fitzjohn’s bad-assery in full effect, as he waltzes into the domain of one of the Patriarco brothers, ie the main Mafia family his department takes graft from. He kicks the shit out of a few thugs, breaking one’s knees and literally kicking another in the ass. He proceeds to beat up the Patriaco brother in residence. Fitzjohn just got wind of a heroin deal the capo brothers were planning behind his back – Fitzjohn only allows them to do their usual gambling and other ventures due to that clean graft they give him and his fellow department cops. Heroin is a big no-no, and Fitzjohn doesn’t give second chances. This sets off the war between Fitzjohn and the Patriarcos; he tells them he’s kicking them “out of the rackets,” but instead they go into hiding and plot his death.

Soon after this, though, Eiden gets to the real focus of the novel – Fitzjohn’s sexual adventures. After a night of bar-hopping he picks up a sexy brunette in “a turquoise shantung pant suit” (the novel is filled with such ‘70s touches, by the way) and takes her back to his penthouse for some Eiden-typical explicit sex. But we also here see Fitzjohn’s assholery: when the gal (whose name Fitzjohn doesn’t even learn until the next morning) implores him to take her, he inspects her, uh, “portal,” deems that she is not fully aroused, and berates her for not really being “ready” yet! He then goes on a tirade about how women fake being horny in order to please their men, with the ultimate effect that the women then have subpar sex and eventually turn to lesbianism. (This same argument was made by the titular character in The Strangler; more indication that this book is by the same author.)

But Fitzjohn is a regular Nick Carter – a demigod in action and in bed. He works the gal up good and proper and then has her really begging for it. And, naturally, he’s the first guy to ever make her orgasm, but next morning he treates her with disdain and practically kicks her out of his apartment. This brunette does not appear again; rather, the focus of Fitzjohn’s sexual powers is Hildegarde, a sexy blonde German babe Fitzjohn spots on the streets of Manhattan that very day – he sees her in the distance, recognizes her from someone having pointed her out to him the other year, runs over to her, and says “Hello, whore!” by way of introduction!

Hildegarde’s description is further evidence that Crooked Cop is the work of Paul Eiden: “The breasts under her striped jersey dress were so full and widely separated that their outer curves hid part of her upper arms.” As mentioned before, Eiden has used a variation of this phrase in all of his books, so I’m certain now that it was his veritable calling card. Fitzjohn knows of Hildegarde, that she’s the “top madam” in New York, and it’s been his dream since childhood to bang the world’s number one whore – as he tells Hildegarde later, he’d rather have her than a few virgins. Their banter is humorous and outrageous – when Fitzjohn tells Hildegarde, who is from Germany, that she doesn’t have much of an accent, she retorts that she speaks seven languages. “But can you fuck?” Asks Fitzjohn. “Just try me,” she replies.

And boy does he ever! There are a handful of graphic sex scenes between Fitzjohn and Hildegarde, and in each we get a glimpse of what a bastard Fitzjohn is. First, when Hildegarde refuses to kiss him during their initial boff, Fitzjohn kicks her right between her nude buttocks, flipping her over on the bed (something John Eagle also did, by the way, in the Eiden-written John Eagle Expeditor #13: Operation Weatherkill), then ties her down, gets out a heavy belt, and whips her mercilessly! Of course, this only serves to make her super-aroused. Gradually – and I do mean gradually, as Eiden wants us to know what kind of a bastard we’re dealing with for a protagonist – we learn that Fitzjohn’s doing all this as an “experiment,” to see if he can make a woman out of Hildegarde…as he tells his partner, D’Amato, the only way to get to a whore’s heart is to treat her like shit, as all whores suffer from self-hatred, even if it’s subconcious, and the only way to get their respect is to play to that. Or as Eiden later puts it, Fitzjohn treats Hildegarde in a “hard-nosed pimp manner.”

He only gets more degrading from there: “Roll your Dutch [sic] ass out of bed and make me something to eat,” he orders her next morning. All this occurs in Hildegarde’s multi-suite apartment, which, Xaviera Hollander style, is actually a cathouse. Here Hildegarde runs her company, and a lordly Fitzjohn moves in, bossing her around, demanding that she pay him a hundred bucks a day for his services! He also promises to beat the shit out of her if she turns any tricks; she’s his “john,” and he won’t share her with any other men. As I say, Bill Fitzjohn is such a stone-cold bastard that you can’t help but laugh throughout Crooked Cop. “You stink of whore sweat,” he later tells her – then lovingly gives her a bath. I do say, a very strange romance ensues, with Fitzjohn almost growing to love Hildegarde, whom he routinely refers to as “bitch.”

Fitzjohn’s day job has him looking into various vice-related crimes. One of them leads to the novel’s second action scene; following leads on a heisted whiskey truck, Fitzjohn and D’Amato get in a shootout, Fitzjohn blowing the heister away with his .357. But as ever, Eiden’s heroes dole out clean, non-messy kills – pretty damn hard when you’re hitting people with a Magnum slug, I’d wager. But the Patriarco business increasingly takes center stage, especially when two men who not only resemble Fitzjohn and D’Amato but also happen to be seated at the same table the two men just dined at are gunned down in an obvious mob shooting. Despite past history of “racket guys” not killing cops, it would appear the Patriarco brothers are looking to take out our hero.

It gets more real when Fitzjohn’s almost hit by a drive-by shooting out at his seldom-visited place in Queens; he fires back and, invigorated by the action, gives chase on foot. He ends up blowing away all three would-be killers in another shootout. He notches another kill when he takes out a crook involved with a jewelry heist – that is, after Fitzjohn’s partaken of the dude’s cocaine stash, which gives him a “cold, clear mind.” Meanwhile the Patriarcos have “gone to the mattresses” (Eiden proving he’s read The Godfather); Fitzjohn gets leads on various family soldiers, including a memorable visit to an old flame who is now married to a minor Patriarco enforcer – Fitzjohn tells her he’ll be back sometime to enjoy more of her “champion head!”

While Fitzjohn, who started the whole war, treats everything as if it were a fun time, his partner D’Amato becomes more unglued. Married, overweight, saving up all his graft for his family, D’Amato wants to take out the Patriarcos before it’s too late. Thus he is the one who pushes Fitzjohn to abduct the first Patriarco soldier they find; they take him to an abandoned warehouse, where D’Amato urges a reluctant Fitzjohn to electrocute the bastard for intelligence. (Surprisingly, they let the guy live – Fitzjohn even congratulating him on how tough he is!) Unfortunately the climax is a bit rushed; Fitzjohn finally tracks down the Patriarcos and their consigliere in a house in Hackensack and, armed with a Remington shotgun he’s illegally modified to automatic, he blows them all away – I was hoping for more of an action-packed finale.

Rather, the brunt of the finale is given over to the Fitzjohn-Hildegarde relationship. Earlier Fitzjohn has told her that he doesn’t “handle prossy cases,” ie prostitutes; further, he tells her it’s only a matter of time before her cathouse is busted. This happens – while Fitzjohn’s lounging in the foyer. A few of his department colleagues come in with various gals, pretending to be johns, and Fitzjohn knows it’s a bust. While Hildegarde pleads with him to do something, Fitzjohn merely repeats his “no prossy cases” line and takes his leave.

If anything Eiden is a master of avoiding sap. He builds up a thread with Fitzjohn thinking more and more about Hildegarde, how she’s gotten to him more than any other woman; even after the climactic shootout with the Patriarcos, a wounded Fitzjohn sits bleeding in his car thinking about Hildegarde. But when he goes to see her at the courthouse later that morning, he basically just tells her she got what was coming to her, and turns a deaf ear to the fact that, without her green card, she’s surely going to be deported back to Germany. “Goodbye, darling,” says Fitzjohn, and that’s that – both for the relationship and for the novel. As I say, it’s pretty great how Eiden just takes all the maudlin glurge you were expecting and basically kicks it in the crotch.

All told, I loved Crooked Cop; it was one of the best standalone crime thrillers I’ve read, and it would’ve made for a great drive-in flick (only one actor could’ve played Fitzjohn, for my money: William Smith!). Eiden does drop the ball here and there, though, likely indication that this was a quickly turned-out contractual work: for one, D’Amato just disappears from the narrative, and Eiden doesn’t bother to follow up on an eleventh hour subplot that the Feds are cracking down on Fitzjohn’s department – his boss, Orlowski, has promised Fitzjohn that he’s “putting in his papers” the next morning to avoid any legal indictments, but we get no resolution on this.

But this is just a minor complaint. Otherwise I had a blast reading this one and I highly recommend it. Here’s hoping Eiden wrote some more of these crime paperbacks for Lyle Kenyon Engel – at the very least, it has me looking forward to reading the two volumes of Mafia: Operation he turned in for Engel as “Don Romano.”

The Strangler

The Strangler, by David Black
No month stated, 1974  Manor Books

Yet another of the crime paperbacks “produced” by book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel and his BCI outfit in the ‘70s (which I refer to as BCI Crime Paperbacks for ease of tagging), The Strangler is for the most part a slow-moving police procedural, but a well-written one, so absorbing in its unassuming way that its 224 pages fly by.

My initial assumption was that William Crawford served as “David Black,” given that Crawford wrote some of these BCI crime paperbacks (under various pseudonyms), and also given that the novel was very grounded in real-world police details, as if it were written by a cop (as Crawford himself was). But now that I’ve read The Strangler I have to guess it is not the work of Crawford; the novel is much too focused. The few Crawfords I’ve read all suffer from the same A-Z plotting, with inordinate backgrounds spun out for practically every character, no matter now minor.

There is none of that to be found in The Strangler, which stays focused on the plot and its central characters throughout; just compare to the similar BCI crime novel The Rapist, which was written by Crawford; that one’s a mess of extrapolated character backgrounds and arbitrary cop-world details. And it’s a boring, tedious novel, whereas The Strangler is a fascinating read – if lacking in lurid details or any action sequences.

It’s a longshot, but if I had to guess from Engel’s writing stable at the time, my suspicion would be that Paul Eiden might’ve written The Strangler. This is mostly due to one particular (and peculiar) phrase which appears in the novel, describing one of the strangler’s victims: “The breasts…were so full and widely separated the outer curves of them hid part of her upper arms.” A variation on this phrase has appeared in each Eiden novel I’ve read, particularly in his four John Eagle Expeditor offerings, so my assumption is this was Eiden’s calling card, if you will.

The novel takes place in New York City, and the author was clearly familiar with the place…or had a helluva city guide. Our hero is Rocco “Rocky” Amalfitano, a junior detective in his early 20s who has just been placed with the Nineteenth Precinct as a probationary detective, given his solid track record as a uniformed officer. On his first day on the job the first of what will ultimately be eight victims is discovered in Manhattan – the corpse of a lovely young lady who has been strangled and raped. Amalfitano is assigned the case.

This is not a Dirty Harry-esque yarn at all; The Strangler almost reads more like a true crime book, focusing as it does on the sometimes-tedious grind of actual police work and detecting. If I were to compare it to any novel yet reviewed on the blog, it would have to be Midtown North, so those approaching the novel hoping for a lurid action yarn will be disappointed. Indeed, Black keeps the strangler’s kills for the most part off-page, cutting away just as he straps his belt around the throats of his victims. To be sure, I had no real problem with this – there’s only so far I want to peek into the abyss.

After his kills the strangler carves “Herostratus” in ancient Greek letters on the chests of the women. It takes a while for the cops to figure out what the words say – a college professor provides the clue – and they learn that Herostratus was notorious in the ancient world for burning down the temple of Diana so that his name would live on in eternity. The strangler too hopes his name will be remembered forever – for strangling 26 women in New York, going alphabetically by their middle names.

Black juggles viewpoints so that our two main characters are Amalfitano and the strangler himself, who turns out to be a computer worker on Wall Street named George Stafford – a tall, dark-haired young man who looks similar to Anthony Perkins, as is often noted. Gradually we’ll learn that Stafford’s mother was a heroin addict…and used to “choke the living daylights” out of her little boy with a belt! This then explains Stafford’s taunting “how do you like it?” as he strangles his victims. Having worked at the department of health for a few years, he has compiled a list of sundry New York-area women, with their full names and addresses, and has inserted himself into their lives under a variety of false names – all of them variations of famous murderers (ie “Dick Speck,” after Richard Speck).

Amalfitano is the only cop who sees this, which leads him into confrontations with the older, veteran, more cynical cops in the precinct, in particular Captain Gregory, who flat-out despises Amalfitano and mocks him in front of everyone. An interesting thing about Amalfitano is that, despite being a junior detective, he doesn’t take any shit. Some of the most entertaining parts of The Strangler are when Amalfitano snaps at Captain Gregory, refusing to lie down and be walked over. Amalfitano is indeed an interesting character – he has no sense of sarcasm, or even much of a sense of humor, and is driven to stop the strangler case not out of a sense of justice, but hecause he’s just sick of the murders and wants them to end. He also encounters flack from his co-cops because he becomes somewhat emotionally invested in the case.

Another big difference between Amalfitano and the protagonists of the novels I usually review here – the dude’s still a virgin!! As is his fiance, Jeannete “Jimmy” Maloney. Both of them still live with their parents. They’re engaged to be married in a few months, and they stay true to their “no sex before wedding” vow, so there goes any hopes for any sexual tomfoolery in The Strangler; as mentioned, despite the incredibly lurid plot material, overall the book is pretty mundane so far as exploitative stuff goes. For that matter, the author appears shy to even use the word “fuck;” there’s a part where a surprised Amalfitano’s curse is rendered as “F –!”

A major factor of The Strangler is a ground-eye view of what detective work was like at the time. We go along with Amalfitano as veteran detectives walk with him from apartment to apartment in the crime zones, knocking on doors, interviewing potential witnesses. There are no chase scenes, no shootouts. The author was either a cop or knew one or just did some serious research. We also learn about fingerprint databases and portrait mockups and the various storehouses of data cops could then access. The job is presented as the grind it no doubt is, and by novel’s end the reader is as weary as Amalfitano himself is.

The chapters are long, and instead of “Chapter 1” and so forth, it’s “Victim One,” “Victim Two,” etc. A curious thing is that the women who become victims of Stafford are probably the most memorable characters in the novel. We only meet them briefly, but in some cases it’s enough for you to feel the impact when they are killed, as is the case with a vivacious lady who gives psychological readings to old movies. Others have weird hang-ups, like a self-hating woman who worries she’s a lesbian because she has no interest in sex with men, and literally begs Stafford to kill her(!), sitting dociley as he straps the belt around her throat.

Stafford himself is a somewhat memorable character; he’s socially awkward and gives off “leave me alone” vibes, yet for all that he’s able to get scores of women to be interested in him; some of them practically demand they go back to their apartments for sex. Stafford’s role becomes greater and greater as the novel goes on, and he’s given a lot more dialog than Amalfitano is. The author is very skilled with dialog, by the way; even an arbitrary scene in which Stafford gets in an argument with some bar patrons over the JFK assassination is entertaining due to the fast-moving dialog, despite the fact that it really doesn’t have much to do with anything.

The novel’s few moments of humor are due to Amalfitano’s lack of a sense of humor. In particular when he and his partner, “the moon-faced Ochs” (“moon-faced” being used practically every time Ochs is mentioned!), come upon a ravishing “Amazon” of a witness: Maria, a haughty German megababe who was friends of sorts with one of the victims and claims that she sees the victim’s “boyfriend” (aka Stafford) every day at lunch, as he works here at Wall Street and sits out in the park sometimes. Taking advantage of the fact that the police department wants her time, Maria demands a thousand dollars a day, and also insists that she be put up in a hotel fancier than the Waldorf. Amalfitano again proves himself an unusual protagonist for these sorts of novels; when Maria bluntly asks him to spend the night with her, he shows her a photo of his fiance and says no thanks!!

But Maria proves the means through which Amalfitano finally breaks the case, months after it started and eight victims in. Again he is mocked by Captain Gregory and the veteran cops, all who think Maria is an untrustworthy witness and who doubt that the police sketch made from her description of the man she’s seen is based on a real person – they think she’s made everything up to get more money out of them. But Amalfitano, about to be kicked off the force due to his latest run-in with the captain, realizes that so far all of his hunches have proven correct – and given that he also believes Maria, he figures this hunch will be correct, too.

Meanwhile the strangler is coming to the end of his latest list of potential victims, and desperately seeks one that will represent the middle initial he’s up to. Here David Black goes where I was hoping he wouldn’t – he makes it personal, but lamely enough it’s personal solely due to coincidence. Yep, folks, George Stafford just happens to have the name “Jeannette Maloney” on his list of potential victims, having met her months ago at a typing class…and just as Amalfitano is walking around Wall Street handing out photocopies of the drawing based on Maria’s description, Stafford is scoping out “Jimmy” as his next victim.

Despite how lame this is, it’s still suitably tense, as Stafford gets Jimmy in his car and goes increasingly insane, abducting her and taking her back to the home she’s about to move into with Amalfitano. Meanwhile our hero has gotten a postive ID on George Stafford and is calling up various people to find Jimmy, having found her name on that list of potential victims in Stafford’s apartment, which Amalfitano has broken into. The climax maintains the tense vibe, but I was seriously buzzkilled that Amalfitano, upon rushing into the house and finding Stafford wielding a knife and standing over Jimmy, only pulls out his .38, yells at Stafford…and then just arrests him! That’s it! I mean, I wanted to see the sonofabitch’s brains blasted onto the walls.

And here The Strangler ends, on an incongruous joke, as Amalfitano realizes that all the glowing words Captain Gregory has to say about him in the newspaper are the work of Amalfitano’s friend on the paper, putting words into peoples’s mouths (fake news!!). Meanwhile Jimmy insists that the reporter be invited to their wedding – the end. I guess so far as a Happily Ever After goes, it’s a fine ending, but one wishes for a more fitting comeuppance for the strangler.

Engel “produced” a bunch of these crime novels at the time, and I’m betting this author wrote more of them. The question is just who “David Black” was. I’m pretty confident it was Paul Eiden (thus I’ve tagged the review with his name), because that “widely separated breasts covering the upper arms” line is too much of a clue. Eiden uses it in every book of his I have read, and given that he is the only author I’ve ever read who uses this curious phrase, I’m figuring The Strangler must be his work.

John Eagle Expeditor #13: Operation Weatherkill

John Eagle Expeditor #13: Operation Weatherkill, by Paul Edwards
October, 1975  Pyramid Books

The penultimate volume of my favorite men’s adventure series, John Eagle Expeditor, is courtesy Paul Eiden, a hit-or-miss writer if ever there was one. While his prose is good, Eiden’s plotting is often lazy, with some of his books, like #7: The Ice Goddess, given over to inordinate padding. But then sometimes he’s capable of greatness, as in #9: The Deadly Cyborgs.

Fortunately, Operation Weatherkill is Eiden on a good day. He keeps the action moving and the padding to a minimum. Sure, there’s stuff that could’ve been cut, but that’s typical for this series. Even at 159 pages (of small print), Operation Weatherkill seems longer than it really is. However it’s greatly improved by the fact that it’s the first installment since #10: The Holocaust Auction to return to the series formula of the earliest volumes: eschewing the tepid espionage plot of #11: Poppies Of Death, Eiden gets back to the series’s roots with John Eagle employing all of his sci-fi gadgetry as he takes on a world-threatening plot.

“Operation Weatherkill” is the name of a shadowy organization that’s blackmailing countries around the world with the threat of “climatic interference.” Somehow these bastards are toying with the jet stream and wreaking havoc with freak weather. America has been duly warned but the CIA, as ever, ignored the threat, and now, as the Weatherkill people are enacting their threats, it’s up to Mr. Merlin to handle things. Thus Eagle – for once described, stated as being 6’ 2”, two hundred pounds of muscle, with black hair, blue eyes, and “almost as tan as the Apache people he loved” – is sent to Stamford, Connecticut, where it rains for three straight days, flooding the city. Next he’s sent to Chicago, where the same thing happens.

The situation is explained to Eagle when he’s called back to Merlin’s HQ on Makaluha island in Hawaii. Operation Weatherkill is demanding a monthly payment of a ton of gold from the US, and possibly from the other countries as well – Merlin mentions that both Russia and Japan have also been suffering from freak weather and flooding. It was interesting reading this book when I did, as South Texas was experiencing torrential rains and heavy flooding, and even the bottom floor of the Louvre was being emptied out due to potential flooding!

Eagle heads for Madrid, where he’s to shadow the US destroyer that’s dropping off the first gold payment somewhere in the Mediterranean sea. Here Eagle becomes reacquainted with the Dolphin, his atomic-powered one-man sub, last seen in The Ice Goddess. Not sure about last time, but this time it’s specified that the Dolphin is painted bright yellow; perhaps its inventor was a Beatles fan. And while Eagle spends a few pages learning how to use a fancy new tracking gizmo on the sub, it’s nowhere in the realm of padding Eiden delivered in that earlier volume, to the point that Operation Weatherkill positively zips along in comparison. Indeed Eagle even brushes off more training, claiming how short time is.

Tracking the dropped-off gold to the island of Svete Hvar, off the coast of Yugoslavia, Eagle and the Dolphin are almost destroyed by depth charges dropped by enemy ships. Eventually Eagle will learn that the island is owned by Turkish billionaire Ferit Sunay, the man behind Operation Weatherkill. First though Eagle is almost arrested by secret police, only to be saved by a “beautiful blond” in a string bikini who acts like she knows him. Her name is Julie Anders and she claims to be Canadian, of Yugo-Ukranian heritage, but Eagle is certain she’s KGB . She also claims to be a nymphomaniac; “I want some sex when we get back to the hotel,” she instructs Eagle while they’re out on her catamaran – not that Eagle obeys her (more of which below).

Julie catches Eagle up on Ferit Sunay and the citadel he rules the island from; for her part, Julie suspects Eagle of being CIA. Like a regular pseudo-Bond villain Sunay stocks his ancient castle with legions of armed henchmen and guard dogs. Eagle, armed only with a knife, tries to survey the place one night, only to nearly get killed by the dogs; he’s saved by Julie, who appears brandishing a bow and arrow. After an interminable escape (the novel is filled with scenes of Eagle and Julie sneaking through the woods as they try to evade Sunay’s men), Eagle and Julie kill off a few more goons, Eagle slicing throats and Julie scoring kills with her arrows; she compares herself to Diana of the hunt. After this it’s time to get back to the hotel for some of that much-delayed sex.

Eiden as ever delivers the most explicit sex scenes in the series, yet this time it takes him a while to get to the good stuff. For some strange reason Eagle isn’t as prone to mixing business with pleasure in Operation Weatherkill, to the point that he even turns down sex from a sexy Spanish maid who slips nude into his bed one night in Madrid, offering herself. Eagle politely turns her down, not wanting to cause any “sexual jealousies” in the small Madrid-based group he’s working with, given that she’s the only girl there, and all the men are clearly lusting after her. And when Julie Anders first gets Eagle into to her hotel room and eagerly strips off both their clothes, Eagle kicks her in the ass(!) and tells her, “Next time, wait until you’re asked,” before storming off!

However when Eiden gets to the novel’s one and only sex scene he spares no details, with a two-page sequence featuring almost textbook documentation of each and every act: “Eagle slid the head of his shaft between the lips of her vagina and placed himself in her.” The same goes for the immediately-following round two: “She began the pulsing contractions of her vagina which would harden his shaft a second time.” (Hey, those are my favorite kind of contractions!) Eiden is also fond of exploiting the ample charms of his female characters; Julie for example must be nicely stacked, as within the first half-page of her introduction her breasts are described as “heavy,” “meaty,” and “bulging.” Julie is probably the best female character in the series yet (well, either her or the Sue Shiomi-esque Orchid Yang in #8: The Death Devils), and not just due to her breastesses; one can’t complain about a sexy KGB agent who enjoys killing her prey with bow and arrow.

She’s also handy with a submachine gun, carrying one in a big leather purse. Having admitted she’s KGB, Julie also acknowledges that the two men shadowing Eagle in the hotel are her comrades. The three decide to join forces to stop Sunay; Julie and team have come to Svete Hvar because the KGB was tracking the Yugoslavian climatologist Sunay is now using for the Operation Weatherkill satellite. The final sixty pages are mostly action, starting with Eagle, having gotten his plastic suit, dart gun, and explosives from the submerged Dolphin, getting in a fight with a pair of frogmen. Here we learn that Eagle’s C02 gun apparently works underwater, as does his suit’s chameleon device – as mentioned, this volume sees the return of all the gadgets that have been denied us in the past few installments.

Eiden doesn’t exploit the violence factor as much, though we do get occasional mention of the backs of heads getting blown off by Eagle’s darts; as ever in Eiden’s hands, the Expeditor goes for head shots. Eagle and Julie kill a slew of Sunay’s men here, as Eagle, chameleon unit activated, slips like a regular Predator onto Sunay’s boat and begins killing off the men who have surrounded Julie’s catamaran. Meanwhile Julie pulls out that subgun and blows off the heads of unarmed men, her “legs spread” as she wields the weapon. (Someone at Pyramid liked this phrase so much that they even used it to describe Julie’s fighting stance on the back cover!)

The climax becomes a bit muddled, as is Eiden’s wont. After some more action and chasing, Eagle and Julie spend too many pages foraging through the woods in the pre-dawn hours, trying in vain to meet up with Julie’s two comrades on the slopes of the cliff upon which Sunay’s castle looms. It goes on and on, not helped by the fact that Eagle watches through field glasses as the two KGB men get in a running battle with Sunay’s forces. Things finally kick in gear when Eagle and Julie storm the castle grounds. The “steel-vaned flechettes” fly fast and furious from Eagle’s C02 pistol as he kills a bunch of henchmen, Julie blasting them apart with her submachine gun – Eagle certain now the girl is a “thrill killer,” clearly enjoying herself too much.

Sunay is given a perfunctory sendoff; after killing several random soldiers Eagle and Julie break into Sunay’s private quarters and Julie guns him down just as he’s gotten out of bed with his mistress! More focus is placed on the climatologist Sunay’s used to create the Operation Weatherkill satellite; Julie wants to take him back to Russia to work for the Soviets, whereas Eagle argues that they don’t have the time or the resources to drag the old man back down the mountain. (The scientist takes care of the problem for them, offing himself with a handy cyanide pill.)

Julie’s thrill-killing reaches absurd proportions in the finale, with the KGB agent acting out of character as she suddenly runs around shooting down everyone, arguing with Eagle that “this is war.” As expected her own thrill-killing proves to be her undoing, shot down by a machine gun crew as she lobs some of Eagle’s “new purple grenades” down at them. I love the fact that Mr. Merlin has equipped his Expeditor with purple grenades, but one wonders what happened to the explosive vials Eagle used in the earliest installment. Ultimately it’s of no concern, as Eiden quickly wraps up Operation Weatherkill, with Eagle, having blown up Sunay’s entire citadel, safely escaping to the still-submerged Dolphin.

Speaking of Mr. Merlin, Eagle’s mysterious employer, he appears only briefly in the opening pages, per series formula, yet he is as memorable as ever in those few pages. Strangely though, these pages feature a clueless Merlin asking his honcho Samson a bunch of questions, whereas typically it’s vice versa. Eagle too is slightly different in Eiden’s hands. While he’s aggressively macho in the installments of Manning Lee Stokes and almost a monosyballic assassin in those of Robert Lory, in Eiden’s hands Eagle is more prone to self-doubt and concern. He also lacks the casual misogyny of Stokes’s version; when Julie is worried about her missing comrades and keeps looking to Eagle for guidance, our hero patiently consoles her. It would be hard to see Stokes’s version of Eagle showing such compassion. And Eiden’s John Eagle is more merciful; when Julie gleefully guns down those unarmed men on her catamaran, Eagle tries in vain to stop her, arguing that killing them would be meaningless.

And that was it for Eiden on John Eagle Expedtior, but then, there was only one more volume of the series to go, anyway. Eiden only wrote four installments (Stokes and Lory wrote five each), and they’re wildly disparate: The Ice Goddess had awesomely lurid potential but squandered it with a few hundred pages of padding until things sleazed up for a great but rushed finale; The Deadly Cyborgs, with its crazy plot of biomechanical yetis, was one of my favorite volumes in the entire series; Poppies Of Death seemed to be an installment of another series and came off like a boring espionage drama with little action; and finally Operation Weatherkill, which sort of melded the sci-fi plots of Eiden’s first two installments with the espionage fare of Poppies of Death.

As another overlong review will attest, I’m a total geek for the John Eagle Expeditor series. I’m having a hard time accepting the fact that the next volume is the last one.

Assignment To Bahrein (aka The Adjusters #1)

Assignment To Bahrein, by Peter Winston
No month stated, 1967  Award Books

Even though it has all the makings of another Lyle Kenyon Engel production, The Adjusters was actually the sole work of Award Books, and clearly they were trying to duplicate the success they’d enjoyed with an Engel production: namely, the Nick Carter: Killmaster series, which is even referenced on the cover of this first volume. And like the Nick Carter books, Award credited this series to its protagonist, Peter Winston.

The Adjusters ran for five volumes, and a big thanks to Juri, who figured out a few years ago who wrote each book. Paul Eiden wrote this first volume as well as the second one, and Jim Boswer wrote volumes three and four. After this the series went on a brief hiatus, returning in 1969 for the final volume, The Temple At Ilumquh, which featured a different cover design than the first four and was credited to the author who wrote it, Jack Laflin. My guess is the series failed to catch a readership, which is too bad, as if this first volume’s any indication The Adjusters has a lot of potential, and is better than another would-be Killmaster from Award: Hot Line.

Assignment To Bahrein opens with a prologue that takes place eight years before the series proper. Peter Winston (or “Peter,” as Eiden refers to him throughout, just like Nick Carter was “Nick” in the early books) is a 21 year-old dude with a love for violence and action. Out of work, he happens to be on a subway when some leather-clad punks attempt to rob an old man at knifepoint. Peter beats the shit out of them, getting hurt in the process. While recuperating in the hospital, he’s approached by a lovely young woman with sad gray eyes who offers him a job at White, Whittle, Limited, a global and famous firm that’s mostly involved in engineering contracts.

Flashforward to eight years later, and Peter, 29 now, is agent A-2 for the secret arm of White & Whittle’s Adjustments Division. Reporting to A-1 (by all acounts old Whittle himself, though this is never confirmed – and Peter’s only met the dude a few times), Peter Winston is now a global troubleshooter who earns a couple hundred thousand a year and has a millon or so in his bank account. He is a total ‘60s alpha male-type protagonist, driving a Ferrari Superfast and living in a swank Manhattan penthouse with all the bachelor pad trimmings. He’s over six feet tall, with a rangy, muscular build and described as not necessarily handsome but attractive to women because they can see the danger in his eyes. So in other words we can once again only envision ubiquitious paperback cover model Steve Holland in the role.

At first I thought Eiden’s writing here was a bit more focused than in later novels, like say John Eagle Expeditor #11. But make no mistake it’s Eiden for sure, with shall we say a leisurely approach to the plotting. Yet for all that, I really enjoy this guy’s style! Like many of these other pulp authors he has a knack for bringing characters to life and making you enjoy reading about them…despite the fact that hardly anything happens! I find it strange that Eiden never broke out into Burt Hirschfeld-style potboilers, as his style is very much in that vein and you think he’d breathe easier if he could get rid of the “action” requirements and just write about the beautiful people doing their thing.

The Adjusters are a group of secret agent-types who handle jobs A-1 himself has come up with, going around the globe and posing as engineering managers for White and Whittle. In brief backstory we learn that there were three A2s before Peter; the first died in action, the second died as well (I think; I forget), and the third “simply disappeared,” to quote Principal Skinner. Now Peter has risen to the top rank of A-2, getting his jobs from Vandervelde, the Dispatcher; then there’s A-3, the interesting Tinker Priest, an older dude who has learned a few hundred languages and serves as Peter’s Q. Eiden sets up a cool vibe in the White and Whittle offices in New York, not to mention Peter’s playboy lifestyle in his swanky penthouse (which has mood-music lights that can be adjusted by a dial on his bed’s headboard).

Peter’s current assignment has him going to the fictional island kingdom of Bahrein, located on the Persian Gulf and run by a Shah who is very forward minded (those were the days…). The country is quite westernized and content, but A-1’s concerned about some strange a-doings courtesy Prince Marko, the Shah’s brother, who was “practically Commie” as a youth and now has been moving funds around, ostensibly to fund a dam but perhaps in reality for some nefarious, communist purpose. Peter is to pose as an engineering inspector (White and Whittle holding the dam contract) while really figuring out what’s going on.

Peter’s main choice of weapon is a .357 Magnum that he’s a helluva shot with, and he also has a slide ruler that can be transformed into an 18” sword. Overall he’s less good-humored than the Killmaster and comes off as more aggressively macho, almost like Manning Lee Stokes’s version of Nick Carter but a bit more arrogant. But then, when gorgeous swinging ‘60s chicks are falling at your feet like they do for Peter Winston, you have every right to be a little arrogant. Indeed we meet Peter just as he’s boffed a hot TV weather girl who threw herself at him – and to note, Eiden’s frequent sex scenes are not very explicit, but he is very heavy on the anatomical details, particularly when it comes to breastesses. This is fortuitious, as every woman in the novel is busty.

The Shah has Peter flown over on his private jet, and here we get a taste of Eiden’s leisurely plotting, as the flight just goes on and on. But it sure is groovy, as Peter’s private room has an astrodome that allows him to sleep in starlight and the sexy Arabic stews are dressed like Barbara Eden, and plus there’s super-sexy hostess Mara, a Hawaiian-Japanese gal who serves as secretary for Prince Marko’s wife and doesn’t seem to mind Peter’s sexual advances at all. I did though have bad flashbacks to the endless chess games in John Eagle Expeditor #7 during a sequence where Peter engages Marko flunky Gholam in an endless game of blackjack, but at least the scene caps off with (fade to black) sex between Peter and Mara, who jumps on Peter’s bed, twists her nude body into a pretzel, and informs Peter that she used to be an acrobat.

Further evidencing Eiden’s steamy potboiler predilections, the Bahrein material is even more Hirschfeld-esque, or better yet a prefigure of Harold Robbins’s The Pirate. For one there’s wily Prince Marko, who treats Peter cordially but clearly hides ulterior motives, and also there’s Princess Ayesha, dropdead gorgeous drunk of the Shah’s wife – by the first night she’s already skinny dipping and making blatant advances to Peter. Then there’s Chahnaz, anoter dropdead Bahreinian beauty, one who flew over with Peter (treating him frostily throughout) and who is rumored to be the Shah’s next wife, whether she likes it or not; she was well on her way to Hollywood stardom before she got the call, and no one refuses the Shah.

It’s all very soapy as Ayesha comes on to Peter, then backs off when it gets hot and heavy – and Peter circumvents modern sentiment by practically demanding the gal give it to him, even trying to get her drunk the morning after she dissed him and forcing himself on her. But nothing ever comes of it, the girl reduced to crying fits, and Peter starts to suspect something’s up. Especially when he’s shot at on the streets of Bahrein, saved by his new best bud, muscular Chinese-American Hank Lee, an expat who runs a business here and who carries a gun. Later Peter’s knocked out at the Shah’s villa, and he suspects Prince Marko and flunky Gholam, mostly because he’s certain they’re afraid he’s about to uncover the purpose behind those mysterious funds.

Peter is most interested in Chahnaz, the only gal who doesn’t give him much play, of course. But his alpha machoness gradually melts her frosty nature, to the extent that she soon helps him and indeed even learns he’s a secret agent. Chahnaz is being forced to marry the Shah even though she hates Prince Marko, thus her willingness to assist Peter. Eiden succeeds in making the three main female characters more than just busty ciphers. He builds a nice budding chemistry between Peter and Chahnaz, for example, particularly given the open hostilities.

The final fifty or so pages ramp up the action. Having broken into Marko’s high-rise office with rappelling gear and stealing some documents, Peter gets Chahnaz to translate the paperwork. Turns out Marko is indeed a Commie and is building a missile silo for the Red Chinese. Here the gadgetry of the Killmaster series comes into play: Peter requests delivery from the Adjusters office of the X-42, a one-man helicopter, and also a Rocket Belt(!). First though we have some aerial action as Peter and another Whittle employee are shot out of the sky in their private plane by Marko-loyal members of the Bahrein air force.

Peter further gains Chahnaz’s assistance – not to mention her interest – by lying low in her place while he waits for the material to be delivered. Here Peter treats the girl with utter macho mystique, lying around and drinking beer while she goes out and buys him food and cooks for him, putting the poor girl down the whole time and never once lifting a finger to help her. Chahnaz comments on his sexist behavior throughout, making fun of it, but she serves him nonetheless. Despite which she still doesn’t sleep with him, even mocking him for assuming she would, and Eiden continues to elaborate on the chemistry between the two, having fun with it.

As typical with Eiden, the climax unfortunately fizzles out. Peter is confronted with a “surprise” traitor (spoiler: It’s Hank Lee, but you probably already figured that out as soon as the guy was introduced), and then he hooks up the ol’ Rocket Belt and flies back and forth to Marko’s refinery in the desert, planting explosives. This takes him two hours. Afterwards he hops on his mini-helicopter and flies off into the night amid the explosion, passes over Marko and the air force dude who shot him down. Peter takes out his .357, about to lower the helicopter and blow ‘em away – and then figures he probably shouldn’t!! Indeed we learn that the two were killed off-page, by Marko’s wife no less, who we find out lost her son in the refinery explosion. Meaning our hero killed an innocent kid, but that’s brushed under the carpet.

After one more quick lay with Mara, who has disappeared for 50 or so pages – and we learn that she’s a “slut” who will do anything for money and even set Peter up for that knockout at Marko’s villa – Peter hops aboard the company plane for the US, having smuggled aboard a secret passenger, one’s he’s going to get to boffing posthaste: None other than Chahnaz, you won’t be shocked to discover.

Another of those deceptively slim paperbacks, Assignment To Bahrein only runs 160 pages but it’s got some super-small and super-dense print. This is not a quick read by a long shot. And while it could’ve used a little more action and forward momentum, it did still have enough of that vintage pulp feel as to be enjoyable – enough so at least that I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

John Eagle Expeditor #11: Poppies Of Death

John Eagle Expeditor #11: Poppies Of Death, by Paul Edwards
June, 1975  Pyramid Books

This eleventh volume of the John Eagle Expeditor series sees a definite change in the formula that was established in the previous ten installments. Tasked by Mr. Merlin with a mission that “comes closer to pure espionage than anything we have ever sent you on,” John Eagle spends the majority of Poppies Of Death undercover, in what amounts to a basic sort of Cold War-era spy novel.

Paul Eiden turned in this installment, which to tell the truth is just as leisurely paced as his first entry, #7: The Ice Goddess. Unlike that volume, Poppies Of Death doesn’t have an outlandish plot, and in fact comes off like a prefigure of Craig Thomas’s 1977 novel Firefox (which is probably more known as the Clint Eastwood film), with Eagle sneaking into Moscow to steal a plane and fly it back into the free world. But there is no action for the first hundred pages, only livened up here and there with the explicit sex scenes Eiden also brought to his previous contributions.

Despite the lack of a pulpy plot and the minimal thrills for the first third of the volume, Poppies Of Death is nowhere as underwhelming as The Ice Goddess, which wasted the reader’s time with endlessly-detailed games of chess and topical details about an Eskimo’s daily life. I have no idea what Eiden did for a day job, but I’ll guess that, like other series author Robert Lory, he did a fair bit of international traveling, as this novel is filled to the brim with details about life in the USSR, with Moscow itself brought more to life than you’d expect in a men’s adventure novel.

In a way, this “Eagle goes undercover” angle had already been done in the series, back in the almighty #5: Valley Of Vultures. Either Eiden, like Manning Lee Stokes, decided a change-up was due to the series formula, or maybe editor Lyle Kenyon Engel wanted the Expeditor books to go in more of a spy novel direction. At any rate, here you will not find the things so familiar from previous volumes: no opening portion from Mr. Merlin’s perspective, no fancy gadgets, no remote fortress that John Eagle must cross hostile terrain to destroy.

This volume also appears to confirm a theory I’ve had that Eiden was the Expeditor author who apparently complained that Lory’s version of the character was too sexually active for someone who had a steady girlfriend.  Eiden is the only series author to give Eagle’s girlfriend, Ruth Lone Wolf (sometimes referred to as Ruth Lame Wolf, as she is here), any narrative time. Ruth factors heavily in the opening of Poppies Of Death, waking Eagle up at midnight to wish him happy birthday (his actual age is not stated, but we learn that the day itself is sometime in September) and gifting him with a Pulsar Date II watch, which she describes as “super-cool.”

Eagle is soon summoned to New York, where his clothing sizes are measured by Brubaker, a tight-lipped intelligence world figure. From there Eagle goes through eight weeks of flight training, so he can receive FAA certification as a four-engine jet pilot. Luckily, this material is wisely summarized in the narrative; you don’t have to read endless pages about Eagle learning how to fly large airliners. Finally he receives his mission; the Russians have copied the 707 in the form of a Soviet airliner called the TU-350. Eagle is to go to Moscow, hook up with his contacts there, and steal the plane.

How exactly this mission is suitable for Mr. Merlin’s one and only Expeditor is not mentioned. As for Mr. Merlin himself, his appearance here is reduced to a handful of lines, and indeed he comes off as a bit more callous than normal, almost taunting Eagle that he might very well not return from this particular mission. To make matters worse, Eagle himself spends the novel wondering why he was given this mission, as he is not trained in espionage, and thus he’s out of his element for the majority of the book.

One thing that stays true though is the native booty John Eagle must have. This would be Ludmilla, a gorgeous and stacked brunette Russian whose husband, an author, was killed by the KGB a year before, hence her sudden desire to defect. She turns out to be Eagle’s contact, and despite her frosty nature Eagle can’t help but check out her awesome bod: “Her breasts were so full and widely separated that their outer curves hid part of her upper arms.” Eiden actually writes this same description twice in the novel, so the lady must have some serious melons.

Ludmilla will be the navigator on the stolen plane; a Soviet Air Force instructor, she currently works as an oceanographer and has the luxury of her own car and apartment. Her accomplice, another Red Army Air Force pilot, is Aleksander Dobrodni, who will fly the stolen TU-350, with Eagle serving as co-pilot. All this stuff takes many pages to play out, with Eiden spending a lot of time with Eagle walking around Moscow and learning how its citizens try to work around the shackles of their oppressive society. There are no action scenes, no moments of suspense of tension.

There is, though, the already-mentioned sex scene. Eiden again proves himself the most explicit of the series authors, with Ludmilla, the night before they undertake the mission, inviting Eagle up to her apartment. In fact Eiden sort of rewrites one of the sex scenes from his previous installment, #9: The Deadly Cyborgs, with Eagle doing this weird “rotating” of his legs and hips so he can roll Ludmilla up onto his lap while he’s “ramming” her. Meanwhile Eagle discovers the poor girl’s ass is lacerated, something she’d been trying to hide from him. Turns out Dobrodni did it, the man being a “sadist” who gets off on whipping girls.

Instead of being outraged, Eagle instead mocks Ludmilla as a “masochist” and pretty much says she deserved it! Only after pleading with Eagle that she “had” to sleep with Dobrodni, so as to seduce him, does Eagle relent that the girl most likely didn’t want to get savagely whipped, after all. But then, Eagle himself is pretty callous, this time around; his first line in the novel, in fact, is a pissy keeper: “I loathe people who go through life saying, ‘I’m sorry!’”

Posing as an engineer named Higbee, Eagle spends the majority of the novel walking around Moscow in Higbee’s tweed suits and wondering why he’s on this assignment. It’s never a good idea to have your character constantly question why he was given a particular mission, for soon the reader begins to wonder the same thing. Countless times Eagle says he’s not cut out for espionage, though he’s obviously seen his share of Bond movies, as he introduces himself to Ludmilla thusly: “Eagle. John Eagle.”

Humorously, after a hundred pages of buildup, the actual theft of the TU-350 goes down in just a handful of pages, with hardly any tension, other than when police chase after the fleeing airliner and shoot at it. Eagle, Dobrodni, and Ludmilla take the plane to Turkey. Here we get lots of technical detail on how one can use celestial navigation to pilot a plane in the absence of Doppler radar, something Eiden informs us commercial Russian planes didn’t have at this time.

An intriguing thing about reading these old action paperbacks is how they can sometimes prefigure things that happened in the real world. Reading this book, I couldn’t help but think of the various MH370 disappearance theories that have been floating around for the past several months. Those theorists who claim MH370 was stolen would have a field day with Poppies Of Death, which basically tells you how to steal an airliner, even how to construct an impromptu landing strip.

Anyway, Poppies Of Death is also similar to Valley Of Vultures in how the last quarter seems to be from an entirely different novel. Landing in Turkey, Eagle finds a truck filled with college-aged Turks, lead by an attractive girl named Shali. Ludmilla and Dobrodni are quickly shuffled out of the narrative, Ludmilla being sent on to her new oceanographer job in Boston and Dobrodni waiting at the impromptu airstrip for a fellow pilot to be smuggled in.

Mr. Merlin, who leaves Eagle an audio tape with instructions, informs Eagle that he is now to report to Shali and do whatever she says. This is after Eagle has coldly spurned the girl’s sexual advances. Shali turns out to be the daughter of Bektek, corrupt Minister of the Interior who is legally harvesting opium and selling it to the Mafia. Shali and her fellow radicals intend to destroy the opium plant, and Eagle is going to lead the mission. (At least this explains the book’s title.)

Eiden delivers another sex scene; it’s not only a short one, but it’s a strange one, as Eagle basically rapes Shali, “ramming” into her for all of a few seconds, so they can “get sex out of the way.” We’ll all recall the “man’s conquest” theme of the John Eagle Expeditor series, and that theme is very strong here, as Eagle resents how Shali enjoys taunting men with her sexuality, so he basically just screws her quickly. As for Shali, she seems to enjoy it, despite the brevity: “I’ve never been taken that way before.” Thus, per the series theme, the female has been conquered.

This takes us into the homestretch as Eagle leads the young radicals on the assault, but they’re all captured as they’re hauling away the opium in several trucks – the mission, finally explained to Eagle, is for him to put the opium back on the TU-350 so that Dobrodni and his fellow Russian co-pilot can fly it back into the USSR. At least, I think that’s the plan.

Finally employing his plastic suit and dart gun (which Eiden refers to as a “flechette pistol”), Eagle gets the upper hand by killing a few of Bedek’s cops – Eagle’s first kills in the novel, over 130 pages in. Like Stokes, Eiden has Eagle’s suit outfitted with a helmet, yet strangely it’s a helmet that can supposedly fit within the pockets of Eagle’s suit! Robert Lory had the smarter idea, making it a hood instead of a helmet. But this action material is quickly over, and unlike his previous volume Eiden doesn’t play up on the violence factor.

The final pages feature a last-second plot where Eagle takes on some New York Mafioso who are here in Turkey and are pissed that their opium has suddenly gone missing. Eagle, once again captured, tries to fool them into thinking he’s from the Montreal branch of the Mafia(?!), then provokes them to shoot each other. Then he gets in an anticlimactic fight with their resident karate master. Eagle of course makes short work of him in one of the more hasty fight scenes ever written.

Eagle then flies to Hawaii for a debriefing by Mr. Merlin, to finally get some answers on this particular assignment. Speaking through the usual audio hookup (Eagle has still never actually seen his boss), Mr. Merlin explains that this whole mission was basically a stab at fighting the drug problem – the opium has been destroyed, and the goal was to destroy it in a Russian plane on Turkish soil. Or something. Eagle tells Mr. Merlin to do something about the “goof ball” menace (by which he means amphetamines) and leaves. The end!

As for the writing itself, one thing I’ve failed to state is that I really enjoy Eiden’s style. He has a very readable prose, and despite the lack of action or suspense the novel was still somewhat entertaining. Eiden though does come off very much as a contract writer; unlike Lory there are no attempts at continuity. Even Eagle’s thumb injury, from Eiden’s own The Deadly Cyborgs, goes unmentioned, whereas the digit was nearly torn off of Eagle’s hand at the climax of that installment.

Long story short, Poppies Of Death is a misfire. Not the worst of the series (I think my least favorite volume, so far, was #6: The Glyphs Of Gold), but sort of a muddled misstep which has nothing to do with the well-established series formula. Here’s hoping Eiden’s next installment, which would be his last, gets things back on track.

John Eagle Expeditor #9: The Deadly Cyborgs

John Eagle Expeditor #9: The Deadly Cyborgs, by Paul Edwards
February, 1975  Pyramid Books

Paul Eiden returns to the John Eagle Expeditor series and more than makes up for his unfortunately-padded and boring previous installment, #7: The Ice Goddess. As we’ll recall, that volume had all kinds of potential for being a trashy, lurid masterpiece, with John Eagle venturing into an “Amazon Queendom” ruled by a man-hating temptress of ultimate depravity, but sadly Eiden spent more time documenting boring stuff like Eagle’s time among the Eskimos and overly-detailed games of chess.

But Eiden must’ve taken a college course in “Men’s Adventure Writing 101” or something in the interim, or who knows, maybe he even just read a few of the earlier volumes, which were courtesy Manning Lee Stokes and Robert Lory. Because in The Deadly Cyborgs Eiden once again delivers a pulpy, promising plot, but this time he doesn’t bog the entire narrative down with unecessary detours; instead, he gets right to the good stuff. In this volume, my friends, John Eagle goes up against cyborg Yetis!!

Eagle’s boss Mr. Merlin has a secret research station in the Himalayas: Base One, which is composed of various scientists and is guarded by Anotnio Da Zara, an old commando hand with a fondness for mountain-climbing; he commands a legion of Sherpas. One evening Da Zara comes upon a Sherpa corpse, and the poor guy’s been shredded. Soon enough Da Zara finds the attacker – and it’s an actual Yeti, a monstrous, shambling creature with red-black fur, long arms, and huge claws!

Da Zara blows away two of the creatures with a .44 Magnum, and after a preliminary autopsy the corpses are quickly shipped to Merlin, who as usual runs the show from his high-tech fortress on fictional Makaluha island in Hawaii. Turns out these aren’t just your everyday, garden-variety Yetis; they’re actually humans, but ones who have been cybernetically and surgically altered, with armor plating welded to their joints and thighs and chests. Also their eyes have been replaced by “stereoscopic cameras” and their ears are “parabolic microphones,” and somehow Merlin is able to deduce that they are the work of Dr. Chen Yu, a Chinese scientist who was raised in the US but now has a hatred of Americans because his acupuncture-teaching father was ridiculed there(!).

Finally, John Eagle is called in. His mission is to venture to Base One in the Himalayas, hook up with Da Zara and his Sherpas, and locate Chen’s secret fortress, where he is creating these cyborg Yetis out of the locals. Oh, and Chen is the appropriately-psychotic villain pulp fiction demands…plus he has a gorgeous woman, nude and in chains, captive in his fortress. This is Susan Blackwood, a 27 year-old British Intelligence agent who was posing as a defecting college student in Peking. Elizabeth is kept tied up and constantly naked as part of a psychological campaign on Chen’s part; he wants to break Susan down and then turn her into a female cyborg Yeti! (Also, you’ve gotta love artist Sandy Kossin’s interpretation of Susan, on the lower left-hand corner of the cover; in the immortal words of Sir Mix-A-Lot, “baby got back!”)

Part of the series schtick is a healthy dose of adventure fiction, with Eagle testing himself against the elements. The Deadly Cyborgs is no different, with lots of detail about Eagle acclimating himself to the rigors of mountain-climbing in the Himalayas. Da Zara (who immediately thereafter drops out of the narrative) hooks Eagle up with two Sherpas, Ondi and Ang Dawa, who go off on a few weeks of mountain-climbing with Eagle. As expected this stuff is pretty egregious and uninteresting, but serves its purpose of page-filling. On and on it goes, overly detailed, but at least here this immaterial stuff only lasts for a few chapters, instead of the hundred pages of banal page-filler we got in The Ice Goddess.

After Eagle saves a thought-dead Ondi from an avalanche, the trio returns to Base One and merriment ensues, with the Sherpas breaking out Nepalese hash, “reputedly the strongest in the world.” We learn here that Eagle is “a moderate drinker” and smokes pot and hash “only as a social gesture.” When Anidede, the sexy and mini-skirted English-speaking sister of Ondi, waltzes up to Eagle and tells him she plans to have sex with him, and also that “To make love after hashish is very, very nice,” Eagle obviously makes an exception to the rule, toking right away with her.

Of the three series authors, Eiden writes the most explicit sex scenes. Here we not only get thorough description of Eagle’s shall we say finger-based explorations of Anidede’s sensitive region, but also lines like, “He slammed his shaft into her body and felt the immediate clonic spasms of her vulva.” Or even: “He hammered his shaft into her with stallion vigor until his own release came.” Man, that’s one slammed and hammered shaft! A later sex scene, the expected one between Eagle and the perennially-nude Susan Blackwood, is just as explicit, though Eiden like Stokes and Lory never goes for outright sleaze, instead couching the dirty stuff in a pseudo-“literary” feel.

Eagle’s so caught up with Anidede that he doesn’t learn until the next morning that the cyborgs have again attacked Base One. Here Eagle sees his first cyborg corpse in person, and Eiden does a nice job throughout capturing their eerie appearance, with their glowing “lidless eyes” which are cameras. After this Eagle hooks up again with the two Sherpas and sets off in pursuit; if he can track the surviving cyborgs, Eagle can find the secret base Dr. Chen is operating out of. Despite repeatedly stating that only large-caliber guns can take down the Yetis, Eiden still has the two Sherpas armed with nothing more than their standard carbines, and even more strangely Eagle is merely equipped with his typical C02-powered dart gun. Eagle also doesn’t make use of his chameleon suit, which is also strange given its heating properties.

The dart gun proves effective against the cyborg Yetis, though; Eagle and the two Sherpas come across a few of them as they’re in the process of attacking some helpless natives. Eagle’s steel “flechettes” blast right through the cyborg armor, and his headshots “jelly” their brains. But as expected Eagle ends up alone after this gory battle, and only here does he don his chameleon suit, which Eiden like Stokes fits with a helmet, rather than the hood Lory describes. (This though leads to some unintentional humor, as Eiden will write that Eagle has “locked in” the helmet, but then pages later he’ll have Eagle, his hands full, placing the dart gun between his “strong, white teeth.”)

Susan meanwhile has been going through her conditioning process, transported from a “hard cell” to a “soft cell,” the former the expected dungeon with chains, the latter an opulent bedroom with its own shower and bathroom. In between the drugs and the conditioning, Susan discovers she has a secret accomplice here: Markov, a KGB agent posing as one of the scientists in Chen’s lair. Markov is able to secretly slack off on Susan’s enforced drug regimen; there’s a goofy bit where we learn that Chen intends to dull her senses and play her films of “happy cyborgs” playing in the snow, so Susan will want to become one!

One thing I wish Eiden had exploited more in The Deadly Cyborgs is, well, the cyborgs themselves. Eagle gets in that brief skirmish with them, but then the threat moreso becomes the Chinese soldiers moving in on the area. Eagle doesn’t know it, but Chen has been declared insane by the Chinese government, who is sending in the troops to take over his fortress. Also instead of action we get lots of detail on how Eagle uses plastique to blow his way into an air shaft into the fortress, where he finds himself in a sub-corridor. 

Dispatching the two Chinese guards, Eagle runs into Susan Blackwood, who in true series style is so horny (merely from hearing Eagle speak English) that she throws herself on him, demanding that they screw, right here and now. Only after the “orgaic frenzy” does Eagle chastize himself for this lack of discipline, giving in to his lust in the middle of a mission. But then, we’ll recall that Eagle has often had sex with some random woman moments after infiltrating an enemy base (off the top of my head, there was #2: The Brain Scavengers and #3: The Laughing Death), so you have to wonder why he’s so hard on himself this time – but more importantly, this sort of nonsense, to me, only makes the series such escapist fun.

The climax sees Eagle, Markov, and a still-naked Susan (who despite being nude brandishes a Chinese “burp gun” in true Girls With Guns men’s adventure mag fashion) holding down the corridor while Chen sends cyborgs after them. Here finally we have more Eagle-vs.-cyborgs mayhem, with a handful of the massive Yetis attacking with violent results. Once again Eagle fires his darts point-blank into cyborg eyes and ears, but this time Eagle himself suffers serious damage, his right thumb nearly torn off by a Yeti claw. This lends tension to the finale, where for once Eagle is more desperate than usual, even struggling to load a new clip into his dart gun. (As for the thumb, the novel ends with Eagle figuring Merlin will have “the best surgeons in the world” fix it, but given the lack of continuity in the series, I’m betting the injury will never be mentioned again.) 

Eiden holds true to the other series tropes, with Eagle’s companions suffering even more drastically. Again though, this author shows a strange quirk for focusing on the wrong stuff. Instead of playing out more on battles with the Yetis and Dr. Chen, Eiden instead rushes through all of that and spends more time with Eagle wondering why he has such a strong hatred for Dr. Chen(?!). Eagle continues to ponder this for the last several pages, while we get more detail of how hard it is for him to sneak out of the base with his mangled hand. (Oh, and Eagle realizes on the last page that he hates Chen because Chen’s cyborg Yetis are an affront to nature!) I would’ve preferred more of the, you know, cyborg Yeti stuff, and less of the pointless introspection.

I think I say this every time, but this is my favorite men’s adventure series. Well, this and Andrew Sugar’s The Enforcer. But as I mentioned above John Eagle Expeditor is just pure escapist fun, so much so that you can overlook the occasional tendency to pad out the pages. The three authors more than make up for it with pulpy plotting, a lurid vibe, and lots of sex – and besides, there aren’t too many other series that would feature cyborg Yetis as the villains.