Glorious Trash Goes AI

I thought I’d share a litle fun I had with various AI programs: I gave ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Google AI the URL for my blog and asked each of them to write a Glorious Trash-style review for a fictional (ie nonexistent) men’s adventure series novel. 

First up is Gemini – this is what the Gemini App provided: 

In honor of your fantastic blog, here is a review of a non-existent 1980s Men’s Adventure paperback, written in the quintessential Glorious Trash style—complete with technical specs, a nod to the cover art, and a cynical yet affectionate breakdown of the carnage. 

THE BLOOD-VIGILANTE #4: NEON NIGHTMARE By "Chet Sterling" (actually a house name for a hungover ghostwriter) 

May, 1984 Gold Eagle / Worldwide Library 

Back in the mid-80s, the Men’s Adventure market was so overstaturated that publishers started throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. If it wasn’t a post-nuclear nomad or a Mafia-hunting veteran, it was usually a guy with a punny name and a massive caliber handgun. Enter The Blood-Vigilante. 

I’ve covered the first three volumes of this series before (see my reviews of The Red Gutter and Kill-Zone Karate), and while they were serviceable Executioner clones, Neon Nightmare is where the series—and presumably the author’s sanity—really goes off the rails. 

Our hero is, as always, Stone Vengeance (yes, that’s his name). Stone is an ex-Black Ops specialist who retired to a quiet life of cleaning his many, many guns until a Japanese death-cult decides to kidnap his favorite waitress from the local greasy spoon. Why? Because the cult leader, a guy named Baron Shidoko who wears a neon-pink kimono and lives in a penthouse atop a defunct Sears building, needs her "purity" to power a laser satellite. Or something. The plot is really just a clothesline to hang various scenes of Stone Vengeance blowing things up. 

The book starts with Stone in a seedy Tokyo-inspired version of Los Angeles. "Chet Sterling" (who rumor has it was actually a sci-fi writer trying to pay off his gambling debts) spends about three pages describing Stone’s customized .44 Magnum, which apparently has a barrel so long he has to carry it in a modified trombone case. 

The action is relentless and increasingly absurd. In chapter six, Stone infiltrates a warehouse by driving a stolen garbage truck through the wall while firing two Uzis simultaneously. Sterling’s prose is pure purple pulp: 

“Stone felt the hot lead singing a song of righteous fury. The cultists folded like cheap lawn chairs under the weight of his 9mm justice. The room smelled of cordite, cheap cologne, and the impending arrival of the Reaper.” 

One thing you have to love about these Gold Eagle-era titles is the casual disregard for physics. At one point, Stone jumps off a moving motorcycle, performs a mid-air somersault, and snipes a helicopter pilot with a flare gun. It’s glorious, high-octane trash of the highest order. 

There’s also the mandatory "soft-core" chapter where Stone meets a female ninja named Jade who is "deadly as a cobra but soft as a silk sheet." They spend exactly two pages "bonding" before she is inevitably killed off in the next chapter to give Stone an excuse to get really mad. 

The climax involves Stone storming the Sears building. He doesn't use the stairs; he uses a grappling hook attached to a motorcycle. Don't ask how it works. By the time Baron Shidoko gets his head disintegrated by Stone’s "Justice-Magnum," the body count is somewhere in the triple digits, and half of downtown LA is on fire. Stone simply lights a cigarette, mutters something about "the trash being taken out," and walks into the sunset. 

Neon Nightmare is a prime example of the "more is more" philosophy of 80s paperbacks. It’s loud, it’s dumb, and it’s over in 160 pages of tight, breezy typeface. It’s not "good" in any traditional sense, but if you want to see a man named Stone Vengeance punch a ninja through a neon sign, this is the book for you. 

Final Verdict: 4 out of 5 Spent Casings. Great cover art by Gil Cohen (probably), featuring a guy who looks suspiciously like a buff Burt Reynolds. 

Side Note: If any of you find a copy of The Blood-Vigilante #5: Arctic Ambush, let me know. I hear that’s the one where Stone fights a polar bear with a chainsaw. 

Next up is one by my buddy ChatGPT: 

Absolutely — and thanks for pointing me to the blog! I read a bunch of Glorious Trash reviews to get a feel for the tone: smart-ass pulp enthusiasm, cranky but funny critique, lots of meta commentary about writing quality, bizarre plot logic, sleaze quotient, and a genuine love for terrible books even while roasting them. 

Here’s a fictional review in the Glorious Trash style of an imagined men’s adventure novel: 

Talon Strike: Omega Dawn, by Rex Bladewolf 

Straight up? Talon Strike: Omega Dawn might be the dumbest damn book I’ve ever loved to read — and that’s saying something coming from someone who once devoured an entire novel about a CIA agent whose secret weapon was a bo staff made of compressed unicorn hair. Which, honestly, should’ve been the title of that novel. 

Plot (Such As It Exists) 

We open in the blistering sands of Zarqon Province, where CIA supersoldier Talon Strike — former Navy SEAL, ex-black ops, current narcissist extraordinaire — is chasing a rogue bioengineered death cult known only as The Final Dawn. They’ve stolen Project Omega Seraph, a lab-grown super-plague that turns people into glowing blue zombies who can still bench-press a Toyota. (Don’t ask how anyone figured that out — the book never explains.) 

Meanwhile, Talon’s ex-flame Serena Savage, a CIA analyst with a PhD in “knife shapes that mean trouble,” has to team up with him again because reasons. Specifically: Talon once saved her life with his bare hands… which honestly seems easier than explaining this book’s timeline. 

And just so you know this book has stakes: the head cultist — the chillingly named Azrael the Undying — is planning to release Omega Seraph at the World Peace Summit (or is it a Dog Show? They both have buffets and chaos, so roll with it). 

The Good 

If your idea of “good” is peak pulp insanity, this novel delivers: Talon once kills a bad guy using only a broken chair and an inspirational quote he learned from his drill sergeant. 

Serena rigs a lab explosion with seventeen paper clips and sheer willpower. One entire chapter is Talon monologuing about how endless war has honed his pecs into diamond-like perfection. (Gross yet compelling.) 

There’s also a fight scene on a moving freight train where Talon flips off one bad guy, then onto another — and honestly, I didn’t know that was physically possible. 

The Bad 

Oh lord, the prose. Dialogue like: “I see the truth in your eyes,” Talon said. “Burning like gasoline on a sunlit highway.” No one says lines like that unless they’re tied to a chair with acid dripping on their boots. Exposition dumps so heavy you’d swear Bladewolf was paid by the syllable. Plot holes you could parachute a Humvee through. But as with the finest of trash epics — I read every damn page. 

The Sleaze 

Like any self-respecting men’s adventure novel worth its salt, this book has: A femme fatale whose idea of subtle flirtation is kicking the hero in the groin, slowly. A cult ritual that’s 90% chanting and 10% gratuitous leather harness commentary. At least one inexplicable bare-chested desert sequence. 

Verdict 

Omega Dawn doesn’t just embrace its ridiculousness — it slays it with flaming twin pistols at sunrise. This is the kind of book where the hero’s laser pistol jam is worthy of fifty pages of internal monologue, and where the villain sometimes pauses just to explain his evil throughout. 

Would I read the next one? Yes. In a heartbeat. Because Talon Strike — for all his invulnerable abs and impossible luck — is a glorious, roaring explosion of pulp brilliance, and Omega Dawn is everything I want from a worthless, wonderful heap of glossy paperback trash. 

Rating: (Five detonators out of five — and I’d carry one to the beach.) 

Now here’s one by Gemini’s web version (ie not the app): 

The Kill-Chain Mandate (1978): A High-Octane Choreography of Cordite and Chest Hair 

The Setup: 

Ex-Special Forces operative turned "independent maritime consultant" (that’s 70s pulp-speak for "mercenary with a heart of gold and a liver of lead") Trace Stryker just wanted to finish his scotch at a dive bar in Macau. But when a mysterious woman in a silk cheongsam drops a microchip into his drink—and is promptly vaporized by a sniper’s bullet—Stryker finds himself caught in a web of global intrigue involving a rogue KGB general, a private island in the Philippines, and a satellite-guided laser system called Project Icarus. 

The Vibe: 

Imagine if a Sean Connery fever dream was transcribed by someone who had just consumed three pots of black coffee and a pack of unfiltered Luckies. Author "Chet Hammer" (almost certainly a pseudonym for a weary mid-list writer named Arthur who lived in a New Jersey basement) writes with the kind of frantic, muscular prose that suggests he was being paid by the adjective—specifically adjectives related to "hardened steel" and "musk." 

What Makes It Glorious Trash: 

The Hardware: Hammer spends three full pages describing Stryker’s customized .44 Magnum, which apparently has "the stopping power of a freight train and the grace of a ballerina." There is a weirdly erotic level of detail regarding the oiling of gun parts. 

The Hero: 

Trace Stryker is the ultimate alpha. He doesn't sleep; he "recharges in the shadows." He doesn't eat; he "fuels his mission." At one point, he cauterizes a wound using a heated Zippo and doesn't even flinch—he just uses the opportunity to light a cigar. 

The Casual Misogyny/Xenophobia: 

It’s 1978, folks. Every female character is a "femme fatale" with "eyes like switchblades," and every villain is a sneering caricature of Cold War anxieties. It’s problematic, it’s dated, and it’s exactly what you expect when you find a book with a shirtless man on the cover holding a rocket launcher. 

The Action: 

The final showdown takes place inside a hollowed-out volcano (of course). The body count is roughly the size of a small Midwestern town. Hammer describes explosions with such phonetic intensity—KRA-KOOOM!—that you can almost smell the sulfur coming off the yellowed mass-market paperback pages. 

The Verdict: 

The Kill-Chain Mandate is a masterpiece of the "Men’s Adventure" genre. It’s fast, it’s loud, and it makes absolutely no sense if you think about it for more than four seconds. It is a literary Slim Jim: zero nutritional value, questionable ingredients, but god help me, I couldn't stop until I finished the whole thing. 

Final Score: 4/5 Spent Casings. 

 Here’s one by Google AI (ie the basic “AI” feature on the Google search bar): 

BLOODY BAYOU (The Gator-Man #1) - By "Buck Savage" (1982) 

Welcome back, trash-fiends. Today we’re diving deep into the humid, mosquito-infested swamps of 1982 with a real piece of shelf-filler from the short-lived "Macho-Gore" line from Pinnacle. I’m talking about Bloody Bayou, the first (and thankfully only) outing for a protagonist who makes The Executioner look like a Sunday School teacher. 

The Setup: 

Our "hero" is Vance Power—yes, that’s his name—a former Green Beret who retired to the Louisiana swamps to "find peace," which in pulp-speak means "waiting for a reason to kill thirty people." Peace is interrupted when a local oil tycoon starts dumping radioactive sludge into the water, turning the local alligator population into six-hundred-pound killing machines with a taste for Coors-drinking locals. 

The Action: 

Author "Buck Savage" (almost certainly a pseudonym for a guy writing this in a weekend fueled by Scotch and spite) doesn’t skimp on the red meat. By page ten, a corrupt deputy is literally turned into a human po' boy. 

The prose is as purple as a bruised rib. Savage describes a swamp sunset as "the bleeding throat of God," and Vance Power doesn’t just walk; he "coils through the sawgrass like a spring-loaded engine of vengeance." 

The Trash Factor: 

What makes this Glorious Trash is the complete lack of internal logic. Vance has a "tactical airboat" equipped with dual M60s and a mini-fridge. There’s a three-page digression about how to properly skin a nutria that reads like a manual for a psychopath. 

The climax involves Vance wrestling the "Alpha-Gator" while a refinery explodes in the background. Does it make sense? No. Does it feature a man stabbing a radioactive reptile in the eye with a sharpened boat oar? You bet your acid-washed jeans it does. 

The Verdict: 

If you find this in a thrift store bin for fifty cents, grab it. It’s got everything we love here: questionable 80s politics, excessive descriptions of firearms, and a body count higher than the author’s IQ. 

Final Grade: 4/5 Slimy Scales. 

And finally, here’s one by Grok: 

Here's a Glorious Trash-style review of a completely made-up men's adventure series entry. I invented a nonexistent series called "Cobra Venom" (because why not?), with our hero being a lone-wolf ex-Special Forces badass who keeps getting dragged into globe-trotting mayhem. Think Penetrator meets Executioner with a dash of that sleazy '80s Pinnacle Books vibe. 

Cobra Venom #7: Saigon Slaughterhouse By “Jack Stryker” (house name) 

Pinnacle Books, February 1984 

Man, I don’t know what it is about these mid-’80s men’s adventure series, but by book #7 they either hit their stride or start circling the drain. Saigon Slaughterhouse falls somewhere in the middle: it’s got the requisite body count, sleaze, and one-liners, but you can tell the house writers were starting to run low on fresh ideas. Still, it kept me entertained for a couple of afternoons, and that’s really all we ask from this stuff, right? 

Our man Cade “Cobra” Harlan is back, still sporting that signature black leather jacket (even in the jungle humidity—priorities!), still chain-smoking unfiltered Camels, and still nursing a grudge against every communist, drug lord, and corrupt politician from here to Bangkok. This time the plot kicks off when Cade gets a coded message from an old ’Nam buddy who’s now running a black-market gun operation in what’s left of Saigon (this is 1984, so we’re still pretending the place is a hotbed of intrigue even though the war’s been over for a decade). The buddy’s been snatched by a rogue ex-ARVN colonel who’s built a private army in the Mekong Delta and is planning to flood the U.S. with a new super-heroin called “Dragon’s Blood.” 

How convenient! Cade just happens to be in the neighborhood (he was “laying low” after icing a Miami cocaine kingpin in #6), so he grabs his trusty .44 AutoMag, a duffel bag of grenades, and heads overseas. Cue the requisite barroom brawl in a sleazy expat dive where half-naked bargirls cheer him on while he smashes a VC holdout’s face through a table. Classic. 

From there it’s the usual rollercoaster: ambushes in rice paddies, torture scenes that get pretty grim (the colonel’s favorite trick is dangling captives over pits filled with bamboo vipers—ouch), and of course the inevitable beautiful Eurasian double agent who sleeps with Cade, betrays him, then gets a last-minute redemption when she takes a bullet for him. Her name’s Linh, and she’s described in loving detail: “long black hair like midnight silk, full breasts straining against her silk ao dai, and eyes that promised heaven—or hell.” You know the drill. The sex scene is abrupt, sweaty, and mercifully short; no one’s pretending this is literature. 

The action really picks up in the final quarter when Cade storms the colonel’s river fortress (because every good men’s adventure needs a river fortress). We get boat chases with mounted machine guns, flamethrowers, a helicopter attack that ends with the chopper getting a LAW rocket through the cockpit, and Cade personally executing about thirty bad guys with headshots and knife work. There’s even a bit where he straps dynamite to a sampan and rams it into the enemy dock—pure ’80s excess, and I was here for it. 

The only real drag is the padding: there’s a long stretch where Cade gets captured and has to listen to the colonel monologue about his “grand vision” for a new Indochinese empire. Yawn. And the ending is abrupt even by series standards—Cade blows up the heroin stash, walks off into the sunset with a fresh pack of smokes, and we’re told “the war wasn’t over for Cobra Harlan.” Cue next month’s adventure. 

Still, for what it is, Saigon Slaughterhouse delivers the trashy goods. Solid action, enough sleaze to keep things interesting, and that unmistakable sense of a writer banging this out over a long weekend with a case of beer and a deadline. If you’re a fan of the Penetrator or the later Executioners, you’ll find plenty to like here. Just don’t expect Shakespeare. 

Recommended for a rainy afternoon when you want something violent, stupid, and fun. Cobra Harlan will be back next month in Cobra Venom #8: Panama Payback—and if the cover painting of him straddling a motorcycle with dual Uzis is any indication, it’s going to be bonkers. 

(Posted with yer pal, taking a break from the real world to celebrate the glorious trash.) 

Overall I found it interesting that none of these AI programs treated their fictional books on the level; all of them were satirical, featuring wild plots that bordered on sci-fi. I also thought it was interesting that some of them included a rating system, something I’ve never done here on the blog. The AI reviews are also a lot more dismissive of the books than I am; personally I’d be thrilled to read some of these books, and certainly wouldn’t mock them in a review. In this regard I think Grok came the closest to capturing the tone of the blog, and also it was the only one that included a month for its fictional publishing date.  However, ChatGPT summed up my blog perfectly in its opening paragraph.

That said, some of the mockery was very funny; Gemini’s comment that one of the ghostwriters was a “weary writer named Arthur” made me laugh out loud, as did the Gemini app comment of the undercover sci-fi writer paying off his gambling debts. I also appreciated how Grok was the only one that put actual sleaze into the fictional book (even mentioning breasts!), whereas the others were more chaste – so perhaps Grok has less limitations on that, who knows. Grok did kind of go nuts a few months ago. 

I might do more of these in the future, just for fun – I’d like to get some that aren’t so satirical, and maybe even have them try some 1970s trashy potboilers or horror.

The Executioner #21: Firebase Seattle

The Executioner #21: Firebase Seattle, by Don Pendleton

January, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Definitely one of my favorite volumes yet, Firebase Seattle is a fast-paced Executioner that features Mack Bolan taking on a Mafia army that is setting up base in Seattle – or, at least, wiping out the base and its backers before the army can get there, presumably to exploit the Pacific North West. Or something; Don Pendleton is light with the details, but it all boils down to a hidden forward base on Puget Sound that’s stuffed to the gills with machine guns and weapons. 

As mentioned previously, Firebase Seattle was the original projected title of the second “Jim Peterson” Executioner novel, following Sicilian Slaughter. I’ve never been able to find out if Pinnacle mocked up covers for the Peterson version – I seem to recall William H. Young in his Study of Action-Adventure Fiction said that they did, and I’ve always wondered if they were the same Gil Cohen illustration as used on this actual published version – but it’s curious that Pendleton waited this long to get to the title. We also know from his interview in Young’s study that Pendleton never read Sicilian Slaughter, so this is clearly not the book that “Peterson” (aka William Crawford) would have written – yet, curiously, the end of Sicilian Slaughter featured a Mafia commando base in Seattle, which is sort of the plot here in Pendleton’s novel. 

Even more curiously, there’s a part in Firebase Seattle where Bolan poses as a news reporter, calling himself “Peterson!” Could this have been a sly in-joke from Don Pendleton, or just a fluke? I have a hunch it’s the former, but I could be wrong; Pendleton does come off a little too “serious” in his books, and it’s clear he doesn’t have the “laughing madly as I indulge myself in my most warped fantasies” nature that I demand in my pulp fiction authors. 

It would be interesting to know if the version of Firebase Seattle written to contract by Gil Brewer was anything like this; as I also mentioned in my Sicilian Slaughter review, Brewer’s manuscript is stored at the University of Wyoming. But then, we also know from a comment Don Pendleton’s wife Linda left on my Sicilian Slaughter review that nothing in Brewer’s manuscript was used in Don Pendleton’s Firebase Seattle. (Speaking of Linda Pendleton, I did not learn until much later that she’d passed away a few months after posting those comments on my review.) 

To be sure, there is little here in the actual Firebase Seattle that pairs with the story promised at the end of Sicilian Slaughter. As we’ll recall, the finale of that book features a commando badass named Mr. Molto who ran a sort of national operation in which he was tracking the Executioner, and he was about to go on the offense. There is nothing like that here – and, so far as I’m aware, Mr. Molto was never mentioned again in the series, even in the Gold Eagle era – but we do get the promise of a mob strike force here in Firebase Seattle, and also the guy in charge of them, Captain John Franciscus, is somewhat like Mr. Molto…but only if the reader strives to make this connection. 

As it is, Franciscus barely appears in the text, and his few appearances do not give a good impression of him: getting kicked down a stairwell by Bolan and then later being rousted from sleep by undercover Fed (and secret Bolan aly) Leo Turin, who goes on to berate a hapless Franciscus. So then this is not nearly the formidable character that Mr. Molto promised to be. 

Speaking of Turin, there’s a crazy part where he and Hal Brognola – the “Head Fed” who is tasked with bringing Bolan down, we’ll recall – hang out on Bolan’s warwagon (ie that massive mobile home that has rocket launchers hidden on the roof), talk strategy, and then drive to some remote mob location and sit there as Bolan blasts the place apart with the rockets. Helicopter pilot Jack Grimaldi also appears frequently, flying Bolan to three combat sites; he has a brief radio discussion with Leo Turin, who is back in the warwagon, and this is the first the two characters talk, though no one knows the other’s name. This was interesting because the characters would all continue in the Gold Eagle books. 

Grimaldi appears from the start, dropping Bolan onto a site on the Puget Sound where Bolan does a “soft probe” and discovers an underground bunker in the process of being built. Bolan’s immediate suspicion is that the mob will be using it as a forward base for expansion into the PNW and on up into Canada, but ultimately Pendleton will take a page from James Bond and concoct this wacky plot where the Mafia, like a low-rent SPECTRE, plans to topple the global economy and then corner all the gold, storing it in an underground vault(!). It was all so preposterous that I was reminded of the similarly-outlandish ideas the Legion of Doom would come up with in the Superfriends cartoon. 

For once Pendleton doesn’t stick to his template, meaning there are no scenes where some one-off local character, usually a cop, will come upon the wreckage of a Bolan hit and then exposit with another character about what might have happened. Also, suprirsingly, Bolan gets laid – courtesy a hotstuff “natural” girl named Dianna who has gotten involved with the Seattle mob scene thanks to her stepfather. 

This is further indication that Don Pendleton is now making The Executioner as escapist as the other men’s adventure pulp of the era; with his high-tech warwagon and resourceful team of helpers, Bolan at this point is like something book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel might have created. Bolan previously shunned getting too close with gals; this time, having saved Dianna and taking her back to his warwagon to wash off her blood, Pendleton develops a steamy sequence where Dianna announces she’s super turned on and basically pulls Bolan into the shower with her. That said, there is precious little exploitation and the entirety of the sexual shenanigans occur off-page…indication that this is not the product of Lyle Kenyon Engel! 

Pendleton, warming to his theme, even introduces another hotstuff gal into the book: Dianna’s mom, Margaret, a “mature” version of her daughter and just as friggin’ sexy, we’re constantly reminded, and there’s a sitcom-esque moment where Bolan comes back from a mob hit and runs into the forty-something babe as she’s walking naked out of the shower. (I am thinking specifically of that episode of Who’s The Boss?, of course.) But, despite lounging around in a robe and making insinuating comments, the older lady subtly informs Bolan she’s too old for him, as if Pendleton had tired of the whole angle. 

Indeed, the two women are summarily dispatched from the narrative once Bolan has rescued Dianna when she stupidly goes to her mob friends to argue on Bolan’s behalf, and Pendleton spends the second half of the novel focused on Bolan and his guy buddies: Brognola, Turin, and Grimaldi. All this is more indication that the lean and mean vibe of the earliest volumes is long gone; Pendleton is now more enamored with Bolan’s high tech warwagon augmentations than he is with delivering taut action scenes, and we have sundry scenes of the guys enthusing over the sci-fi augmentations of the vehicle. 

Which is to say the action scenes are, for the most part, perfunctory. Bolan is so superhuman now it’s not even fun anymore. He parachutes into mob sites, takes down a few guys with his “TranGun” (a tranquilizer dart gun that brings to mind the “Ava” of fellow Pinnacle hero The Penetrator), then later on ‘chutes into another place where he goes in and out without much fuss, until finally wiping everyone out with an M-16/M-79 combo in a harried finale that lasts all of a few pages. 

Bolan also blows up the unfinished underground bunker – and, by the way, the strike force we were promised in the opening pages doesn’t even appear. Pendleton has pulled this before; Firebase Seattle isn’t the first Executioner to promise but not deliver a mob commando force. But at the end of the book Bolan realizes this is his “hardest touch” of the mob yet in his war, and the conflagration he creates will leave a lasting impact on the Mafia. 

There really isn’t much continuity anymore; Grimaldi occasionally refers to the action in Texas Storm, but for the most part Bolan’s life is now a surreal one, venturing from one Mafia site to another in his massive motor home, filled with an emptiness he knows will be a part of him until he dies. Overall, though, Firebase Seattle was my favorite volume in the series in a while; I was happy to see that Pendleton had loosened up a little and decided to make the series a little more pulpy. I still like to imagine though what The Executioner would’ve been like if Lyle Kenyon Engel had gotten his hands on it.

NYPD 2025: A Reappraisal

NYPD 2025, by Hal Stryker

May, 1985  Pinnacle Books

Back in April 2014 I first read and reviewed NYPD 2025, and at the time I declared that it was “either a work of warped genius or a bunch of fascist drivel.” Well, now that it is 2025, I thought I’d take another look and find out which one it was. 

I first thought of reading this book again back in 2021, back during the Covid pandemic, when wearing masks in public was a necessity – a sign, it occurred to me at the time, of this novel’s prescience. But then I decided to wait until the actual 2025 to read the novel again, just for the sake of completeness…and then 2025 came and went and I only just remembered to read the book again like a few days ago…so fittingly enough, this will be the last post of 2025. 

First of all, the main thing I want to state is that I enjoyed NYPD 2025 even more this time than I did when I first read it; this time I friggin’ loved it, and truly wished there had been a followup volume or series. For as I mentioned last time, this was clearly intended as the start of a series – author “Hal Stryker” (aka prolific genre writer George Henry Smith) even drops clues in the text of what the next volume(s) would entail, like for example a mention that the titular NYPD would go up against drug kingpins, or that there might be a traitor in their midst. 

I still greatly admire how George H. Smith so carefully treads the line between parody and seriousness; while there is a lot of intentional comedy in the narrative, the events are real as death to the characters themselves…which is just how I like my pulp. As I mentioned last time, there is some wildly exaggerated violence in the novel, complete with detailed descriptions of bodies being torn apart, chopped up, and in general mutilated – excessive carnage the equal of Phoenix. (Though no sex, which is plumb curious given Smith's background in sleaze paperbacks.) 

And, just as with that David Alexander series, the author’s tongue is clearly in cheek; for example, there’s a part where hero Captain Zack Ward is looking at a row of “smudge masks,” ie the rubbery full-face masks people must wear in this 2025 due to pollution (aka “smudge”), and we’re told that the masks are “replicas of great lovers of the past – Clark Gable, George Burns, men like that.” In 1985 the “George Burns” reference would’ve been seen as an obvious joke; today, in the actual 2025, many younger readers might not even know of that once-famous (and famously old) comedian. 

The same holds true of the fictional 2025 itself; Smith goes for wild exagerration, giving us a United States where all creativity is legal, even if it entails real murder, where “there are no immigrants” due to erased borders, where cops are criminals, and where war is shunned but the US is constantly in a state of war…not realizing how close he was to predicting the actual 2025. Whereas NYPD 2025 might have seemed absurd in 1985, likely selling in low numbers because readers thought it was too far-fetched, today there is a lot about the book that rings true. 

True, there is much that has not aged well: there’s no space exploration on the scale Smith mentions – we have minor tidbits of space voyages to Mars and beyond, and also cloning is to such an extent that one of the NYPD is a four-armed, two-headed “monster.” And snuff films are not mainstream entertainment as they are here in the novel: “solidios,” which are movies where viewers can have sex with actresses (or actors), and where the actresses can be killed – for real – in the viewing comfort of a person’s living room. And yet, this blurring of fantasy and reality is somewhat similar to our modern TikTok culture, if not with the snuff and the gore, but at least in how social media bleeds into the real world…if you don’t believe me, spend about five minutes with a kid and tell me how quickly you get sick of hearing them say “6-7.” 

Speaking of endless war, our hero Zack is a career soldier, having spent the past twenty-some years out of the country fighting wars. Lately he’s been in Mexico, helping that country “fight for its freedom,” in particular fighting the USSR (which still exists in this 2025). When I posted my original review of NYPD 2025 in 2014, a commenter named Halojones-fan mentioned that “It’s interesting how many of these stories assumed that the next big US military deployment was going to be in Central and South America.” Well, we see how that has changed in the past year.  Again, Smith’s prescience about the actual 2025 is sometimes uncanny. 

But then, his 2025 isn’t so much the one we got, but the one we could have gotten. This is demonstrated most clearly in the never-seen character that is President Buchanan, aka “The Mahatma,” a “Flower Child” who has erased all borders, declared there are “no immigrants,” and has rewritten the Constitution as he sees fit. Indeed, Zack at one point notes all the “brown people” on the streets, and comments “the Melting Pot seems to be overflowing.”  Portia informs Zack that “America is said to be the largest of the Third World countries, with immigrants making up at least half the population and illegals a third. But then the Mahatma ruled there were no illegals.” That’s right, folks; George H. Smith predicted the Great Replacement Theory, or whatever it's called.

It’s also interesting that Smith even predicts the tiresome “politics from the bench” of the real 2025, where circuit court judges think they can coutnermand the duly elected President of the United States with the bang of a gavel. But in NYPD 2025, it’s the good guys who push back against federal policy; Judge Portia van Wyck, the thigh-length robe-wearing hotstuff blonde who pulls Zack out of a fatal solidio shoot (and immediately thereafter tells him she’s putting him on trial for his life), takes it upon herself to declare “The Mahatma’s” various rulings unconstitutional; a prefigure of Extreme Federalism (from a New York City judge, no less!).  

President Buchanan certainly would have appeared in a future volume; in this one, the only one, it’s his daughter, Indira, who appears; she’s been abducted, and Portia suspects she’s about to become the unwitting star of a snuff solidio. But Buchanan is always on the periphery, always being mentioned; I got a big chuckle out of the off-hand comment that one of Zack’s (many) opponents is “probably one of the many immigrants who made up nearly a third of the President’s Green Party, which had elected him President-For-Life.” One wonders if any of them embezzled billions of dollars in childcare fraud or ate wildlife in the park... 

I went over the plot in my original review, so won’t go into detail this time. I did have the same issues as my first reading, though; NYPD 2025 starts off strong, if a little derailed by scenes that go on too long, but slightly loses its footing in the final quarter, when Smith throttles back on the gory action and instead turns in a sci-fi mystery sort of thing, with Zack trying to figure out who has kidnapped Indira Buchanan…and what the true identity of solidio star “The Slasher” might be. This latter element brought to mind nothing less than The Spider, with its similar red herrings and “you’d never guess it was this minor character who is really the main villain,” and given that Smith was born in the 1920s I’m going to go ahead and assume he was a young reader of the pulps. 

But then, even some of these too-long sequences struck more of a chord in my second reading of NYPD 2025. For example, the over-long bit early on where Zack has to climb across the face of a building, fifty floors up, to try to escape some goons who are closing in. Back when I first read the book, I surely skimmed this sequence. This time, however, I couldn’t help but notice the eerie foreshadowing of September 11, 2001, when people trapped in the Twin Towers attempted this very thing, to escape the burning buildings, many of them falling to their death (the most horrific images of a horrific day – and, curiously, something that has been whitewashed in 9/11 retrospectives). In fact I’m surprised I didn’t notice this when I first read the novel several years ago…at the time I also didn’t notice the curious fact that, despite many New York landmarks being referenced in NYPD 2025, the Twin Towers are never mentioned. 

I also wish more time was spent with the team Zack would lead in the future volumes that were never written; again given the book a pulp vibe, Zack is to become “Captain Death,” and wears a skull mask when in this guise. Or at least he’s supposed to; he never actually wears the damn thing in the book! Smith certainly would have brought the NYPD cops to life in future books; I hate to say it, but there’s even more unwitting presience here, as the NYPD must work undercover, operating out of a secret headquarters – because the police are so hated in this 2025. Talk about “defund the police!” 

In fact, there’s even more prescience, as the NYPD is defunded at the end of the novel, or at least we’re told it soon will be, thanks to an angry President Buchanan. I’d forgotten the end-of-the-novel gimmick that Foxxy van Pelt, twenty-two-year-old bimbo star of solidios, announces that she’s not only going to join the NYPD but also fund them with her billions of dollars. I wonder if Smith would have kept her in the books; Foxxy is not a memorable character, just the cliché of a dimwitted, big-boobed valley girl (in other words, a very ‘80s cliché), but yet at the same time she brings to mind the vapidity of the average social media-obsessed Millennial of today, so props to William Henry Smith for once again predicting the actual 2025. And I still think it’s curious that Smith put a “van” in the name of both female characters – Judge Portia van Wyckk and Foxxy van Pelt – and I wonder if this was a mistake or if he was going for some sort of trendy “future” naming convention. 

Speaking of the ‘80s, the gory and sex-filled snuff solidios are clearly a reference to the slasher flicks that were popular when Smith was writing the book; the villainous Slasher could come out of any of those movies, save for the fact that Smith really drops the ball with his character design (basically he’s a Muslim terrorist in purple tights who wields two swords). But the solidios are slasher flicks to an exaggerated degree; in technology that is never adequately described, the solidio actors actually appear in the living rooms with viewers…and you can have sex with them, if you want. This raises many questions, questions that Smith does not answer. Unfortunately, Zack is so disgusted by the charade that he pushes away the solidio actress who offers herself to him as part of the scripted movie. 

It was hard to buy the “real” killing of the snuff solidios, though; what I gathered was that the actors were killed on a studio somewhere but the death and ensuing gore would splatter the living rooms of the viewers in some sort of virtual reality bit (though to be sure, “virtual reality” is not a term Smith uses). This still begs the question of how viewers could have sex with the actors and actresses, but I guess I should stop thinking of that. 

I also got a chuckle out of how President Buchanan has declared all art to be a protected right, with no such thing as censorship, thus even snuff films are legal…Smith getting wild and absurd with his predictions of the future, of course, but again there’s a slight bit of the real 2025 here, at least in regards to the wonderful pushback our current administration is giving to the censorship efforts of hypocritical foreign tyrants. Sure, it’s not “actors getting gutted for real on screen,” but we’ll take it! And I also appreciated how Smith used Zack as a fish out of water, alternately shocked and disgusted by what the America of 2025 has become. 

Speaking of Zack, I realized this time we have no idea how old the guy is. Or at least if we are told, I didn’t catch it. Last time I assumed he was young, but this time I noticed that we are only told that Zack has been out of the country for the better part of the past twenty years, having gone off as “a fresh-faced recruit” to fight wars around the globe. This means that Zack would be in his late 30s or early 40s, which puts him more in-line with the average men’s adventure protagonist. And this is what he truly is, always rushing off to a fight and gorily dispatching his opponents; Smith makes it clear that there would be an ongoing bantering between Zack and Portia in future books, given the hotbodied blonde judge’s distaste for Zack’s “kill first” mentality, yet of course she is clearly attracted to him. In other words, Zack is a “toxic male,” a phrase Smith surely would have used if it had occurred to him. There’s no doubt there would be the ongoing gimmick that Zack and Portia might become an item in future installments. 

Overall, I think George Henry Smith got a lot of things right in NYPD 2025, and sometimes even inadvertently; for example, people fly “floaters” instead of driving cars, but there’s still a prediction of the electric cars of today when a character at one point says, “And where do you propose to find gasoline in this day and age?” Smith also did a good job of knowing what people would forget about in forty years; we’re told, for example, that President Buchanan is “a Flower Child in an era that has forgotten what a Flower Child is.” 

And need I elaborate on Portia’s off-hand comment that “although there are strict laws in this country, they apply only to police and security forces, not to criminals?” Let’s think back to the “Summer of Love,” shall we?  And speaking of social commentary, Sally Mondo, the rock-singing solidio newscaster with her perfect body that is covered in tattoos, almost seems like some wild take on a social media influencer – hell, there probably are TikTok influencers out there right now who are just like her.

So yeah, I’d say NYPD 2025 really is a “work of warped genius” – time has only proved that Smith was altogether too reserved in his predictions of an absurd future. And yes, it’s a damn shame we didn’t get more books in the series.

Death Merchant #23: The Budapest Action

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

July, 1977  Pinnacle Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I went home and tried to read the book. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Red Berets

The Red Berets, by Tom Biracree

February, 1983  Pinnacle Books

Well folks, like a suicidal Looney Tunes cartoon character, now I’ve seen everything. For we have here with The Red Berets the world’s first – and hopefully only – attempt at a non-violent men’s adventure series. No sex, either! It’s of course not very shocking that there wasn’t a followup volume, though one was clearly intended; once upon a time (ie ten years ago, when I purchased this book), Amazon even listed a second volume of the series, though no copies were ever listed for sale. I cannot recall the title, and the book is no longer listed on Amazon, but it was there at one time, I tell you! Which I imagine means it was on Pinnacle’s publication schedule, which Amazon somehow picked up. 

Now, having read this “first volume,” which The Red Berets was clearly intended to be, I am in no way, shape, or form surprised that the series itself never came to pass. For one, it’s a bloated 342 pages! Granted, it’s got some big print, but still. That’s way too long for a men’s adventure novel. And also, it’s tepid, features a protagonist who comes off like a wuss, and did I mention there’s no violence? Or sex? You don’t need a DOGE task force to figure out why The Red Berets was expendable. 

Speaking of intrusive political tangents, The Red Berets is also notable because it has a left-wing vibe. This is likely the only ‘80s men’s adventure novel that bashes Reagan, and repeatedly at that. We’re given frequent sermons on how “the new administration” focuses on overseas shenanigans and whatnot, leaving inner cities to fend for themselves, and one can almost feel the author gnashing his teeth in hot-blooded Democrat rage. Sure, Butler was also left-wing, but at least Len Levinson was sure to include some good ol’ sex and violence in his books…not so Tom Biracree, who by the way still appears to be publishing today. 

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh on The Red Berets. Truth be told, it has a respectable setup: a ‘Nam vet becomes an unwitting hero of the people when he puts together the titular force of young men and women, which patrols the subways of New York for purse-snatchers and rapists and murderers, and along the way they run afoul not only of a crime kingpin but also the mayor and the transit authorities. 

We get an indication that The Red Berets won’t be your average Pinnacle offering when the novel opens in Vietnam in 1972, with a young Green Beret battlefield medic named Jim Knight deciding that he’s had enough of the killing and the atrocity and that he’s quitting the warfare game, court-martial or not, and he’s going to devote himself to saving lives. From there we flash-forward ten years and Jim is now in New York, where he runs a clinic on the Lower East Side – right in the hellzone that was Alphabet City (though I don’t believe Biracree actually uses that name for the neighborhood). 

It’s a strange setup for a would-be men’s adventure series for sure. Jim Knight, former ass-kicking vet turned bleeding-heart doctor in the inner city. The veteran genre reader will of course understand that such setups are usually just window dressing, and despite all the tree-hugging such a character will eventually start kicking ass. But crazily, such a thing doesn’t really happen in The Red Berets. Indeed, Jim constantly nags at his young wards, the titular Red Berets, insisting that they not engage in any kind of fighting. There’s also an unintentionally hilarious part where he tells them their “weapon” is a whistle – to call for help! 

It takes a while to get there, though. The first quarter of The Red Berets is devoted to establishing Jim’s life in early ‘80s New York; we get another indication that this dude isn’t your traditional men’s adventure protagonist when we learn that he has a crush on Dr. Sara Cummings, a pretty young lady who works in Jim’s clinic, a lady who happens to be married. It’s hard to imagine John Eagle having a crush on someone, but again, this isn’t your average men’s typical yarn. 

As mentioned we also get periodic sermons on how crime-ridden New York has gotten, which for some unspecified reason is the fault of President Reagan, and Jim stews at how dangerous the streets have become. Biracree often cuts to the perspectives of other characters, and through these sequences we learn there is a new gang that terrorizes the subway in particular; young kids who have cut their faces as a sign of their membership in the gang, calling themselves the Savage Skulls. 

Jim’s purpose in life begins when an old woman he knows is murdered by a Savage Skull in a subway mugging gone wrong; with the assistance of his friends, Jim begins riding the subway each night, to see if he can find the punks who killed her. Not to dish out any payback, but so as to get their descriptions and report them to the police! But through this Jim Knight ultimately begins a movement to make the subways – and New York itself – safe again. 

His two main accomplices are Renaldo, a mountain of muscle who happens to be a professional heavyweight boxer, and Baseline, a young black basketball player who drives a taxi and likes to rap his dialog. Yes, it’s the early ‘80s, folks, with the occasional mention of Ghetto Blasters to boot. Other characters will come into the fray – like a young black girl who is also a basketball player, and an old man who once as a Vaudeville comedian – but Renaldo and Baseline are Jim’s standbys. 

What starts as a simple act of vigilance – riding the subway and watching out for gang-bangers – turns into a movement that sweeps the city. When Jim and his colleagues stop a few muggings, already going beyond Jim’s “no engagement” policy, a female reporter comes along and turns Jim into a hero via a series of newspaper articles. This not only gets people interested in joining Jim, but it also pisses off the mayor and the transit cops, as it makes them look bad – ordinary citizens must defend themselves because the authorities are incapable. 

This is where “the Red Berets” are born; when Renaldo’s elderly trainer is nearly killed by thugs (you can just picture him as Burgess Meredith in the movie that plays in your mind), Jim and the team decide to adopt the old man’s trademark red beret as the “uniform” of their movement. And, let’s not forget, a friggin’ whistle will be their weapon. The action scenes follow more of a smallscale, non-lethal template, with mostly fistfights or people running from each other. What I mean to say is, there’s no gun-blazing action in The Red Berets. It’s all very anemic and G-rated, as if Tom Biracree got on the “kinder, gentler” vibe of the ‘90s a decade early. 

There’s no sex, either. Jim manages to hook up with both the married lady – who leaves her husband before offering herself to Jim – as well as the reporter. All the sex is off page, and folks even here Jim Knight comes off like a wuss. There’s a part where Sara asks Jim to spend the night and he balks at the idea, saying they should wait! But then, Jim is indecisive and weak throughout the novel; he even breaks the cardinal hero rule and tries to quit multiple times in the narrative, only to be pulled back into it by other characters. 

We soon learn of Anthony Brown, a local crime kingpin who is involved with the Savage Skulls and who also sets his sights on Jim and the Red Berets. But for the most part the team handles those who prey on innocents in the subway, like a memorable scene where they stop a rape in progress. And as mentioned they also become heroes to the citizens of New York, showing that if you stand together you can fight back against crime – quite an evolution for the men’s adventure genre, coming out of the lone wolf ‘70s. 

Teams were the thing in ‘80s men’s adventure, and in that one regard The Red Berets has something in common with its brethren in the genre. Otherwise, it’s no mystery why this “series” only amounted to one volume, and why the second volume was not published. Personally when I read a men’s adventure novel, I don’t want something less violent, less graphic. I want gore-soaked insanity with tons of lurid stuff. But as I’ve said many times before, that’s just me.

The Terminator #2: Silicon Valley Slaughter

The Terminator #2: Silicon Valley Slaughter, by John Quinn

July, 1983  Pinnacle Books

The second volume of The Terminator is similar to the first: a somewhat slow-moving piece that is more focused on building tension and suspense than it is to catering to Pinnacle’s almost desperate declaration that they (still) are “the number one action-adventure publisher.” 

Dennis Rodriguez is again outed as the writer on the copyright page, which makes one wonder why the “John Quinn” by-line was even necessary. It’s not like Pinnacle’s contemporary Justin Perry series, where author Hal Bennett likely used a pseudonym (and didn’t put his name on the copyright page) so no one would think he was batshit crazy. As with the first book, Rodriguez turns in a book that’s very sedate and methodical in its delivery, at times more approaching the vibe of a hardboiled yarn than an action caper. 

What I find most interesting about Silicon Valley Slaughter is that series protagonist Rod Gavin – who by the way is never reffered to as a “Terminator” in the entire book – is revealed here to basically be a drunk. This was already hinted at in the previous book, where Gavin “fortified” himself with a bottle of booze while lurking in the trunk of a car, feeling “good” and “loose” when he finally came out for the big finale. 

Well, Rodriguez takes that and runs with it in this second volume. Gavin drinks his way through a lot of bottles in the course of the book, even recreating the previous volume’s bit by asking some goons to buy him a bottle of liquor so he can go to sleep and they won’t have to worry about him! I mean if this guy doesn’t have a problem, I don’t know what a problem would even be. 

Rodriguez also follows the template of the previous book in that the majority of the tale is at a slow boil, cutting across a swathe of characters, until reaching a harried finale. A curious thing about Silicon Valley Slaughter is that Gavin has no personal impetus in the plot; he isn’t out for revenge, and indeed only gets into the fray so as to help his friend Duffy (returning from the previous volume). Otherwise Gavin has no personal stake in the proceedings; ostensibly his goal is to rescue Duffy’s hotstuff, 20-something niece, but Gavin’s never even met her. 

The Terminator series is somewhat similar to the earlier Dakota in how Rod Gavin has a supporting group of characters, who appear in each volume. Actually, his “girlfriend” Kendall does not appear in Silicon Valley Slaughter, but she’s mentioned a lot. But there’s also Duffy, a Justice Dept. colleague of Gavin’s, and Dorn, a car mechanic who fixes up a beaten ’74 Trans Am for Gavin…even putting the very “1980s action” augmentation of an Uzi hidden inside of a center console. One can almost see Steven J. Cannell at his typewriter. 

As mentioned, Rodriguez likes to jump around a large group of characters. So for Sicilian Valley Slaughter we have material with Duffy (who is knocked into a coma after his intro, where he will remain for the duration of the novel), material with Duffy’s niece, Susan, and then stuff with both a high-level Japanese gangster as well as the American-born Japanese thug who works for him, with other characters besides. There is a lot of cutting between perspectives – and Rodriguez is good because he gives us white space or a chapter break to warn us of the perspective hopping – which ultimately means that Gavin comes off like a guest star in his own book. 

The plot concerns Duffy’s niece Susan being abducted, and the editors at Pinnacle do a great job of hyping the lurid aspects of this on the back cover, claiming that she’s about to be sent off into sexual servitude. However, author Dennis Rodriguez has much less lurid intentions. While it is mentioned, in passing, that the ultimate plan is to send her off into some sex slavery thing in Japan, for the most part Susan’s been kidnapped because she is working on some top-secret encryption device for an electronics firm in Silicon Valley. 

The novel is quite prescient in its talk of encryption and data, yet at the same time it’s not really the subject I want to read about in a men’s adventure novel. That said, Gavin himself is blithely unaware of all this mumbo-jumbo and tells people gladly that it’s outside of his realm. Regardless, he acts as a private investigator for the most part, trying to find young Susan as a way to pay back his injured friend, Duffy. 

Action is sporadic, and again has the vibe of a Gold Eagle novel from decades before; it’s mostly Gavin punching people. At one point an old Agency colleague gets him a P-38 pistol, a la the gun Gavin wields in the cover portrait on each volume – and also, the copyright page further states that the cover art is courtesy Bruce Minney. But honestly Gavin doesn’t use the gun much, and he’s more prone to hit the bottle than he is to shoot someone. 

Gavin does find the opportunity to get laid, though. While searching Susan’s place he discovers an attractive young woman hididng, fully clothed, in Susan’s shower. This turns out to be Hillary, a friend of Susan’s – a pretty one, naturally, with “full, upswept breasts.” Hillary has no idea who Gavin is – he uses a fake name throughout, claiming he’s a reporter – and later on there’s this unintentionally hilarious part where an injured Gavin needs to hide…and he goes to Hillary’s place and insists that she let him in, then tells her to go take a bath while he prepares dinner! I’ve seen a couple episodes of Dateline with this setup. 

But instead of telling Gavin to go away, Hillary opens the door and invites him in – this total stranger who is bleeding from an injury, who she met just a few days before, when he was snooping through her missing friend’s house. She even goes off to take a bath! Gavin makes a meal and the two eat and then they go to bed, but as with the previous book Rodriguez does not go into detail; indeed, the sex scenes seem to be incorporated merely so as to meet a publisher requirement. 

It’s the drinking, though, that makes me question how serious Dennis Rodriguez was about this whole affair. There’s actually a part where Gavin thinks to himself, “You can’t be on duty twenty-four hours a day,” and proceeds to get drunk. By himself. Then Dorn drives to California with the rebuilt Trans Am and Gavin gets drunk with him, too. Then there’s the part I already mentioned, where Gavin is caught by these yakuza thugs and he tells them to buy him a bottle so he can get drunk and won’t be “much trouble” for them! And it isn’t even some clever ploy, like Gavin throwing the booze on them and then flinging a match on them (which would totally combust in an action novel, there’s no reason to question “the science”). No – Gavin really does just drink until he goes to sleep! 

Another interesting thing is that Gavin keeps screwing up, thinking to himself that “the old Gavin would never have been caught” and that “the new Gavin [is] an amateur at this.” He’s an assassin – well, a Terminator, technically – and he’s been programmed to kill for the government. But acting on his own in a lone wolf capacity is outside of his experience, and he keeps messing things up and getting caught – even knocked out at one point, by nothing more than a bartender! 

As with the previous installment there’s a lot of cutting across the group of people, from the yakuza thugs to the treacherous employees of Susan’s company. And speaking of which, Rodriguez fills up so many pages with his scene cutting that Susan’s surprising fate is almost anticlimactically rendered, and the reader thinks he’s missed something. The worse thing is that Gavin is reduced to a supporting status, and we waste our time reading about one-off characters. 

But again it all is quickly wrapped up with an action scene that spans a few pages. And yes, Gavin does manage to get his Uzi out of his hidden Trans Am console, though the setup for this to happen is incredibly belabored and hard to buy. Rodriguez is again shy with the juicy details, though we do get occasional lines like, “One burst [from the Uzi] ruptured their chests, blowing pink meat against the walls.” 

Otherwise it’s a quick wrap-up after this, with Gavin dispatching practically all of his foes in a page or two. There’s not much in the way of a setup for the next volume – in fact, Gavin is essentially listless and without any plans for the future at all – but I did get a chuckle out of how the back cover proclaims that The Terminator series is “taking America by storm!” If that’s not hyperbolic copy, I don’t know what is.

The Butcher #14: African Contract

The Butcher #14: African Contract, by Stuart Jason

April, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Well, first the good news: James “Stuart Jason” Dockery for once writes an installment of The Butcher that isn’t a retread of every other volume he wrote, meaning that we don’t have the recurring template that I’ve nauseatingly complained about for the past several reviews of this series. But that brings us to the bad news: African Contract isn’t very good. It isn’t very good at all. 

This is a shame, because once again James Dockery proves himself a pretty good writer. But man, his plotting is so bizarre that even Russell Smith would get frustrated by one of Dockery’s books. Because once again Dockery takes a novel about a former mobster turned government assassin – Bucher the Butcher, of course – and, instead of the inner-city action piece one might expect from that setup, he turns in a tale where Bucher goes on a safari in Africa…oh, and apparently gets married! 

The reader knows he (and I’m sticking with the old-fashioned “he” instead of “they,” ‘cause we all know there’s no woman anywhere ever who would read a book titled The Butcher #14: African Contract, don’t we? I mean, let’s be honest!) is in for a bumpy and unusual read when African Contract opens, not with the series template opener of Bucher in some unstated city being dogged by two colorfully-named Mafia goons, both of which Bucher will gun down before being briefly arrested by a slackjawed yokel cop…but instead, African Contract opens with Bucher already in South Africa, already on a job – and indeed, there is no part where he is stalked in some city and briefly arrested, etc. (BTW I was trying to see how far I could stretch out that sentence.) 

Granted, that part will come later, but this time Dockery grafts his usual recurring schtick within the storyline proper (such as it is). So we don’t get the customary scene of Bucher being arrested, the slackjawed yokel cop going on about how illegal Bucher’s silencer is, etc. This does not mean that African Contract is wholly new, though; there are trace elements of Dockery’s previous installments throughout. 

Most notably would be #7: Death Race, an earlier tale in which Bucher, would you believe, fell in love, and you get a no-prize if you guess what happened to the gal in question. This time Dockery throws an old flame of Bucher’s on us, with little in the way of setup; Bucher’s in South Africa, on his latest assignment, when there’s a knock at his hotel room door…and he’s shocked to see his old girlfriend, blonde beauty Franziska, a South African babe who “picked Bucher up” on the street in Paris, years before, and Bucher immediately went for the gorgeous young college student with her “plump breasts.” 

It seems that Bucher was already a White Hat agent when he met Franziska, as it’s stated he was “on a mission” when she threw herself on him in Paris; at any rate, she calls him “gunslinger” as a pet name, so she is aware of his mob background. But here’s the thing: Franziska was the most important woman in Bucher’s life (though obviously we’ve never heard of her)…but Bucher thought she was dead! There’s a hazy backstory that she flew back home to South Africa, but the plane crashed, and Bucher was devastated for days because he thought she was gone. 

But now here the blonde is, alive and well – and what’s more, she’s a doctor, now. (Dockery isn’t very specific on how much time has passed, btw). She explains that she got off the plane when they had a stopover, and she herself later heard of the crash; further, she claims she sent Bucher a cable telling him that she was still alive, but Bucher never got any cable…so he’s just staggered that Franziska is still alive, after all this time. 

But Franziska isn’t done with the revelations yet – she also says she was pregnant at the time, but did not tell Bucher…however, the baby was stillborn. I mean all of this is a lot to dump on a guy who thought you were dead (for how many years we do not know), but still one would think Bucher would be a little suspicious of Franziska…especially because it soon develops that the mob knows Bucher is here in South Africa, and they’re sending people to kill him! 

Oh and Franziska has become a doctor due to the loss of her and Bucher’s child, and Bucher takes her back into his arms, and she will be the sole female character in the novel. But, anyone who has read the previous Dockery novels will know he is a “fade to black” sort of writer when it comes to the sleazy stuff; there are zero sex scenes in African Contract, and, also as is customary for Dockery, there is zero exploitation of Franziska. About the most we get is a bit, bizarrely late in the novel, where Dockery suddenly decides to write about her boobs:

Another thing the veteran reader of The Butcher might note from the above excerpt is that Franziska talks like every other female character in the series. A very highfalutin, reserved, “I rarely curse or use contractions” sort of demeanor, so Bucher cleary has a type…not to mention this is another facet in the (eternally?) recurring plot of Dockery’s installments – every novel sees Bucher in a sort of purgatory in which he experiences the same sequence of events, meets the same sort of woman, over and over again. 

Another thing the cagey reader might’ve noticed from the above is that Franziska refers to Bucher and herself as “husband and wife!” And mind you, this is Chapter 10 of the novel, and this is how the reader actually learns the two have gotten married! Poor Bucher is really head over heels for this girl he thought was dead…this is after 9 chapters in which Franziska acts increasingly suspicious…like for example she takes Bucher on a trip into the jungle in her “bush buggy,” and despite being a doctor she’s got this tricked-out truck that’s positively stuffed with weaponry, from rifles to machine guns. And when Bucher questions her on the necessity of this stuff, she has an explanation for each thing, like charging rhinos and whatnot, and Bucher accepts her explanations, and you wonder how this guy became such a top mobster (not to mention special agent). 

The main plot has to do with Bucher trying to figure out if the Mafia has started up a “replacement parts” deal where they give new human organs to old and dying mobsters. What’s been happening is that high-level mobsters who were previously old and near death have suddenly shown up looking younger and healthier. And also one of them was about to turn state’s evidence, or something, and exploded, and the theory is that these replacement parts might be booby trapped or somesuch. 

But as usual with a Dockery Butcher, all this is just background detail. Dockery does cater to his recurring template, just a bit out of the typical order: two superdeformed goons do inevitably come after Bucher, in the jungle no less, but Bucher easily dispatches them. There’s also a lot of stuff with various tribes Bucher and Fraziska encounter in the jungle, in particular one that is led by a guy who speaks in perfect British English, courtesy an education abroad. 

There’s also a lot of “flying fiction,” which harkens back to #10: Deadly Doctor and #11: Valley Of Death, in which Bucher suddenly became an aviator – which might indicate that Dockery had read those two installments, which were courtesy Lee Floren. Here Bucher flies an STOL around the jungle…I mean folks the title is not misleading at all. This one’s really an African Contract, and it’s more about Bucher on safari than it is the gritty action tale you might expect. 

Action is infrequent and, as ever with Dockery, fairly bloodless. Honestly, The Butcher is an anemic series in Dockery’s hands, not to mention how little it has in the way of sleazy exploitation. That said, there is still a ghoulish vibe to the series, mostly courtesy the dark humor Dockery brings to his plotting. But the thing is, Bucher must consistently be made to look stupid, as he overlooks obvious things…and, once again, the finale is a nightmare of exposition as everything is patiently explained to Bucher. This too is part of the recurring template of Dockery’s books. 

Overall, there isn’t much to recommend African Contract. I mean, saying “at least it isn’t a retread of the previous volumes” isn’t the most sterling endorsement. But what we get in exchange is so lackluster that a retread would’ve actually been preferable. Also, someone entirely new to the men’s adventure series will suspect something is amiss with Franziska’s story, but Bucher has proven himself in past Dockery installments to be a fool when it comes to women. 

At this point, I am looking forward to when Michael Avallone takes over The Butcher, but that won’t be for many more volumes – not until #27, to be precise.