It took seven years for author Dan J. Marlowe to release the sequel to his masterpiece, 1962's caper novel “The Name of the Game is Death”. Between 1962 and 1969 he would release seven stand-alones, all through the Fawcett Gold Medal line and in the crime/caper genres. 1969's “One Endless Hour” picks up with a slightly modified prologue of the prior book's last chapter. In it, a severely burned Chet Arnold (later to go by the name Earl Drake for this and the series) survives a car chase and firefight, and ends up behind bars in a prison's hospital wing.
The opening third of the novel is an elaborate but articulate escape plan hatched by Drake. These events purposely recalls Drake's turbulent childhood and defiance of authority. He's had back against the bricks numerous times and, aside from a few potential hangups, can escape prison. There's an immense story surrounding a surgeon from Pakistan and Drake's disfigured face and hands. In an unbelievable series of events, the surgeon is able to cosmetically repair most of Drake's face while returning use back to his hands. This was a bit of hyperbole on Marlowe's part and probably detracted from the story. We'll let it pass because it's conducive to the overall series.
The middle of the novel is Drake's financial misfortune (with a little payback) and immense scouting and planning of the next bank job. He meets up with a couple of recommended accomplices and sacks a makeup artist briefly (Marlowe is never explicit here). The next bank job is a large facility in Philadelphia, but the three do a quick run at a smaller bank and score a measly $6K.
The last third is the saving grace and makes up for the slower concoction of scout, plan rehabilitate. The bank job has the mandatory “wrench in the gears” and it's fun to watch the characters perform under stressful conditions. The wild ending is an absolute shocker that once again sets up the obligatory continuance in book three, 1969's “Operation Fireball”. While inferior to it's predecessor, this one is still highly recommended. Marlowe and Drake are an entertaining couple that deliver the goods.
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Donald Hamilton started his fiction writing career in the later 1940s coinciding with the introduction of paperback original novels into the American literary marketplace. After a series of decent stand-alone mystery, western, and adventure novels, he finally found critical and commercial success with his 'Matt Helm' espionage series that spanned for 27 novels released between 1960 and 1993. The character of Matt Helm was poorly-adapted for the screen in a handful of awful James Bond parody films starring Dean Martin. Those films failed to capture anything that was great about the books. The series never got the film adaptation it deserved.
“Matt Helm #17: The Retaliators” (1976) was a mid-series great installment in the adventures of the cynical-realist assassin. This novel followed a string of tepid, over-long, and convoluted Helm installments apparently designed to showcase Donald Hamilton’s nautical knowledge. Thankfully, the series found its legs again in this land-based propulsive action story.
In the novel, Matt Helm and two U.S. government assassin colleagues are on-the-run and suspected of treason after internal investigators discover mysterious large cash deposits into their bank accounts. The action quickly turns to Mexico where the seeds of the plot against Helm and his co-workers were planted. Many double-crosses and compelling characters surface. Blood flows. Matt gets laid. All good stuff.
Although it wasn’t the best book in the series, “The Retaliators” was nominated for an Edgar award for Best Paperback Original - probably as a means for recognizing Donald Hamilton’s lifetime of quality genre fiction. In any case, it was great to see this beloved series regain the high-quality action that Hamilton was capable of delivering. Highly recommended.
One of the most harrowing aspects of the Vietnam War became the basis for an obscure paperback series. The Vietcong dug some incredibly extensive tunnel systems beneath the jungle, in which soldiers and war supplies could be hidden for surprise attacks on American troops. Tunnel openings were cleverly concealed, and the tunnels themselves were riddled with booby traps (not to mention armed sentries lurking in the darkness), making these underground systems hard to find and harder still to penetrate.
There’s a lot of potential there for some good action/adventure fiction. Can author Cliff Banks deliver?
Well, Banks is actually Stephen Mertz (creator of the excellent M.I.A. Hunter series), so we’re in good hands, and the debut novel 'TUNNEL RATS' is outstanding. The only disappointing thing is that this would prove to be a very short-lived series, with just one more novel to come before an impatient Popular Library killed the franchise. If sales were soft, I blame the cover designs, not the writing.
Our heroes are a three-man squad who are selected for their general fighting ability, along with a Vietcong defector who trains them and accompanies them on their first assignment. One of the men is too proud to admit that he suffers from claustrophobia, and that’s going to be problematic later on, once they’re snaking their way through a tight VC tunnel system on their bellies in total darkness. Another guy in the squad has a bad feeling about the defector, who may or may not betray them.
There’s a lot more to the novel than just crawling around in tunnels. We get a jungle firefight, go-go dancers, a Saigon bar brawl and an incredible interrogation scene up in a helicopter, all before any of the tunnel stuff even begins. But everything that really matters is underground, and Mertz knows how to keep the reader wide-eyed and turning those pages. He maintains the perfect balance between action (to propel the narrative) and detail to help us feel like we’re down in those hot, stifling, terrifying tunnels ourselves, dealing with the snakes, the rats, the punji sticks and the rest of it.
I found myself holding my breath during a few of the most powerful passages. That’s the mark of truly great pulp fiction, and I doubt there are many action/adventure books that can top 'TUNNEL RATS' for tension.
Dan J. Marlowe was cursed with the wrong last name. Many in the genre, including myself, confused the author with Stephen Marlowe and Chandler's own iconic character Philip Marlowe. It's unfair, but some of the burden falls on the fan/reader's own ignorance. I fall into that category every time. Marlowe was an odd bird, with a lifespan that's rather peculiar and complex. Born in 1914, he was an accountant and avid gambler, validating his inclusion of poker and horses in his work as influences through experience. His wife died in 1956 and things drastically changed from there.
His love for writing and booze were support mechanisms that provoked his move to New York to write full-time. After five books about hotel detective Johnny Killian, Marlowe would go on to write the influential masterstroke - “The Name of the Game is Death”. It's an influential caper novel firmly entrenched under the much broader crime genre umbrella. Megaseller Stephen King dedicated his own noir work, “The Colorado Kid”, to Marlowe deeming him the “hardest of the hard-boiled”. The book is worthy of King's praise.
In the hard-boiled tradition of the first person narrative, we are introduced to the man with no name. Later, as the series continued (and arguably declined), the character is referred to as Earl Drake. In this book he uses an alias of Chet Arnold, fundamentally a loner who does bank jobs for a living. The story opens with Arnold and his mute partner Bunny knocking over a Phoenix bank. The hired driver panics and is fatally shot while Arnold takes one in the shoulder in an escape with Bunny. Most of the bag goes to Bunny, along with instructions for his partner to drive to Florida's gulf coast, find a small town and mail a thousand in hundreds to him. Once Arnold (at this point going by Roy Martin) heals, they will meet up. That plan goes to Hell in a handbag.
After one week of cabbage by mail, a letter arrives from Bunny saying he is in trouble and for Arnold to lay low until things clear up. The kicker – Bunny says he will call Arnold. Bunny is mute. After healing up, the novel then converts from recovery to road trip, encompassing Arnold's drive from Arizona to Hudson, Florida. It's this road venture that allows Marlowe to explain Arnold's past – equally as absorbing and intriguing as Bunny and the missing cash. We learn Arnold is 100% a loner, dedicated to solo strength and perseverance. His childhood is a suburban oddity, from a dead pet to knocking over convenience stores. Arnold did five years of hots and a cot, and swore he would never go back.
The book then moves to a bit of a slow, but entertaining burn as Arnold acclimates himself with the tiny town and has a fling with the lovable and fiery barkeep Hazel. There's a side-story on an underground illegal supplier from Alabama, while the story unfolds on Bunny's whereabouts and the missing $200K. The finale doesn't disappoint and has Arnold hammer back, pedal down in a whirlwind of headlights and gunfire. The book's ending defiantly pronounces Arnold's journey is far from over.
Again, it's Marlowe's masterpiece, a tour-de-force that showcases everything we love and cherish in the crime and caper epic. Arnold/Drake is the perfect anti-hero – methodical, calculating, ruthless but altogether lovable - from across town. The supporting cast of Hazel, corrupt deputy Blaze, the luscious Lucille and the spunky youngster Jed enhance the story with small town charm. It's this tease that puts Arnold teetering ever so close to the brink of normalcy. The novel's sequel is “One Endless Hour” before Drake and Marlowe take the series and character into the spy genre. Both “The Name of the Game is Death” and “One Endless Hour” have been reprinted as an omnibus through Stark House Press.
Kudos to author Paul Bishop for writing a terrific piece on Marlowe here.
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When African-American author Marc Olden began his fiction writing career in the early 1970s, he juggled two different action-adventure series characters. As Robert Hawke, the nine books in his 'Narc' series spanned from 1973 to 1975. Meanwhile, his 'Black Samurai' series lasted eight installments - all released in 1974 and 1975, a heavy production schedule for a relatively new author.
“Black Samurai #1” is a terrific introductory novel from an author who clearly understood the genre. The story opens in 1973 with an action-packed massacre at a Samurai training camp outside Tokyo. After being banished from the U.S. Army for Vietnam war crimes, Colonel Leo Tolstoy (an odd literary reference never fully explained), along with a group of rogue commandos and a pack of attack dogs launch a bloody raid on the Samurai encampment.
The slaughtered Samurai students and master in the camp were all Japanese with the exception of the one survivor, our hero, Robert Sand. The reader is quickly presented with a few flashbacks that explain how an American Black Guy became a Black Samurai with a paperback series of his own.
As a character, Sand is not exactly brimming with personality, but he sure knows how to kick ass. The action sequences featuring Sand’s quest for vengeance are really well-written. They are the perfect blend of bloody martial arts fighting and gory gun-play. Sand is an earnest man of honor who is intelligent, gallant, courageous and highly-skilled in every martial arts discipline.
However, this inaugural 'Black Samurai' novel really succeeds because of the addition of two key characters: an outstandingly diabolical villain and a powerful billionaire benefactor.
First the villain: Colonel Tolstoy is one of the best bad guys ever appearing in 1970s numbered paperbacks. His suicide squad of lethal toadies includes an Arab terrorist, an IRA gunman, a Vietnamese torture specialist and an American black militant - all lead by a U.S. Army officer bent on revenge. He is a growling, loathsome, genocidal maniac and the reader really becomes invested in his eventual downfall.
Early in the novel, the reader is also introduced to its most interesting character, former two-term U.S. President William Baron Clarke. He was responsible for discharging Colonel Tolstoy from the Army following atrocities in Vietnam, and now uses his money and influence to save the world behind the scenes. He’s a brash Texan running an off-the-books intelligence apparatus and sponsoring capable action heroes to prevent global tragedies. His working relationship with the Black Samurai is the richest relationship in the short novel.
The plot is extremely well-executed and structured similarly to an early Mack Bolan novel. Good guy scenes and bad guy scenes alternate leading to a satisfying and violent conclusion. Blood is shed. Women are laid. Ethnic stereotypes abound. But it’s a formula that works because Olden is such a good writer who can spin a tale filled with interesting characters, vivid action and creative bloodshed. Book one of this series will definitely make the reader want to tap into future Black Samurai adventures.
After Olden’s death in 2003 and the subsequent digital fiction revolution, the author’s heirs did something very smart: they kept his work alive by making his books available on eBook and audio platforms at affordable prices. It’s astounding that more rights-holders haven’t gone this route to monetize and preserve genre fiction stories from this era. Modern readers who want to explore his fiction don’t need to scour used bookstores for scarce and decaying paperbacks. For 'Black Samurai', some great action is only a click away.
'The Trailsman' was a very long-running series (398 novels!), employing multiple authors writing under the house name Jon Sharpe. Almost inevitably, the level of quality varies from book to book, sometimes markedly.
David Robbins was one of the better writers in the Trailsman stable, so I selected one of his books to read, since I’m already a big fan of his 'Wilderness' series. (He actually wrote more Trailsmans than Wilderness novels.)
“Mountain Mankillers” is set in the Rockies, where a minor gold rush is underway and a bustling tent city has been established. Skye Fargo stops by, and is very soon caught up in violence and mystery. A number of miners have disappeared, including the father of two sexy sisters, and Fargo helps them out by investigating. It’s pretty clear that the town’s corrupt establishment has something to do with it all, but pulling the strings is an unknown Mr. Big. Who could it be?
Well, a modestly attentive reader won’t be kept in suspense very long, because Robbins telegraphs the identity of Mr. Big on page 130, leaving the remaining thirty-two pages of text a bit anti-climactic. That’s not to say the book is ruined. It’s still a notch or two above average, thanks partly to a couple of vividly violent sequences. One is a brutal beating on a very muddy street, and the other is a savage lashing by a bullwhip-wielding bad guy. Unfortunately for Fargo, he’s on the receiving end of both of these assaults, each of which is nearly fatal. But don’t feel too sorry for him, as he’s rewarded by the author with some mighty steamy interludes with the sexy sisters.
There’s actually a third sister too, a likable ten-year-old who befriends Fargo and is in turn watched over by him. Their scenes together are very charming, and help differentiate this character from the usual two-fisted, fast-on-the-draw western stereotype we’ve seen so many times before. (My inner casting director put Rory Calhoun in the role of Fargo, and that seemed to help bring the character to life too.) The author showed a welcome light touch in another way: Fargo keeps running into strangers who embarrass him with gushing praise for the exploits recounted in earlier novels!
Anyway, there may be better Trailsman books out there (and there are), but you could do a lot worse than “Mountain Mankillers”.
Gold Eagle released “Neutron Solstice” in March of 1987. The novel is the third installment in the long running post-apocalyptic series 'Deathlands' and is penned by Laurence James (as James Axler). The last book, “Red Holocaust”, had our magnificent seven entering a redoubt in Alaska, with the last page promising that the exit would be hot. Thus the stage is set for this book, “Neutron Solstice”, which has it's location in the balmy swamps of Louisiana.
At 254-pages, this book could have shaved 50+ pages off. Aside from a few firefights, it's lacking any forward pacing or substantial plot development. Instead, it methodically sets up exploration, locations and the familiar “kidnap and torture” premise that's overly utilized. Voodoo themes, telekinesis and even the walking dead are par for the course for any destructive fantasy set on the bayou, yet even those factors don't elevate the book to an enjoyable pace. The end result finds this one average at best.
The story has Ryan and his crew facing a squad of bullies led by the tall, crippled Baron Tourment (get it?). He has a physic mutation and fears that his kingdom will fall to a man with one eye – Ryan. The Baron is camped in a Best Western hotel with troops and a lieutenant named Mephisto. Across the village at Holiday Inn lies our heroes, now six after losing a member. There's endless scouting and planning, that ultimately leads to Krysty and Lori being captured and used as rape bait. Ryan's team aligns with a ragtag group of survivors led by Jak Lauren, an albino teenager that has a knack for killing. The finale is entertaining but highly predictable.
Embedded in the narrative is some backstory on Ryan. His home is in Front Royal, VA and he escaped death at the hands of his evil brother Harvey. This sinister sibling killed Ryan's older brother Morgan and is also the culprit behind Ryan's missing eye. Harvey also sired a child with his father's wife. It's messy and will eventually be expanded in the fifth novel “Homeward Bound”. In between is the fourth title, "Crater Lake". I'm on it.
