Hell to Eternity

Edward S. Aarons started his writing career cranking out short stories for the pulps under the name Edward Ronns. The popularity of men’s paperback original novels in the 1950s gave Aarons a market to spread his wings with his stand-alone men’s crime and adventure books. His most successful venture was the Sam Durrell 'Assignment' series of spy novels that spanned over 40 installments between 1955 and 1970.

“Hell to Eternity” is an anomaly in Aarons’ body of work. It’s a 1960 Fawcett Gold Medal novelization of a screenplay (written by someone else) based on a true story from World War II. Although the events in the book ostensibly happened, the story has been filtered through the meat grinder of time and fictionalization: events occurred in 1944 that were recounted to a screenwriter 15 years later that were adapted for a book by the successful action novelist. This is good news for a reader who wants to enjoy a kick-ass war novel that reads nothing like a high school history textbook. The fact that the hero was a real guy is just an added bonus.

“Hell to Eternity” is the story of Hispanic USMC Private Guy Gabaldon and his experience at the Battle of Saipan during the war. For those without a deep knowledge of history, here’s what you need to know: Saipan is a small island in the Pacific about 135 miles from Guam and 1500 miles from Tokyo. The island was taken over by the Japanese during World War I and liberated by American troops during the sequel war. The isolated nature of this event allows the reader to enjoy the story of this battle without taking a deep dive into all the war’s machinations. It’s a bite-size story in a super-size war.

The reader is in good hands with Aarons as the storyteller. He introduces us to Gabaldon as he and his fellow Marines are positively terrified at the prospect of fighting the Japanese on the heavily-fortified island of Saipan. Flashbacks to Gabaldon’s childhood give us insight into his humble beginnings and the circumstances that taught a poor Los Angeles kid to speak fluent Japanese after he developed close relations in that immigrant community. As always, Aaron’s writing is superb, and the reader really comes to know young Gabaldon as a person while creating a rooting interest in his survival and success on this important mission.

For his part, Gabaldon is an understandable and imperfect hero. Fresh out of boot camp and scared out of his wits, he is far from a typical action star as he storms the beach on Saipan under enemy fire. He’s also conflicted as he sees Japanese soldiers dying at his feet because the immigrant community meant so much to him growing up. Flashbacks to Gabaldon’s life following Pearl Harbor and the internment of his Japanese-American friends add additional moral nuance to this exciting adventure story.

The interior of Saipan is a mountainous jungle pocked with caves deep into the woods. Those caves became fortifications and hiding places for the Japanese soldiers during the U.S. invasion. These hideouts serve as a great set-piece for Aarons to show us the way Gabaldon uses his language skills to coax enemy soldiers from the safety of their hiding places into surrender and interrogation. Meanwhile, there are plenty of bloody battles as the Marines fight Japanese Imperial soldiers armed with both guns and samurai swords. Aarons knows his way around a good action scene, and “Hell to Eternity” has plenty.

Later in life, Gabaldon went on to become a losing candidate for the U.S. Congress and the owner of a seafood business on Saipan where he lived as a civilian for 20 years before relocating to Florida for his final years. Before his 2006 death, Gabaldon wrote a non-fiction account of his war experiences called “Saipan: Suicide Island.” I don’t know much about Gabaldon’s own book, but there’s no way it’s more entertaining and exciting than Aaron’s fictionalized version of the story. “Hell to Eternity” is essential reading for fans of pulpy WW2 adventures. It will fit perfectly on the shelf next to Len Levinson’s 'Rat Bastards' series. Highly recommended.

Black Eagles #01 - Hanoi Hellground

I’ll be honest with you. I’ll only read one or two thick doorstop books a year, because I hate taking the risk that I’ll be trapped in the middle of a long-ass book that isn’t going anywhere. And at 330 pages and a tiny typeface, “HANOI HELLGROUND” is more than twice the length of the standard action/adventure series novel. But I’ve had a lot of luck with Vietnam War pulp lately, and I love the grinning skull covers on these 'Black Eagles' novels, so I tore into this series’ debut. Fortunately, the book keeps moving from start to finish.

It’s basically “THE DIRTY DOZEN” in Vietnam. An elite squad is put together for special combat missions, and the first assignment is to seize a huge pagoda complex way up in North Vietnam, kill all the military bigshots inside, find a hidden code descrambler there, and get out of the country with it after blowing up the place. 

The pagoda is the headquarters of an evil, ambitious general who curries favor with his superiors by maintaining it as a party palace where they can do all the nasty things they can’t get away with in Hanoi. Most of those things happen behind closed doors and involve underage boys, but the general himself is fond of the ladies. (As the Black Eagles close in on the night of the raid, he’ll be busily boinking a young commie cutie; his heat-seeking moisture missile will deliver a payload six separate times, a feat which even Longarm might envy.) 

The book is a little schizophrenic. On the one hand, it wants to be a serious military/espionage story, and it’s loaded with lots of details about weapons, strategy, Vietnamese culture and so forth. For example, a sequence where the squad learns high-altitude parachuting isn’t covered in a couple of sentences, but in page after page of exacting detail. 

But then on the other hand, the book wants to be pulpy, and after a few mundane chapters one sordid shocker after another pops up. Some of them are lurid, like the female commando who dates a hated communist enemy just to castrate him and stuff his package into his mouth as he bleeds to death. Some are tragic, like the innocent Vietnamese tribesmen who are captured by the communists and tortured with electrodes attached to their scrotum. And occasionally they’re just psychotically evil, as when the communists punish nuns by forcing excrement down their throats, all for the crime of sheltering the orphans of non-communists. There’s a lot of excess here, and not all of it is fun to read. But like they say, war is hell.

Writing under the pen name of John Lansing, author Mark K. Roberts is clearly trying a different approach than the one employed in his lightweight, sexy 'White Squaw' westerns. For the most part, “HANOI HELLGROUND” works. I liked all the combat action, and the inventive ways in which the Black Eagles deal with various perils on this mission. There was also ample backstory material on each member of the team, which helped flesh them out. (I still wasn’t really able to keep all thirteen of these guys separate and distinct in my mind, but that’s probably my fault rather than the book’s. I was still able to differentiate them as The Black Guy, The Hispanic Guy, The Jewish Guy, The Vietnamese Defector Guy, etc.) 

There was one glaring flaw in the story. The pagoda is situated up in the mountains of northern North Vietnam. There’s no good, level place there for an Army helicopter to land, so the Black Eagles have to parachute down, about a day’s hike away from the target. Okay, fine. Once the mission is completed, they have 48 hours to reach a secret pickup location in a flatter area, where a chopper will land and carry them out of the country. But that pickup location is hundreds of kilometers away, down in the southern part of the country. Huh? There’s no other out-of-the-way place in all of North Vietnam where a chopper can land? That’s insane. But it gives the author a good excuse to extend the book by eighty pages or so, as the Black Eagles desperately hijack vehicles and race south, trying to elude the enraged North Vietnamese who are right on their heels, and hopefully get to the pickup location before it’s too late. Some of the book’s best material is in these eighty pages, including a brutal showdown with the depraved general on a racing locomotive, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

Yes, the novel is longer than it needs to be. But it’s lively enough, and there’s some great action in it, so I didn’t mind much. Roberts did a good job with it. And although he didn’t write any of the later books in the series, I’m looking forward to exploring the later chapters of the 'Black Eagles' saga… none of which are nearly as lengthy as this one was.

Hell Rider #01 - Hell Rider

Author Dan Schmidt contributed a lot to the genre in the 80s. While subbing as Don Pendleton he penned over 20 'Executioner' titles. He penned double-digit installments for both Super Bolans and 'Stony Man'. The author seemed to specialize in the team based books. His 'Eagle Force' line of Bantam books ran nine issues and as Frank Garrett he wrote another nine volumes of his 'Killsquad' series. 'Hell Rider' looked like the birth of another long-running series, but the idea was shelved (or wasn't shelved) after only two installments. Both are under the fitting name of Dan Killerman. 

“Hell Rider” was released in 1985 by Pinnacle and follows the trend of vigilantes on bikes. The series is about bounty hunter Jesse Heller, a Vietnam vet who's trailing members of a biker gang called Satan's Avengers. While in transport from 'Nam back home, he learned that his entire family was killed on a camping trip in California by these ruffians and he wants revenge. He rides a bike in the mostly abandoned stretches of the southwest and carries an Interarms Virginia Dragoon .44. I like the gun, but Schmidt talks about it way too much. Essentially, the bike and this Dragoon are the trademarks for “Hell Rider”.

Schmidt is a meat and potatoes writer, heavy on action, low on plot and absolutely knew his 80s audience. Heller rides, shoots straight and speaks the truth and we all love that. Early in the book he gets to shooting, taking a hostage named Mitchell and learning the whereabouts of a secret meeting between the Satan's Avengers and a rival gang. There's a brief side-story about two Texas detectives and a sexy spot with The Madame, a whip wielding dominatrix that runs Mob coke and sex to the bikers. Heller befriends an old guy in the desert, loads up on explosives and meets the bikers head on in what could only fit into a “Mad Max” or “Road Warrior” type of climax. In fact, other than learning about Dallas police and a few citizens, “Hell Rider” could have easily just been a doomsday book. It's universally compatible with what we know of that genre – hot sand, blistering highways, biker combatants, lone warriors and no law. Interesting that Schmidt didn't commit completely to that vibe. 

Overall, we've read it, watched it and loved it all before. This story has been done to death in all sorts of media, but Schmidt writes high-octane stories and this is no different. If you are just needing that Saturday afternoon gunfire then “Hell Rider” has you covered. I'll definitely hunt down and read the second and last novel of the series - “Blood Run”. 

Violent Hours

I’ve been beating my head against the wall trying to learn anything useful or interesting about the author of “Violent Hours”, Robert Walsh, but I’ve been coming up empty. I do know that he was a real guy, not a pseudonym. I also know that “Violent Hours” was his first published novel as a Signet paperback original in 1958, but it didn’t seem to be reprinted thereafter. I can find zero evidence that he ever wrote another book that ever saw the light of day.

“Violent Hours” is a half-decent crime novel that had the potential to be great. The story takes place over the course of 22 hours with each chapter comprising a small block of that time (kinda like Fox-TV’s “24”). At 126, big-font pages, it’s a quick novella-length read. 

Our setting is the sleepy, isolated, town of Sareto. Far away from the main highway, the establishment of Sareto doesn’t take kindly to strangers. When a Yankee named Bill Carney is stranded with car trouble, the local mechanic is compelled to report the presence of the stranger to Monty, the town’s sinister land baron. Carney’s first impression is that Monty may own the town, but it’s not much of a prize. To Carney, the town of Sareto looks “like a forgotten prop in a low-budget Western.” 

There is a tense and unsettling feeling to Sareto, and the dark underbelly of this dysfunctional town was the book’s strongest feature. We meet the sexy waitress, Marylou, who grew up with an unbalanced mother and a father who looked at her with lust in his eyes. It’s through Marylou’s perspective that we learn about Monty’s wealth and his history of deliberate cruelty. We later learn that the counterbalance to the Monty’s power is an earnest newspaperman who is preparing to blow the lid off Monty’s corruption through a tell-all article in the town’s paper. Soon enough, the journalist and the stranger meet and discuss a plan to expose Monty to the entire town. All of this is happening in the hours before, during, and after a town dance and beer fest sponsored by Monty to placate the townsfolk and ensure their continued loyalty. 

At its core, “Violent Hours” is just a western novel. In fact, I have a theory that the author may have written this short book as an 1800s western, and New American Library offered to buy it if he changed the setting to the 1950s by simply adding an automobile and a telephone. Consider this: A stranger rolls into a lawless town under the thumb a corrupt boss and a feckless sheriff. The mysterious stranger attempts to bring needed justice to the cowed townsfolk. Violence ensues. The time frame is really immaterial to the story.  

Unfortunately, after a promising start, “Violent Hours” quickly fizzles out. The writing is adequate but nothing special. The bad guys are truly reprehensible and our hero is sufficiently reluctant to get dragged into the internal workings of a small town’s drama before doing just that. The book just lacks originality or any character with real charisma. You’ve seen this story before in many different forms, most of which are more compelling than this iteration. 

Fun Fact: The cover art on “Violent Hours” was painted by Robert Emil Schulz, an artist whose claim to fame was drawing the Brawny Man on the paper towel rolls (good work if you can get it, I imagine). It’s a well-packaged, good-looking book worth owning for the cover alone. The story inside, while not terrible, just isn’t the best use of your time.

The Rat Bastards #03 - River of Blood

This third novel in the 'Rat Bastards' series maintains the very high standards of the first two. The guys are still on Guadalcanal, still fighting the Japanese, and still getting the job done. But the mental and physical burdens get heavier all the time, and we’ll see several of them begin to break down.

The men are individually haunted by fears that they won’t survive the next firefight, that their women back home no longer care about them, that the Army won’t give them the material support they need, and that each new assignment is more impossible than the last. They’re rats trapped in a maze from which there’s no exit.

Don’t get the idea that this book is just some sort of downbeat psychological study. It isn’t. The action comes at you almost continuously, and it’s gritty, tense and exciting. It’s because the author has skillfully brought us into the hearts and minds of these men that we care about what happens to them, in and out of combat. And that’s why this novel is vastly better than your typical 'Abel Team' or 'Phoenix Force' bang-bang shoot-‘em-up story. You won’t be just observing the action. You’ll be in it with them. 

The cover says the author is John Mackie, but it’s really Len Levinson, and I’ve yet to read a book of his that was less than outstanding. He’s the gold standard. However, this book isn’t for everybody. If you’re concerned that graphic depictions of hand-to-hand jungle combat might make you queasy, or if references to “Japs” might be upsetting, you should read something else. (I suggest HOP ON POP; my toddler loves it.)

This is a novel grounded in both reality and humanity. Of course, it’s still pulp fiction, and the magnitude of the action is enhanced for dramatic effect. That’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing. You want history? Read a history book. You want a hell-for-leather, gut-churning, heart-pounding war saga that’ll keep you sweating through the action and devouring chapter after chapter way past your bedtime? You want RIVER OF BLOOD. 

River of Death

“River of Death” was a late-career release for Scottish adventure writer Alistair Maclean. It was his 27th book among the fiction and non-fiction contributions. By the book's release in 1981, Maclean had made it big, writing numerous international bestsellers and a few screenplays. Unfortunately, the author would pass away just six-years later at the age of 64 (strokes fueled by alcohol abuse).

Instead of frigid Arctic Circle atmosphere, “River of Death” is set in the scorching jungles of South America. This exotic adventure is prefaced with a peek at Germany's downfall in 1945. Two Nazi SS officers, Manteuffel and Spaatz, are stealing a fortune in Grecian treasure from peaceful monks. After loading the goods and burning the temples, Manteuffel leaves Spaatz high and dry, escaping in a submarine with the riches to parts unknown. Spaatz swears vengeance on the traitor.

Fast-forward twenty years and a multimillionaire named Smith hires an adventurer named Hamilton to escort him to the famed Lost City deep in the Brazilian rain forest. There's a host of last names beginning with H that really keeps the confusion at an all-time high – Hamilton, Hiller, Haller and Heffner. It's uncanny. Essentially, we all know who Smith really is and the reader would be a fool to think the Lost City holds anything other than Manteuffel, monkeys and monk money. Maclean isn't fooling anyone. The adventure includes cannibal tribes, an anaconda attack and a rip-roar ride on high-speed rapids. While all of this sounds exciting, it's as flat as Taylor Swift's chest. The obvious reveal and fizzled finale left me closing the book and pondering how to recoup four hours. “River of Death” is the river of boredom.

The Butcher #35 - Gotham Gore

You know how a schlocky action movie will promise you all kinds of crazy, high-velocity mayhem on the DVD cover, but then the movie delivers little or nothing of that and you’re left feeling ripped off?

Well, that happens with action/adventure novels sometimes, and Gotham Gore is a standout example. It’s the 35th and final novel in The Butcher series, written by Michael Avallone under the pen name Stuart Jason. 

The first disappointment an unsuspecting reader will face is that the Butcher doesn’t live up to his name. If you’re hoping (as I was) that he’s a kill-crazy vigilante psychopath, forget it. He’s actually a former Mafia guy who turned secret agent for the government. Oh well.

As always in this series, the novel opens with the Butcher having to deal with a would-be assassin. Once that’s out of the way, we slowly work our way into the slow-moving story, and slowly begin to realize that none of the cool stuff depicted on the front cover of the paperback will be forthcoming. 

The blurb on the back assures us that the novel has “something to do with black magic, hand grenades and a Demon Master--- with a little Nazi know-how thrown in for good measure.” Well, here’s what you’re led to expect, and what you’ll actually get: 

What you want: The evil Satanic ritual depicted on the book cover, with the human sacrifice of a busty virgin 

What you get: The Satanist is about as creepy as your dad’s accountant; the girl is no longer a virgin (ladies can’t resist the Butcher) and there will be no ritual and no human sacrifice

What you want: The Butcher blowing away bad guys with a machine gun, like he does on the cover

What you get: One pistol, no machine gun. The Butcher shoots only two or three people in the entire book

What you want: That Nazi with the “know-how”

What you get: The Satanist’s henchman is a German guy who never does anything remarkable, other than getting the drop on the Butcher several times but stupidly never killing him

What you want: That “Demon Master”

What you get: No demon, no master

What you want: The Satanist is scheming to blow up New York landmarks like the Empire State Building. Let’s see stuff get blown up!

What you get: Nothing gets blown up but the Satanist and his hide-out

What you want: The book’s called Gotham Gore, so let’s have some!

What you get: No gore, just a couple of explosions, and they don’t happen in Gotham 

What you want: A fitting conclusion to the saga of The Butcher, since this is the final book in the series

What you get: He calls Headquarters, gives the boss his report, that’s about it (mitigating factor: the book is finally over)

Johnny Rotten once asked his audience, “Ever have the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Why yes, Johnny, I have. I’ve read Gotham Gore.