Gold Eagle originally had the idea for 'Track' as 'Hunter', which would have made more sense overall. At the time NBC had the 'Hunter' name branded for television, thus 'Track' is given as this series name. It had a 13-book run from 1984-1986 and had a mythology of protagonist Dan Track “tracking” down 99 stolen nukes.
According to the “Brian Drake at Large!” blog, and comments Drake made at Trash Menace, Ahern had less than favorable opinions of the Track series. According to Drake, Ahern had publishing constraints and disliked the series' title. Perhaps his lack of enthusiasm is the driving force behind the debut's failure. “The Nintey-Nine”, the series opener, is a lethargic read that left me wishing the book length was the standard 180-pages instead of 220. It was a bear to get through.
Dan Track is a retired Army Major and former member of the branch's Criminal Investigation Division (CID). The beginning of the book has Track undercover and under covers with arms dealer Desiree Goth. After investigating her robbery of Wiesbaden arsenal, Track decides to break cover and detain her. Unfortunately, Goth and enforcer Zulu overpower Track and the prologue's closing pages has Track fighting drug runners in a North African desert.
Early chapters introduce us to series villain Johannes Krieger and his liberation of terrorist bomber Klaus Gurnheim. Krieger's “super power” is that he can alter his appearance to look like anyone. This Nazi sympathizer even becomes a woman in one ridiculous scene where he recruits a pilot at a gay bar. Krieger has the plans to capture 99 nuclear warheads from a military installation...because anyone can do this with a little planning, right?
Track teams with a global insurance underwriter, Sir Abner Chesterton, and his truck-driving nephew George to stop Krieger. So, what's so bad about the veteran good guy facing the mad bomber? The fact of the matter is that it's so utterly ridiculous that it's hard to even throw out logic to enjoy simple 80s fun. In one scene we learn that an IRA terrorist has captured the top floors of a department store. They have threatened to blow up the building if their demands aren't met. Intelligence, led by a Sir Edward Hall, advises that the terrorist has 80 people AND...there's a girl in a wheelchair. It's this sort of nonsense that is maddening. As if terrorists planning on bombing a building filled with Americans isn't enough to warrant Track's attention, the author has to add a handicapped child into the equation to really heighten the sense of urgency. Why?
The ridiculous notion that Krieger can walk into a military installation and force a General to hand over nuclear warheads is just too easy. To dumb down the reading even more...NO ONE but Track, George, Chesteron and an assemblage of 10,000 black mobsters even know the warheads are missing! The finale has Track saving the city of Chicago by stopping a train but my brain checked out with 40-pages left. It was truly an exercise of internal fortitude to get through this much nonsense. Don't track 'Track'. Just leave this series alone in the wild.
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The problem with Harry Whittington is that he wrote so many books that it’s hard to differentiate his crime fiction masterpieces from the so-so paperbacks he authored for a quick paycheck. While I consider him one of my favorite authors, I find myself repeatedly acquiring and reviewing novels that just aren’t his best work.
Whittington’s “So Dead My Love” was released in 1953 as half of an Ace Double paired with Stephen Ransome’s “I, The Executioner.” At some point, “So Dead My Love” was also released in Australia under the title “Let’s Count Our Dead,” and it was also included in the 2001 “Pulp Masters” anthology edited by Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg.
Jim Talbot is a New York private eye returning to his hometown of Duval, Florida (population 35,000) after a ten-year absence. He’s come at the request of Mike, an attorney and politician who functions as the benevolent political king of Duval. Mike needs Talbot’s help to find Mike’s missing law partner, and Talbot owes Mike a big favor from a decade earlier. Because this is a Harry Whittington novel, Talbot quickly learns that Mike is now married to Talbot’s old flame, Nita. Did I mention that she is beautiful and stacked?
Anyway, Mike seems to be a pretty honest politician, but his rival is a corrupt sheriff who controls the rackets in Duval. Could the sheriff have anything to do with the missing lawyer? Perhaps Nita knows more than she’s saying? Can Talbot navigate the corruption of Duval to learn the truth? Throw a spicy young stripper into the plot to further confuse Talbot’s loyalties, and we have a pretty traditional hardboiled mystery.
I’d describe “So Dead My Love” as a middle-of-the-road Whittington novel. It’s nowhere near as brilliant as “A Ticket to Hell” but it’s way better than “Saturday Night Town,” for example. The mystery was legit, and Talbot was a compelling main character to follow through the twists and turns thus making this paperback a fairly easy recommendation. Don’t move heaven and earth to buy a copy, but if you can read it on the cheap, it’s worth your time.
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It's no secret that I really didn't care for the ninth installment of Don Pendleton's vigilante series The Executioner. Vegas Vendetta was a marathon of complacency, resting on the laurels of Bolan's status as the mob killer. With that novel, the narrative was one-dimensional, relying on planning and plotting The Strip's war of attrition, but Pendleton just never got to the white-knuckle action. Or, really any action. Thankfully, the author shifts gears with the tenth volume, Caribbean Kill. It begins and ends with a bang.
Bolan, fresh from his Vegas hit, boards a plan and haphazardly flies it smack dab into a mob mansion on Puerto Rico's southern shoreline. Bailing before impact, the flying firebomb scorches the site, scattering Glass Bay's mob army into the jungle. The tone is set as Bolan diagnoses his situation:
"He had two full eight-round clips of ammo, plus six rounds in the service clip. He was literally up a tree, soaked to the skin with sticky salt water. He was hungry, and he was just about physically exhausted. Less than a quarter-mile away, an army of some fifty to seventy-five guns was methodically sweeping the periphery of the bay in a determined hunt for his person." – page 32.
From some brief but captivating cat and mouse tactics, Bolan begins to diminish and demoralize the ranks, eventually catching a ride into San Juan where the majority of the book's action takes place. Bolan eventually befriends a female cop named Eve. She's running a covert scheme to take down a mobster named Sir Edward. The two become a romantic item, with the author going as far as describing Eve as the Female Executioner. They hide out with farming couple named Juan and Rosalita while the mob scours the countryside for their whereabouts.
With the help of a pilot named Grimaldi, Bolan is able to ebb the tide. Hunting both Sir Edward and Quick Tony Lavagni (had a cameo in Executioner #05), the fight takes him through the jungle, up the shoreline and into the city streets. It's this wild-ride that's bumpy, thrilling and laced with gunfire. With Caribbean Kill, Don Pendleton is firing on all cylinders. Place this one up there with the series debut, Nightmare in New York and Chicago Wipe-Out as early standouts.
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During his prolific career, Michael Avallone wrote around 38 novels and countless short stories featuring his private eye character, Ed Noon. Most of the early installments are straightforward mystery novels in the bawdy tradition of Shell Scott or Milo March. Later in the series, Avallone reinvented the Noon character as a spy working on special assignments handed to him directly by the U.S. President. Toward the end of the series, I’m told that Noon tangles with UFOs and aliens. He was an all-purpose, multi-genre hero for the ages.
“Lust Is No Lady” is the 14th novel in the series - although I’ve found that they can be enjoyed in any order. The paperback was originally released in 1965 by Belmont Books and later again under the title “The Brutal Kook.” Avallone’s son, David, is a successful comic book writer who has lovingly kept the Ed Noon series available as affordable Kindle editions while preserving the original cover art wherever possible.
The story opens with Noon’s car experiencing a blowout while driving through desolate Wyoming en route to a much-needed California vacation. While preparing to change the tire, a small airplane flies out of nowhere and starts dropping bricks from the sky onto his car - destroying any hope of a roadside repair.
Setting out on foot in the blistering heat, Noon finds a half-dead, naked, Native American woman staked to the ground with vultures circling above. The language barrier prevents a full explanation, but the woman leads Noon to a small settlement in the middle of nowhere called Agreeable Wells where every person that Noon encounters behaves in a guarded and suspicious manner.
While stranded with these oddball settlers, Noon is not exactly a prisoner but not quite a guest among them. A brutal murder occurs and Noon - being a hotshot NYC private detective - lends a hand toward getting to the bottom of the situation. However, the bigger mystery to the novel involves the true reason these people are in the middle of nowhere. For much of the novel, Noon is an observer bearing witness to a feuding and duplicitous small community brimming with dysfunction and greed.
At some point during this short paperback, it occurred to me that “Lust Is No Lady” was Avallone’s attempt at placing Noon into a Western novel - albeit one with periodic attacks by a killer airplane. The good news is that this works splendidly thanks to the author’s knack for compelling storytelling and vivid characters. The action sequences - particularly the one at the book’s climax - are all expertly engineered for maximum excitement.
As long as you know what you’re getting - a big-city private detective plopped into an old west adventure - “Lust Is No Lady” is an easy recommendation. You really can’t go wrong with the Ed Noon novels of Michael Avallone.
Postscript:
Thanks to the efforts of David Avallone, an unpublished Ed Noon book called “The Walking Wounded” by Michael Avallone will finally be published. The novel was written in 1973, and features cover art by contemporary comic book artist, Dave Acosta. Keep an eye on Amazon for details about this exciting release.
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Leisure released the debut 'Buckskin' novel in 1984, the height of the adult western boom. The series would run for 42 entries and 10 giant editions. Speculation is aplenty on who wrote a majority of the series, but fingers point to Mitchell Smith as penning the first 12-14 books. After that, names like Chet Cunningham, Lawrence Cerri, Peter McCurtin, David Keller, Dean McElwain and Mary Carr are in the conversation as contributors to the series.
Buckskin is loosely based on the real “Buckskin” Frank Leslie (1842-1927), a former U.S. Army scout, gambler, rancher and gunfighter. The debut novel, “Rifle River”, introduces our protagonist Frank Leslie as a drunken fighting man who accidentally shoots and kills the love of his life in an alcohol-fueled frenzy. After antics with icons like Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok and Doc Holliday, Leslie eventually changes his name to Fredrick Lee and uses his profits to purchase a horse ranch in Montana.
Right out of the chute, the book really takes off in what we would assume is the typical “rehabilitating cowboy trying to settle down against unfavorable odds” formula. Instead, author Mitchell Smith does some extraordinary things with the western genre. Immediately we sense that this Buckskin character may be a different type of hero in a really unique series.
First, Buckskin brutally beats a young Native American boy who takes a shot at him on the ranch. Shooting the boy's horse out from under him (typically frowned upon), Buckskin wallops the kid with the leather until the servant/cook loosely intervenes. Second, Buckskin rapes a woman. In case you glanced past that – BUCKSKIN RAPES A WOMAN (again...frowned upon – even back then). In fear that the local deputy will arrest him, he sends the lawman an envelope of cash to let him walk free (severely frowned upon). Remember, Buckskin is the guy on the cover selling the books. It's his series.
Oddly, all of the above unpleasantness is written in a way that doesn't appear to be designed to offend the reader. The story here is that the local land baron wants to acquire the Montana ranch. It controls the river flow downstream to other seedy cattlemen that want nothing more than control and power of the water. Buckskin advises the ranchers that he is not damming the river, but this is the 1800s and gunpowder is more convincing. The neighbor's sultry sister is raped...absolutely raped...but towards the end of the incident she starts to enjoy it. This is an adult western and Buckskin proves to her, and three prostitutes, that he aims to please. Take it or leave it, that’s what happened. Don’t shoot the messenger.
“Rifle River” has tremendous staying power as a traditional western – feuding cattlemen, quick draw gunfights, an epic back-alley boxing match and the obligatory hanging. All of these elements should please genre fans. However, the series creator clearly has an anti-hero flavor in mind for this character. Buckskin, while brooding over poor decisions, still continues to make additional poor decisions. It is this aspect of “Rifle River” that leaves you either placing Buckskin as a vile villain or an unlikely hero in a gray chapter of western fiction. If anything, it proves that some westerns don’t fall easily into the black vs. white, good vs. evil formulation that cemented the genre foundation. Buckskin is something completely different in a genre not known for its originality. I'm intrigued enough to search for the next installment.
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First published in 1954 by Lion Books, Sin Pit was the only known novel written by Paul Meskil. According to an introduction by academic David Rachels in a 2017 eBook re-release, Meskil was a New York crime reporter whose descriptive writing was lurid enough to catch the eye of a literary agent who encouraged him to write crime fiction. In short order, he turned in a manuscript called Blood Lust that was released by Lion Books as Sin Pit.
The narrator is East St. Louis Police Detective Barney Black who is thrust into a murder investigation involving a beautiful young woman with a .32 bullet in her skull and whip marks all over her legs. The novel is structured as a pretty standard police procedural with Barney following logical leads in a corrupt town riddled with poverty and vice.
The real appeal of this book is the character of Barney himself. At 6’2” and 210 pounds, the 32 year-old cop is hardboiled as hell. He’s not afraid to slap a witness around to start them talking or to take a belt of whiskey on the job to wash the taste of murder from his mouth. Barney is the kind of morally-compromised, but highly effective police officer that James Ellroy later depicted in his classic his L.A. crime stories. Barney’s tragic backstory made him into a sociopath dedicated to holding criminals accountable solely because it’s his job and not because of a functioning moral compass.
The characters and writing in Sin Pit are about as good as it gets in 1950s crime fiction. When a sexy and alluring witness threatens to warm Barney’s cynical heart and generates human romantic feelings, the reader just knows that it’s not going to end well for the would-be lovebirds. The hunt for the killer takes some dark turns into the dungeon of an S&M freak and a world of darkness and corruption that exists right under Barney’s nose.
Meskil’s writing really is superb - some of the best I’ve read from the era. He makes me want to shake my fist at the heavens wishing he’d stuck with novel writing. You should definitely seek this one out if you like your noir twisted and perverse. The original paperback and reprint might be pricey, but an outfit called Automat Press has been quietly reprinting orphaned works from the era as eBooks at nice prices. Don’t let the grass grow under your feet. This one is highly recommended - a must read.
“Nighfall” is a 1947 crime novel by genre great David Goodis. The book has been reprinted and released by Stark House Press along with "Cassidy's Girl and "Night Squad". Many rank this along with “Dark Passage” and “Down There” as the trio that immortalizes Goodis as a genre heavyweight. I've now read two of the three and have been extremely pleased with them. “Nightfall” is a highly-recommended embodiment of what makes this genre so addictive and compelling.
The novel follows two distinct characters that hover around that gray area of right and wrong. One is Vanning, a thirty-something WWII veteran and successful commercial artist. The other is New York City detective Fraser, who's on the trail of Vanning and a case of stolen cash worth $300,000. How the two intersect and their roles in each other's lives is really the whole premise of “Nightfall”. It's an interesting clash of personalities and styles drizzled over the familiar “man on the run” narrative.
In back stories we learn that Vanning was unknowingly caught up in a trio of bank robbers from Seattle. The three made the cash grab and wreck their car outside of Denver. In a poor stroke of luck, Vanning comes to their aid only to find himself taken as a hostage. In a mysterious chain of events, Vanning awakens in a hotel bedroom with the suitcase and a revolver. Goodis throws the wrench in the gears by having Vanning shoot a bad guy (or was it really a good guy?) and then flee into the forest with the cash. But, in present day, we learn that Vanning doesn't have the money and has no idea where it is!
The reader is left with just enough information to propel the story but reserving the payoff until the closing chapter. Vanning is the good “bad guy”, but the real difficult decision is placed on Fraser, who's on to Vanning but believes he's an innocent spoke in this turning crime-wheel. While Fraser doesn't have a partner to relay his thoughts too, we the reader are subjected to his investigative mindset through interesting and sporadic phone conversations with his wife. Fraser contemplates his career, the investigation and whether he has internal fortitude to break the case. Vanning and Fraser are lovable opposites, but Goodis takes otherwise normal people and heaps immense pressure on them to see how they perform and interact. Oh, there's an obligatory beauty thrown in for Vanning because this is a crime novel.
Overall, “Nightfall” kept me on my toes throughout a riveting one-sit read. Goodis is just as good, or better, than advertised. I'm not sure I found any astonishing subtext or social commentary, but there are loads of sites out there that break the book down in various degrees of comprehension. Personally, I can't say enough good things about the author. Up next is “Dark Passage”...apparently the cream of the crop.
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