S-Com #01 - Terror in Turin

By the early 1970s, the team-based commando theme had become a popular market for men's action-adventure paperbacks to explore. The idea probably stemmed from military fiction, but became increasingly more prevalent after Don Pendleton's second Executioner installment, Death Squad. By the 1980s, the sub-genre hit its pinnacle with titles like S.O.B., M.I.A. Hunter, and Phoenix Force among others. To capitalize, Warner Books launched their “Men of Action” line of paperbacks and one of their creations was an obligatory team-based series called S-Com (short for Strategic Commandos). The publisher hired freelance writer Robert McGarvey to author all six volumes under the house name Steve White. The series debut, Terror in Turin, was published in 1981.

The five-member team is led by Stone Williams, a Yale graduate who excelled as a soldier in Vietnam and later inherited his father's lucrative business. After contemplating a mercenary life, Williams forms S-Com to fight the good fight internationally. The team is rather diverse:

Myles – African-American who served with Williams in 'Nam. Martial arts.

Leah – Israeli, the only female member.
Acrobatic and uses throwing stars.

Lucky – Cuban defector. Explosives.

Rod – Australian mercenary. Comedic big man.

The Terror in Turin stems from a terrorist group called “Seventh Mao Force”. It's leader, Vincent Teresio, introduces readers to his communist ideology by blowing up an Italian post-office. Partnered with his girlfriend Gina, Teresio then murders Turin's police chief before shoplifting celebratory bread and wine from a nearby grocery store. However, readers quickly learn that the terrorist group is actually just one guy – Teresio. The explosives used to demolish the post-office were just some sticks of dynamite stolen from a construction site. In fact, other than an AK-47, Teresio has no fighting ability or any other weaponry. How could the author possibly validate such a weak foe for a team of five hardened heroes?

Teresio targets the owner of an Italian auto company, Salvatore DiGrazia. In a botched kidnapping, Teresio grabs Salvatore's daughter Maria and scampers off to his crumbling residence to make the ransom call - $50 million in cash for Maria's safe return. With the police written as just foolish fodder, Leah becomes involved and the entire team quickly hits Turrin to stop the terrorist. Due to the author's weak villain, the majority of the book focuses on S-Com picking a fight with the local mob. While the team searches for a formidable foe, Teresio spends his days playing grab-ass with Maria while threatening rape. Thankfully, on page 154 the team actually confronts Teresio and the whole book mercifully concludes on page 159.

Needless to say, Terror in Turin is a Hall of Shame entry. Don't waste your life reading a page of this nonsense. I've already sacrificed enough time for the both of us. This series is abysmal.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Travis McGee #09 - Pale Gray for Guilt

The character of Travis McGee was the most successful creation of Florida crime fiction icon John D. MacDonald. The McGee series lasted for 21 installments from 1964 to 1984. Like most long-running series titles of that era, the earlier entries are known to be better than the later ones. MacDonald was smart cookie and wrote the books so they can be read in any order. Today, we’ll tackle the ninth McGee paperback, Pale Gray for Guilt from 1968.

McGee is a self-described beach bum living on a Florida houseboat called The Busted Flush named after the poker hand that won him the boat. To the extent that he works at all, he’s a “salvage consultant” who helps people find things they’ve lost - usually money or people - in exchange for a piece of the recovery. In practice, he functions as an unlicensed private eye (or “knight errant”) for friends and their referrals. In many of the books, McGee has a sidekick named Meyer, an underemployed economist and fellow armchair philosopher who often joins McGee on his escapades. That’s pretty much all you need to know to jump into the series at any point.

Pale Gray for Guilt opens with McGee going to visit a friend of his nicknamed Tush who owns a low-end motel and river marina with his wife Janine not far from the Bahia Mar marina where McGee resides on his own boat. Tush is having financial difficulties, and there’s a major land developer who wants Tush and Janine’s leveraged property. The evil corporation up the road is polluting the river and wants to dredge the waterway to make room for barges. However, these plans are contingent on Tush and Janine getting out of the way.

It’s important to understand that the environment and corporate development of Florida’s coastal waterways were major bugaboos for MacDonald. Many McGee books have the character pontificating about this issue, and it’s clear that McGee is speaking with MacDonald’s voice. Some of MacDonald’s stand-alone novels address this issue head-on, and Pale Gray for Guilt is the McGee paperback that makes corporate greed and land development the enemy of the righteous and the apparent motivation for murder.

As the foreclosure documents are being served upon Tush, his body is found at his marina dead from an apparent suicide. Upon learning this, McGee refuses to believe his friend would kill himself and sets out to find the killer and save the property for the distressed widow Janice. The legal and business machinations McGee employs to stymie the foreclosure are plenty clever. The author had an MBA and enjoyed strutting his business acumen for many storylines through this career as a fiction writer.

The problem with white collar crime stories involving land deals and stock price manipulation is that it can make for some dry and technical reading. The middle section of the novel has a lot of that, and if such things are uninteresting to you, there are 20 other McGee novels that aren’t as mired in business machinations.

Once he gets back to the actual murder investigation, the plot is materially more satisfying. The boots on the ground investigation into the causes and perpetrators of Tush’s death make for a fun mystery novel. McGee’s sidekick for this adventure is a plucky love interest named Puss (I know, I know) who adds some value to McGee’s fieldwork. His normal sidekick Meyer also gets a piece of the action in the paperback’s second half.

Under no circumstances should Pale Gray for Guilt be your introduction to the Travis McGee series. It’s just too slow to hook a new reader. However, if you are acclimated into McGee’s world and open to a financial crime murder adventure, you’ll probably enjoy this one just fine.

Buy a copy of this novel HERE

The Sharpshooter #01: Killing Machine

The publishing industry for men's action-adventure paperbacks in the 1970s was a fertile ground to create house names, marketable characters and engaging series titles in pursuit of the almighty dollar. Marketing these books became a cash grab for whomever depicted the best guns and chests on the cover. That wild west mentality created one universal problem for publishers – time. As the production schedule moved at light speed, deadlines and quality became real antagonists. Nothing exemplifies that problem more than Belmont Tower's 1970s series trio The Assassin, The Sharpshooter and The Marksman.

Ignoring some very positive reviews from other critics, I've managed to avoid these three titles for a very specific reason. Literary critic and scribe Lynn Munroe outlines the entire history of these three titles HERE and explains that these books weren't published in the correct sequence. Shockingly, some of the books weren't even published under the correct series name. You may find
“The Sharpshooter Johnny Rock” starring as “The Marksman” or vice versa. You'll conjure up a headache of epic proportions by simply attempting to make sense of it all.

In order to provide insightful commentary here at Paperback Warrior, I've decided to read these books and offer individual reviews solely on the book itself. I may loosely mention continuity, but my main emphasis is story content (as it should be). My first endeavor is the Sharpshooter debut novel The Killing Machine, authored by Peter McCurtin (Soldier of Fortune, Sundance) and published by Belmont Tower in 1973.

The novel explains that the owners of Rocetti Designs were killed by a grenade after refusing to cooperate with the mob. In the book's prologue, their son Johnny, now heir to the company, miraculously survives a drive-by shooting that kills Johnny's brother and sister-in-law. In a thirst for vengeance, Johnny Rocetti is now “The Sharpshooter” known as Johnny Rock. By procuring enough wealth from the family business, Johnny now vows to hunt and kill the mobsters that murdered his family.

By 1973, every author and publisher wanted to recreate the success of Don Pendleton's The Executioner. Essentially, The Killing Machine is a Mack Bolan clone - but an enjoyable one. Johnny's marksman ability in Vietnam is utilized to crush a northeastern Mob family. Like Pendleton's strategy with Mack Bolan, McCurtin has Johnny pitting two rival factions against each other. With the two warring families consistently mired in chaos and paranoia, Johnny's guerrilla snipe and run tactic is successful. Assisting Johnny is the voluptuous Iris, a widow in black who is wielding her own revenge against the mob.

While certainly not original or particularly clever, McCurtin's writing is an enjoyable, fast-paced blend of violence, mob politics and sexual foreplay. The heated chemistry between Iris and Johnny was a welcome addition, and I particularly enjoyed the rural landscape of Vermont as a unique backdrop for a mob-vigilante story. Overall, those of you who loved the pre-Gold Eagle era of Mack Bolan should find plenty to enjoy with The Killing Machine.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Larry Kent #794 - Hello Dolly...Goodbye

By 1974, Australia’s sexy and violent Larry Kent series was reaching the end of its 800 installment run. In fairness, the first 500 or so were magazine novellas before the series switched to independent short paperbacks in 1965 while continuing with the same sequential numbering. The character of Larry Kent was an American hardboiled private eye similar to Mike Hammer, but he occasionally drifted into espionage work in the tradition of Chet Drum. Today we join Kent in a more traditional P.I. mystery called “Hello Dolly...Goodbye,” the 794th entry in the series. This one was written by an American named Don Haring who emigrated to Australia after WW2 to write a slew of the Larry Kent adventures before his 1981 death in Honolulu at age 58.

The short novel really starts out on the wrong foot as I had to read the first chapter three times to understand the setup. The writing was stylistically fine but extremely unclear. Here’s what I could figure:

Kent is engaged by an NYPD detective on behalf of the department to solve the mystery of two police officers who recently disappeared. One of the missing cops is the kid brother of the detective who hires Kent. That much is clear. The missing officers were investigating a list of names, but the relevance of the list is unclear. The client cop mentions that the list has something to do with a mob from Chicago “interested in aliens.” I assume they meant foreigners and not E.T. Kent also mentions the Secret Service, but there was no indication of why, and the agency is never mentioned again in the novel.

Another thing unclear to me was the era. This paperback was published in Australia in 1974 and takes place in New York City. However, on page one of the novel a character says, “This cop is a client...Write down in your clients’ book. Twentieth of May, eighty...” Does this book take place in 1980? The future? Everyone in the book used a 1940s vernacular and wears fedoras. There’s also a reference to Sonny Liston, an American boxer who competed from 1953 to 1970. I don’t know what to make of any of this, and I guess it really doesn’t matter. The paperback just felt very unstuck in time in addition to the opaque plot.

Anyway, Kent begins working his way down the list of names just like missing cops did. The first name is a famous television personality named Grant Kelso. Unfortunately, Kelso gives Kent the slip before anyone could explain the plot to me. Eventually, he learns that the list of names are all millionaires who belong to a fraternal organization called The Nations Club. Some members are tied into a group that is, in fact, moving people in and out of the U.S. in a scheme that was never entirely clear.

In the author’s defense, there are lots of great scenes in “Hello Dolly...Goodbye” in which Kent is either kicking ass or getting his ass kicked. The hardboiled P.I. patter is amusing and borders on parody at times. Moreover, the collaboration scenes between Kent and the police were also fun to read. Kent shoots and fights his way closer to the truth regarding the two missing cops, but the eventual solutions were rather unsatisfying.

I recently read Larry Kent #642: “Curves Can Kill,” from 1965, and it was awesome - one of the most satisfying private eye-espionage mashups ever. It was also written by Haring when he was clearly at the top of his game. The only thing I can figure is that the Larry Kent series was winding down by 1974, and Haring began just phoning it in to fulfill his contractual obligation because “Hello Dolly...Goodbye” is a total mess. However, I’m not giving up on Larry Kent because I’ve seen how good the series can be. Going forward, I’m going to avoid 1970s installments unless I get a solid tip on a particularly good one from that era.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Paperback Warrior Podcast - Episode 32

This week we are doing a deep-dive into the life and work of Richard Deming, including a review of his novel, “She’ll Hate Me Tomorrow.”  The first installment of the “Able Team” series is also reviewed, and Eric discusses his brush with fame when he finally spoke to Men’s Adventure cover model Jason Savas about his remarkable career in the publishing industry. Stream the episode below or your favorite podcast app. Download the episode directly HERE.
  Listen to "Episode 32: Richard Deming" on Spreaker.

Special Operations Command #01 - Special Operations Command

Special Operations Command was a six-volume series of men's action-adventure novels authored by James N. Pruitt and published by Berkley. Pruitt was a former U.S. Army Green Beret master sergeant and winner of the Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars and five Purple Hearts. The Vietnam War veteran also wrote three stand-alone novels of military fiction as well as a short-lived series of NASCAR fiction paperbacks. My first experience with the author is the eponymous series debut Special Operations Command from 1990.

In this series opener, the author introduces the two core members of “SOCOM”, Major B.J. Mattson and Lieutenant Commander Jacob Mortimer IV. In backstory segments, readers learn that Mattson is a career soldier with multiple campaigns as a Green Beret in Vietnam. Mortimer is a distinguished Navy Seal with a majority of his battle experience in Latin America and the Middle East. The two have united under General Johnson's plan to create a diverse, superstar team that can analyze, lead and execute international missions for the U.S. military. While Mattson and Mortimer will perform a supervisory role, they are both willing to suit up for the team's first mission.

In the oil-rich, Ecuadorian town of Lago Agrio, Cuban commie fighters penetrate a dictator's fortress in hopes of kidnapping Juan Garces, the Minister of Finance. In a frenzied (and extremely perverted) exchange, the fighters end up killing Garces and instead foolishly kidnap the U.S. Counsel General. Later, in an attempt to return the Counsel General unharmed, the group of fighters are setup by Ecuador’s dictator who hopes to capitalize on the kidnapping. By creating turbulence between the U.S. and Havana, he hopes to enrich his pockets with more criminal funds while the spotlight is firmly on the hostage ordeal. Once he detonates one of his own oil fields, SOCOM is called in to negotiate.

Unlike other team-commando based entries such as Eagle Force or Phoenix Force, Pruitt showcases a hint of techno-thriller writing. Most of the book's action is presented as board room meetings and briefings from a high level. Eventually the boots hit the dirt, but for the most part they remain unsoiled as planning and execution remain the narrative's focal point. Due to the author's vast military experience, occasionally some sequences were lost on me. This wasn't a major disconnect, but still distracted me from the story.

Special Operations Command was an enjoyable debut for a series that I look forward to exploring periodically. With only six novels, I may read one a year just to preserve the enjoyment. If you are a men's action-adventure reader looking for something to split the difference between Chet Cunningham and Tom Clancy, this series and author may be exactly what you're seeking.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Johnny Maguire #01 - I’ll Find You

Between 1950 and 1958, prominent interior designer Richard Himmel (1920-2000) wrote five novels starring a hard-nosed Chicago lawyer named Johnny Maguire with the first being I’ll Find You (U.K. title: It’s Murder, Maguire). Both the cover art and synopsis sell the novel as a melodramatic romance, but the reality is that Himmel wrote something likely to please readers of well-written hardboiled crime who are also comfortable with some romance and human drama in their stories. You can obtain this book as well as the entire Johnny Maguire series through Cutting Edge Books.

I’ll Find You begins with Johnny being rousted out of bed by the cops. A female client named Cynthia that he’d attempted to romance was dead, and Johnny was the last person to see her alive. As narrator, Johnny recounts the trajectory of their brief relationship (“She needed some rough stuff, she needed a guy like me to let her have it, to give it to her good.”) that became an obsession to the horndog lawyer. Here’s the thing: Cynthia had Johnny, as her attorney, bring her $200,000 cash the night of her death, and she supposedly committed suicide by walking into Lake Michigan in the pitch darkness with all that cash. Neither her body nor the money were ever recovered making it the most Fawcett Gold Medal demise in the history of death.

Johnny is a very funny narrator and a self-deprecating lawyer. He explains to the reader that he was a night school guy, and he shares an office on Chicago’s State Street full of low-end punk attorneys, poseurs who use fancy stationary to create the illusion of successful practices. He’s a ladies man, dead broke, and completely honest - with one exception. You see, Johnny does some legal work for a local mob boss in Chicago. Nothing serious, but Johnny knows that his client is seriously bent. His relationship with the racketeer makes for an interesting subplot that gets intertwined with the missing girl story.

Naturally, Johnny begins to suspect that maybe Cynthia’s “suicide” was staged, and he can’t get her out of his mind. The plot is really about Johnny conducting an investigation into Cynthia’s disappearance - and possible suicide - based solely on his romantic obsession with her. The mystery brings Johnny down to Florida in search of the truth. To be fair, there’s a lot of romantic content in the Florida part of the book, and if that’s problematic for you, skip this one. If you’re willing to buy the idea that a guy will turn the world upside-down for a woman he hardly knows based on a hunch she’s alive and in trouble, you’re bound to enjoy this short, well-written paperback.

Richard Himmel was an outstanding writer, and I’ll Find You is a quality book. It must have been a successful title for the publisher as the paperback went through five print runs between 1950 and 1955. That’s good news for you decades later because there should be ample old copies for you to find and read today. And you should. This is one of the better genre novels - call it romantic suspense- from the dawn of paperback originals. If it helps, disregard the overwrought romantic cover art and focus on the revolver sticking out of Johnny’s pocket. Recommended.

Buy a copy of this book HERE