Joe Gall 10 - The Ill Wind Contract by Phillip Atlee

Joe Gall 10
The Ill Wind Contract
by Phillip Atlee

1969, Fawcett

Joe Gall is a former CIA agent and current rich a-hole who does contract work for the agency. A scientist is working on puromycin, which causes memory loss in mice. Gall hangs around Japan for half the novel in Japan waiting for orders. He runs into a half-Black, half-Japanese sumo wrestler a couple times in a subplot that goes nowhere, a running theme here.

The puromycin is forgotten about, Gall's real mission is to smuggle 10,000 pounds of precious metal out of Indonesia. Gall loads it in the back of his sedan (about 10 times the average carrying capacity, guess they build different in Indonesia) and drives it a couple miles, where someone else unloads, arranges transportation, moves it to Japan, and unloads. Not sure where Gall comes in, another running theme.

The smuggling portion is dealt with quickly to make room for the real plot - Gall is pulled in to the 30 September Movement's coup attempt and tasked to saving generals targeted for assassination. Which he fails at. He does assist in reclaiming a communication building in an unlikely sequence in which he sneaks in and doses the enemy's food with the puromycin, which makes them forget how to shoot their guns.

A communist paper claims responsibility. Gall stops the army from suppressing the paper and has them force the press to print more, in order to whip up a backlash that in real life resulted in around a million deaths. Yay.

Quickly back to the smuggling, which Gall is just along for the ride. There's a "love" interest, but the sex scene involves him calling her a whore for a couple pages and a quick two sentence sex scene:

"She was in her natural position, on her back, when I took her first. Then I flipped her over expertly, because a lot of those lonely journeys of mine had been to seaport towns." Which I'm assuming is butt stuff. I'm not sure why he's being coy - this is right after he tells her he can tell she sleeps around a lot by the smell of her vaginal musk.

Gall is a miserable prick without the charm of a Bond or a Hammer, and is a passive character in what's basically a combination travelogue and historical novel.

The name Phillip Atlee sounded familiar - he's the brother of CIA officer David Atlee Phillips, who's been accused of involvement in various political assassinations.

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Encyclopedia of Abnormal Sex by Roger Blake

Encyclopedia of Abnormal Sex
by Roger Blake
1965, Brandon House

One of a flood of fake sexology texts that came in the wake of the Kinsey Report, the fake scholarship used as a cover for hard core vignettes.

Highlights include a family straight out of the Aristocrats, a bike seat sniffing high school janitor, and a man who would gather up a crowd of homeless people to watch him be buggered by his chauffer, which I think was a line in Soft Cell's Sex Dwarf.

The only move new to me was 69 bagpiping, and the claim that Europeans and gay Americans are way more into armpits than American straights are.

An interesting aspect is how much is invested in the male/sadist/dominant and female/masochist/submissive binary. 

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War Dogs by by Nik-Uhernik

War Dogs
by Nik-Uhernik (Nicholas Cain)
1984, General Paperbacks/Panda

Set in the early 60s, the War Dogs are a team of brutal soldiers recruited Dirty Dozen style: a soldier of fortune, a soldier who beat his CO to death, a cop who beat a mentally ill prisoner to death for mouthing off, a drug smuggling pilot, and the only sympathetic figure, a sex worker turned vigilante. They're recruited Nick Fury style and trained in an underground bunker before being used in assassination missions around the globe.

The book breezes by the 450 pages and is strongest in the origin stories of the various members. It later struggles as a lot of team books do - the lieutenant who recruits goes from being a shadowy figure to the main character, with the rest of the team pulling back as support. The sex worker gets the most characterization, or she might just stand out as the others are distinguished by various levels of dirtbaggery.

The story oddly insisted on moral certainty while carrying the theme of moral ambiguity. The concept of the team was that American needed a dirty team to carry out dirty jobs, and that the War Dogs should kill without question. Then the team are shown ironclad evidence that what they're doing was right, kind of undercutting the theme.

After slaughtering a seemingly innocent South American village, the team are shown film of their victims' horrid crimes, presumably taken with hidden 16mm cameras all over town. And when the Lt. struggles with the morality of a decision, he happens across a detailed diary which answers all of his questions.

I had some issues with the realism in places. The lieutenant swoops in, sometimes minutes after a recruit is caught by the police - even with an intelligence network that broad there's still travel time. And the War Dogs MO involves hovering a helicopter over the target's building, letting the crew jump off onto the roof or balcony, without anyone hearing it. Started off strong, but some of the convolutions turned me off by the end.

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Dusty Ayres: The Green Thunderbolt

Dusty Ayres: The Green Thunderbolt
November, 1934

Dusty Ayres is a future war pulp, combining air war with yellow peril. Asian warlord Fire Eyes leads the Black Invaders on a quest for world domination. Humble pilot Dusty uncovers an enemy base in Mexico that plans on launching a proto-atomic bomb guided missile. The series is running out of steam at this point - some good action, but mostly capture/escape cycles.

Dusty Ayres was unusual in having supporting short stories set in the same universe, but with none of the main characters, both involving a wrongfully accused pilot clearing his name.

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Traveler 1: First You Fight by D.B. Drumm

Traveler 1
First You Fight
by D.B. Drumm (Ed Naha)
1984, Dell

The series is set 15 years after a 1989 apocalypse. The Traveler was a special forces op who was exposed to an experimental neurotoxin which allows him to sense fear and pain in others, but makes him oversensitive to world around him, combined with good old fashioned PTSD.

Drumm travels the country looking for other members of his unit. He comes to a town run by two warring factions, and plays against them Yojumbo style as they look for a stash of weapons.

Good action and manages a great balance of elements: deeply grim while keeping a sense of humor, realistic characters in cartoonish situations.

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Specialist 5: Zombie by Errol Lecale

Specialist 5
Zombie
by Errol Lecale (Wilfred McNeilly)

1974, New English Library

Eli Podgram is The Specialist, a wealthy occult investigator who was once a vampire for a couple hours. That fact isn't relevant to the story but takes up a big chunk of the prologue. He's joined by mute virgin psychic Mara and his French servant Hugo. The Chill series also had a woman psychic assistant/potential love interest, don't know how often that comes up in occult investigators of the era.

They go to Haiti to assist a man whose wife had been resurrected as a zombie. Not much plot wise, but things turn real nasty. The wife is gang raped by voodoo cult members in a ceremony to return her soul to her corpse so that she may suffer more for it. Packs of zombies roam the countryside cannibalizing everyone they come across.

Podgram spends a good chunk of the book in astral form snooping around. In a particularly chilling sequence he comes across a man being roasted alive and helps guides the terrified spirit to the afterlife.

Lecale is a pseudonym for Wilfred McNeilly, one of the most common users of the Peter Saxon house name.

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The Lone Wolf 3: Boston Avenger by Mike Barry

The Lone Wolf 3
Boston Avenger
by Mike Barry (Barry N. Malzberg)
1973, Berkley Medallion

Ex-cop on the run Wulff heads to Boston with twenty pounds of heroin he scored in the last book. He survives an assassination attempt at a toll booth but loses the heroin to two thugs who run off with it. Wulff tosses a grenade at a memorial at a mob mansion, while the two thugs try to sell the heroin to a Harvard associate professor who sidelines as a dealer.

Wulff is captured by the local mafia who agree to let him live if he recovers the heroin. Wulff goes after the prof, who had turned himself in to the cops. Wulff chases the police and recovers the heroin, but finds himself in a dragnet closing in. His master plan to evade the police involves crashing his car in the woods, walking thirty feet into the forest, and taking a nap. Not sure why he didn't just pull over if it was that easy.

The prof goes home, Wulff follows, the mob shows up, people are shot, the end.

Goes hard into characterizations, which might have worked if the story did. None of the motivations checked out - Wulff, anti-heroin crusader, wanted to recover the junk, to the point of shooting cops over it, for ill defined reasons other that using it for bait, somehow. The mafia don wanted the junk gone, something about avoiding flooding the market and lowering prices, as if storing it or moving it to a different territory wasn't an option. Both of them seem to change their minds.

Wulff's man on the run bit didn't play well with the fact that the mafia knows where he is at all times, even knowing what route he's driving. Four different times the mob just shows up, only twice to try and kill him - if the mob's informant network is that comprehensive, they need better reasons why Wulff is still alive. For part of the story they want Wulff to take care of the Prof, which they can't do themselves for undisclosed reasons.

I liked the tone, the most nihilistic of the Mack Bolan clones, but the actual prose is atrocious. Not quite at Lionel Fanthorpe levels, there is constant repetition, with characters repeating things back to each other and repeating that they don't need to repeat things. Wulff himself is Jimmy Two Times. Probably wouldn't have crossed a hundred pages without the filler

There's a line of opinion that this is subversive satire, or that it's building up to a climax in book 14 that will make it all worthwhile but you have to read the whole series to get the whole effect. I think this is based on Malzberg's positive reputation as a science fiction writer. Whether there's a master plan that pays off at the end or Malzberg's phoning it in at a genre he doesn't respect, there's too much pulp and not enough juice.

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