Apocalypse U.S.A.! - Death Merchant 54 by Joseph Rosenberger

Apocalypse U.S.A.!
Death Merchant 54
by Joseph Rosenberger

I hadn't had much luck with this series and hadn't seen what the fuss was all about.  Finally I turned up an installment that delivers.

Libyans, with the help of the Russians, are planning a chemical weapon attack on the east coast of the US.  We open up with a raid on an ice cream plant.  The Death Merchant, Richard Camellion, and crew hope they don't need to kill any cops, but they will, damn it, don't think they won't.  They do get to kill some innocent security guards, so there's some consolation.

The raid goes sour, so on to the next raid, at a salvage yard.  Then we've got a raid on a Libyan sleeper cell at a brickyard, but first - want to know how bricks are made?  Rosenberger will tell you.  Several times.  After the violent shootout they find the location of the nerve gas and the Soviet agents in charge of it - in a boat off the Pacific.  The President has ordered that the boat be taken intact and the nerve gas seized.

Carmellion, crew, and a team of SEALS head out to sea, but first a chapter about Israeli war atrocities, complete with footnotes.

I wouldn't have thought that several pages of helicopters strafing a boat would hold my attention, so well done, Rosenberger.  The crew sets down and clears the boat room by room by room by room.  Bullets, bombs, deadly karate moves with made-up names.  Wasn't counting but this one surely went up to triple digits in on-page deaths.  Well done.

I'm learning to skim over Rosenbeger's lengthy Platonic discourses.  He has characters which you think will represent different points of view, but they mainly just agree with each other and throw out random statistics and right-wing talking points.  If Rosenberger was alive today I get the feeling he'd be reposting memes on Facebook 24-7.

This is the first Death Merchant I've read that has brought in Rosenberger's pseudo-scientific spiritual side - he had written some cataclysmic non-fiction for Fate magazine.

"The tilt of the earth would come during World War III - a nuclear holocaust - and usher n a new age, one of peace, one that would last for a thousand years, from A.D. 2000 to A.D. 3000, after which there would be a new horror, a new evil.  Only this time man would not be fooled; he would be prepared, having developed a higher spiritual consciousness.  At the end of the year A.D. 7000 there would be a universal conflagration in which earth would be destroyed."

This is just thrown in the middle a scene, apropos of nothing.

Get the paperback from Amazon.

Author Overview: Joseph Rosenberger

Joseph Rosenberger (1925-1993)
aka Joseph R. Rosenberger PhD; Joe Rosenberger; Jose Rosenberger; Lee Chang

Joseph Rosenberger is best known for the Death Merchant series, and for writing like a bigoted, drunken reactionary.  To modern audiences his rants against the evils of communism such as the metric system seem like parody, but no, I'm afraid he's the real deal.

He's known for convoluted and sometimes poetic descriptions of physical violence (lines like "the bullet hole in his forehead made him look stupid for forgetting not to get killed") as well as the occasional mystical bent.

He claims to have written for the original Weird Tales, but if he did it was under an unknown pseudonym.

He wrote some non-fiction articles for Fate Magazine.  One I read was a standard pole-shift, meteor strike cataclysm piece with a slight Christian angle.

Some other 60s non-fiction oddities of his include:

Smoke Without Panic: The Truth About the Smoking Scare (1966)
Bestiality (1968)
Sex Kicks of the Watchers (1968)
Confessions of the Pain Seekers (1969)
The Demon Lovers: A Psychosexual Study of Witchcraft and Demonology (1969)
The Young Deviates

His bread and butter for the next two decades was the Death Merchant (70 books plus one super sized special, 1972-88).  Other series include:

Kung Fu starring Mace (5 books, 1973-4)

Murder Master (3 books, 1973-4): Blaxploitation fiction from the man who called Mr. T a bur-head.  I'm sure that went over well.

He evidently wrote some non-fiction "how to kill people" type books for Paladin Press under the name Richard Camellion, the character name of the Death Merchant.

Shadow Warrior (4 books, 1988)
Geneva Force (one off 1988)
and one book of Killmaster Nick Carter, #125

Much more, including interviews, at Glorious Trash.

Joseph Rosenberger at Amazon

Death Merchant 43: The Devil's Trashcan

Death Merchant 43: The Devil's Trashcan
by Joseph Rosenberger
1981 Pinnacle Books

To lure out the Nazi organization ODESSA, the Death Merchant Richard Camellion, along with US and West German intelligence agencies, send out a diving expedition to the bottom of Lake Toplitz, where a legendary stash of Nazi documents may have been buried at the end of the war.

I've read reviews about the ridiculous, over the top violence of the Death Merchant series, but maybe I've just had bad luck.  This particular installment had two small action scenes, neither especially memorable or graphic.  What we had instead were lengthy planning sequences, pissing contests over which intelligence agency was more gay, and more planning.  And dive tables.  Because nothing says action like discussing what ratio of oxygen to nitrogen is needed for diving at varying depths for varying length of time.

I know Rosenberger went to all the trouble of going to the library to get these tables, so damn it, he's going to use them.  But nobody cares.  I'm sure actual divers care when they go diving, but it doesn't make for interesting reading.  You're the Death Merchant.  You kill people for a living.  Memorizing dive tables doesn't make you any cooler.

Paperback from AbeBooks