Hardman 2: The Charleston Knife is Back in Town by Ralph Dennis

Hardman 2
The Charleston Knife is Back in Town
by Ralph Dennis
1974, Popular Library

Hardman and Hump (who should have gotten equal billing) are hired by the family of a kid who participated in a robbery at a mobbed up party, trying to find him before the mob assassin The Charleston Knife does. The characters and sleazy setting of 1970s Atlanta carry a lot of the weight, and for me it seems as time goes on it won't cover for the plotting as effectively.

Available from Amazon

The Executioner 10: Caribbean Kill by Don Pendleton

The Executioner 10
Caribbean Kill
by Don Pendleton

Mack Bolan flies straight from Las Vegas to Puerto Rico, smashes his plane into a mafia compound and hits the ground running. After some jungle combat he rescues a sex worker who ends up being a federal agent, rescues a hostage, and raids a mansion to take out the local head. Along the way he recruits a mafia pilot 'Nam veteran.

Bolan learns of a Federal Government effort to have him snuffed out. The perceived enemy also expands, to include governments and corporation who profit from organized crime.

Available at Amazon 

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.

Available from Amazon https://amzn.to/3BX67Bb

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.

From Amazon 

Swag 1: Swag Town by L.S. Riker

Swag 1
Swag Town
by L.S. Riker
1992, St. Martin

Near future America in decline - a new scenario to me, a combination of targeted assassinations of economic figures and financial terrorism decimates America's economy, with foreign companies buying up everything and turning the States into a third world country.

Swag (nickname from the phrase Scientific Wild Ass Guess) is a former cop turned hired gun who has a bodyguard client killed in front of him, dragging him into a plot to control New York's criminal underworld. Swag's role in the plot is a little cloudy, and you could tell the author had some background into finance and economics that they didn't mind sharing at length.

Like a lot of detective novels, Swag mainly just stumbles around with people either dumping exposition or trying to kill him, but the action scenes are some of the best I've read.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/4elKF6d

Hardman: Atlanta Deathwatch by Ralph Dennis

Hardman 1
Atlanta Deathwatch
by Ralph Dennis
Popular Library 1974

Jim Hardman is a disgraced former cop who operates as an unlicensed private detective, along with other minor criminal hustles. He's teamed up with former NFL player Hump Evans, more than a sidekick but doesn't get full co-billing.

Hardman is hired by The Man, a godfather in the Black gangs of Atlanta, to find the killer of his secret white collage-aged girlfriend. This leads Hardman and Evans from the Black bars of Atlanta to rural redneck drinking holes to high priced lawyers and politicians.

The vibe sits nicely between Parker and Hap & Leonard, and the ride along the way works better than the plot, which for me kind of went off the rails a bit towards the end.

The language won't work for some modern audiences. Some of it falls in the category of "reflecting the gritty realities of 1970s Atlanta criminal underworld" while some is just outdated language. When half your characters are African American, using "the black" as a generic pronoun isn't very helpful. Mostly has its heart in the right place, but definitely from a White perspective.

Available from Amazon

Blood and Ice by Leo Kessler

Blood and Ice (aka Frozen Mountain)
by Leo Kessler (Charles Whiting)
1977, Futura

I've seen this listed as either 7 or in 8 in the SS Wotan and/or Dogs of War series. If it followed a larger group, at this point the series is down to Sergeant Major Schulze of the SS. Schulze, leading green European conscripts, moves through the mountains of Budapest in a suicidal diversionary action. When defeat is certain, Schulze leads a group of deserters and teams up with Jewish refugees to evade both the Soviets and Germans on the way to Austria.

Violent and sleazy, though a titch tame when compared to other 70s British historical exploitation. The scale of the story jumps back and forth between blow-for-blow action and high level summarizations - kind of inevitable in war fiction, but felt more abrupt than usual. 

The book didn't exactly glamorize the Nazis, but the author clearly had a lower opinion of the Soviets. Schulze gets more anti-hero cred than I'd like to see a Nazi get, but it's not like any of this is morally defensible. Schulze hates Hitler and the Nazi establishment, but is a virulent racist in his own manner. 

Available from Amazon

John Eagle Expeditor 2: The Brain Scavengers by Paul Edwards (Manning Lee Stokes)

John Eagle Expeditor 2

The Brain Scavengers

by Paul Edwards (Manning Lee Stokes)

Pyramid, 1973

John Eagle is a White man raised by Apaches who answered Mr. Merlin's classified ad for a secret agent. His mission is to eventually go to Siberia and blow it up. Half the book follows Russian scientists around and generally lounges around, but the basic idea is that Russia is kidnapping Western scientists and keeping them in an underground base.

The action half of the book isn't much of an improvement. Some decent snowbound survivalist adventure, but the action scenes weren't much and Eagle largely just waltzes in and out of the base without much trouble. Instead of firearms he has a gas gun and bow and arrow, neither of which seem to perform much better than a silenced pistol.

I guess Stokes felt obligated to squeeze in a sex scene somewhere, and he does so in the worst way possible. A scientist he's "rescuing" seems to panic, so he uses the time honored Apache method of making a woman submit by raping her. It was a titch more "dubious consent" as they say in the romance novels, but it ain't great. Eagle isn't exactly the most heroic of characters, reminding his allies that they're expendable or outright threatening to murder them.

The book felt a bit of early Nick Carter Killmaster, which Stokes also wrote for, with some added superficially outré elements that didn't amount to much.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/45Qg9xI

Doomsday Warrior 2: Red America by Ryder Stacy

Doomsday Warrior 2
Red America
by Ryder Stacy

The ultimate American Ted Rockson infiltrates and liberates a Russian brainwashing factory. Afterward he runs into a native American biker community, which would have been painfully stereotypical except that they all talk like beatniks. More sex than most post-apocalyptical books of the 80s, including a peyote fueled romp.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3XyvFNp

Butler 1: The Hydra Conspiracy by Philip Kirk

Butler 1
The Hydra Conspiracy
by Philip Kirk (Len Levinson)
Leisure, 1979

One of the worst novels I've ever read by one of my favorite authors. Not even any camp value, just a dull grind to a word count.

Butler is a CIA agent who gets fired for his objections to the agency's interventions in South American. He's recruited, via plot convolutions, to join a secret international conspiracy The Bancroft Institute to oppose a secret international conspiracy Cobra. This takes the first half of the book.

The second half has Butler being hired as head of security for a billionaire, getting involved in a military coup, and defusing a nuclear bomb. Butler occupies a weird place on the spectrum between le Carré and The Man From B.O.N.E.R. - the plot is too sparse and bad to be serious espionage, not enough sex to be a farce, and not funny enough to be parody.

Speaking of sex, three scenes, the first two fade to black shortly after beginning. Not enough for a spank book or sex farce, but present and creepy enough to overwhelm the other elements. To say it doesn't age is well is an understatement, as Butler's main seduction move is to hope she doesn't press charges.

The writing, especially the first half, felt like the author was blocked, kept typing through it, and didn't go back to revise. Butler wanders around not doing anything, conversations go in circles with speakers repeating things back to each other for pages, just completely aimless.

The series ran twelve books, with Levinson doing the first six. The later ones are strangely more collectible, probably smaller print runs, but I'm guessing it's more for the covers than the content.

Available from Amazon https://amzn.to/3rrlKex

Black Samurai by Marc Olden

Black Samurai
by Marc Olden
1974, New American Library

Robert Sand is trained as a samurai after being shot by "military racists" and later faces a Vietnam vet trying to bring My Lai to America.

I suspect I'll like further installments more - way too much origin story and seems to be more restrained than later books. This was an interesting experiment in how I process text - listening to the audiobook the action scenes felt glossed over but the rest was OK. Reading the same sections, the action was written fine but the dialogue felt juvenile.

Available from Amazon https://amzn.to/3uHQr0Q

Outrider by Richard Harding

Outrider
by Richard Harding
1984, Pinnacle

A century or so after the nuclear apocalypse, survivors gradually made their way out of hiding, connected by scouts called Outriders. One such Outrider is our hero Bonner, who survives an assassination attempt by his former buddy turned despot Leather, and learns that his girl is being held captive.

Bonner makes his way to Chicago to New York to DC, seemingly recognizing everyone he meets and joins forces. He ends up with the pyromaniac, Cooker, two mute barbarian types call the Mean Brothers, biker gang the Sisters, among others.

Very juvenile in tone, except for the cussing and violence. Some creative characters, but the action scenes often felt rushed, with a multi-state chase finale crammed into what felt like the last handful of pages. Probably the closest in feel to the Mad Max movies I've come across. Even had Radleps, radiation poisoned suicide troops, which prefigure Fury Road.

The author mainly worked in novelizations, including four Beethoven (the dog) tie-in novels.

Available from Amazon

Last Ranger 4: Rabid Brigadier by Craig Sargent

Last Ranger 4
Rabid Brigadier
by Craig Sargent (Jan Stacy)
1987 Warner Books

Martin Stone and his dog Excalibur join forces with an insane military dictator, who in a shocking turn of events turns out to be the wrong kind of insane military dictator. Stone starts a war with the mafia and biker gangs and has to stop a nuclear missile.

More restrained this time, with most of the story stalling during training sequences and Stone being tempted by the illusion of stability. It's becoming increasingly apparent that it takes some plot convolutions for Stone to end each story with his bike and dog intact.

Available from Amazon

Bounty Hunter 4: Blood Mountain by Tiny Boyles and Hank Nuwer

Bounty Hunter 4
Blood Mountain
by Tiny Boyles and Hank Nuwer 
1982 Playboy

Loveable dirtbags Tiny and company chase after a computer genius and his stolen bank money, running into an Italian cult/terrorist group for their troubles. They pick up a lady bounty hunter along the way, and there's more action this time, involving mowing down ultralights with a machine gun.

The series coasts on charm over plot or action, but there's plenty of charisma to keep it going.

Paperback from Amazon

Vietnam Ground Zero 5: Soldier's Medal by Eric Helm

Vietnam Ground Zero 5
Soldier's Medal
by Eric Helm
1987 Gold Eagle

A nineteen year old sergeant , wracked with survivor's guilt and denied a medal as the last man to survive an attack, goes rogue and takes a team of Vietnamese strikers into the jungle. Gerber and Fetterman pursue, to talk him down or take him out.

Some introspection, as Gerber is completely aware that the AWOL soldier's actions aren't that much different from what the Army is usually up to. Morrow is mentioned but doesn't appear, which is preferable to being captured and tortured like the last two books.

Available from Amazon

Matt Helm 2: Wrecking Crew by Donald Hamilton

Matt Helm 2
Wrecking Crew
by Donald Hamilton
1960 Fawcett

Matt Helm is assigned to take pictures for a journalist in Sweden with the expectation he will be given a target to "touch". In the meantime he's been ordered to not take action, and lets himself get beat up to avoid arousing suspicion, which doesn't help thrill levels. Every cover is blown from the start, and Helm jus kind of hangs around while those around him are occasionally murdered.

The Helm series feels like a reaction to idealistic trends in the genre, like grimdark is to fantasy, but this is years after James Bond and decades into hardboiled and noir crime fiction, and I have no idea what he's reacting to. The whole "I might eventually kill someone, do you find that upsetting?" attitude seems a bit tired by 1960.

The attitude towards women is tiresome - one has to put up with at least a little chauvinism in these kinds of books, but it felt like half the word count was Helm judging women's appearances. Some folks go in for the non-PC, "when men were men" stuff, but here he's complaining about their shoes. Pretty much all the secondary characters are women, but they just exist for Helm to brutalize. He even brags about torturing a woman in the first novel. It's not that I disapprove of women in action settings, but it's written to be edgy years after I the Jury started that trend.

Another take is that Helm the character is actually sentimental and trying to convince himself, unsuccessfully, that he isn't. Either way, these kinds of themes are better delivered while the action is going on - here, we get themes instead of action.

Available from Amazon

Vietnam Ground Zero 4: The Fall Of Camp A-555 by Eric Helm

Vietnam Ground Zero 4
The Fall Of Camp A-555
by Eric Helm (Kevin Randle)
1986 Gold Eagle

While the bulk of the troops are on a mission to rescue a VIP downed behind enemy lines, traitors among the South Vietnamese troops allow a takeover of Camp A-555, with journalist Robin Morrow taken captive.

The re-taking of the camp plays out as a series of small skirmishes. This series works better on a smaller scale, and I didn't get a sense that hundreds of people were involved. This is the second book in a row in which Morrow is captured and tortured, this time with even less emotional impact than the last - hopefully this doesn't become part of a formula.

Available from Amazon

Book of Justice 1: Genocide Express by Jack Arnett

Book of Justice 1
Genocide Express 
by Jack Arnett (Mike McQuay)
1989 Bantam

William Lambert is William Justice, CEO of Lambert International and ruler of his own island nation Haven. After a man dies in his UN office, he takes his entourage to Uganda and involves himself in a civil war. Gaddafi is trying to reinstall Idi Amin as ruler, using biological weapons developed in a cola plant.

Justice fulfills a white savior prophecy of Mama Alice, the spiritual leader of an opposing tribe, and leads a charge to destroy the factory, releasing the biological agent that kills the defending army.

Not great on action - a handful of scenes of Justice's crew running from soldiers before the final raid, for which Justice is naked throughout - but some interesting elements. In the fake bio in the back for McQuay's pseudonym, it states this book is "the bulk of his message to the world".

McQuay is slow dripping Justice's background, which would be great if I intended to read the other books. His family was killed, and sometime after that he created Lambert International, a company that does business. LI liberates an island from the French and starts its own country of Haven. Justice rules as CEO, and citizens are also shareholders and employees. This maps out to either Libertarianism or Communism. Other than standing against injustice and wanting corporations to rule everything, we don't get much more of Justice's politics.

Probably best to read Justice as a lunatic wreaking havoc wherever he goes, not so great at traditional heroics. He leads hundreds of unarmed tribesmen to their death as a distraction (if that), kills 10,000 soldiers who probably aren't involved with the biowarfare, all to maintain power for Museveni, who is technically an improvement over Amin.

Available from Amazon

Eric Brighteyes 2: A Witch's Welcome by Sigfridur Skaldaspillir

Eric Brighteyes 2
A Witch's Welcome
by Sigfridur Skaldaspillir (Mildred Downey Broxon)

1979 Zebra

The original Eric Brighteyes by H. Rider Haggard was published in 1891. This is more of remake than a sequel, and not much room to make this a series given that Brighteyes is born and dies in this Viking saga. 

Brighteyes is banished for a couple years from Iceland and does Viking stuff around the British Isles. Swanhild the witch is obsessed with him, and her manipulations lead to both their downfalls. In true saga form, most of the story is in broad summary, with some battles being wrapped up in a sentence. The more "real time" the story the better, but things speed up again towards the end making the conclusion feel like an epilogue. As this is someone's life story, not much in the way of a plot, just Eric going from place to place.

I've seen this described as the story from Swanhild's perspective, and while I haven't read the original to compare, most of the story focuses on Eric. I half expected some revisionist version, like the way Grendel was from the perspective of the monster, but not so much.

The book stands on weird moral grounds. While Eric seems to have some modern ideals (no killing monks, sees dishonor in attacking the weak) he's still a psychopathic serial rapist slaver. This is historical fiction and these are Vikings, after all, and most of the book is written without judgment. This is olden times and this is a story of horrible people doing horrible things to each other. However, there are parts that imply that Eric is supposed to be a honorable hero, and the ending definitely makes Swanhild out to be a villain deserving of being dragged to Hel at the end.

The ending plays sadly tragic for Eric, but it's hard to feel any sympathy. Can't get too outraged that he was framed for that one rape he didn't do. Morals aside, some occasional good battle sequences and historical details, but I didn't dig the narrative structure.

Paperback from Amazon

The Hand of Dracula by Robert Lory

The Dracula Horror Series 2
The Hand of Dracula
by Robert Lory
1973, Pinnacle

Horror meets Men's Adventure in this unique series. Criminologist and telekinetic Dr. Damien Harmon has revived Count Dracula, and keeps him under control through a sliver of wood embedded next to his heart. Aided by former cop Cameron Sanchez and Dracula's thrall Ktara, they fight crime.

Dr. Harmon's niece has a friend falsely accused of murder, and the group vow to clear his name, encountering an evil cult, an inhumanly strong hunchback, and a mob-connected necrophilic undertaker.

Fun enough when things get going, but Lory indulges in almost Rev. Fanthorpe padding, dragging out the most inconsequential actions and conversations for pages on end.

Paperback from AbeBooks