Nick Carter: Killmaster 188 Death Island by Nick Carter

Nick Carter: Killmaster 188
Death Island
by Nick Carter (David Hagberg)
1984, Ace Books

The Chinese are riling up natives on a Pacific Island to interfere with a radar installation. Still had the feel of a 60s espionage novel, but a bit darker in parts. The natives are shown projections of actors killing and raping children, and Carter gets strapped to a chair with a hole in the seat and a fondue chafing dish underneath. Otherwise a bit tepid.

From Amazon

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.

From Amazon

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

Top Secret/S.I. - Double Agent #1

Top Secret/S.I
Double Agent #1
Web of Danger by Aaron Allston
Acolytes of Darkness by Flint Dille and David Marconi
1988 TSR

Top Secret was TSR's contemporary espionage role-playing game, originating in 1980.  The system was updated in 1987 with Top Secret/S.I., which had a variety of game settings, which in turn had tie-in novels.

Web of Danger is similar to The Man From UNCLE.  The good guys work for ORION, an extra-governmental espionage agency, who fight the bad guys, the Web.  The plot: the web has a knockout gas, which they plan to use on an attack on the New York Stock Exchange, which in turn is cover for spreading a computer virus into the world's financial computer systems.

The novel has the feel of an RPG campaign, with different characters having different specialties, and you can almost feel the rolling dice as they attempt different tasks.

Acolytes of Darkness is set in the 1930s and is pure pulp homage, with beats lifted from the Shadow and the Spider.  Agent 13 is a former member of the Brotherhood, which is led by the sinister Hand Sinister.  The Brotherhood is functionally a yellow menace threat, but it also incorporates ancient South American priesthoods and European monks.  There is a supernatural element, with formulas for eternal life and a vampire.

While Web of Danger had the feel of a fictionalized rpg session, Acolytes of Darkness was more of a series of scenes stitched together.

There are two more Double Agent novel collections with different writers, and at least a couple more standalone Agent 13 novels.

Free Stuff: Smear Job by James Mitchell

Smear Job by James Mitchell

Kindle ebook from Amazon

Borrow for free from archive.org

The Predator by Andrew York

The Predator
by Andrew York
Jonas Wilde - The Eliminator 3
Arrow 1969

Jonas Wilde is the Eliminator, an assassin working for a secret branch of the British government.  As he's being forced into retirement, the entire staff of a local safehouse front are tortured and murdered, including the secretary he was having a fling with.

Wilde goes to Rome to track down the group responsible for the murders, infiltrating them pretty much effortlessly.  He ends up joining them under an alias and trains to become assassin.

A good third of the book takes place in a house during their going away party before the big mission.  Wilde tries to ditch his female company and send a message out and ends up killing one of the group.  Loooong discussions ensue as to whether to trust him, and against all common sense they do.

Wilde and company fly to New York where they spend the bulk of the rest of the book...hanging around another house.  Wilde eventually kills the rest, though his involuntary female sidekick manages a higher body count.

I hate to bash this too much because it's pretty well written, but too little happens and there are some conflicting tones that rub me the wrong way.

The book is decidedly "low budget".  The premise: a spy goes to three different countries to stop an army from carrying out a series of assassinations.  The execution: people hang around houses and talk.  It reminds me of riffs in the MST3K episode of Agent for H.A.R.M. about the low budget.  Thing is, this book is even cheaper on the sets and special effects, even though they're free because it's a book and you can make it up.

Not that every book has to have exotic locations and elaborate action set pieces.  This is where the tone conflicts come in.  Is this an over the top, campy James Bond style thriller, or a gritty, releastic noir.  It's got a little of both, and not in a good way.

Most of the story continues because Wilde is afraid that he can't surprise and overcome three different killers in the same house.  Yes, in real life, three to one is being hopelessly outnumbered.  However, for the world's greatest killer who can kill a man with one karate chop, it should have taken him thirty seconds.

Death of a Citizen - Matt Helm 1 - Donald Hamilton

Death of a Citizen
Matt Helm 1
by Donald Hamilton
1960 Gold Medal Books

First, forget about the Dean Martin movies.  While the films try to out-camp James Bond, the books are closer to Mickey Spillane than Ian Fleming.

Matt Helm is a retired secret agent who is trying to live a normal life after leaving the service at the end of World War II.  Most of the first installment is a series of slow-paced cliches - Nobody ever really quits, being framed for murder, searching femme fatales for weapons, "I want you to find her and stop her.  Permanently.", etc.

I'd like to give Hamilton the benefit of the doubt since the book is pretty well written, but I'm sure all of this was already old hat by 1960.  Most of the first person narrative is Helm thinking about what he's going to do, doing it, then thinking about what he did.  There's a good gritty, realistic tone, but not enough happens until the end, and the ending's not quite enough to really recommend it.

Throne of Satan

Throne of Satan
by James Dark (James Edmond MacDonnell)
Signet Books, 1967

"Today Dominat is the demon scientist who conceived Operation Sugarstrike.  Tomorrow he will be World Emperor...unless Intertrust agent MARK HOOD can wrest him from his volcanic lair."

Opens mopping up from the events of the last novel, Caribbean Striker.  Agent Tommy Tremayne is in the clutches of the villanous Borja.  Mark Hood investigates the sunken ship they were believed to have perished in, and gets in an underwater knife fight.  This is all Mark Hood does the entire novel.

Most of the books slim 128 pages is Tremayne being given the grand tour of the volcano lair of Dominat.  The text is painfully aware that having the villian explain his plot to his captive is cliche, and proceeds to do so anyway without a hint of irony.  There is a great deal of Dominat lording over Tremayne, while at the same time desperate for his approval.  This kind of inferiority complex seemed a bit out of place and heavy handed, until I learned that the title of the original Austrialian printing was Black Napoleon, with the tagline "A black extremist is the quary of spyman Mark Hood". 

Mark Hood, meanwhile, hooks up with a couple of women who both betray him.  One was kind enough to bring him to the volcano lair, which I couldn't figure if Hood even knew existed.  From there, his oriental manservant Murimoto does the fighting for him, the volcano erupts, the end.

Throne of Satan, the seventh in the Mark Hood series of James Bond knock-offs, reads like a fifth grader recapping You Only Live Twice, which was released earlier the same year.