Showing posts with label Death Merchant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Death Merchant. Show all posts

Monday, March 14, 2022

Death Merchant #34: Operation Mind-Murder


Death Merchant #34: Operation Mind-Murder, by Joseph Rosenberger
June, 1979  Pinnacle Books

This 34th installment of Death Merchant is another one that promises a helluva lot more than it ultmately delivers. That is, if you’re expecting the plot that’s outlined on the back cover. But if you’re expecting an endless series of action scenes, then that’s exactly what you’ll get. Personally, I was hoping for the story promised on the back cover…that Richard “Death Merchant” Camellion would venture into a desolate Soviet experimental station where people are tortured via mind-control means, some of the prisoners holdovers from WWII. Instead, the entire friggin’ novel is Camellion battling his way to the station, just so he can take photos of it and vamoose. 

It's clear Joseph Rosenberger was interested in mind control and fringe science in general, so it’s surprising he didn’t elaborate more on his own setup here. I guess mostly he just used his interests as a framework for the series-mandatory action setpieces. I’m not sure why Rosenberger did this so often. In the Death Merchant novels where he relaxed a little from the action onslaught, like for example The Burning Blue Death and The Cosmic Reality Kill, he delivered novels that were actually enjoyable to read. But with ones like this or Hell In Hindu Land, it’s like he had these cool setups but just didn’t have the fortitude to commit to them and instead went for a knee-jerk “action” approach. But then maybe there are readers who prefer that. I would’ve preferred an entire novel with Camellion stuck in a mind control facility. 

But at the very least Rosenberger is commited to delivering copious amounts of battle sequences. To the extent that we meet Camellion once he’s already on location, holed up with a few Chinese-American CIA agents on Wrangel Island, eighty miles from Siberia. This white hell is a real place, as Rosenberger informs us via footnote. There are a ton of footnotes throughout Operation Mind-Murder, to the point that it comes off like fastidousness on Rosenberger’s part. But basically Rosenberger read in some publication that here on Wrangel the Soviets installed a facility in which subjects – traitors, criminals, and even WWII prisoners – undergo harsh mind-conditioning torture. 

Camellion is purely in cipher mode this time; there was even more emotional makeup to Philip Magellan in one of Russell Smiths instllaments of The Marksman. The three Chinese agents have no idea who Camellion even is; as usual, our hero has been put in charge of a strike force with no explanation of who he is to the underlings. Rosenberger indulges in his usual penchant for disguises with the off-hand note that Camellion is “fixed up to look like an Oriental,” so as to blend in with his compatriots (one of whom is named Dionysius Woo!). But other than this initial mention, nothing more will be made of Camellion’s disguise; for that matter, Rosenberger seems to forget it, mentioning Camellion’s blue eyes later in the book. (Or whatever color they are, I can’t remember – they just aren’t brown, which they should be if the guy’s truly been “fixed up to look like an Oriental.”) 

One thing I do like is that Rosenberger again brings in that bizarre “Cosmic Lord of Death” stuff. It’s not explicitly mentioned, but there’s a random part where Camellion tells one of his colleagues “you’re a long way from dying;” when the guy asks how Camellion can be sure, the Death Merchant just looks at him. Veteran readers will know that Camellion is seeing the guy’s aura, of course, and apparently it’s not in the color that denotes upcoming death or whatever. Camellion also makes cryptic comments about being on the side of the “Sons of Light” or somesuch. In other words he comes off like a total nutjob once again, and you kind of feel bad for these three agents who have been partnered up with an obvious psychopath in the middle of a snowswept hellhole. 

Camellion’s a lot more verbal about his psychotic hatred of Russians, though. Or “pig farmers,” as he typically refers to them. There are various roving bands of Soviet troops on Wrangel Island, the fodder for the endless action scenes Rosenberger bores us with, almost from the very beginning of the novel to the very end. And as ever they are no match for Camellion, even though they vastly outnumber him. He runs roughshod over them, mocking them as “commie pieces of trash” as he easily blows them away. It was a little interesting reading this, what with the real-world situation in Ukraine at the moment. But given the level of psyops and outright lies about that situation I’ll refrain from saying anything. (Well, maybe just one thing.) 

And Camellion does make it look easy to blow away pig-farmers. Rosenberger tries to inject some suspense into the tale; Camellion and crew are holed up in a cave on the island, the goal to loacate the mind-muder facility and take photos of it. There are various roving bands of Soviet soldiers all over the island, from foot patrols that stay out for a week to helicopter patrols and such. But man it’s basically a cakewalk for the Death Merchant and his newest toy, a .357 Automag made for him by Lee Jurras, an apparently real-life gun manufacturer who has been referenced frequently in this series. This is the weapon Camellion uses most in Operation Mind-Murder, even shooting down one of those Soviet helicopters with it. 

So here’s the plot of Operation Mind-Muder: Richard Camellion gets in a series of endless fights with an endless series of roving Russian army patrols. I mean it just goes on and on for 180+ pages, Rosenberger as ever overwriting to the point of tedium, to the extent that the reader is soon benumbed. And as ever he hops in and out of the perspectives of Camellion’s victims, one-off Russian characters for whom we are given full names, ages, backstories, and the like – moments, that is, before their brains are blasted out by our hero’s Automag. There are also periodic chapters where we get a glimpse of the action from the Russian side of things, with even more one-off Soviets arguing among themselves about the bloody developments on Wrangel Island. At no point anywhere do we get to see the material promised on the back cover. 

The festivities begin when Camellion makes a lone sortie onto the island, getting into a skirmish with a patrol. From there it just escalates with more and more skirmishes, with Camellion at one point even gunning down a bear. There are explosions, avalanches, the expected loss of some of Camellion’s colleagues, and etc. Here is a random example of what is in store for the reader, complete with footnote: 


The absolute slap to the face is that Rosenberger teases us with what could have been a better tale at the very end of the novel. On page 182 we learn that there is something called a “cosmic generator” on the island, but no one can figure out what it does, and they’ll need to grill the captured Soviets for more info. Meanwhile Camellion’s all fired up because he just got a message concerning his next assignment, which no doubt will entail yet more endless action sequences in the next installment. So in other words, he spends the entirety of Operation Mind-Murder fighting to get to this bizarre installation, only gets there at the very end, and then leaves, learning about the strange contraptions within via dialog in the final chapter of the book! 

As ever the most entertaining thing about Death Merchant is how bonkers its creator is. Rosenberger attempts to inject some humor this time, but it just further conveys his own strangeness. For one, Camellion calls people “turtle butts” (as usual he won’t curse), and also there are weird asides like, “Oh, gee whiz and all that sort of worried stuff.” We also get a comedic exchange between Camellion’s Chinese colleagues, during a firefight, about beer making you stupid, to which one of them jokingly responds, “Beer makes you smart…it made Bud Wiser.” Just weird, wild stuff, as Johnny Carson would say…but overall this was not an installment I enjoyed.

Monday, February 19, 2018

Death Merchant #37: The Bermuda Triangle Action


Death Merchant #37: The Bermuda Triangle Action, by Joseph Rosenberger
February, 1980  Pinnacle Books

The 37th volume of Death Merchant treads familiar territory, as Joseph Rosenberger turns in an installment that seems much indebted to the plots of #17: The Zemlya Expedition and #30: The Shambhala Strike – this time nutjob Richard “Death Merchant” Camellion again visits a massive underwater Russian complex, and again (sort of) meets some aliens (of the outer space sort). However he’s more worked up about people who talk while eating. 

Rosenberger as ever goes full out with his manuscript – the book comes in at a whopping 177 pages of small, dense print; a whole heaping ton of it could’ve been cut for a more streamlined (and less taxing) read. For example, we know from chapter one that those wily Russians (aka “pig farmers” and “ivans”) are up to no good on the floor of the ocean, near Jamaica; drilling into the tectonic plates or somesuch to trigger massive earthquakes and other destruction across the United States. Oh, and while they’re down there, they might as well look into all those “UAOs” everyone’s been talking about (aka Unidentified Aquatic Objects).

Then when we cut over to Camellion, here in Kingston, Jamaica with the usual group of easily-confused comrades, we endure a long, long chapter where everyone exposits on what the Russians might be up to down there. As ever, Camellion’s the only one who gets it; everyone else doubts those damn pig farmers could be that evil. The fools! Meanwhile Camellion munches on figs from a box and insists on waiting until he’s finished chewing to talk – he becomes “annoyed” with those who talk while eating. And that’s pretty much the entire glimpse we get into our hero’s personality (such as it is). As ever, Richard Camellion is a total cipher, more of an android than a man.

He’s also the Walking Encyclopedia we know from other volumes; a US nuclear sub disappeared here three months ago, and Camellion’s certain that his own theory is the correct one – that the notorious Bermuda Triangle of this area is in reality a rift in the space-time continuum, and the ship has merely slipped over into another dimension! We get lots of exposition about the Triangle, as ever Camellion expositing from his encyclopediac memory. But unfortunately none of it will ever progress into full-blown sci-fi (despite the arbitrary appearance of aliens later on), and instead will devolve into the usual endless gunfights the series is known for.

Camellion’s main comrade here is Josh Forran, a Navy Intelligence operative stationed in Kingston for years. As usual, the supporting characters have more personality than Rosenberger allows for Camellion, even if the personalities manifest themselves at the most arbitrary of times, like for example during the climactic battle: “Forran was still fighting the nostalgia he felt over having been forced to leave Kingston, Jamaica. All his Dvorak records were still in Kingston.” This mind you is while he’s dodging Russian bullets. There’s also Billy Coopbird hanging around, a Jamaican with an Ivy League education who enjoys speaking like the cliched native for tourists.

But Forran is Camellion’s main teammate for the most part; together they board a mini sub that has fancy “invisibility” gear and head into the depths. On the way they, with the crew of the mother ship, see an actual UAO – a massive underwater craft that defies reality. They watch in shock as it sits there on the ocean floor, then takes off at an impossible speed. Camellion, who refers to the thing as a “OINT,” ie an “Other Intelligence,” takes it all with the same sort of casualness he displayed for the aliens he met back in The Shambhala Strike. And for that matter, Camellion never even once pauses to reflect to himself about those earlier aliens.

Nope, Camellion’s more like, “Okay, that’s that – on with the mission.” To me, this represents probably one of the main sources of frustration about the Death Merchant series. It has all this fringe science and supernatural stuff, but all of it’s just used as window dressing. What does it matter that you have aliens, UFOs, spontaneously-combusting people, and myriad other weird things, when your protagonst clearly couldn’t give two shits about any of it?? Even later, when after the mission the Navy dudes find an object of alien metal mysteriously deposited in their ship, clearly left (somehow) by those aliens, Camellion basically shrugs and forgets about it.

But anyway Camellion and Forran make their way to the massive underwater Soviet complex, which of course brings to mind the similar one in The Zemlya Expedition. Not that Camellion even once reflects back on that, either. It’s sad when the reader actually knows more about Camellion’s past assignments than Camellion himself does. About the only bit of continuity in the book is an arbitrary bit where Camellion thinks of “the coming horrors” of the 1980s, in particular those having to do with spontaneous human combustion – clumsy foreshadowing, I suppose, of the next volume

They infiltrate the place and sneak around, Forran “feeling as uncomfortable as an armless poker player.” Soon enough they’re spotted and engaged in a firefight with KGB guards, a bit where we see Camellion’s insanity, as he literally laughs in the face of death. To Rosenberger’s credit, Camellion’s comrades almost always realize that the dude’s a psychopath. After this we’re back to the exposition, as Camellion again faces off with the dumbass intelligence bigwigs who bicker over what the Russians might do, now that Camellion’s gotten visual sighting of their massive underwater drills. Once again, only Camellion insists that those damn ivans might nuke everyone.

One expects a Thunderball-esque underwater battle at the complex, but instead The Bermuda Triangle Action plays out in an overlong (way overlong) battle aboard the ship Camellion and crew are on, which is attacked by Cubans and KGB soldiers. The underwater complex is almost casually destroyed by submarines. Camellion leads a crew of Navy SEALS, armed with grenade-bearing crossbows(!), against the Cubans, leading into another mostly-boring Rosenberger action scene that seems to never end. But at least Rosenberger has a sense of humor, for after shedding copious amounts of blood, Camellion tells Billy Coopbird at the end: “I hate violence.” WTF?? Even Billy is thrown by that one, thinking to himself how there is something “alien” about Camellion, “another kind of presence staring out through his eyes.”

This volume does have a lot of underwater action in it, and I’ve always been a sucker for that stuff, having seen Thunderball at an impressionable age. Or was it the underwater part in For Your Eyes Only that hooked me? In fact it might’ve been, as I saw that one in ’82, or whenever it debuted on HBO, when I was seven or so. But anyway we get a lot of that in The Bermuda Triangle Action, which despite the title and (brief) appearance of an underwater flying object, is really just the same old, so far as the Death Merchant goes. 

Here’s Allan’s review

Monday, October 16, 2017

Death Merchant: An Insider's View

A big thanks to Allan Wood of the World of Joseph Rosenberger blog for transcribing this and emailing it to me, for publication here – this is the Death Merchant writeup by Joseph Rosenberger that ran in the back of some Pinnacle books in the early ‘80s. It was originally written for a free flyer Pinnacle gave out in bookstores in the late ‘70s (hence the “1978” reference toward the end of the piece).

 Anyway, please enjoy this “insider’s view” into the Death Merchant, courtesy the fevered imagination of its (possibly insane) creator!

An insider's view of the Death Merchant— A master of disguise, deception, and destruction . . . and his job is death. 


DEATH MERCHANT 
by Joseph Rosenberger 

One of Pinnacle's best-selling action series is the Death Merchant, which tells the story of an unusual man who is a master of disguise and an expert in exotic and unusual firearms: Richard Camellion. Dedicated to eliminating injustice from the world, whether on a personal, national, or international level, possessed of a coldly logical mind, totally fearless, he has become over the years an unofficial, unrecognized, but absolutely essential arm of the CIA. He takes on the dirty jobs, the impossible missions, the operations that cannot be handled by the legal or extralegal forces of this or other sympathetic countries. He is a man without a face, without a single identifying characteristic. He is known as the master of the three Ds—Death, Destruction, and Disguise. He is, in fact and in theory, the Death Merchant. 

The conception of the "Death Merchant" did not involve any instant parthenogenesis, but a parentage whose partnership is more ancient than recorded history. The father of Richard Camellion was Logic. The mother, Realism. 

Logic involved the realization that people who read fiction want to be entertained and that real-life truth is often stranger and more fantastic than the most imaginative kind of fiction. Realism embraced the truth that any human being, having both emotional and physical weaknesses, is prone to mistakes and can accomplish only so much in any given situation. 

We are born into a world in which we find ourselves surrounded by physical objects. There seems to be still another—a subjective—world within us, capable of receiving and retaining impressions from the outside world. Each one is a world of its own, with a relation to space different from that of the other. Collectively, these impressions and how they are perceived on the individual level make each human being a distinct person, an entity with his own views and opinions, his own likes and dislikes, his own personal strengths and weaknesses.

As applied to the real world, this means that the average human is actually a complex personality, a bundle of traits that very often are in conflict with each other, traits that are both good and bad. In fiction this means that the writer must show his chief character to be "human," i.e., to give the hero a multiplicity of traits, some good, some bad.

At the same time, Logic demands that in action-adventure the hero cannot be a literal superman and achieve the impossible. Our hero cannot jump into a crowd of fifty villains and flatten them with his bare hands—even if he is the best karate expert in the world! Sheer weight of numbers would bring him to his knees.

Accordingly, the marriage between Logic and Realism had to be, out of necessity, a practical union, one that would have to live in two worlds: the world of actuality and the world of fiction. This partnership would have to take the best from these two worlds to conceive a lead character who, while incredible in his deeds, could have a counterpart in the very real world of the living.

Conception was achieved. The Death Merchant was born in February of 1971, in the first book of the series, Death Merchant.

This genesis was not without the elements that would shape the future accomplishments of Richard J. Camellion. Just as a real human being is the product of his gene-ancestry and, to a certain extent, of his environment during his formative years, so the fictional Richard Camellion also has a history, although one will have to read the entire series to glean his background and training.

There are other continuities and constants within the general structure of the series. For example, it might seem that the Death Merchant tackles the absurd and the inconceivable. He doesn't. He succeeds in his missions because of his training and experience, with emphasis on the former—training in the arts and sciences, particularly in the various disciplines that deal not only with the physical violence and self-defense, but with the various tricks of how to stay alive—self-preservation!

There are many other cornerstones that form the foundation of the general story line:

 Richard Camellion abhors boredom, loves danger and adventure, and feels that he may as well derive a good income from these qualities. The fact that he often has to take a human life does not make him brutal and cruel.

 Richard Camellion works for money; he's a modern mercenary. Nevertheless, he is a man with moral convictions and deeply rooted loyalties. He will not take on any job if its success might harm the United States.

 The Death Merchant usually works for the CIA or some other U.S. government agency. The reason is very simple. Richard Camellion handles only the most dangerous projects and/or the biggest threats. In today's world the biggest battles involve the silent but very real war being waged between the various intelligence communities of the world. This war is basically between freedom and tyranny, between Democracy and Communism. 

(The Death Merchant has worked for non-government agencies, but he has seldom worked for individuals because few can pay his opening fee: $100,000. Usually, those individuals who could and would pay his fee, such as members of organized crime, couldn't buy his special talents for ten times that, cash in advance.)

 The Death Merchant is a pragmatic realist. He is not a hypocrite and readily admits that he works mainly for money. In his words, "While money doesn't bring happiness, if you have a lot of the green stuff you can be unhappy in maximum comfort." Yet he has been known to give his entire fee—one hundred grand—to charity!

 Richard Camellion did not originate the title "Death Merchant." He hates the title, considering it both silly and incongruous. But he can't deny it. He does deal in death. The nickname came about because of his deadly proficiency with firearms and other devices of the quick-kill. (All men die, and Camellion knows that it is only a question of when. He has never feared death, "Which is maybe one reason why I have lived as long as I have.")

 The weapons and equipment used in the series do exist. (Not only does the author strive for realism and authenticity, but technical advice is constantly being furnished by Lee E. Jurras, the noted ballistician and author.)

Another support of the general plot is that Camellion is a master of disguise and makeup, and a superb actor as well. 

It can be said that Richard Camellion, the Death Merchant, is the heart of the series; but action—fast-paced, violent, often bloody—is the life's blood that keeps the heart pumping. This is not merely a conceptual device of the author; it is based on realistic considerations. The real world is violent. Evil does exist. The world of adventure and of espionage is especially violent. 

The Death Merchant of 1971 is not necessarily the same Death Merchant of 1978. In organizing the series, we did use various concepts in constructing the background and the character of Richard Camellion. 

Have any of these concepts changed? 

The only way to answer the question is to say that while these concepts are still there and have not changed as such, many of them have not matured and are still in the limbo of "adolescence." For example: 

We have not elaborated on several phases of his early background, or given any reasons why Camellion decided to follow a life of danger. He loves danger? An oversimplification. Who first called him the Death Merchant? What kind of training did he have? At times he will murmur, "Dominus Lucis vobiscum." What do the words "The Lord of Life be with you" mean to Camellion? 

All the answers, and more, will be found in future books in the series. 

Camellion's role is obvious. He's the "good guy" fighting on the side of justice. He's a man of action who is very sure of himself in anything he undertakes; a ruthless, cold-blooded cynic who doesn't care if he lives or dies; an expert killing machine whose mind runs in only one groove: getting the job done. One thing is certain: he is not a Knight on a White Horse! He has all the flaws and faults that any human being can have. 

Camellion is a firm believer in law, order, and justice, but he doesn't think twice about bending any law and, if necessary, breaking it. He's an individualist, honest in his beliefs, a nonconformist. 

He also seems to be a health nut. He doesn't smoke, indulges very lightly in alcohol, is forever munching on "natural" snacks (raisins, nuts, etc.), and uses Yoga methods of breathing and exercise. 

Richard Camellion is not the average champion/hero. He never makes a move unless the odds are on his side. He may seem reckless, but he isn't. 

Richard Camellion wouldn't turn down a relationship with a woman, but he doesn't go out of his way to find one. The great love of his life is weapons, particularly his precious Auto Mags. 

As a whole, readers' reactions are very favorable to the series. It is they who keep Richard Camellion alive and healthy. 

The real father and mother of Richard Camellion is Joseph Rosenberger. A professional writer since the age of 21, when he sold an article, he worked at various jobs before turning to fulltime writing in 1961. Rosenberger is the author of almost 2,000 published short stories and articles and 150 books, both fiction and nonfiction, writing in his own name and several pseudonyms. He originated the first kung fu fiction books, under the name of "Lee Chang." Among other things, he has been a circus pitchman, an instructor in "Korean karate," a private detective, and a free-lance journalist. 

Unlike the Death Merchant, the author is not interested in firearms, and does not like to travel. He is the father of a 23-year-old daughter, lives and writes in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, and is currently hard at work on the latest adventure of Richard Camellion, the Death Merchant.

Monday, September 19, 2016

Death Merchant #38: The Burning Blue Death


Death Merchant #38: The Burning Blue Death, by Joseph Rosenberger
April, 1980  Pinnacle Books

The 38th installment of Death Merchant sees Richard Camellion venturing from Holland to DC to West Germany, in a borderline sci-fi adventure that spans about three months. At this point in the series Joseph Rosenberger was freely indulging in his fringe science interests, to the point that, for once, we have here one of the rare installments that is more composed of dialog and plot rather than action sequence after action sequence. Indeed, there are only a handful of action scenes throughout The Burning Blue Death.

We get the impression from the outset that this won’t be a typical installment, with an opening missive from the Death Merchant himself:


It’s quite strange reading such words from a fictional character whose business is death and who has killed, by a rough estimate, perhaps a thousand or so people by the time of this novel’s events. But The Burning Blue Death is High Rosenberger for sure, overwritten to the point of insanity (183 pages of super-small print), littered with egregious footnotes, filled with metaphysical stuff like auras, Krillian photography, and Spontaneous Human Combustion (or SHC). For a while it’s occurred to me that there are some points of similarity between Death Merchant and The Mind Masters; both series seem to come from authors with rather twisted imaginations, and Rosenberger and Rossmann/Ross clearly share the same interests – even the writing styles are somewhat similar, with both authors prone to having their characters baldly exposit on esoteric subjects, even referencing specific magazines and articles verbatim.

But whereas The Mind Masters put more focus on sleazy sex and less on action (at least in the first three volumes), Rosenberger as we know could be guilty of turning in a book that was really just one overlong action scene after another. The problem with that is, at least for me, Rosenberger’s no David Alexander. I mean, that guy could write a 183-page action scene that would probably be a blast to read, so to speak, but Rosenberger’s action scenes can be turgid and repetitive. This is why installments like Burning Blue Death are so special – a rare instance of Joseph Rosenberger putting more focus on the story and the latest weird assignment Camellion has undertaken. I’ve only read a few other Death Merchant novels I could say the same of (for which reason they’re still my favorites): The Cosmic Reality Kill would definitely be one, as would be Blueprint Invisibility.

When we meet Camellion he’s in Holland, having just appeared the previous night on a late night TV show starring “the Johnny Carson of the Netherlands.” As ever Camellion is in one of his disguises, this time looking like a Dutchman in his 60s. He’s put a bunch of ads in various newspapers asking about SHC, which is what he discussed on the TV program the night before. Gradually we’ll learn that a few US notables, including a Senator, have literally gone up in flames recently, imploding with blue flame. Camellion, like his creator, is enamored with esoteric subjects, thus is so handedly familiar with Sponataneous Human Combustion that he can easily pose as a scientist specializing in it – even speaking in pristine Dutch. Unfortunately we don’t see the TV bit. Rather, the focus is more on the goons Camellion is certain will be coming for him, given that he pointedly revealed some info that would surely come across the attention of whover is behind these SHC attacks.

Sure enough some goons come a-calling late that night, but have no fear – Camellion is armed with some cool-sounding modified .45s that have elongated barrels and pistol grips in front of the trigger guards. (Dean Cate has illustrated one of them in his typically-wonderful cover art.) There follows the standard Rosenberger action scene, complete with rampant POV-hopping where we are suddenly informed the names and backgrounds of the one-off gunmen who show up briefly enough to shoot at Camellion, miss, and get killed. Throughout Camellion has on “old man” makeup and a half-bald wig and wears very sci-fi-sounding night vision goggles, which Rosenberger must’ve thought were so cool that he actually describes them twice; Camellion wears them again in the novel’s final action sequence, and Rosenberger tells us all about them as if forgetting he already did so a hundred pages earlier.

Thirteen days later and Camellion, in another disguise, is over in London, having tracked down the man who hired the thugs who failed in the hit on him in Holland. As ever working with the CIA (with whose local director, Harvey Spare, Camellion engages in page-filling arguments about everything from SHC to gun control), Camellion puts together a team and raids the tobacco shop of his target, a man named Marmis. Here Rosenberger gets positively poetic about the variety of expensive tobacco to be found in Marmis’s shop, only to finally inform us that Camellion doesn’t smoke(!). And speaking of our hero, his latest disguise has him as a “crippled up” old man, complete with a cast on his arm.

There follows another Rosenberger action scene, more tedious than exciting, which again culminates with everyone dead, including Marmis – killed by a fatal drug accidentally given him by a junior agent. But Marmis’s place is really a hideout for a branch of the IRA, and once everyone’s dead Camellion finds coded documents written in the Labanotation method – humorously, Camellion instantly knows they are written thusly, given that he is an expert on every subject known to man. Finally the SHC angle returns – I was afraid at first that The Burning Blue Death would be another Death Merchant that squandered its fringe science plot with random shootouts and whatnot – and Rosenberger muses on the subject via several pages of case studies.

A whopping six weeks later, Camellion’s back in the US, working with usual CIA contact Courtland Grojean, and the CIA specialists have finally broken the code. Marmis’s uncoded documents hide illustrations of men in weird-looking suits, complete with metal rods sticking out of “skullcap”-type helmets; Dean Cate also attempted to illustrate this, at the top of his cover art, but it looks like he misread Rosenberger’s description, or perhaps the Pinnacle editor didn’t properly convey it, as the dude in the drawing looks more like the grand dragon of some sci-fi KKK branch. Courtesy more bald exposition with CIA science contact Dr. Russell Courtier, a biophysicist from an unsepcified New York university, we learn that SHC might be induced artificially, and indeed the Nazis were working on such a weapon.

Mention of “The Brotherhood” in those coded documents has Camellion figuring a neo-Nazi group is behind the plot. After a brief firefight with thugs who try to take him out on the way to his apartment in the DC suburbs – after which he spends a week, off-page, in jail – Camellion hops a plane to Germany. Twenty-three days later, he’s now working with a group of West German agents and researching the SHC developments made by the Nazis in WWII, under the guidance of a scientist named Helmut Koerber. We learn that the SHC device was called the Transmutationizer, and we see one in use, as a group of Brotherhood gunmen attack Camellion and crew, two of them wearing portable SHC devices which are powered by a trailer truck. Some of Camellion’s comrades go up in weird blue flames.

It seems that just about every Death Merchant climaxes with an assault on a fortress, and such is the case with The Burning Blue Death. Having determined that an old SS sadist named Baron Hammerstein is behind the Brotherhood and the plot to use SHC to kill off his enemies, Camellion teams up with a crew of West German agents and British SIS commandoes and storms the Baron’s Gothic castle. Here Rosenberger again tells us all about Camellion’s new-fangled night vision goggles, apparently forgetting he already told us about them before, and also we’re informed that Camellion makes use of a Sidewinder submachine gun, which us Pinnacle diehards know was a gun also favored by fellow imprint hero The Penetrator.

The ensuing action scene is heavy on the carnage – as ever Rosenberger injects just the right amount of gore in his action scenes, with heads blowing off and whatnot – but is a bit unsatisfying in that the villains of the piece, Koerber and Baron Hammerstein, are quickly introduced and dispensed of within just a few pages. However we do get to see more usage of the SHC device, with friend and foe imploding with blue flame. Camellion, realizing this would just be yet another device used to terrorize mankind, ends up destroying the Transmutationizer. The designs for building one are also lost, what with the massacre of the people behind it.

As usual the highlight of this Death Merchant is the arbitrary ranting of Camellion, which is to say Rosenberger. He bitches about religion, anti-smoking (ie warnings not to smoke), and Jimmy Carter, among many other things, though to be honest his Carter-bashing is perfectly understandable. The highlight though is Camellion’s theory on the “level of incompetence,” which he discusses with Grojean:

“The principle is very simple. In every organization, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. That is, if people do well in one job, they are promoted to another higher up the ladder, and so on until they reach a job they can’t do well. As soon as people reach jobs they can’t do, they tend to make mistakes because they’ve reached their level of incompetence. Understand?” 

“Certainly. The cream rises until it sours.”

I planned to put a Hillary Clinton joke here, but decided not to, so as not to offend anyone who might be planning (for whatever reason) to vote for her.  Plus the joke wouldn’t have worked anyway, because Hillary Clinton has never done well in any job.

Finally, here’s a review by Allan.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Death Merchant #17: The Zemlya Expedition


Death Merchant #17: The Zemlya Expedition
July, 1976  Pinnacle Books

The Death Merchant veers again into sci-fi with a plot that could come out of John Eagle Expeditor (or one of Roger Moore’s Bond movies), as “pig farmer”-hating hero Richard Camellion heads to a massive high-tech city beneath the sea. However any hopes that this will be an interesting installment are quickly dashed, as for the most part The Zemlya Expedition is about 130 endless pages of densely-detailed gun battles, and, like most other books in the series, quickly becomes a chore to read.

Not to come off too negatively; as ever, Joseph Rosenberger injects enough of his patented bizarro diatribes to brighten the occasional spot. We’ll get random arguments about religion, mind control, and even doomsday prophecizing straight out of one of those faux-“documentary” type end of the world movies that were so big in the late ‘70s. But to get there you have to read like twenty pages describing in minute detail a gunfight between Camellion and legions of “Stalin saps” and whatnot.

The Zemlya Expedition starts off strongly enough. When we meet him Richard Camellion has snuck onto a Soviet research ship in the freezing desolation of the Arctic Ocean. He’s the only American in a few hundred miles and he’s surrounded by KGB and Russian soldiers. We learn that, for the past eleven weeks, Camellion has been working on project “Saddlesoap – Two Bars” for the NSA. Apparently there is a Russian doctor who is a contact for the US government and who has gotten in touch with her handlers about something major going on, for which she needs to be exfiltrated immediately.

The only problem is, this doctor, a climatologist named Raya Dubanova, is deep down in Zemyla II, a high-tech underwater complex built by the Russians in the Barents Sea of the Arctic circle. In the first few chapters Rosenberger occasionally hops back to Camellion’s briefing with the NSA and CIA several weeks before, shoehorning as customary tons of exposition about the Zemyla experiment as well as other odds and ends that don’t have much to do with anything. But we have to read tons and tons of stuff about ocean research, deep currents, and the dangers of weather being used as a weapon. Indeed the novel ends with a warning of the earth’s upcoming destruction.

The first of many, many fights ensues as Camellion is promptly discovered on the ship. He beats three men to death and assumes the identity of one of them – as we’ll recall, Camellion lives up to his surname by being able to disguise himself. Indeed he considers himself “the Rembrandt of plastic putty.” He now goes about the ship as “Valentin Prisk,” arrogantly confident that “even Prisk’s mother” wouldn’t realize that he is an imposter. And yet Camellion’s discovered in just a few pages, as he’s overlooked the fact that the real Prisk was missing a finger. Confronted by the KGB man in charge of the ship’s security, Camellion gets in the first of endless gunbattles that take up the brunt of the novel. It goes on and on and on, but Camellion is uninjured thanks to his “Kevlar-Thermacoacytl longjohns” which are bulletproof and even absorb impact.

However Camellion is caught, and here we have a bit of human depth from him, as he’s photographed and fingerprinted by the Reds, and this burns him to the core, as this has never been done to him before. Now Moscow will know what the legendary “Death Merchant” really looks like. For reasons of plot contrivance the KGB leader decides to take Camellion down to Zemyla instead of sending his ass posthaste to Moscow; he wants to show off how far advanced the USSR is in underwater technology. Thus Camellion is escorted to the “underground pig pen” on Weise Island in the Arctic, where the Russians have hidden their SPECTRE-style massive underwater fortress. 

Zemyla II is straight out of science fiction. It’s composed of five transparent domes deep in the ocean, each about 75 feet high, with sodium lights illuminating the crushing depths above them. Even Camellion has to admit the Russians are far advanced in this regard, and KGB leader General Vershensky gloats over it. “Too bad Jesus Christ and all the wild-eyed prophets didn’t have to deal with these Russian pig farmers,” Camellion thinks to himself. While this sci-fi underwater vibe sounds like a fascinating premise for an entertaining novel, Rosenberger basically just uses it as the framework for 130 or so pages of Camellion shooting at people.

First though we have more bald exposition, as Camellion, Vershensky, and a host of other Soviet bigwigs argue about brainwashing, with Vershensky even reading verbatim from a handy copy of Argosy magazine! Just like the blatant exposition in The Mind Masters, Camellion even argues back, citing sources with apparent photographic memory. It’s interesting but stupid, if you know what I mean – they’re on the bottom of the ocean in a high-tech fortress and they’re arguing over whether America uses Russian brainwashing techniques!

But we haven’t even gotten to the religion-bashing yet. Camellion, imprisoned, meets Dr. Raya Dubanova, a two-hundred pound lady in her mid-40s (forget about the blonde on the cover; she doesn’t exist in the novel). When Raya makes the mistake of mentioning God to Camellion, he goes off on a ranting diatribe that would even befuddle Archie Bunker. He does get in a good line, though: “One man’s religion can be another man’s hell.” But anyway, given her off-hand mention of God, Camellion promptly regards Raya as “a Commie Christian crackpot” and rants against her beliefs – mind you, while they’re in the middle of an escape!

Raya you see totally saves Camellion’s bacon, coming into his cell and killing the two guards. After arguing about Christianity for several pages (another rant of Camellion’s: “Christianity denies man his right to reason, makes him a moral slave”), the two finally escape the cell. Here we are given lots of technical detail about Zemyla. It’s made up of five domes but only a few of them have anyone in them. Rather than bring the place to life Camellion just fills up several pages with bald technical detail. Camellion and Raya two split up – Raya confident that her cover will protect her from suspicion in Camellion’s escape – and Camellion gets in yet another protracted battle.

Here Rosenberger as ever lightens up the overbearing grimness with bizarro phrases like “he took a one-way trip to stiff-city.” Coming across a cache of “nitrostarch” explosive, Camellion is able to blow up the dome he’s currently in – that is, after another endless gun battle. Seriously, this novel is like Die Hard for 150 pages, but without any of the fun or charm. It’s really just dire and endlessly detailed, and again the helluva it is the book is so densely written with small print and hardly any white space. If Rosenberger had just loosened up and had fun with it, he might’ve had something more along the lines of The Cosmic Reality Kill and less along the lines of Hell In Hindu Land. Why not skip the gunfights and have Camellion shown around Zemyla II, perhaps even meeting a sexy but duplicitous female KGB agent who tries to sway him? But fun pulp like this does not exist in the world of the Death Merchant.

As is customary for the series we get a lot of cutovers to arbitrary Russian characters who worry over Camellion’s swathe of destruction and wonder how they can stop him. But they are uniformly stupid, like a group of KGB soldiers who buy Camellion’s story for mercy and get in a diving bell and are then all blown up by a few RPG blasts. (Camellion even briefly feels sorry for them, a rare moment of sympathy from Camellion for the “pig farmers”). Oh and meanwhile Raya is in the process of being beaten and tortured; turns out the Russians aren’t total morons and quickly learned she was the one who freed Camellion, mostly because she didn’t ensure her kills when she shot the two guards. 

But Raya’s able to free herself (she’s no damsel in distress, which is admirable on Rosenberger’s part) and reconnects with Camellion, who all by his lonesome, surrounded by about a thousand Red soldiers, has managed to blow up most of Zemyla II. They escape on a “little boat” (the apostrophes constantly and annoyingly used to describe them), aka a small submarine, and escape into the freezing ocean. Camellion suits up in a high-tech deep diving suit and takes on some Russian frogmen just for the hell of it, but this too just comes off as more endlessly-detailed action. He plants some more nitrostarch on the last few domes and that’s all she wrote for Zemyla II, though we learn General Vershensky has escaped.

The novel wraps up in a several-page “Addendum” in which we learn why Raya so desperately wanted to be pulled out of Zemyla. She has learned that earth has entered a “magnetic null zone” and that, due to the earth’s core about to be ripped apart or somesuch, the world will end “within twenty years.” More doomsaying straight out of a late ‘70s faux-documentary ensues, with rampant description of how the earth will be destroyed by chaotic weather and earthquakes and this and that. 

But does Camellion give a damn? Of course not…he’s more concerned that his next mission will be taking him to…Algeria! And that’s that, and we readers need a breather even if Camellion himself doesn’t appear to. Or Rosenberger, for that matter. While his writing doesn’t do much for me I still have to respect this guy; I mean he never took a shortcut with his writing. The books just go on and on and you just want to go back in time and tell him to cut some stuff out and worry less about the endless gun detail and, you know, have a little more fun with it.

Finally, here are reviews by Marty McKee and Allan Wood.

Monday, December 8, 2014

Death Merchant #40: Blueprint Invisibility


Death Merchant #40: Blueprint Invisibility, by Joseph Rosenberger
August, 1980  Pinnacle Books

Sporting an awesome cover (I think the Death Merchant covers, courtesy Dean Cate, were the best in the entire Pinnacle line), Blueprint Invisibility features psychotic protagonist Richard Camellion taking on a mission that involves the Philadelphia Experiment hoax, MKUltra-style mind control, the Red Chinese, and, uh, New York City escort services.

But man, how about that cover? You’ve got bizarre, Ken Strickfaden-style gizmos, what appears to be a pair of teleporting people, and a nattily-attired Richard Camellion pulling himself out of a gurney or something while almost casually firing his submachine gun. Best of all, the top of the cover features a muscular dwarf with an eyepatch and robotic arms! I’ve been hopping around this series with no concern about reading it in order, so I decided to check out this volume, just given the cover alone.

And while most of this stuff’s in the actual novel, it isn’t featured as much as you wish it would be. Instead, Joseph Rosenberger is more concerned with pointlessly-detailed gun battles and lots of material which was obviously lifted from various encyclopedias or copies of National Geographic, as well as the odd issue of Fate. The Philadelphia Experiment stuff is basically just the framework Rosenberger uses to get Camellion in a host of fights with the Red Chinese, and ultimately it’s a complete McGuffin.

Anyway, Rosenberger opens the novel as if we’ve missed something; at first I thought it was a direct lead-in from the previous installment, which I don’t have, but it isn’t. Camellion’s in DC, leading a group of Navy Intelligence operatives as they tail Mason Shiptonn, a Navy Intelligence staffer who, Camellion is certain, has been turned into a mind-controlled sleeper agent by the Red Chinese. Shiptonn was one of the few people with access to the ultra-classified Philadelphia Experiment papers, and apparently three months ago he took photos of them and gave them to the Chinese – all without his conscious knowledge.

Rather than the Philadelphia Experiment’s “hyperspace quality and/or factor” stuff, Camellion is more concerned over how the Chinese comrpomised Shiptonn…and how they did it so quickly, like in just a few hours. Because, as we are reminded at length, there’s no surefire way to completely control a person’s mind in such a short time. I should mention here that more, much more, attention is placed on mind control/MKUltra stuff rather than the more-interesting Philadelphia Experiment stuff, which Rosenberger almost blithely documents and then moves on to other things.

When they lock down Shiptonn after a firefight with some Chinese agents, Camellion is briefed by his CIA handler Grojean, and decides to move on to New York City to figure out how exactly Shiptonn was brainwashed. No one’s much concerned about the leaked Philadelphia Experiment stuff; they’re more worried over other sleeper agents. Anyway, Shiptonn spent one night with a high-class hooker from the Olympia Escort Service in Manhattan, and at great length Camellion learns that it’s run by a gorgeous former escort named Soraya Duncan, who is involved with a Mafia boss named Charley Franzese.

Rosenberger fills the middle quarter of the novel with material almost lifted verbatim from various guides to New York. Reading Blueprint Invisibility, I had to laugh, recalling what Donald “Dr. Rock” Schnell mentioned in his memories of Rosenberger – namely, how Rosenberger’s study was lined with National Geographic magazines and maps of US cities. One can easily tell, reading this novel, that Rosenberger had each of these things by his side as he pecked away at his typewriter.

The escort service material actually gets more print than both the Philadelphia Experiment and the brainwashing stuff combined. My guess is Rosenberger also must’ve been leaning on the various “sex expose” paperbacks that had been printed at the time – but then, the dude himself penned some, back in the ‘60s, a few of which I’ll get around to reviewing someday. Anyway the Olympia service has never been busted, due to the curious fact that no client has ever managed to score with one of the escorts!

Camellion suspects Soraya Duncan and mobster Farenzese are involved with the Red Chinese somehow, and that the escort programmed Shiptonn that night. Camellion canvases Manhattan, doing his research, working with his CIA contact – a man named William Fieldhouse!  Stephen Mertz has told me that Fieldhouse was friends with Rosenberger, and indeed was part of what Mertz calls “the Rosenberger Circle.” So this character, a tough ‘Nam vet who is described as “well-muscled and nice-looking,” is clearly a reference to the actual William Fieldhouse, whom Camellion starts to like so much that he soon just calls him “Bill!”

Soraya Duncan is a mega-babe redhead who despite being involved with Farenzese will still go out with the occasional client. Camellion uses a dandy named Ewart Gremmill, a CIA contractor marked for death by the Agency, to set him up with her. We get lots of background detail on Soraya, none of which matters much in the grand scheme of things. So shoehorned is all of this that the dwarf on the cover, who turns out to be a former wrestler named Gregory Gof (and who has steel fingers, instead of the friggin’ cooler robotic arms of the cover painting), is not only Soraya’s assistant but also her brother – and this tidbit is not fleshed out in the least. In fact, Gof amounts to zilch in the novel, appearing for maybe three pages.

The Camellion-Soraya date is the most interesting moment in the novel, as Camellion finds himself taken by the gorgeous beauty, despite his concern that she might be a traitor. And she’s my dream girl, too, casually discussing P. D. Ouspensky on a first date!! But still, Camellion senses “a strong negative thought-field around her.” They go back to her posh apartment, where the lady makes clear her intention to screw Camellion senseless. I figured she’d instead lead him into a trap, or some out-of-nowhere and pointlessly-detailed fight scene would ensue, but nope – Rosenberger writes an actual sex scene, my friends.

Spanning four pages, the Camellion-Soraya encounter is a lot more explicit than I expected it to be, given the author. But just after their mutual whopping orgasms the two are surprised by the sudden entrance of Soraya’s mobster partner, Charley Franzese, with a few of his goons. Camellion, who is playing a Texan enterpreneur named “Jefferson Davis Hafferton,” busts out his kung-fu skills and beats them all senseless. He then leaves Soraya there with them, having come to the decision that she isn’t the best woman he’s had sex with, even though he lies to her that she is(?).

So far there hasn’t been much of the tedious action Rosenberger is known for, but he makes up for it posthaste. Launching a soft probe in the middle of the night on the building which houses the Olympia Escort Service, Camellion and Fieldhouse (the former who wears a Frankenstein mask, the latter a Wolfman mask) get in a huge battle with Franzense’s stooges. It goes on and on, and culminates with the two making an aiborne escape on a helicopter, with the NYPD helicopter patrol in pursuit.

It should be mentioned that Camellion goes out of his way to kill cops this time around – in fact, several times he tells his associates that they too had better be ready to kill any police officers that get in the way! So here he casually oversees the destruction of a few NYPD helicopters, marking up the policeman’s deaths as just par for the course. But then, Camellion is more psychotic than usual this time out; even Rosenberger seems to understand this, as toward the end he informs us that “in eleven years [Camellion] had killed literally thousands of people.”

Another mostly-tedious action scene follows, as Camellion, Fieldhouse, and more CIA agents attack a “Red Chinese fortress” in the affluential 160s section of Manhattan. In this sequence Camellion et al are themselves disguised as Chinese, thanks to Camellion’s usual wizardry with makeup; also notable is this tongue-twister of a line, which is delivered just before Camellion’s new buddy guns down a few Red Chinese: “Go screw a sapsucker, you slant-eyed slobs,” snarled Fieldhouse.

In the homestretch it’s learned that the Red Chinese who stole the Philadelphia Experiment stuff are on Chelsworth Island, off of Maine’s coast. Also the Chinese agents who have perfected the mind-control are there, not to mention Soraya Duncan, the three of her escorts who were in on it with her, and Farenzese. I mean, they’re all just conveniently gathered together. Camellion, his stalwart Agency pals, and a handful of SEALs stage an ambush, Camellion informing them that everyone on the island is to be killed – and indeed, if any of the men have problems with shooting women, they’d better leave now!

As if to prove how heartless and sick he is, Camellion soon after blows away a Chinese whore in cold blood, just some innocent hooker brought in to entertain the Chinese officers. Then, dressed in a “sky blue jumpsuit,” Camellion proceeds to lead his team on a gore-soaked assault on the island, in the third and final of the novel’s incredibly-boring action scenes. It’s all just like Rosenberger’s earlier Mace junk, with a barrage of Chinese names and obscure martial arts terms thrown at us.

Rosenberger himself relishes in describing the gruesome deaths of Soraya Duncan and her three girls, documenting thoroughly the path of each bullet through Soraya’s “once-beautiful body.” It’s dark, disquieting stuff, and off-putting as well – Rosenberger writes that one of the poor girls is even given “a free hysterectomy” thanks to a SEAL-fired bullet, and it’s all just depressing because it’s our supposed heroes who are shooting these unarmed girls, and it’s all presented to us as a sterling victory against the dark forces of Communism.

All of the Philadelphia Experiment stuff is rendered moot in the melee; we learn that the Chinese have built a “space bending machine,” but Camellion has no interest whatsoever in learning what it does. And Rosenberger has no interest in telling us. Instead, Camellion oversees the death of everyone, save for a few captured Chinese scientists, and then wires the entire compound to blow, including the space-bender. And now he’s all excited because Grojean just told him that his next mission will be in…North Ireland! The End!!

So yeah, none of the cool shit depicted on the cover actually happens in the novel. But in exchange you at least get to witness the Death Merchant scoring with a woman. Plus, we learn the usual random and bizarre tidbits about Camellion, like that “one of his favorite drinks” is two parts Scotch and one part Perrier over two ice cubes. Also that he enjoys eating kumquats while drinking cocoa. Oh, and that not only does he need just four hours of sleep a night, but that his typical breakfast is “black coffee, a small cup of honey, and two vitamin pills.”

Finally, the super-bizarre shit is in full effect, so far as the “Cosmic Lord of Death” goes, with Camellion apparently knowing when he’s going to die (“but not today!”), the aforementioned sensing of “negative thought-fields,” and occasional lines like, “The Cosmic Lord of Death was always on [Camellion’s] side, but Time hated his guts and was forever his main enemy.” Best of all is Camellion’s apparent unwillingness to curse, the harshest line he delivers being, “Ostritch crap!”

Which, sadly, pretty much sums up Blueprint Invisibility.

Finally, be sure to check out the Sharp Pencil blog, where Alan has been reviewing every single volume of the Death Merchant series!  Now that is commitment!

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Joseph Rosenberger: The Man, The Myth -- Part II

A big thanks to Donald “Dr. Rock” Schnell, who wrote me out of the blue last week, telling me that he knew Joseph Rosenberger back in the early ‘80s. Dr. Rock, who can be found at the Young For Life site and has published the books Fitonics For Life and Young For Life, has kindly offered to share his memories of Rosenberger with the rest of us.

The interesting details provided below go a long way toward fleshing out the mysterious character who was Joseph Rosenberger, especially when combined with the interview and letter which are also here on the blog.

Anyway, here’s Dr. Rock!


I met Joseph Rosenberger in the 1980s. He assisted me with starting my writing career.

In no particular order, I will present my recollection of Joe. Thats what he wanted me to call him.

I was about 25 years old and Joe was in his mid-fifties. This was approximately 1982-83. I met him at his home in Mesa, Arizona. I was living in Mesa at the time while attending Arizona State University and teaching full time in the Tempe School District. I was taking a course in fiction writing with Writer’s Digest at the time.

I was interested in writing Action Adventure. I was working on a series, called “The Cobra.”  It was similar to the Remo Williams stories. The main character was trained in an ancient martial art, the cobra style. At that time I was studying the works of Don Pendleton and Joseph Rosenberger for ideas on how to develop my stories and characters.

As improbable as it may sound, I believe I looked his name “Joseph R. Rosenberger” up in my local phone book. Sure enough, there was a listing in Mesa, Arizona. I took a chance and called and explained who I was and why Id like to meet with him.

Joe lived in what you could describe as a non-descript perfectly plain middle class neighborhood. It would be the type of home a spy might select if they were choosing to blend in and go unnoticed.

He met me at the front door. The front door was heavily screened with a super heavy metal door. The door was a solid barrier to any unauthorized entrance. I would later discover the back door was similarly covered by a security door. Both the front door and rear door had extra heavy duty locks and chains. The windows of the house were also protected from easy entry or burglary.

It seemed that Joe was either a very cautious man or “paranoid” about intruders. It may have been another way that he lived to truly identify with his character so that he could write about the Death Merchant. Most of the homes in that neighborhood did not have that type of heavy duty security. I think that may have been one of the secrets to his creative success with the series. He lived the part and immersed himself into his character.

Joe wore a military shirt and pants with black boots. The shirt was long sleeved and had epaulets. His clothes were Khaki colored. It was as if he wore a military uniform without any rank or medals. He wore this same outfit every time I saw him. Joe was about 6 feet. He was lean and had dark hair. He projected the air of a man of no nonsense.

Joe reminded me of stories Id read of Hemmingway and other professional writers. He was a paradox in terms of appearance because he looked like and dressed like a soldier who was ready for combat. Perhaps he dressed this way to be able to identify with his main character, Richard Carmellion of the Death Merchant.

After basic introductions, he took me to his writers studio. It was one of the bedrooms of the home. The office contained a desk with a typewriter. Joe didn't use a computer. The room was filled with National Geographic magazines and copies of his Death Merchant series.

Joe explained to me that writing was “hard” work. At the time he had a contract with a company that purchased his Death Merchant series. I believe he was producing about one book every three months, but it may have been more frequent.

He showed me articles he'd written in the 1960s for dozens of mens magazines from Argosy, Fate, and others that were more suited for Playboy type magazines. He also wrote erotic fiction. I dont think that was where he made the bulk of his money. Essentially, in Joe's words, “if a publisher paid by the word, he would write for them.” Joe worked to make a living as a writer.

He had a formula for producing the Death Merchant and other similar action adventure novels. He showed me his formula. I can only recall at this time that he had what I believed was a 10 chapter formula. Each chapter contained approximately 20 pages. Each of those 10 chapters had a purpose to them for the story to properly develop. Once he finished each chapter he would staple that chapter together, and then move onto the next chapter. When he was finished he would stack all ten chapters, place rubber bands around them and place them in a box to mail to his publisher. He was very organized and systematic. I believe his success was due to his organization.

Joe said his readers were tough on him to be accurate with details. He used National Geographic to describe scenes for the Death Merchant. This way he could be sure he was using the right descriptions to describe geographical locations. His office was also filled with street maps of all 50 states. He would use these to describe routes driven by the Death Merchant. He strove for accuracy. He also had a collection of guns and ammo magazines. He would use these to describe different weapons and their effects.

Joe had an interest in the “psychic” world and ESP. He wasn't a “New Age” type. He was intrigued by these subjects from the research of JB Rhine. His interest was in the possibility of using these techniques for warfare. I shared with him my experiences while at the Defense Intelligence Agency. The DIA and CIA were in fact using the Rand Corporation to study these same topics during the mid 70s and maybe into the 80s.

Joe was a bright man, a hard worker and a dedicated writer. He loved to entertain his readers. My perception of Joe was that he was very much like his main character. He lived a very quiet private life. His hours were spent researching and writing.

He seemed to be a loner. He didn't live alone. He shared his home with a woman who agreed to cook and clean for them in exchange for room and board. They werent married. But, in spite of the fact that he shared the home, it seemed to be that he was a loner. I never heard him talk about family. That may have been because he respected their privacy. But, I also don't recall any family photos in his office. It seemed that everything in his office was there to facilitate his writing. His office was all business.

We only had about a 1/2 dozen meetings. I moved onto other things, including leaving Arizona and going to Palmer College of Chiropractic.

I believe I learned from Joe that to be a professional writer you have to put in serious time every day. It was a business. It was a business that required research and preparation. Joe was goal oriented and knew each day how many pages he needed to write and what he needed to accomplish in that days work.

I had great respect for Joe as a writer. I still do. I will always appreciate the fact that he met me and was willing to show me the nuts and bolts of the craft as best he could.

One last thing, Joe did mention me in one of his books in the Death Merchant series.  “Schnell” was one of the guys that Richard Carmellion had to take out. It was a minor role, LOL.

12/1/14 UPDATE:

Dr. Rock strikes again -- after reading the above post, Dr. Rock sent me a few more details about Rosenberger, which he gave me permission to post here:


I saw you had a link to a letter and photograph. I went to check it out. Yes, the woman, “Virginia,” was the same woman that he introduced me to. He didn’t say that it was his wife, however. He may have been protecting her privacy. Also, notice the shirt he’s wearing has epaulets!!! The home is the same one that I saw him in.

I read through that letter and another fact was pointed out to me. The letter was written in 1985. Joe was upset because he was being paid $2,500 a book and they wanted 6 books a year! That is one book every two months. As a writer, I can tell you that is hard, hard work.

Now, let’s look at the pay: I was a teacher in 1985 and I was making about $24,000 a year. It is well known that teachers aren’t paid well. Starting salaries in my district were about $18,000. Joe was therefore earning half as much as a teacher, and 1/3 less than a new teacher.

When I realized that, I had even more respect for him. He was literally working himself to death to support himself and Virginia on the money he made from writing. That is all the more reason I wish him well and wish to honor him.

He was definitely an opinionated individual, but that is what made his writing sharp. Joe was a bright man.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Death Merchant #30: The Shambhala Strike


Death Merchant #30: The Shambhala Strike, by Joseph Rosenberger
October, 1978  Pinnacle Books

Wrapping up the “ancient aliens” trilogy that began in Hell In Hindu Land and continued in The Pole Star Secret, The Shambhala Strike turns out to be an okay entry in the Death Merchant series, one that takes it straight into the realm of science fiction. Here Joseph Rosenberger manages to combine his interest in mysticism, overly-described exotic locations (and its people’s customs), and endlessly-detailed firefights. Oh, and Camellion teams up with an ancient alien!

Having traveled to Bhutan, thirty miles from the Tibetan border, we meet Richard “Death Merchant” Camellion as he is once again leading a party of CIA agents and army commandos. Heading up “Operation Arrowhead,” in which the CIA has decided to look into the mystery of Agharta, the so-called underworld empire of myth, Camellion commands a group of redshirts, among them Vallie West, a Schwarzenegger-sized CIA commando who apparently has fought beside Camellion before. Believe it or not, there’s even a girl in the group, certainly a rarity for Rosenberger: Helena Banya, a gorgeous blonde Russian “sex-spy” who has recently defected to the West.

As usual Rosenberger shoehorns all kinds of exposition into the proceedings, but when it comes to detailing the “sexpionage” efforts of the USSR, who can complain? As Camellion broods over Helena, who of course he doesn’t trust, he thinks to himself for pages and pages how these Russian sex-spies are taught to use their bodies in various ways. Helena’s story has it that when she defected, she brought along a folder of classified Russian intel so as to prove her honesty; among the paperwork was material on how the Russians recently tried to find Shambhala, supposedly the gate to Agharta.

Since the Soviets are trying to find the place, then America wants in on it too, thus Camellion has been hired to venture into the treacherous Himalayas. He leads a party into the mountains, and once again Rosenberger serves up too many characters who run together, from an anthropologist turned CIA contractor named Paul Gemz to a handful of Bhutanese soldiers who do nothing but quake in superstitious fear throughout the novel. There are also a handful of Black Berets, humorously enough led by a dude named “Red,” which isn’t confusing at all.

Making an appearance here is the rampant footnoting the series was at times known for; The Shambhala Strike is stuffed to the gills with paragraphs of footnotes, most of them absurdly unnecessary. Rosenberger takes a page from John Rossmann, with characters discussing semantics in outright exposition, with Rosenberger often backing up their claims with footnotes. But it’s all so stupid and shoehorned in. For example, at one point while setting up their perimeter defenses in the mountains, Camellion says they’ll at least be as safe as the average homeowner, and in a footnote Rosenberger actually gives statistics on how many housebreaks there are per year in the US!

Much worse though is the exposition. As in Hell In Hindu Land, the characters here will discuss metaphysics at the most preposterous of times, like right after firefights or even when meeting alien beings(!). You’ll have these army commandoes discussing esoteric lore in the baldest of exposition, with footnotes backing up everything they say. And like every other Rosenberger novel, The Shambhala Strike is too damn long, coming in at 208 pages of small type. If Pinnacle had just gutted the expository stuff and removed the footnotes, they would’ve been left with a leaner novel that would’ve been more in keeping with their other action paperbacks.

The first half of the book is pretty trying, very much in the adventure fiction mold, as Camellion and team trek across the Himalayas and Rosenberger footnotes all kinds of uninteresting shit. In fact, the reader isn’t even prepared for the fact that The Shambhala Strike is tied in to those earlier two novels, as Camellion isn’t even here looking for any aliens. He just wants to get to the bottom of the Shambhala mystery, and more importantly wants to get there before the Chinese do. Cue lots of tension as the small party knows they are being followed by Chinese soldiers, just waiting for the hammer to drop.

The action scenes here, for the most part, aren’t written in the same wearying style typical of Rosenberger. They’re more like something out of a war novel, with Camellion laying explosives and blowing up his pursuers, rather than endlessly-detailed gunfights. Once the “riceballs” are out of the way, Camellion makes it into Shambhala, which turns out to be a massive city beneath the earth, the group traversing down miles of tunnels to the place. Here the novel becomes full-on sci-fi, with ancient beings known as “Goros” speaking to Camellion et al telepathically, welcoming them into their underworld kingdom, complete with its “sun” of artificial light, which is just like the one Camellion saw in Thuleandia.

The Goros are humans, but ones who are 18,000 years old. They claim to have been residents of China, before even the Chinese lived there, and they were recruited by the Inelqu, the alien “grays” Camellion refers to as “Sandorians.” We get a long backstory here, complete with egregious exposition and footnotes, in which the Goros relate that millennia ago the Inelqu came to Earth from their planet in the Pleiades galaxy, turned the apes into humans, and eventually got into a holocaustal war with another race of aliens, these ones called the Flimmms, who came from an alternate reality!

Now the Inelqu slumber, having fought their war with the Flimmms to a draw. The Goros, who are cloned into new bodies every few hundred years, are tasked with watching over them. They’ve drawn Camellion and team into Shambhala because the Goros know that the Chinese are on the way, and Shambhala must be kept secret. Since the Goros are forbidden to harm anyone, they ask Camellion if he will fight off the Chinese, of which there are a mere 460!! Camellion, as blasé as ever, makes use of the Goros’s “flying doors,” ie high-tech flying contraptions created thousands and thousands of years before by the Inelqu.

One of the more perfunctory action scenes ensues as Camellion and Vallie West fly overtop the Chinese, who have gotten into the caves which lead to Shambhala, and just throw explosives down at them. But still there are a hundred or so Chinese soldiers eft, and they have tanks – however conveniently enough, all mechanical and electronic gear is negated by the energy field which pulses around Shambhala’s massive dome. Camellion’s team is forced to retreat back into the underworld, where the Death Merchant insists that they wake one of the aliens, something the Goros have said they can only do in “emergencies.”

Here follows a scene that you’d never expect in the world of men’s adventure, as the Goros wake up one of the little aliens, who engages in several pages of expository dialog with Camellion and crew! The alien goes into further detail on the story the Goros told, blithely informing the humans that they were created by the Inelqu. Comically enough, Rosenberger has Camellion and the others seeing all kinds of religious allusions in what the alien says, like when it mentions that the Flimmm’s massive spaceship crashed to Earth, Camellion quotes a line from the Bible about Lucifer’s falling star. In other words, the catastrophic war between the Inelqu and the Flimmm gave us humans all of our myths, and Camellion further informs us that the Inelqu are the Nephilim of the Old Testament.

So, one thing you can’t say about The Shambhala Strike is that it short-shrifts on the “ancient aliens” angle, like The Pole Star Secret did. But then, given the endless exposition and stupid questions and “insights” from Camellion et al, you kind of wish Rosenberger had kept a little mystery to it. But after lots of talk, the alien (one of a hundred sleeping in Shambhala, but woken by the Goros because it was the one in control of the weapons) hands over a few laserguns, stating that it cannot take life and thus Camellion and team must do so.

The novel’s climatic action scene is more typical of Rosenberger’s work, with lots of excessive description and POV-hopping and redshirts getting killed as Rosenberger documents their name and where they’re from and other extranneous details. The laserguns decimate everything in their path, but still it comes down to regular gunplay, with Camellion wielding dual autoloading .44s. By battle’s end only he and a few of his party survive, among them Vallie West and Helena Banya, who you won’t be surprised to know just disappears in the second half of the novel and has no relevance to the plot. In fact you wonder why Rosenberger even created her in the first place. Oh, that’s right – to fill pages.

Now, you’d think an alien being just awoken from an 18,000-year slumber, who told you that his people created your ancestors, would perhaps rattle your worldview a little. But not the Death Merchant, who basically just says, “Well, that’s that,” and leads his surviving party out of Shambhala, which closes off forever behind them. And hell, Camellion’s already thinking about his next mission, which might take place in…North Korea!!! Obviously, such a mission would appear mundane to the average person, after he or she had just met an alien and seen a fantastical underworld kingdom, but not blank-slate Camellion.

While many installments broached sci-fi topics, I think this is the most out-there the Death Merchant series ever got. It’s basically an overly-long trawl in “ancient alien” theory, with lots of egregious detail about this and that tossed in for good measure. In other words, it’s about what you’d expect from Rosenberger, who is the only writer who could have his hero meet ancient aliens and not bat an eye. There is a cool unexplained bit, though, where the Goros telepathically tell Camellion they know he serves “the Lord of Light” and is protected by him.

As I read The Shambhala Strike I kept wishing that Rosenberger was still around; maybe we’d see him as one of the talking heads on History Channel’s super-stoopid Ancient Aliens show.