Showing posts with label Don Miles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Don Miles. Show all posts

Thursday, February 18, 2021

The Devil’s Ring (Don Miles #4)


The Devils Ring, by Larry Kenyon
July, 1967  Avon Books

The first thing one realizes about this fourth and final installment of Don Miles is that it actually takes place before the previous volume; we know this due to an early comment that Don won the race in Le Mans “two years ago,” an event which happened in the first volume. We also get a recap of the events of the second volume, with the note that they happened “one year ago.” And we’ll recall that in the third volume, Le Man was “four years ago,” and the events of the second volume were “three years ago.” So anyway not to draw a chart or anything, but you get my drift – even though it has a “4” on the spine and was published one month after the third volume, The Devil’s Ring clearly takes place before Revenge At Indy and likely only came out last in the series due to a publishing snafu. 

Anyway, we also know, per Revenge At Indy, that Challenge At Le Mans took place in 1963, which means that The Devil’s Ring takes place in 1965. Not that Lou “Larry Kenyon” Louderback mentions any dates this time. There aren’t as many topical details this time, either. If anything The Devil’s Ring more so harkens back to twenty years before, as the plot of this one is focused on World War II and it seems that Don is forever coming across some bombed-out ruin or abandoned bunker as he drives across West Germany. This is how we meet him, Louderback delivering an evocative opening in which Don is running solo along a section of the Nurburgring, the titular Devil’s Ring, a notoriously-dangerous racing course that cuts through the Eifel mountains in Germany. 

Don crashes out during his late-night trial run and ends up injured and stranded in a remote section of a fenced-off forest; it’s been condemned given all the artilery, tanks, bunkers, and other detrius of the final days of WWII which litter the countryside. In an effectively surreal moment Don’s fired at by a spectral figure who emerges from the foliage, blasting away with an old Schmeiser. It’s the infamous “Wolf Man” of the area, a psychotic holdover from the war who has been haunting these condemned hills for over twenty years, complete with Nazi helmet and everything. Don, who has a severely-injured leg due to the crash, manages to get the upper hand in a tense sequence, the outcome of which sees Don in possession of the Wolf Man’s SS ring. 

While a savage WWII relic known as the “Wolf Man” would be enough for most authors to devote an entire novel to, Louderback’s over and done with him in this opening chapter, though the Wolf Man’s ring will play a central role in the ensuing plot – a nice play on the title from Louderback, the “Devil’s Ring” referring to the race course as well as the SS ring. But as ever Louderback stuffs the novel to the gills with oddball characters, to the extent that the oddness of each is ultimately lost: a skull-faced rival driver (his skin burned off in a crash so that his face is literally skull-like), a hulking Patagonian Indian, kidnappers who wear Frankenstein and Dracula masks, two women who claim to be the same person, and even a return of Don’s rarely-seen boss, Hedge, whose entire being seems to be a carefully-constructed special effect, from his face to his voice. Don even gets in on the oddness by once again wearing the “Mr. Nobody” mask, a “plastotex” creation which makes his face so unremarkable that it’s impossible for anyone to remember it; he wears it during a meet with another agent who wears a similar mask, adding another surreal sequence to a novel that’s filled with them. 

This is another one of those “secret agent stumbles into an enemy plan” sort of novels; Don’s not on assignment, and in fact is never officially briefed on an assignment. It’s just that his fight with the Wolf Man sets the action in play and it turns out various groups of people want that SS ring. Don gets his first indication of this some time later, once he’s back in Texas; it’s not exactly stated how long after the fight with the Wolf Man this is, but Don’s leg is healed and he’s sick of fending off questions from the media about the bizarre attack. He’s also concerned that the Wolf Man battle will ruin his cover, as it might seem too coincidental to some that a millionaire race car driver just happened to find himself in a fight to the death with a WWII holdover in full Nazi battle gear. 

This part in Texas features Sierra “Smoky” Stover, Don’s hotstuff blonde secretary-slash-former race car driver. We’re informed here that the two have never done the deed, even though they’re both hot for each other, as Don believes that a good secretary is more important than a good lay. Now there’s a LinkedIn recommendation I’d love to see! This also means that this would’ve been the first time we saw Sierra, had this volume been published in the proper sequence, ie before Revenge At Indy. We also get to see, once again, Don’s engineer Buck, who continues to speak in an annoying Texan drawl – annoying due to how Louderback phonetically spells it out, to the point that most of what he says is incomprehensible. 

Don’s racing world stuff is not given as much precedence this time, though Louderback works in a few car chases here and there. For the most part the opening trial run in the Devil’s Ring is the most we get, and in fact The Devil’s Ring ends with Don just about to enter his latest championship race, per the template of earlier installments. It’s more so his cover identity Don is concerned with, and here in the Texas portion he learns he might indeed have undone his own cover when a good-lookin’ babe named Marilu Madero shows up for an interview – and all she wants to talk about is the fight with the Wolf Man. With her “high breasts” and sultry South American looks, Marilu has Don all worked up…particularly when she offers her body in exchange for info. She even sort of goes down on him to keep him talking, though Louderback isn’t super-clear with the details, this being a mainstream book from the ‘60s and all. 

However Don loses all randiness when it turns out Marilu wants the ring – and she wants it for her father, who is none other than an infamous SS sadist named Helldorf, one of the most notorious of the concentration camp commanders. But a crying Marilu insists her dad is just an old man, living feeble and almost senile in Argentina, and plus she was born long after the war, her mom an Argentinian woman. Don tells her to take off, without giving her the ring or consumating the act, then takes a cold shower…only for Sierra Stover to inform him that another “Marilu Madero” is here to see him! This one’s a built blonde, just the type Don likes, we’re informed…as if this makes Don different from practically any other guy in history. This Marilu also claims to be half-Argentinian, though she’s clearly pure German and is only pretending to be someone else, and failing miserably. Regardless, Don works her up so much that she screams they must do it “Now! On the floor!” 

This one’s name turns out to be Rosemarie Kwiff, aka Rosie, and she’s a German secret agent in training. Don promises to bring the SS ring to her, as she claims her boss wants it to destroy it, as it could be seen as a talisman to neo-Nazi movements…particularly the one the real Marilu Madero is part of in Argentina. The plot gets even more busy when it turns out that Buck is wearing the SS ring, and what’s more he wants to keep it because it helps out in his engineering work or somesuch, so Don just decides to buy another SS ring when he’s over in Europe and take that to Rosie. After all, they’re all the same, he figures. This turns out to be the main plot of The Devil’s Ring, as the SS ring Don got, which Buck now wears, is anything but typical, and various factions are willing to kill for it. 

The middle section stalls out a bit as Don muddles his way through Germany; as with the previous books, The Devil’s Ring is “only” about 180 pages, but boy does it have some small, dense print, to the point that it would probably be near 300 pages at normal-sized print. These books are as overwritten as one of my reviews! Like I said before, I don’t know why Louderback went to such trouble to plot-build in this series. I mean his writing is great and all, with copious evocative scenes – like when Don meets with a German intelligence official who has a room completely made of and furnished by plastic – but there’s just too much of a good thing. Like this interminable sequence in Bonn; Don arrives, takes out Rosie, and is immediately chased by some goons. But the chase just goes on and on, and later material, with Don being shuffled around by various groups of kidnappers, makes our hero seem like a nitwit. Don Miles has never been the most perfect of secret agents, as evidenced by the previous three books, but in this one he’s constantly getting outsmarted or captured – easily at that. 

More revelations and plot-heavy stuff ensue when it develops that the original “Marilu Madero” is really named Justa Boll, the mistress, not daughter, of SS bastard Helldorf (who never appears in the novel, by the way). She has various oddball goons at her disposal, but when she too manages to capture Don the two find the opportunity to consumate their earlier shenanigans. I should mention here that while Louderback doesn’t go for full-bore sleaze, he’s definitely one to exploit the ample charms of his female characters: some of the stuff in here is like paeans to boobs. While this breast worship will go on for quite a bit, the actual boinkery only occurs over a few sentences, the actions only vaguely described. At any rate, the stuff with Justa Boll also turns out to be very plot heavy, with various revelations occurring for her character – and who she really works for – as the novel trudges for the climax. 

Don even comes off poorly in the climax, for that matter; with some enemies turned friends, he tries to lead an ambush on the villain of the piece. And is immediately captured – for like the fifth time in the book. Louderback goes to his usual elaborate lengths in scene-building here, with the finale taking place in a ceramics kiln, where the villain intends to melt the gold stored in a bunker in the hills – the Wolf Man’s SS ring containing microfilmed directions on how to safely recover the gold, which is protected by nerve gas. Don and his comrades put in “six hours of back-breaking labor” to transport the bricks of gold from the truck to the kiln, after which the villain intends to put Don and comrades in the kiln. But our hero is saved by another character, after which he gets in a protracted fight which of course sees the villain going up in flames. All pretty much telegraphed, but it just takes forever for any of it to happen. 

Once again an installment ends with Don about to run another race. Only periodically has he raced his Panther throughout this one, and Louderback includes a chase within a race sequence at one point, a fellow racer being one of the enemy agents after Don. As mentioned though Don’s not “on assignment” this time, despite a brief appearance by Hedge, who gives Don what turns out to be faulty intel. Don’s also given some poison-tipped C02 pens, which he spends more time trying to get away from other people who keep taking them from him; as I say, Don Miles is about a rung above the dude in Get Smart, so far as his secret agent skills go. 

Back to the publishing goof which caused this one to come out last…it actually works that Revenge At Indy was the real finale of the series, given how it ties back to the plot of the first volume. So it was kind of weird reading this “final volume” knowing that the events of the previous book were Louderback’s true finale to the series – though of course it’s likely Revenge At Indy wasn’t even planned as such, and Louderback no doubt was ready to write more volumes. I imagine Don Miles got canned because the books, despite their awesomely pulpish plots and exploitative nature, are just too plot-heavy and sluggish, coming off like miniature epics instead of fast-moving action yarns.

Thursday, June 13, 2019

Revenge At Indy (Don Miles #3)


Revenge At Indy, by Larry Kenyon
June, 1967  Avon Books

The third Don Miles takes place four years after the first volume, and we’re reminded of this often because ultimately the main villain of Revenge At Indy turns out to be a character from that earlier book. This also means that Challenge At Le Mans took place in 1963, as Lew “Larry Kenyon” Louderback makes it clear that this installment occurs in 1967.

At 176 pages of small and dense print, Revenge At Indy is as busily-plotted as the previous two books. This seems to have been a thing with Louderback, as evidenced by his Nick Carter: Killmaster novel Danger Key, which featured enough plots for ten books. This one isn’t as bad but it’s close. That being said, Louderback is a fine writer and delivers some big action setpieces, not to mention a cool pulp touch. 

In fact the opening is pulp heaven; we meet Don as he’s barreling across some land in Indiana in his Panther sportscar, being chased by a black helicopter. At his side is his secretary, Sierra Stover, a hotstuff blonde who was once a racecar driver herself; I think this is the first time we’ve actually seen her in the series. The helicopter shoots at them and Don crashes, and a bunch of submachine gun-toting women in form-fitting black leather catsuits get off the ‘copter. Indeed, “jut-breasted” women with swishing thighs and knee-high boots, plus eye masks. Leading them is a Fu Manchu type in a cape.

Then some dude yells “Cut!” and we see this is all a movie – Don’s doing stunt-driving work for a TV show pilot called Owlman based on “the old pulp series.” A “high camp for adults” sort of thing masterminded by a fellow vet named Tom Jerrold, who is producing. Jerrold, we learn in complex backstory, was a POW in Korea in ’50 with Buck Garrett, Don’s Texas-drawling mechanic and himself a top-secret agent of SPEED, though in more of an advisory capacity than Don’s field duties. And for any who don’t get the Batman spoofery, we’re informed that in the show Don’s Panther will be referred to as the “Owlmobile.”

Playing the female Owlman lead is Chan Pelletier, a super-gorgeous and stacked Eurasian babe who has made her name modeling and is now starring in her first movie, mostly as a favor for her new husband Tom Jerrold. But it’s clear Chan can’t be contained by one man and is having an open affair with the lead actor. All this we learn in opening setup with the various characters congregating on the shooting location, among them the mysterious Hong, a professional magician who is playing the Fu Manchu-esque villain in the pilot.

Soon enough yet another new character is introduced: Kay Yen, one of the “black leather gang-girls,” all of whom are Asian women who are part of Hong’s magic show. Part of the belabored setup is that Owlman is being filmed here in Indianapolis because Hong’s a locally-famous magician and refused to go to Hollywood. But this is also tied in with the upcoming Indy 500, which of course Don is about to take part in.

Kay asks Don for a ride back to his hotel and he gives her one, and given the genre and Don’s studly manliness and all it’s clear they’re about to have some sex. Kay is worried and claims she’s in trouble, and further has come to Don for help, but she refuses to divulge any details until after she and Don have screwed. But when Don comes out of the shower and is ready for some lovin’, he finds a nude Chan waiting for him in his hotel bed and Kay is gone without a trace.

Don isn’t one to stand on ceremony, though, and gives Chan some brutal loving. There are only two sex scenes in this volume, but they each get more risque than the previous books. The Don-Chan conjugation goes on for a few pages and doesn’t leave anything to the imagination. Also Chan wears an expensive French perfume which stirs memories of Ulla, the hotbod evil spy from the first volume; there are frequent flashbacks to Ulla and that first volume throughout, so you certainly want to read Challenge At Le Mans before this one.

On his way out of the hotel Don sees a crowd of onlookers and sure enough there’s Kay’s corpse on the pavement; she’s clearly been tossed off the roof way above – and Don’s suite is on the top floor. This sets up an annoying, go-nowhere subplot where a local redneck cop sets his sights on Don and is determined to bring him down on murder charges, mostly out of jealousy because the cop himself is a never-was on the racing circuit. This entire subplot could’ve been taken out and the book would’ve benefitted from the loss.

Don soon learns that Kay was really an American Indian of the Namakan tribe who was briefly famous several years ago for leading an all-female “squaw squadron” in rebellion over fishing rights in Namakan territory, in Minnesota. Yet now here she was posing as an Asian actress in a magic act in Indianapolis. The Indian stuff ties in with Buck’s time as a POW, as one of his fellow soldiers was a Namakan Indian named Wayne Deerfleet who turned traitor and began working with the Reds, before coming home to the US.

Louderback piles the “Indian stuff” on pretty thick: when one of his crew gets sick, Buck basically hires some guy off the street named Gump Pine Tree who himself is a Namakan Indian, but Buck doesn’t see anything coincidental about that. Later in the book Don goes to the local university and checks out a thousand-page tome on the tribe, treating us to lots of page-filling “excerpts” from the book. But when Don sees it’s been written by a teacher at the college, he heads onto campus to grill the guy.

Only, in one of the more arbitrary “I need to write another sex scene” incidents I’ve ever encountered, the professor who wrote the book turns out to be a hotstuff blonde babe…who is more than ready to hop in bed with Don. It’s not as long as the material with Chan, and Louderback tries to incorporate more exposition about the tribe here. Ultimately all this stuff will play out, with the Namakan Indians being part of the latest plot against the United States, a plot which has something to do with Buck and Tom Jerrold’s POW time in Korea seventeen years before.

Louderback’s scheme gradually becomes clear, and he carries it off well – the opening fake-out Owlman stuff turns out to be the ultimate course of events. For it becomes more and more apparent that Hong really is evil, and he also retains a squad of Asian women…indeed, the very same women who portray the “black leather gang-girls” in Owlman! Halfway through the book I figured that’s the way it was going, and hoped I was right. Sure enough the final quarter of the novel sees Don in full-scale combat with Hong and his black leather-garbed female commandos – and Louderback is one of the few men’s adventure writers to actually have his hero killing female opponents.

The book as usual is a little overstuffed; part of the elaborate, overly-complex plot has it that there’s a guy in Hong’s circus called Mr. Memory, who can spout all kinds of trivia and answer high math questions in seconds. But otherwise he has the mental capacity of a child; Don eventually learns that Mr. Memory was in prison and was part of a test group that was taken to a top-secret experimental weapons factory in Texas called the Jefferson Proving Grounds. Don flies down there and goes on a tour of the facility, complete with a lecture on its setup, and again it’s material that should’ve been cut.

In fact the problem is the plot becomes hard to buy, which is sometimes the kiss of death in this genre. Like for example Chan chases after Don’s Panther on the freeway and another car shoots at her and Don comes to the rescue. She claims her husband, Tom Jerrold, is trying to kill her. Further she claims to be a secret agent, and says that Kay Yen was also an agent, and these people who were trying to kill Chan also know that Don himself is an agent. But she offers no more details. So Don hides her from Tom in his trailer at the speedway.

And through all this…Tom Jerrold continues to film the TV pilot, with Sierra Stover doubling for the missing Chan. And Tom keeps confronting Don over “stealing” his wife/lead actress…and it becomes more and more evident that Hong isn’t just a villain on-screen but off as well. Yet the wheels just slowly grind for a good poriton of the narrative as Don slowly puts things together, even though they should be apparent to him from the get-go.

But things perk up in the final quarter. There’s a fun action scene where a carnival barker shoots at Don while keeping up his spiel for the audience over the P.A. system. Also here we first see Hong’s female soldiers in action, complete with Don hitting one of them right in a delicate part of her anatomy. After this, again as if in complete disregard of plot logic, Louderback has Don getting in a helicopter with Tom Jerrold as he films the make-believe takeover of a small town.

And sure enough…fantasy is reality, and those gang girls in black catsuits and eye masks are toting real submachine guns, and the residents of little Indian Springs, Indiana are being taken hostage for real. Tom here reveals himself to be part of the plot (duh) and Don’s taken captive; he’s put on various manual labor duties with the other captured townspeople. The belabored plot is this: Jerrold and Hong plot to simulate a nuclear explosion, which will not only trigger a US-USSR war but will also entail the removal via train of various top secret weapons from the Jefferson Proving Grounds. This they happen to know thanks to the photographic memory of former prisoner and Jefferson test subject Mr. Memory.

Honestly you wonder why Louderback even put so much effort into this stuff – the series is about a racecar driver who doubles as a secret agent. The plot almost writes itself but Louderback insists on turning out intricate storylines that are a lot more complex than they need to be. Oh and by the way Don’s racecar driving is more of a nuissance than anything this time around; there’s actually more of it, with pages-long sequences every few chapters of him racing various heats. But it has no bearing other than to fill the “racing quota” Louderback doubtless was given by series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel. In fact the novel ends with Don about to start the Indy 500, so we don’t even see him actually race in it.

But the finale’s pretty cool, and makes all the busy plot-building mostly worth it. Don frees himself, arms some of the townspeople of Indian Springs, and kicks “black leather gang-girl” ass, then gets back his Panther and books it at a steady 150 mph for several hours, racing for Minnesota. Apparently not a single cop is on duty during this cross-country race, but whatever. Here everything gets even more pulpy, with Namakan Indians in full war paint taking Don captive upon his arrival in their territory.

Louderback does an admirable job of tying the disparate strings together. So the gang girls aren’t Asian after all…they’re really Namakan women, and Hong himself is a disguised imposter. The entire thing is really an American Indian plot, in conjunction with the Red Chinese. Pretty bonkers stuff, and it gets even more surreal…spoiler warning here friends so skip to the next paragraph if you don’t wanna know. But Chan herself is an imposter…she’s really Ulla, the evil spy babe from the first volume, after some cosmetic surgery to make her look Asian! She became part of this plot and, against orders, involved Don in it so she could exact her revenge (and get a little more sack-time with him, I guess). Anyway Ulla is sucked into some quicksand at novel’s end and seems gone for good now, but Don wonders.

Louderback always keeps the action moving, save for the aforementioned plot and exposition heavy stuff. He’s one of those men’s adventure authors who knew how to deliver the goods but at the same time seemed to doubt himself; you don’t need this much setup for a series about a racecar-driving secret agent. I guess readers in 1967 must’ve felt the same, as there was only one more volume to follow.  

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Countdown At Monaco (Don Miles #2)


Countdown At Monaco, by Larry Kenyon
May, 1967  Avon Books

The Don Miles series returns with a second adventure that takes place one year after the first; Lew Louderback once again serves as “Larry Kenyon,” just as he would for the next two volumes in this brief series. And once again he turns in a complexly-plotted spy yarn that comes off as a helluva lot longer than its misleading 159 pages would imply, thanks to the small, dense print. But as ever Louderback’s writing is good (he remains locked in Don’s third-person perspective throughout, without a single instance of POV-hopping!), and he’s very much in-line with the high-caliber writing expected of book producer Lyle Kenyon Engel’s writing stable.

Don Miles does a little better for himself this time around, not coming off quite so much as the bumbling fool he was in the first volume. (That being said, he does manage to get captured at one point, has electrodes implanted in his brain, and is turned into a mind-controlled would-be assassin of his comrades.) We’re informed at the outset that Don has had no other missions since his first one in Le Mans; he is for the most part a sleeper agent, only activated when his latest race happens to be occurring in some area US Intelligence is interested in. Thus he is eventually contacted while in scenic Monaco, training for its upcoming Grand Prix.

As with the first book, the race itself doesn’t feature much in the novel (and we’re informed that Don did win Le Mans after the events of volume one, using his American-made Panther racer), with the majority of the action taking place in the days leading up to the big event. Louderback provides the racing stuff via training and heats Don competes in; to tell the truth I skimmed over this stuff, as it doesn’t have much appeal to me, all about performance engines and hugging the curves in sharp turns and Don feeling alive behind the wheel. I’m more interested in the spy stuff.

Louderback typically delivers complicated scenarios, and such is the case in Countdown At Monaco, though it’s nowhere as complex as the one in the previous book. Don isn’t even on assignment when the book opens, blissfully unaware he’s about to be activated by his still-unseen handler, who is back in the US. Don’s here in Monaco noticing how many of the residents seem so strange and sleepy, and he’s driving along the twisting roads on the everyday model of the Panther when some beautiful blonde engages him in a high-speed chase, a la your average James Bond novel.

This turns out to be Airadne Dexos, 20 year-old daughter of multibillionaire shipping magnate Apollo Dexos. Ariadne crashes her car and confesses to her rescuer Don that she’s a huge fan of his and engaged him in a race just to meet him. Posthaste they’re having sex at a nearby hotel. Louderback writes three sex scenes this volume and they follow the same template of the previous book, with copious detail of the women’s anatomy before cutting away from the action. But whereas last time Louderback would quickly fade to black via an ellipsis, this time he provides a bit more juicy detail before the inevitable three dots appear.

The novel touches on mind control, which is pretty cool given it’s early date – published even before the RFK assassination, which was a mind control job if ever there was one. A post-coital Don flips on Radio Monte Carlo, which is the hip “ye-ye girl” station here in Monaco, and as soon as the station’s signature “Domino” tune kicks in Ariadne turns into a veritable zombie and comes at Don with a knife. It gets weirder still when a trio of beautiful but zombie-eyed gals in swimsuits break in, hold Don at harpoon point, and steal Ari off; one of the girls even tries to kill Don by knocking him off a cliff. He survives and puzzles over this super-weird shit.

Shortly after this Don is activated; his race team mechanic/fellow secret agent Buck Garrett is sent in, speaking in the same painfully-rendered “Southern dialect” as the previous volume. The assignment hinges around missing uranium, Apollo Dexos, a Swiss psychiatrist named Dr. Hirn, and Dr. David Wollenberg, “the father of the A-bomb,” who has retired here to Monaco after a stroke years before. There’s also a plot that’s turning the residents of Monaco into half-asleep zombies; at length Don will discover that the tap water is poisoned with a chemical called BZ, and Don has remained unscathed because he “never drinks the stuff.”

The racing aspect of the series isn’t nearly as prevalent this time, and indeed comes off as a hindrance to the action. With the fate of the world in the balance, I could care less that Don has a big race coming up the day after next. Perhaps this is why Don Miles never achieved the success of Engel’s other 1960s spy series, Nick Carter: Killmaster. I don’t think the fault could be laid on Louderback, who keeps everything moving and introduces enough unusual concepts that Countdown At Monaco stands out from the countless other spy paperbacks of the era.

One thing missing though is action. Don goes unarmed for the majority of the text, and doesn’t even have any of the gadgets he used in the previous book. He’s chased several times by mind-controlled zombies, and shot at even more times, but it gets to be a little old how bad of a shot the ambushers are; it seems like Don dodges about a zillion bullets in the course of the book, usually by just rolling around and jumping. As for the other kind of action, in addition to Ariadne, Don also scores with the girl’s young stepmother, superhot superstar Danielle Corri, Bardot-esque latest wife of Apollo Dexos.

This score takes place on a nudist beach immediately after Don has ducked and dodged bullets courtesy the latest round of mind-controlled ambushers. Danielle is free of the mind control but lives in fear of Apollo, however she reveals that Ariadne herself is under control, something Don has already suspected. In the last pages we’ll learn a twisted family dynamic is behind all this, but at any rate Danielle is the closest thing to a heroine in the book, whereas Ariadne is in love with Don while at the same time under mind control by her father, who loves Ariadne in a non-fatherly way and thus resents Don.

Also, Don Miles works in more of an investigator capacity throughout, tracking leads and clues to find out what’s going on in Monaco. He puts together the mind control scheme, which is courtesy Dr. Hirn and has to do with electrodes placed in the brains of several subjects who are activated by a remote control center which broadcasts via computer through radio relays. In this way the novel has a sort of modern, almost sci-fi aspect; there’s even a part where Buck handles an IBM computer, much to Don’s amazement. It seems both outdated and modern at the same time; there aren’t too many other ‘60s or even ‘70s action series where the two-fisted heroes do research on a computer.

But this investigative stuff serves again to make Don Miles seem like a second-stringer in the world of Nick Carter. He’s constantly being jumped by ambushers and walking into traps, and as mentioned he’s captured late in the book. Louderback retains the locked third-person perspective even though our hero is under mind control, and it’s masterfully done, with a bit of a psychedelic edge. Don stumbles around in a confused fog, at Apollo’s beck and call, having become “a life-sized doll” for Ariadne – who goes into a rage when she discovers that Don can no longer “perform” for her, thanks to the mental blocks her dad has put on him. However those blocks don’t prevent Don from having sex with Danielle again…

When Don is sent via mind control to kill Buck, the Southerner saves Don’s ass with a jury-rigged scrambler device which sends out white noise or somesuch, thus cancelling out the mind control waves. We’re in the homestretch now, as a freed Don realizes that Apollo has all the uranium and plans to destroy the entire planet while he and Ariadne stay safely below the ocean in an aquatic home, to come out afterwards and repopulate the world together(!). Louderback, as last time, works in Don’s race car driver profession here, with Don doing the high-speed driving while Buck shoots at their pursuers. Even here in the finale we’re denied an ass-kicking title hero.

We’re also denied much of a send-off for the main villain; he’s piranha-bait after a quick tussle with Don aboard his massive personal ship. Countdown At Monaco climaxes with a long racing sequence as Don competes in the Monaco Grand Prix, just a few hours after brain surgery to remove those electrodes(!), and he still doesn’t know where the atom bomb is. Louderback successfully combines Don’s racing and spy halves as our hero discovers that two of his competitors are also mind-controlled Apollo dupes who have been preprogrammed to initiate the atomic countdown; Don has to take them out while making their crashes appear natural.

Overall Countdown At Monaco is a lot of fun, and definitely has that ‘60s spy-fy vibe, though I can’t say it’s one of the best such spy series out there – I still much prefer the ‘60s installments of Nick Carter: Killmaster and even Mark Hood. Louderback’s writing is skiled and fast-moving, but it must be stated that his plotting is so overly-complex that his finales are usually composed of some villain are other explaining everything in bald exposition. Anyway, Don Miles returned a few months later in Revenge At Indy.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Challenge At Le Mans (Don Miles #1)


Challenge At Le Mans, by Larry Kenyon
April, 1967  Avon Books

One of the more obscure series produced by Lyle Kenyon Engel, Don Miles only ran for four volumes, all of which were published by Avon in 1967. I’d never heard of it until I came across Will Murray’s 1981 interview with Engel, which was published in Paperback Parade #2 (1986), where Murray briefly mentioned “the Don Miles books.”

Engel’s response was that, at the time, he was into automative publications, and thus came up with an action hero/auto racer. However, in the interview Engel could no longer remember who had actually written the books. Thanks to James Reasoner, who posted here, we now know that the author was Lew Louderback, one of Engel’s writing stable who also wrote a volume or two of Nick Carter: Killmaster. I’m not familiar with Louderback, but it seems an article on fat acceptance he wrote back in 1967 is well-regarded today.

Anyway, as expected, Don Miles is basically like Nick Carter, only with an auto racer day job. Challenge At Le Mans, the first book of the series (none of the books were numbered), tells the tale of how Miles becomes an agent for SPEED, a highly-secret branch of US intelligence. Unusually enough for an early-model men’s adventure novel, this first volume takes the time to tell the origin story for our character, a gutsy 35 year-old Texan who, in addition to being mega-rich thanks to his oil prospecting father, is also a world famous racing champion.

Be prepared for lots of racing stuff; many, many paragraphs are devoted to how race cars run, the competitive circuit, pit crews, and the like. So then another series this is reminiscent of is The Mind Masters, only without the supernatural element or ultra-sleazy sex scenes – though, to be sure, there are many sex scenes in this novel. But, given the 1967 publication date, they aren’t all that raunchy. But at least they’re there.

In fact, we get one early on, as Don beds a hotstuff female reporter who has come down to Houston to check out the unveiling of Don’s new Panther racer, a car he himself has designed. Le Mans is coming up, and Don plans to unveil it there, winning with a US-built automobile. Lowderback proves himself a good pulp writer, with copious exploitation of the lady’s, uh, ample charms, though when it comes to the actual screwin’ he fades to black. So in other words, it’s about on par with what you’d read in a Killmaster novel from this time period.

But after he crashes the Panther in a test run for the journalists, Don’s life is changed forever. He wakes up in a hospital, where a man calling himself “Hedge” informs Don that he was not harmed in the wreck, but the accident could be used to cover a few months of secret training. Hedge, who wears a mask and distorts his voice, offers Don the opportunity to become a secret agent, using his globe-hopping, famous identity as the perfect cover story. Don, reflecting back on advice his dad once gave him(!), says “Sure.” Otherwise this series would’ve been even shorter.

Similar to Eric Saveman in The Smuggler, Don is taken through a few months of intense espionage training. After which he returns to his life as a race car driver, with two months of preparation before Le Mans; he’s informed he might never even be activated, but of course he promptly is, as soon as he arrives in France. Don’s first mission has him researching the mysterious death of a CIA operative, who was looking for a young German girl named Greta Thiess, a nuclear researcher who apparently murdered her mentor – a man who had just devised a new device that could make any nuclear device into a warhead.

Like Nick Carter, Don Miles has a trio of weapons he relies on, though he does not give them goofy names: a .25 magnum Sauer automatic, a ballpoint pen that fires poison-tipped needles, and a 16-inch piano wire which he uses as a garrotte, hiding it in specially-lined pockets of his pants. He also has a Mission: Impossible-style face mask, made of “Plastotex,” which turns him into “Mr. Nobody,” a face computer-designed to be forgotten as soon as it is seen. In addition to his gadgets, Don is also given new partners. First there’s Buck Garrett, a redneck engineer who speaks in the most painfully-rendered dialog ever.

In addition to being a super-skilled racing car engineer, Buck himself is a SPEED agent, and serves as Don’s conduit to another new partner, Sam Harris, who stays back in the US and acts officially as the CEO of Don’s racing enterprise. Harris, then, is like the David Hawk of the series, even though he doesn’t appear in this particular volume.

Similar to The Mind Masters, more focus is placed on the preparation for the race rather than the race itself (in fact, the novel ends just as the race begins). So then we get lots of scuttlebutt among the racers in Le Mans as they discuss the upcoming contest. The back cover mentions that Don will be going up against a gang of leather-clad biker women, and they show up promptly: they are the Devil Bombers, a gang of gorgeous German girls lead by Wilma Zeiss, an actress who recently appeared in a biker film. They terrorize Le Mans, driving on sidewalks and knocking aside pedestrians.

The gang is staying at a nearby chateau owned by Baroness Falkenhorst, aka Elga Winter, herself a once-famous actress who is apparently 30-something and of course stunningly beautiful, and a man-eater to boot. She is the villain of the piece, and she must be an unforgettable sight, with a magnificent body, red hair, silver nails, and white lipstick! She is infamous for tearing through professional racers, conveniently enough, but has yet to sink her hooks into Don Miles.

I found this “Baroness” stuff interesting, given Engel’s later Baroness series, which itself was credited to a “Kenyon” house name. Maybe this character provided some inspiration for the later Penelope St. John-Orsini? Baroness Falkenhorst is even once described as wearing the same outfit Penny wears on the Baroness covers, “a black outfit resembling a skin-tight track suit.” And as mentioned, she’s just as sexually-insatiable as the later Baroness.

As for Don Miles, he doesn’t come off so well on his first mission. He bumbles and stumbles throughout; first almost being crushed by a car that’s kicked on him. While investigating the car the CIA agent was driving when he had his fatal crash, Don is trapped when someone kicks the car off the cinder block that’s holding it up; he just manages to pull himself free. Later, he’s almost run over by a car. A later incident has him getting captured – while having sex with a woman who has clearly set him up for abduction. Later on, he’s captured yet again, and is only saved by a female accomplice.

Tracking the clues for the CIA agent’s murder leads Don to the chateau of the Baroness. It’s a pulpishly depraved place, with the Baroness entertaining the fifty-some biker chicks who are staying there with her, many of whom Don finds naked in the Baroness’s palatial-sized bedroom. There’s a fountain in there, an “opium lamp,” erotic posters, and a massive bed that has electronically controlled (and mirrored) floorboards and headboards. Would you be surprised that the Baroness promptly throws herself on Don?

A funny thing about the sex scenes is that Louderback will set us up with lots of anatomical detail, but then he’ll always fade to black with an ellipsis. However we are told enough to know that the Baroness is insatiable, doing Don “at least ten times” through the night, even waking him up for more. He finally beats a retreat, claiming exhaustion, only to get more German booty the next night, when he finds Ulla Kihss, daughter of another racer, waiting for him in his hotel bed.

We get another somewhat-explicit sex scene, followed by a quick ellipsis, as Don, despite suspecting something, quickly ravishes the hot blonde…only to realize at the last second it’s a trap. Louderback continues to make the plot overly complex; we learn Ulla is a secret agent for SD-3, the French version of the CIA, and her boss, a man named Dimanche, drugs Don in order to figure out if Don is really a secret agent. Thanks to his training, Don is able to fool Dimanche, who goes on to request that Don begin working for SD-3, given his “relationship” with the Baroness – as it turns out that the Baroness is aligned with an East German spy group called SPIDER, and likely has the nuclear McGuffin hidden in her chateau.

Have you noticed how busy all of this is getting? Louderback keeps piling on new plots and characters, and doing precious little to exploit that which he has already created. Like those biker chicks. Forget about them! They appear in maybe three scenes, and usually for only a few sentences. How a pulp author could write a book that features a gang of gorgeous female bikers and do nothing with them blows my mind. But there are no scenes where Don, uh, “consorts” with any of them, and when one of the biker girls is taken out, it’s not even by Don (Ulla does it), and it happens off-page.

In his review of Louderback’s Killmaster novel Danger KeyKurt Reichenbaugh states that Louderback pretty much does the same thing in that Nick Carter novel; he just keeps piling on the characters and the subplots. This results in the fact that Challenge At Le Mans feels a lot longer than it really is – unlike the Killmaster novels of the era, which are quick reads, this one is at times an uphill struggle.

Louderback does try to factor Don Miles’s racing background into the climax, but still it’s a bit tepid because Don is such a waste of a spy – honestly, he’s knocked out, captured, and hoodwinked throughout the entire novel. But anyway he spends most of the finale driving back and forth from France to the Alps in a souped-up VW built for him by Buck Garrett. Here we learn that he does not have a “speed threshhold” and can go incredibly fast without fear.

Don’s racing around looking for the nuclear McGuffin, Ulla riding with him, as the Baroness has taken it to her castle in the Alps. Even here though we do not get much of an action scene, and Don’s kills are limited to three or four SPIDER agents back in France, in the very final pages. In fact, he does nothing to prove himself as a capable agent, even though the SD-3 guys gush all over him for “saving Europe.” But he’s a dolt, fooled throughout by the women of the tale – any idiot could easily figure out who Ulla Kihss really is.

Also, there really isn’t a memorable send-off for any of the villains; the Baroness, despite being built up as this man-eating tigress, is dispatched almost casually (and not even by Don), and when the real villain is uncovered, Don’s more shocked than spurred to action. What I’m saying is, he’s no Nick Carter. You’d think perhaps that was Louderback’s point, that Don is an untried agent, this being his first assignment, but instead he’s played up as a primo shit-kicker. So in other words it comes off as unintentionally humorous; Don Miles, in this adventure at least, is in the Mitchell class of heroes.

At 160 pages of small print, Challenge At Le Mans does not exactly “speed” by; in fact, it’s less like Don’s Panther and more like my old VW Rabbitt (which my friends and I always called “the Joe Weider car,” because it didn’t have power steering and you got one hell of a workout turning the steering wheel). But even still, it was enjoyable for the most part, just a little too harried with too many characters and plots, and too little action – not to mention a protagonist who came off as a bit ineffective.