Showing posts with label Expeditor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Expeditor. Show all posts

Monday, May 30, 2022

Announcing Tocsin Press


I’m interrupting the usual review schedule to let you all know that Tocsin Press is up and running – those two awesome novels The Undertaker #1 and The Undertaker #2 are now available for purchase. 

A quick background note…the books are slightly different than the versions I reviewed. Not in content, but the actual paperbacks themselves. John Doe wanted to follow the same “handcrafted” aesthetic of the copies he sent me – printed on actual pulp paper like an oldschool men’s adventure paperback – but it proved to be impossible. For one, the pulp paper he originally used is no longer available. And secondly, it would’ve been unfeasible for John Doe to handcraft every single copy he sells…printing and assembling each book, gluing the binding, shipping the books out, etc. A pretty serious time commitment for someone who already has a fulltime job! 

So in the end, Mr. Doe has decided the Amazon route makes the most sense, and the Buy Now buttons on the Tocsin Press site will take you to the individual Amazon pages for each title, where you can preview contents and order a copy. He’s gotten the books as close to the look of the original handcrafted editions as possible: glossy covers, the same physical dimensions as a ‘70s men’s adventure paperback, and typesetting that looks very close to the print in those ‘70s paperbacks. 

I’m only providing this behind-the-scenes info because I raved about the pulp paper of the handcrafted editions John Doe sent me a few months ago, and I didn’t want anyone to be disappointed that the versions they’ll receive from Amazon are a little different. The important thing is that the text has not been changed…and folks Death Transition and Black Lives Murder were two of the best novels I’ve read in years. I give them my highest recommendation. 

Currently there’s one other title available at Tocsin, by a different author: John Falcon Infiltrator: The Hollow Earth. Here’s the cover: 


You could think of this one as a “lost” installment of John Eagle Expeditor – perhaps even the novel that The Ice Goddess should have been… 

So currently there are three titles at Tocsin Press, and I am certain you all will enjoy each of them! But like the old Pinnacle house ads said, there’s “more to come,” so when more titles are listed I’ll do another post here on the blog. 

And if you read any of the books, please leave a review on Amazon or drop a note here to let us know what you think!

Thursday, April 6, 2017

John Eagle Expeditor #14: Silverskull


John Eagle Expeditor #14: Silverskull, by Paul Edwards
December, 1975  Pyramid Books

I hope you’ll all shed a tear with me – I’ve now come to the final volume of my all-time favorite men’s adventure series, John Eagle Expeditor. I can’t believe it’s taken me nearly seven years to read these 14 books, particularly when you consider that the entire series was published within the span of three years! But to tell the truth I just didn’t want the series to end. I like it so much I even lobbied to name my son “John Eagle Kenney,” but I was quickly shot down.

Manning Lee Stokes wrote this final volume, which is fitting, given that he also wrote the first volume. But anyone hoping for a fitting conclusion to the Expeditor saga will be disappointed. Sadly, Silverskull could almost be an installment of practically any other series Stokes worked on. For, as he did in his previous entry The Green Goddess, Stokes turns in an installment lacking the science fiction-tinged adventure pulp of the earliest volmes, coming off more like a slow-boil crime-thriller. In fact, there are trace elements that make me wonder if it started life as a manuscript for another Stokes series, The Aquanauts.

For something weird happened with Stokes on John Eagle Expeditor. He turned in the first and the second volumes, which established the series formula that would last for the next several books: hero John Eagle, equipped with his high-tech gear and his “Apache cunning” (tempered of course by his white heritage, let’s not forget), would venture deep into some exotic locale and blow up an enemy installation. But with the fifth volume, Stokes dispensed with this formula and turned in a lurid thriller that had little in common with his first two books; despite which, Valley Of Vultures was still one of the best volumes in the series.

Then Stokes disappeared for two years, and the series was in the hands of Robert Lory and Paul Eiden, who for the most part stuck with the formula Stokes had devised in Needles of Death (a formula which more than likely was the work of series creator Lyle Kenyon Engel). But when Stokes returned for the 12th volume, The Green Goddess, it was as if he’d forgotten what the Expeditor series was even about. That one was another lurid thriller, but it was completely lacking any of the standard elements of the series; whereas Eagle at least donned his “plastic suit” (if only for a moment) in Valley Of Vulures, in The Green Goddess none of Eagle’s fancy bags of tricks made an appearance or were even mentioned. As I wrote in my long-winded review, it was almost as if Stokes had forgotten about all of it.

In fact, it’s now occurred to me that The Green Goddess and Silverskull were more along the lines of the slooow-moving thrillers Stokes was writing for The Aquanauts. It’s possible that both these books started life as installments of that series, which was cancelled in 1974 – one compelling indication is that Silverskull is stated as taking place in late June, 1974.

Len Levinson once told me it took “about a year” to see his series manuscripts appear as paperbacks in the ‘70s, so this could just be the case here, that Stokes wrote the book around June of ‘74 and it wasn’t pulished until a year and a half later. But another compelling clue is that the titular villain of Silverskull has his own submarine. As noted below, this submarine is excessively built up before being dropped abruptly, so could it be possible that Stokes’s original vision was to have this submarine engage in combat with Aquanauts hero Tiger Shark’s KRAB?

It could also be that Stokes was just in burnout and was churning out scripts to meet deadlines, with little thought to any grand design. By this point Stokes had turned in many, many books for Lyle Kenyon Engel, having begun his worker-for-hire writing duties for him a decade before, with The Eyes Of The Tiger. I wonder if Silverskull was the last novel Stokes wrote, as he died in January of 1976. In Will Murray’s 1981 interview with Engel, published uncut in Paperback Parade #2 (1986), Engel makes the tantalizing comment, “Manning is dead you know, and he was one of the greatest writers I ever had. It’s just a shame he died when he did because we were both on the track of something very very big when he died.” I’d love to know what this was, but unless Will Murray happened to write it down, I guess no one will ever know.

As for Silverskull, it unfortunately sticks to the lurid mystery vibe of The Aquanauts and The Green Goddess, with none of the cool stuff I so love about John Eagle Expeditor – other, that is, than a very late appearance of Eagle’s “plastic suit” and “gas gun.” Otherwise the book could almost pass for one of Stokes’s earlier Killmaster novels, only a lot more bloated and slower-paced. At 191 pages of small, dense print, Silverskull crawls along, and sadly is one of my least favorite books in the Expeditor series. Another thought: perhaps Engel felt this way, too, and the book was really written earlier (ie June of ’74), only held back from the publishing schedule for reasons of quality. 

Despite the padding and the lack of action, Stokes as ever invests himself in the writing, no matter how menial or tedious the events transpiring are. He also again busts out his Oxford Dictionary, delivering a brace of ten-dollar words you won’t often encounter in the men’s adventure genre. But the thing with Stokes is, these fancy-pants words are so naturally employed that you know without a doubt that Manning Lee Stokes was a well-read, intelligent guy. He just suffered a bit when it came to gripping plots; his books are more akin to sprawling affairs in which a central event is built up and up and up to the breaking point, and then everything quickly and anticlimactically comes to a close.

The villain of the piece, Silverskull, is a Flemingesque creation if ever there was one: Sir Rodney Hamilton, 51, a British billionaire with a fringe of red hair and a “polished silver plate” that is “the top of his skull.” As a racer in his youth, Sir Rodney suffered a serious crash which shaved off the top of his skull; it was replaced with this “silver tonsure,” which he polishes every night. Sir Rodney’s fortunes are slipping, and as the novel opens he has hit upon a scheme to become richer than ever: to kidnap the no-good son of Carlos de Ojeda, oil minister of Venezuela, and force Ojeda into giving Sir Rodney the controlling interests in a new oil field deep in the jungle (or something).

Stokes is never the best when it comes to main villains, so I was happy that here for once he gave us a memorable one – I mean the guy is the closest this series has ever come to a Goldfinger. But after getting a merciless stooge to kidnap de Ojeda’s twentysomething slacker kid (and kill all the witnesses), Sir Rodney proceeds to…fret over his plan, and meanwhile masturbate to X-rated fantasies of his mega-hot babe of a daughter, Jennifer, who is 22 and an infamous jet-setting nympho. Sir Rodney’s lust for his daughter is overly exploited by Stokes, leading to some intentionally humorous lines, like, “[Sir Rodney] thought a father was not supposed to notice his daughter’s breasts even when they were swinging ripe and full a few inches away.”

But ultimately this is just another go-nowhere digression on Stokes’s part; Jennifer and Sir Rodney don’t even have a face-to-face meeting in the entire novel, and all this incestual stuff is here so Stokes can indulge in sleaze. I’m a lover of sleaze, but not when we’re talking about a few pages of a silver-skulled guy jerking off at the thought of his daughter. And sadly this is the most XXX-rated scene in the book; even when Eagle has his mandatory sex-action, later in the novel (with Jennifer, naturally), it’s actually given less focus, over and done with in the span of a paragraph.

Eagle is called in to Venezuela to meet with old Simon de Ojeda, all the while wondering why he’s been handed this assignment. This is yet another Stokes novel in which the protagonist puzzles over why he was given his mission from first page to last, and you can’t blame Eagle – the assignment has nothing to do with the Expeditor setup. Stokes has it that Mr. Merlin, Eagle’s wheelchair-bound boss, owes an old colleague of de Ojeda’s a favor, one that Mr. Merlin has owed since he was a young man. Otherwise there’s no reason at all for Merlin’s top Expeditor to head to Venezuela to look into a kidnapping case.

Further proof that Stokes has forgotten what he himself wrote for this series is proven later in the book, when John Eagle phones Merlin, back in his underground labrynth in Hawaii, and gives him a “sitrep” on the action. Stokes just has the two speaking to each other plainly, clearly having forgotten that Eagle has no idea who Mr. Merlin is (Merlin’s true identity is kept even from the readers).

More importantly, Eagle has never heard Merlin’s real voice; previous books have stressed that Merlin, who gives Eagle his assignments over an intercom, electronically disguises his voice when he speaks to his Expeditor. And yet here Eagle acts like he’s quite familiar with Merlin – even knowing that he smokes cigars, when recall the two have never been in the same room. This could be more indication that Silverskull started life as another series book…the Eagle-Merlin relationship here being similar to the Nick Carter-Hawk relationship of Stokes’s Killmaster novels or even the Tiger Shark-Admiral Coffin relationship of The Aquanauts.

The book’s first half is very slow, very much in the suspense mode, as Eagle monitors the situation from de Ojeda’s palatial villa. Supposedly the man’s son is being held captive by a jungle guerrilla named the Wild Dog, and there’s a part early on where Eagle captures one of these men and tortures him (off-page) for info. But Eagle, that “assassin extraordinaire” (as he was dubbed on the back cover of some of the earlier volumes), doesn’t even kill anyone until page 132. He spends most of the novel hitting the buffet in de Ojeda’s villain, smoking a “rare cigarette,” and fretting over how the assignment is getting out of control.

Rather it’s all like some slow-boil mystery as Eagle gradually ascertains that Sir Rodney “Silverskull” Hamilton is behind the de Ojeda kidnapping, and that it has something to do with oil fields. Eagle, again sans any of his fancy gadgets or gear, poses as de Ojeda’s assistant and tries to set up a trade with Joe Garm, the sadistic old mercenary who carried off the abduction for Sir Rodney. Eagle devises a plan to hold one child for another, and flies off to London to kidnap Jennifer. Here follows more of Stokes’s patented sleaze, as Jennifer of course is nude when Eagle springs upon her in her bedroom, oggling her “medium size, pink buttoned” breasts and her “abundant brush of luxuriant red-gold pubic hair;” further, Eagle thinks she is “one of the most attractive females in the world.”

After the expected sexual shenanigans, Jennifer clings to Eagle and wants to help him – she hates her father and knows he lusts for her. Back they fly to Venezuela, where Jennifer tries to jerk Eagle off beneath a magazine, but he tells her no and “remains limp”(!). The helluva it is, after all this time spent on setting up the “one kid for another” bluff – it falls apart instantly! Eagle fails to fool Garm with the fake finger he claims is Jennifer’s, and thus Eagle is back to “square one.” Meaning we’ve spent about 50 dense-print pages on a veritable red herring of a subplot. But that’s Stokes for you.

At least we here get the first bit of action, with Eagle taking out a few men and escaping from Sir Rodney’s island in a sequence that brings to mind Stokes’s earlier Killmaster novel Mission To Venice. Here we also get the sole glimpse of Sir Rodney’s yellow(!) submarine, which is much talked up but ultimately forgotten; we’re told sleazy parties are held aboard, but Eagle just glances at it and steals a convenient inflatable raft from the cargo supplies. All that buildup for nothing. This sadly is just one indication of the sloppiness of Stokes’s plotting throughout. The novel is rife with heavily built-up, quickly tossed-aside subplots.

In fact, the kidnapping of Carlos de Ojeda – the act which got Eagle involved in the first place – is itself forgotten, for we learn that the kid has in fact been adbucted from his abducters; in hazily-rendered backstory we are informed that the Wild Dog’s soldiers have been mistreating the headhunter Indians in the nearby jungle, and these Indians, the Jivaro, launched an assault on the Wild Dog’s fortress and stole away Carlos de Ojeda, somehow knowing he was an important preson. 

Harkening back to the final quarter of Valley Of Vultures, John Eagle parachutes into the Venezuelan jungle to find the boy. Here, on page 145, we get the first mention of the usual Expeditor trappings: Eagle wears his insulated “plastic suit” and is armed with his “gas gun,” which fires needles. Finally, I thought to myself, we’ll get some of the stuff I love about this series – Eagle using his chameleon device to take out his enemies, along with the other high-tech gadgets and gear he usually employs. Instead, Eagle just pulls regular clothing overtop the plastic suit and just trudges through the jungle, pretending to be an oil prospector or something.

He hooks up with a Motilone Indian tribe led by pidgin-speaking Rauni, who reveals that his tribe is in the possesion of…the severed head of Carlos de Ojeda! Folks, that was pretty much it for me. The entire friggin’ purpose behind the entire friggin’ story has already been dispensed with, off-page…Eagle is informed the Jivaro killed the boy (and ate his body!), and Rauni doesn’t want his people to be blamed for it. He gives Eagle the head, and even offers him a 13 year-old girl that night; Eagle turns her down, despite being “tempted.” Eagle finally makes a few more kills, gunning down some Jivaro headhunters from cover, but for the most part our hero spends the “climax” running and hiding while other characters do themselves in for him.

Stokes can’t even give us an Eagle-Silverskull scene; Eagle becomes obsessed with glimpsing the elusive Sir Rodney, and ventures to his mansion, deep in the jungle. He arrives just as the Wild Dog’s men are pulling an assault on the place. Then, convenient plotting be damned, Jennifer just happens to parachute onto her dad’s property (Stokes earlier covering his ass by having Jennifer – that jetsetting nympho – declare that she’s fond of skydiving!), and Eagle pulls her away from the guerrilla soldiers who chase after her. There’s a clear Doctor No riff as the two run and hide from an armored marsh buggy; Stokes even refers to it as a “dragon.”

But friends, Eagle just hides in the tall grass and watches as the Wild Dog’s men and Sir Rodney’s men kill each other…and then the friggin’ Venezuelan air force arrives, and fighter jets blast all of them away – while Eagle just watches! I kid you not…when Eagle inspects the carnage afterwards, everyone’s dead, even Sir Rodney himself – killed off-page by a jet attack, the jets having been ordered by a vengeful Simon de Ojeda, who has somehow learned of his son’s death. That’s it! It’s all so lazy and hamfisted that I think there might be good possibility that Engel did in fact hold this one back from publication, only publishing it once the series’s fate was sealed.

Let’s recap: in the course of this novel, John Eagle beats up a henchman, kills a couple guys in combat, guns down a few Indians from afar, smokes one of his “rare cigarettes,” and gets laid by a hot nympho with an “abundant” bush. And yet we’re informed at the close of Silverskull that Eagle’s nerves are so rattled from this particular assignment that he’s told Polly Perkins, Mr. Merlin’s secretary, that he’ll be hanging a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door of his Arizona ranch…for at least two months! (And speaking of Polly Perkins – I don’t believe we’ve previously been informed Eagle was even aware of Polly, which is perhaps more indication that Stokes had forgotten about his own series.) And here the novel as well as the series comes to a close, fittingly enough with Merlin hoping that Eagle will indeed get a chance to rest.

Plotwise the book is subpar, but as mentioned Manning Lee Stokes as ever invests himself in the writing. Nothing much might happen, but at least the writing’s good. It’s lacking some of the thematic elements of other Stokes installments; for example, the foreboding nature of The Green Goddess is gone – and for that matter, Stokes doesn’t pick up the subplot from that earlier book of whether Eagle’s foster mother survived her battle with cancer. Eagle himself seems a little blah throughout, lacking even the “macho mystique” which is usually standard for any Stokes protagonist. Save that is for a bit of TMI we’re given about Eagle’s youth:

Back on the Apache reservation, growing up with his friends, and at an age when such things were compared, [Eagle] had been known as kaki somn gunt – the well hung one. There had been the usual juvenile jackoff club with the chiefdom going to the one who could spurt farthest. Joe Thunder Horse had come in second there, too.

I used to figure that John Eagle Expeditor wasn’t really cancelled; it was just a casualty of Pyramid Books going out of business sometime in 1976. But only just now have I learned that, in 1977, Pyramid Books became Jove Books. This was news to me! So then Robert Lory was correct when he stated that the Expeditor series was in fact cancelled, thus denying us the novel Lory was considering, with John Eagle avenging the rape and/or murder of his girlfriend, Ruth Lame (sometimes “Lone”) Wolf (who by the way goes unmentioned this volume).

As I’ve gone on at length elsewhere, I really enjoy Stokes’s writing, but honestly I think he was my least favorite writer on this series. My favorite of the three who served as “Paul Edwards” would be Robert Lory, who for the most part stuck to the formula and who even made stabs at continuity, something neither Stokes nor Paul Eiden seemed to care much about. As for Eiden, the guy was wildly uneven in quality, and like Stokes seemed to sometimes forget the series he was writing for (ie Poppies Of Death), but despite which I still think he did a better job of sticking to the formula and delivering what I wanted from the series.

Well, now that I’ve finished the series, there’s only one thing left to do – the same thing I’m doing with The Baroness, just start reading it again!

Speaking of the Baroness, my own pet theory is that, after a few more years of adventuring, John Eagle and The Baroness hooked up, retired from the spy biz, and opened up a bed and breakfast somewhere on the coast of New England.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

John Eagle Expeditor #13: Operation Weatherkill


John Eagle Expeditor #13: Operation Weatherkill, by Paul Edwards
October, 1975  Pyramid Books

The penultimate volume of my favorite men’s adventure series, John Eagle Expeditor, is courtesy Paul Eiden, a hit-or-miss writer if ever there was one. While his prose is good, Eiden’s plotting is often lazy, with some of his books, like #7: The Ice Goddess, given over to inordinate padding. But then sometimes he’s capable of greatness, as in #9: The Deadly Cyborgs.

Fortunately, Operation Weatherkill is Eiden on a good day. He keeps the action moving and the padding to a minimum. Sure, there’s stuff that could’ve been cut, but that’s typical for this series. Even at 159 pages (of small print), Operation Weatherkill seems longer than it really is. However it’s greatly improved by the fact that it’s the first installment since #10: The Holocaust Auction to return to the series formula of the earliest volumes: eschewing the tepid espionage plot of #11: Poppies Of Death, Eiden gets back to the series’s roots with John Eagle employing all of his sci-fi gadgetry as he takes on a world-threatening plot.

“Operation Weatherkill” is the name of a shadowy organization that’s blackmailing countries around the world with the threat of “climatic interference.” Somehow these bastards are toying with the jet stream and wreaking havoc with freak weather. America has been duly warned but the CIA, as ever, ignored the threat, and now, as the Weatherkill people are enacting their threats, it’s up to Mr. Merlin to handle things. Thus Eagle – for once described, stated as being 6’ 2”, two hundred pounds of muscle, with black hair, blue eyes, and “almost as tan as the Apache people he loved” – is sent to Stamford, Connecticut, where it rains for three straight days, flooding the city. Next he’s sent to Chicago, where the same thing happens.

The situation is explained to Eagle when he’s called back to Merlin’s HQ on Makaluha island in Hawaii. Operation Weatherkill is demanding a monthly payment of a ton of gold from the US, and possibly from the other countries as well – Merlin mentions that both Russia and Japan have also been suffering from freak weather and flooding. It was interesting reading this book when I did, as South Texas was experiencing torrential rains and heavy flooding, and even the bottom floor of the Louvre was being emptied out due to potential flooding!

Eagle heads for Madrid, where he’s to shadow the US destroyer that’s dropping off the first gold payment somewhere in the Mediterranean sea. Here Eagle becomes reacquainted with the Dolphin, his atomic-powered one-man sub, last seen in The Ice Goddess. Not sure about last time, but this time it’s specified that the Dolphin is painted bright yellow; perhaps its inventor was a Beatles fan. And while Eagle spends a few pages learning how to use a fancy new tracking gizmo on the sub, it’s nowhere in the realm of padding Eiden delivered in that earlier volume, to the point that Operation Weatherkill positively zips along in comparison. Indeed Eagle even brushes off more training, claiming how short time is.

Tracking the dropped-off gold to the island of Svete Hvar, off the coast of Yugoslavia, Eagle and the Dolphin are almost destroyed by depth charges dropped by enemy ships. Eventually Eagle will learn that the island is owned by Turkish billionaire Ferit Sunay, the man behind Operation Weatherkill. First though Eagle is almost arrested by secret police, only to be saved by a “beautiful blond” in a string bikini who acts like she knows him. Her name is Julie Anders and she claims to be Canadian, of Yugo-Ukranian heritage, but Eagle is certain she’s KGB . She also claims to be a nymphomaniac; “I want some sex when we get back to the hotel,” she instructs Eagle while they’re out on her catamaran – not that Eagle obeys her (more of which below).

Julie catches Eagle up on Ferit Sunay and the citadel he rules the island from; for her part, Julie suspects Eagle of being CIA. Like a regular pseudo-Bond villain Sunay stocks his ancient castle with legions of armed henchmen and guard dogs. Eagle, armed only with a knife, tries to survey the place one night, only to nearly get killed by the dogs; he’s saved by Julie, who appears brandishing a bow and arrow. After an interminable escape (the novel is filled with scenes of Eagle and Julie sneaking through the woods as they try to evade Sunay’s men), Eagle and Julie kill off a few more goons, Eagle slicing throats and Julie scoring kills with her arrows; she compares herself to Diana of the hunt. After this it’s time to get back to the hotel for some of that much-delayed sex.

Eiden as ever delivers the most explicit sex scenes in the series, yet this time it takes him a while to get to the good stuff. For some strange reason Eagle isn’t as prone to mixing business with pleasure in Operation Weatherkill, to the point that he even turns down sex from a sexy Spanish maid who slips nude into his bed one night in Madrid, offering herself. Eagle politely turns her down, not wanting to cause any “sexual jealousies” in the small Madrid-based group he’s working with, given that she’s the only girl there, and all the men are clearly lusting after her. And when Julie Anders first gets Eagle into to her hotel room and eagerly strips off both their clothes, Eagle kicks her in the ass(!) and tells her, “Next time, wait until you’re asked,” before storming off!

However when Eiden gets to the novel’s one and only sex scene he spares no details, with a two-page sequence featuring almost textbook documentation of each and every act: “Eagle slid the head of his shaft between the lips of her vagina and placed himself in her.” The same goes for the immediately-following round two: “She began the pulsing contractions of her vagina which would harden his shaft a second time.” (Hey, those are my favorite kind of contractions!) Eiden is also fond of exploiting the ample charms of his female characters; Julie for example must be nicely stacked, as within the first half-page of her introduction her breasts are described as “heavy,” “meaty,” and “bulging.” Julie is probably the best female character in the series yet (well, either her or the Sue Shiomi-esque Orchid Yang in #8: The Death Devils), and not just due to her breastesses; one can’t complain about a sexy KGB agent who enjoys killing her prey with bow and arrow.

She’s also handy with a submachine gun, carrying one in a big leather purse. Having admitted she’s KGB, Julie also acknowledges that the two men shadowing Eagle in the hotel are her comrades. The three decide to join forces to stop Sunay; Julie and team have come to Svete Hvar because the KGB was tracking the Yugoslavian climatologist Sunay is now using for the Operation Weatherkill satellite. The final sixty pages are mostly action, starting with Eagle, having gotten his plastic suit, dart gun, and explosives from the submerged Dolphin, getting in a fight with a pair of frogmen. Here we learn that Eagle’s C02 gun apparently works underwater, as does his suit’s chameleon device – as mentioned, this volume sees the return of all the gadgets that have been denied us in the past few installments.

Eiden doesn’t exploit the violence factor as much, though we do get occasional mention of the backs of heads getting blown off by Eagle’s darts; as ever in Eiden’s hands, the Expeditor goes for head shots. Eagle and Julie kill a slew of Sunay’s men here, as Eagle, chameleon unit activated, slips like a regular Predator onto Sunay’s boat and begins killing off the men who have surrounded Julie’s catamaran. Meanwhile Julie pulls out that subgun and blows off the heads of unarmed men, her “legs spread” as she wields the weapon. (Someone at Pyramid liked this phrase so much that they even used it to describe Julie’s fighting stance on the back cover!)

The climax becomes a bit muddled, as is Eiden’s wont. After some more action and chasing, Eagle and Julie spend too many pages foraging through the woods in the pre-dawn hours, trying in vain to meet up with Julie’s two comrades on the slopes of the cliff upon which Sunay’s castle looms. It goes on and on, not helped by the fact that Eagle watches through field glasses as the two KGB men get in a running battle with Sunay’s forces. Things finally kick in gear when Eagle and Julie storm the castle grounds. The “steel-vaned flechettes” fly fast and furious from Eagle’s C02 pistol as he kills a bunch of henchmen, Julie blasting them apart with her submachine gun – Eagle certain now the girl is a “thrill killer,” clearly enjoying herself too much.

Sunay is given a perfunctory sendoff; after killing several random soldiers Eagle and Julie break into Sunay’s private quarters and Julie guns him down just as he’s gotten out of bed with his mistress! More focus is placed on the climatologist Sunay’s used to create the Operation Weatherkill satellite; Julie wants to take him back to Russia to work for the Soviets, whereas Eagle argues that they don’t have the time or the resources to drag the old man back down the mountain. (The scientist takes care of the problem for them, offing himself with a handy cyanide pill.)

Julie’s thrill-killing reaches absurd proportions in the finale, with the KGB agent acting out of character as she suddenly runs around shooting down everyone, arguing with Eagle that “this is war.” As expected her own thrill-killing proves to be her undoing, shot down by a machine gun crew as she lobs some of Eagle’s “new purple grenades” down at them. I love the fact that Mr. Merlin has equipped his Expeditor with purple grenades, but one wonders what happened to the explosive vials Eagle used in the earliest installment. Ultimately it’s of no concern, as Eiden quickly wraps up Operation Weatherkill, with Eagle, having blown up Sunay’s entire citadel, safely escaping to the still-submerged Dolphin.

Speaking of Mr. Merlin, Eagle’s mysterious employer, he appears only briefly in the opening pages, per series formula, yet he is as memorable as ever in those few pages. Strangely though, these pages feature a clueless Merlin asking his honcho Samson a bunch of questions, whereas typically it’s vice versa. Eagle too is slightly different in Eiden’s hands. While he’s aggressively macho in the installments of Manning Lee Stokes and almost a monosyballic assassin in those of Robert Lory, in Eiden’s hands Eagle is more prone to self-doubt and concern. He also lacks the casual misogyny of Stokes’s version; when Julie is worried about her missing comrades and keeps looking to Eagle for guidance, our hero patiently consoles her. It would be hard to see Stokes’s version of Eagle showing such compassion. And Eiden’s John Eagle is more merciful; when Julie gleefully guns down those unarmed men on her catamaran, Eagle tries in vain to stop her, arguing that killing them would be meaningless.

And that was it for Eiden on John Eagle Expedtior, but then, there was only one more volume of the series to go, anyway. Eiden only wrote four installments (Stokes and Lory wrote five each), and they’re wildly disparate: The Ice Goddess had awesomely lurid potential but squandered it with a few hundred pages of padding until things sleazed up for a great but rushed finale; The Deadly Cyborgs, with its crazy plot of biomechanical yetis, was one of my favorite volumes in the entire series; Poppies Of Death seemed to be an installment of another series and came off like a boring espionage drama with little action; and finally Operation Weatherkill, which sort of melded the sci-fi plots of Eiden’s first two installments with the espionage fare of Poppies of Death.

As another overlong review will attest, I’m a total geek for the John Eagle Expeditor series. I’m having a hard time accepting the fact that the next volume is the last one.

Monday, December 28, 2015

John Eagle Expeditor #12: The Green Goddess


John Eagle Expeditor #12: The Green Goddess, by Paul Edwards
August, 1975  Pyramid Books

After a two-year absence, Manning Lee Stokes returns to the John Eagle Expeditor series with his first contribution since the awesomely lurid #5: Valley Of Vultures. Stokes continues the sort of series reset of the previous volume (which attempted to fashion the books more as straight spy stories), only occasionally featuring the exotic adventure fiction of the earlier volumes. And while it does achieve some pulpy, lurid heights, be warned that, like much of Stokes’s work, The Green Goddess takes its time to get going.

Stokes was 64 when The Green Goddess was published (and would die just five months later, unfortunately), and it’s impressive how this guy was in accord with the changing, more permissive times. What I mean to say is, the dude enjoyed his sleaze. Stokes injects a healthy portion of sleaze into the novel, from Eagle making a fake obscene phone call (where he delivers the immortal line, “We’re gonna crack our nuts over the phone”) to Eagle watching as a dead girl is raped…twice. And while previous volumes, including the non-Stokes volumes, have all had very lurid vibes, rarely if ever did anyone curse; Stokes takes care of that within the first few pages, doling out a barrage of F-bombs and other such filthy language that almost made me put down the book and pray.

First though the back cover copy, which is so bonkers I just had to share it with you. Whoever wrote this (perhaps series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel himself?) clearly had no idea what the overriding plot of The Green Goddess was, so just went for it with vague, lurid hypberbole:


And I have to say, The Green Goddess really is all over the place for the first 50-some pages (of typically small, small print – our man Stokes does not shirk on his word count). Starting off with a plane crash in Boston (and boy was I sure happy to read that right before taking a flight myself), the novel throws the reader in with no idea of what’s going on and who is doing what. We learn that a State Department courier named Christian Pangborn was on that flight, and that he had some sort of attache case that was spirited away from the scene. But by whom? And what exactly was in the case? 

A dude named Fred Talbert, Mr. Merlin’s man in Washington, DC, is on the case. We get a lot of padding material about this, with Stokes getting more experimental in his latter days with various fonts and even letters written in triplicate as various characters read letters and briefs. Pangborn was being watched by various people, among them two KGB agents working as free-lancers in the US: Boris Chebotarev and Zoya Tchekov. Stokes speends a goodly portion of the novel cutting over to these two guys as they get in long, long discussions, and it’s all very similar to the page-filling, inconsequential discussions of Admiral Coffin and the head of the Navy in Stokes’s earlier Aquanauts series.

Pangborn was having an affair with a young schoolteacher named Doris Morrisan who lives in Vermont. Here is where our hero John Eagle finally enters the scene; per the tradition of the earliest installments, Eagle doesn’t appear until well into the book. He’s called in by Mr. Merlin (who himself is given a rather cursory introduction, rather than the usual belabored affair of him looking down for many pages into the gaping maw of the Hawaiian volcano which his mountaintop aerie overlooks), who instructs Eagle’s contact Samson (a recurring character) to order Eagle up to Vermont to watch Doris Morrisan and determine if anyone else is watching her – the vague concern is that Pangborn might’ve spilled some intel to her, or something.

Eagle is as taciturn and all-business as ever in Stokes’s hands. We learn here that he’s been serving Mr. Merlin for three years, with two years left to go until his contract is fulfilled and he’s awarded a million dollars (up from the original payment as stated in the first volume, which was also written by Stokes). (Another intesterting tidbit is the revelation this time that there are other Expeditors, though Eagle is the first and best, of course.)  One return to the previous volume (and also Valley Of Vultures, now that I think of it) is that Eagle goes off without his customary gadgets and weapons. He calls Doris Morrisan upon his arrival in the “village” of Montrose, Vermont, and quickly deduces someone is there in the house with her – someone the young lady is terrified of.

As mentioned, Eagle for no reason other than Stokes’s penchant for sleaze subjects the girl to an obscene phone call; in the few seconds before he heard another extension on her line picked up, he told the girl he was “a friend.” His goal is to see how long he can draw out the other person, or something. All that really matters is that Stokes treats us to a few pages of a dirty-talking John Eagle, which in itself is pretty fun. But it’s all got a downer ending, for when Eagle sneaks to the lady’s place he finds her, as mentioned, lying nude on her bed, her neck broken, while a big stooge rapes her corpse.

Eagle is however as savage as ever; he ambushes the dude, who turns out to be a Commie sleeper agent born in Boston, beats him to a pulp, and gooses him with the dude’s own .357 Magnum. Then he takes him to the woods, ties him to a tree – the dude now a blubbering baby, devastated over the fact that someone caught him in the act of necrophilia(?!) – and proceeds to slice off his toes!! Once the dude has given up all he knows, namely that someone in Russia (we later learn it was Boris) ordered Doris’s death, Eagle slices his throat and then chastizes himself for “failing” this particular mission. He was supposed to meet Doris and hopefully have sex with her (seriously, this is the mission Samson tasked him with), but instead he found her dead.

Meanwhile we get a bit more information on what the hell is going on. It turns out Boris and Tchekov are plotting against the Soviet government, hoping to take over the entire regime. Their angle is a precious mineral recently discovered by a Soviet geologist in Afghanistan, which at this time was still on peaceable terms with the USSR. The mineral, named Kolymanite after its discoverer, is described in scientific briefs (printed in triplicate) as a “catalytic converter,” and when exposed to other metals and water it produces continuous electricity. As just one example of this incredible potential, were it to be mixed in with the hull of a nuclear sub, the sub would be powered for at least a year by just the Kolymanite and the seawater.

All of which provides the long leadup to John Eagle finally venturing over to the desert wilds of Afghanistan, a place which here in 1975 still has the mystical splendor of Arabian Nights and hasn’t descended into the ISIS hell of today. Eagle, who can apparently speak a few Arabic dialects, poses as a desert warrior in robes and veil, his plastic suit worn beneath, and rides a trusty camel over the desert wasteland in pursuit of some mysterious Russians (ie Boris and Tchekov) that Mr. Merlin has told him to contact. He ends up in the rugged expanse of the Hindu Kush, and the adventure fiction is very heavy and very reminiscent of #4: The Fist Of Fatima, which was written by Robert Lory.

Most of the middle portion of the text is just Eagle roughing it in the desert, his faithful and annoying servant in tow. This is Jinn, a prepubescent and cross-eyed waif who grew up in a whorehouse and rides around on a diseased camel. Stokes builds up such a “cute” rapport between the two, with Eagle as usual stoic and bossy and Jinn almost slavish in his cross-eyed devotion, that you can practically see Jinn’s fate coming from five miles away. And you won’t be disappointed. But anyway it just keeps going on and on, and you wonder if it will ever end, much like this review.

It seems to me that by this point in his life Stokes was more interested in the plotting and scheming of older characters than in any sort of heroic action fiction; he seems to get more enjoyment out of the ultimately-pointless digressions with Boris and Tchekov, not to mention lots of scenes of Merlin sitting overtop his volcano and talking to loyal secretary Polly Perkins. Eagle doesn’t do much of anything throughout, fires his trusty “gas pistol” but once, and doesn’t even wear his full plastic suit; this is a first in the series. Eagle merely wears it beneath his robes, but this is the first time in the series where Eagle doesn’t at some point pull on the mask as well.

Jinn tells Eagle of the mysterious Lala Khatun, “the green goddess,” who rules an army of multinational brigands in the remote Valley of Arjuna. The Lala Khatun line extends back a thousand years, from mother to daughter; “Shades of Rider Haggard,” Eagle thinks to himself. But we learn that Merlin hooked up with the 1916 edition of Lala Khatun, and indeed even has a photo of the lady locked up in his desk. Realizing Eagle is in the general location of Arjuna, Merlin sends out a radio message to her…and friends, given the usual all-padding writing method of Manning Lee Stokes, the titular “green goddess” (as Merlin refers to Lala Khatun) doesn’t even appear until page 156. 

Unfortunately, she isn’t really green; I had hopes for one of those Orion Slave Girls out of Star Trek. The “green” refers to the Earth and to fertility, as the Lala Khatun has sex with tons of men, getting pregnant again and again, the male babies exposed and left to die and only one female baby chosen to become the next green woman. The line suffers from Mayfly Syndrome, and the green women all die before 30. You won’t be surprised to learn that both Merlin and Eagle meet their respective green women before they’ve had any children, of course. I can’t imagine a woman that’s had child after child after child would be up to the high “hot chick in a pulp action novel” standards.

The novel’s sole action scene has Eagle, Boris, Tchekov, and Jinn defending themselves from bandits in a desert fortress. Eagle uses a .45 and a submachine gun for once. The pulpy gadget trappings of previous books is long gone; even later in the book, when Eagle pulls on his plastic suit (sans mask) and runs around a dark cemetery, Stokes goes on and on about Eagle worrying if he will be seen, as if Stokes has completely forgotten that Eagle’s suit has a chameleon unit which allows him to blend into his surroundings. But after this action scene we’re finally taken to the homestretch, as well as the appearance of the green goddess.

Who will be surprised when, upon her first meeting with Eagle, who has been bathed and separated from the others in posh accomodations, Lala Khatun announces her intention to screw Eagle silly? This current green woman is only nineteen but looks younger, with the body of a young girl – Stokes caters to the creepier ‘70s trend of having his hero screw a veritable teenager, something Eagle already did in a previous installment. After performing literal phallic worship upon Eagle, Lala Khatun gives herself to our hero, and Stokes as usual treads the line between metaphorical stuff and outright sleaze.

But man…forget about any thrilling conclusion. All plot threads clumsily come together and the denoument sees Boris and Tchekov escaping and Eagle trying to find them; poor Jinn is machine gunned down by accident. Eagle takes out the henchman of Lala Khatun’s sadistic top soldier – this top soldier, Major Akbar (not to be confused with Admiral Akbar), hates Eagle due to jealousy – and that’s that. There’s no resolution with the green woman and there isn’t even any resolution to Major Akbar’s animosity; I thought Eagle would at least break the guy’s neck, but Stokes flash-forwards a few weeks to Merlin’s HQ in Hawaii, where Tchekov is now staying.

The novel continues on its suspense/espionage vibe to the bitter end, with long backstory on the fact that Boris was really Merlin’s anonymous mole within the KGB, but he was secretly found out and Tchekov was put on his trail, in the hopes of discovering whoever was behind these would-be moles. Tchekov’s mission, you see, was to penetrate the headquarters of the mysterious “Merlin” and report back to the USSR. Stokes almost had me thinking that he was building a recurring plot here, with future volumes featuring Tchekov sneaking around Merlin’s place and snapping photos, but instead Samson shows up at Tchekov’s bed one night and blows him away with a .45. Finally, the end. 

Stokes tells the tale with his usual measured pacing; be prepared for a lot of padding via go-nowhere conversations among minor characters and lots and lots of narrative water-treading. But as I’ve said in like every review of a Stokes novel I’ve ever written, I enjoy the guy’s style nonetheless. An interesting note, back on the topic of Stokes’s age at the time, not to mention his impending fate, is the melancholy vibe of The Green Goddess, of time nearing its end. Merlin often relfects how “very old” he is, how he doesn’t have much time left. Even John Eagle, an assassin for hire, is prone to concern over the death of a loved one; Stokes makes a passing, vague mention of a “tumor in the left breast” of Eagle’s foster mother, White Deer.

And this is just the two main characters; a sort of foreboding and preoccupation with death runs throughout The Green Goddess. Given that Stokes’s next installment, Silverskull, was likely the last novel he ever wrote (and was also the last volume of the series itself), we’ll see if the theme continues.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

John Eagle Expeditor #11: Poppies Of Death


John Eagle Expeditor #11: Poppies Of Death, by Paul Edwards
June, 1975  Pyramid Books

This eleventh volume of the John Eagle Expeditor series sees a definite change in the formula that was established in the previous ten installments. Tasked by Mr. Merlin with a mission that “comes closer to pure espionage than anything we have ever sent you on,” John Eagle spends the majority of Poppies Of Death undercover, in what amounts to a basic sort of Cold War-era spy novel.

Paul Eiden turned in this installment, which to tell the truth is just as leisurely paced as his first entry, #7: The Ice Goddess. Unlike that volume, Poppies Of Death doesn’t have an outlandish plot, and in fact comes off like a prefigure of Craig Thomas’s 1977 novel Firefox (which is probably more known as the Clint Eastwood film), with Eagle sneaking into Moscow to steal a plane and fly it back into the free world. But there is no action for the first hundred pages, only livened up here and there with the explicit sex scenes Eiden also brought to his previous contributions.

Despite the lack of a pulpy plot and the minimal thrills for the first third of the volume, Poppies Of Death is nowhere as underwhelming as The Ice Goddess, which wasted the reader’s time with endlessly-detailed games of chess and topical details about an Eskimo’s daily life. I have no idea what Eiden did for a day job, but I’ll guess that, like other series author Robert Lory, he did a fair bit of international traveling, as this novel is filled to the brim with details about life in the USSR, with Moscow itself brought more to life than you’d expect in a men’s adventure novel.

In a way, this “Eagle goes undercover” angle had already been done in the series, back in the almighty #5: Valley Of Vultures. Either Eiden, like Manning Lee Stokes, decided a change-up was due to the series formula, or maybe editor Lyle Kenyon Engel wanted the Expeditor books to go in more of a spy novel direction. At any rate, here you will not find the things so familiar from previous volumes: no opening portion from Mr. Merlin’s perspective, no fancy gadgets, no remote fortress that John Eagle must cross hostile terrain to destroy.

This volume also appears to confirm a theory I’ve had that Eiden was the Expeditor author who apparently complained that Lory’s version of the character was too sexually active for someone who had a steady girlfriend.  Eiden is the only series author to give Eagle’s girlfriend, Ruth Lone Wolf (sometimes referred to as Ruth Lame Wolf, as she is here), any narrative time. Ruth factors heavily in the opening of Poppies Of Death, waking Eagle up at midnight to wish him happy birthday (his actual age is not stated, but we learn that the day itself is sometime in September) and gifting him with a Pulsar Date II watch, which she describes as “super-cool.”

Eagle is soon summoned to New York, where his clothing sizes are measured by Brubaker, a tight-lipped intelligence world figure. From there Eagle goes through eight weeks of flight training, so he can receive FAA certification as a four-engine jet pilot. Luckily, this material is wisely summarized in the narrative; you don’t have to read endless pages about Eagle learning how to fly large airliners. Finally he receives his mission; the Russians have copied the 707 in the form of a Soviet airliner called the TU-350. Eagle is to go to Moscow, hook up with his contacts there, and steal the plane.

How exactly this mission is suitable for Mr. Merlin’s one and only Expeditor is not mentioned. As for Mr. Merlin himself, his appearance here is reduced to a handful of lines, and indeed he comes off as a bit more callous than normal, almost taunting Eagle that he might very well not return from this particular mission. To make matters worse, Eagle himself spends the novel wondering why he was given this mission, as he is not trained in espionage, and thus he’s out of his element for the majority of the book.

One thing that stays true though is the native booty John Eagle must have. This would be Ludmilla, a gorgeous and stacked brunette Russian whose husband, an author, was killed by the KGB a year before, hence her sudden desire to defect. She turns out to be Eagle’s contact, and despite her frosty nature Eagle can’t help but check out her awesome bod: “Her breasts were so full and widely separated that their outer curves hid part of her upper arms.” Eiden actually writes this same description twice in the novel, so the lady must have some serious melons.

Ludmilla will be the navigator on the stolen plane; a Soviet Air Force instructor, she currently works as an oceanographer and has the luxury of her own car and apartment. Her accomplice, another Red Army Air Force pilot, is Aleksander Dobrodni, who will fly the stolen TU-350, with Eagle serving as co-pilot. All this stuff takes many pages to play out, with Eiden spending a lot of time with Eagle walking around Moscow and learning how its citizens try to work around the shackles of their oppressive society. There are no action scenes, no moments of suspense of tension.

There is, though, the already-mentioned sex scene. Eiden again proves himself the most explicit of the series authors, with Ludmilla, the night before they undertake the mission, inviting Eagle up to her apartment. In fact Eiden sort of rewrites one of the sex scenes from his previous installment, #9: The Deadly Cyborgs, with Eagle doing this weird “rotating” of his legs and hips so he can roll Ludmilla up onto his lap while he’s “ramming” her. Meanwhile Eagle discovers the poor girl’s ass is lacerated, something she’d been trying to hide from him. Turns out Dobrodni did it, the man being a “sadist” who gets off on whipping girls.

Instead of being outraged, Eagle instead mocks Ludmilla as a “masochist” and pretty much says she deserved it! Only after pleading with Eagle that she “had” to sleep with Dobrodni, so as to seduce him, does Eagle relent that the girl most likely didn’t want to get savagely whipped, after all. But then, Eagle himself is pretty callous, this time around; his first line in the novel, in fact, is a pissy keeper: “I loathe people who go through life saying, ‘I’m sorry!’”

Posing as an engineer named Higbee, Eagle spends the majority of the novel walking around Moscow in Higbee’s tweed suits and wondering why he’s on this assignment. It’s never a good idea to have your character constantly question why he was given a particular mission, for soon the reader begins to wonder the same thing. Countless times Eagle says he’s not cut out for espionage, though he’s obviously seen his share of Bond movies, as he introduces himself to Ludmilla thusly: “Eagle. John Eagle.”

Humorously, after a hundred pages of buildup, the actual theft of the TU-350 goes down in just a handful of pages, with hardly any tension, other than when police chase after the fleeing airliner and shoot at it. Eagle, Dobrodni, and Ludmilla take the plane to Turkey. Here we get lots of technical detail on how one can use celestial navigation to pilot a plane in the absence of Doppler radar, something Eiden informs us commercial Russian planes didn’t have at this time.

An intriguing thing about reading these old action paperbacks is how they can sometimes prefigure things that happened in the real world. Reading this book, I couldn’t help but think of the various MH370 disappearance theories that have been floating around for the past several months. Those theorists who claim MH370 was stolen would have a field day with Poppies Of Death, which basically tells you how to steal an airliner, even how to construct an impromptu landing strip.

Anyway, Poppies Of Death is also similar to Valley Of Vultures in how the last quarter seems to be from an entirely different novel. Landing in Turkey, Eagle finds a truck filled with college-aged Turks, lead by an attractive girl named Shali. Ludmilla and Dobrodni are quickly shuffled out of the narrative, Ludmilla being sent on to her new oceanographer job in Boston and Dobrodni waiting at the impromptu airstrip for a fellow pilot to be smuggled in.

Mr. Merlin, who leaves Eagle an audio tape with instructions, informs Eagle that he is now to report to Shali and do whatever she says. This is after Eagle has coldly spurned the girl’s sexual advances. Shali turns out to be the daughter of Bektek, corrupt Minister of the Interior who is legally harvesting opium and selling it to the Mafia. Shali and her fellow radicals intend to destroy the opium plant, and Eagle is going to lead the mission. (At least this explains the book’s title.)

Eiden delivers another sex scene; it’s not only a short one, but it’s a strange one, as Eagle basically rapes Shali, “ramming” into her for all of a few seconds, so they can “get sex out of the way.” We’ll all recall the “man’s conquest” theme of the John Eagle Expeditor series, and that theme is very strong here, as Eagle resents how Shali enjoys taunting men with her sexuality, so he basically just screws her quickly. As for Shali, she seems to enjoy it, despite the brevity: “I’ve never been taken that way before.” Thus, per the series theme, the female has been conquered.

This takes us into the homestretch as Eagle leads the young radicals on the assault, but they’re all captured as they’re hauling away the opium in several trucks – the mission, finally explained to Eagle, is for him to put the opium back on the TU-350 so that Dobrodni and his fellow Russian co-pilot can fly it back into the USSR. At least, I think that’s the plan.

Finally employing his plastic suit and dart gun (which Eiden refers to as a “flechette pistol”), Eagle gets the upper hand by killing a few of Bedek’s cops – Eagle’s first kills in the novel, over 130 pages in. Like Stokes, Eiden has Eagle’s suit outfitted with a helmet, yet strangely it’s a helmet that can supposedly fit within the pockets of Eagle’s suit! Robert Lory had the smarter idea, making it a hood instead of a helmet. But this action material is quickly over, and unlike his previous volume Eiden doesn’t play up on the violence factor.

The final pages feature a last-second plot where Eagle takes on some New York Mafioso who are here in Turkey and are pissed that their opium has suddenly gone missing. Eagle, once again captured, tries to fool them into thinking he’s from the Montreal branch of the Mafia(?!), then provokes them to shoot each other. Then he gets in an anticlimactic fight with their resident karate master. Eagle of course makes short work of him in one of the more hasty fight scenes ever written.

Eagle then flies to Hawaii for a debriefing by Mr. Merlin, to finally get some answers on this particular assignment. Speaking through the usual audio hookup (Eagle has still never actually seen his boss), Mr. Merlin explains that this whole mission was basically a stab at fighting the drug problem – the opium has been destroyed, and the goal was to destroy it in a Russian plane on Turkish soil. Or something. Eagle tells Mr. Merlin to do something about the “goof ball” menace (by which he means amphetamines) and leaves. The end!

As for the writing itself, one thing I’ve failed to state is that I really enjoy Eiden’s style. He has a very readable prose, and despite the lack of action or suspense the novel was still somewhat entertaining. Eiden though does come off very much as a contract writer; unlike Lory there are no attempts at continuity. Even Eagle’s thumb injury, from Eiden’s own The Deadly Cyborgs, goes unmentioned, whereas the digit was nearly torn off of Eagle’s hand at the climax of that installment.

Long story short, Poppies Of Death is a misfire. Not the worst of the series (I think my least favorite volume, so far, was #6: The Glyphs Of Gold), but sort of a muddled misstep which has nothing to do with the well-established series formula. Here’s hoping Eiden’s next installment, which would be his last, gets things back on track.

Monday, October 13, 2014

John Eagle Expeditor #10: The Holocaust Auction


John Eagle Expeditor #10: The Holocaust Auction, by Paul Edwards
April, 1975  Pyramid Books

Robert Lory turns in his final contribution to the John Eagle Expeditor series, and in his interview with me the other month Lory rated this installment as his personal favorite. At 158 pages, not only is The Holocaust Auction shorter than other volumes in the series, but it also features some notable differences.

For one is the way in which the novel is told. The traditional Expeditor forumla has followed the same outline: an inciting incident; a long scene with Mr. Merlin in Hawaii assessing the situation; an introduction of John Eagle; a Merlin-Eagle briefing in Hawaii; and then on to the mission itself, which takes up the rest of the narrative. Lory dispenses with this formula and instead tells the first half of the novel in a sort of out-of-sequence format.

The inciting incident remains in the opening, though, per tradition, as in a long but well-done sequnce we meet Dr. Hamlin Goddard, an American weapons specialist who is currently under heavy guard in a secret base near Washington, DC. Eventually we learn that Goddard has created a new smart bomb, but when we meet him he’s a virtual prisoner here, “for his own protection.” But then a small group, lead by a “round Chinese man,” breaks into the base and kills everyone, leading to the unsettling denoument in which the “round” leader decapitates Goddard. Interestingly, the assassins are armed with dart-firing gas guns very similar to John Eagle’s.

Eagle, who for once is in New York, has his briefing with Mr. Merlin in a Wall Street office building, one of Merlin’s many secret locations. Lory telescopes through the traditional briefing sequence, instead cutting in the next chapter to days later, and Eagle’s already on location in Nepal. Lory backfills us from here on, with Eagle getting in scrapes in the “present” and then flashing back to what he was briefed on a few days before. In some ways this is similar to how Andrew Sugar wrote the Enforcer books.

Of the three authors who worked on this series, it seems to me that Lory took the most care in making it all seem to be the work of one writer, ie “Paul Edwards.” Per his comments in his interview here on the blog, Lory tried to ensure some sort of consistency in the books. Here he refers to previous Eagle adventures, and not just the ones he wrote; for example, in this volume we get references to #1: Needles Of Death (Eagle journeys to Base Camp One, Nepal, which he visited in that first volume, even meeting the same people), #4: The Fist Of Fatima (in particular how Merlin gifted Eagle with a lifetime’s worth of good brandy for a job well done!) and #5: Valley Of Vultures (a reference to the “Neo Nazis” Eagle once fought).  But as I expected, there is no mention of the thumb injury Eagle suffered in the crazy previous volume.

Eagle, in Nepal, first must fend off the whores offered him by the staff of Base One(!) and then he makes his way on foot through Nepal and on into India, tracking a beacon signal. But John Eagle must have his native booty, and sure enough it turns out that one of those Nepalese whores follows after him – cue a pretty explicit sex scene, where the gal, Veena, shows off her oral skills for a very impressed John Eagle. Eagle’s all business, though, and once they’re finished he tells Veena to scram so he can get back to tracking the beacon that’s leading him into India – a beacon which Lory tantalizes us as being “in the belly of a whore.”

Yes, whores are pretty prevalent in The Holocaust Auction. As it develops, again via backstory flashback, Mr. Merlin employs a high-class pimp in India for intelligence-gathering purposes, as the pimp provides entertainment for all manner of people. It just so happens that this guy has retained an order for a few high-class girls to entertain someone in the middle of nowhere, India, and figuring this might be the site where Goddard’s appropriated smart bomb tech will be displayed, Mr. Merlin has one of the whores outfitted with a secret tracking beacon device.

The titular auction is being held in Meerut, India, which we’re informed is 50 miles northeast of New Delhi. It’s being put together by Chirundhar, Dr. Goddard’s former assistant, and three people have been invited to the auction to purchase the weapons tech: Colonel Dyuzhev of Russia, Colonel Wu of China (a woman, by the way), and none other than Father Tan, wily Triad ruler who first appeared in #3: The Laughing Death (which fittingly enough was the first volume of the series Lory wrote). The whores have been purchased to provide entertainment, and the prettiest of them, Flavia, a young Indian woman with “perfect breasts,” is the one who wears the tracking beacon, hidden in a belt of diamonds.

Again per tradition, Eagle has to make his way through lots of tough terrain, as usual clad in his plastic suit with chameleon device. Unlike fellow series authors Manning Lee Stokes and Paul Eiden, Lory has Eagle’s outfit featuring a more-believable “hood and face mask,” whereas the other two authors provide him with a motorcycle-style helmet (which makes one wonder how “chameleon” the suit could actually be). This time Lory adds more touches, like a pair of “flat, non-reflective googles” Eagle can snap into place over the hood, allowing him to see in infrared. But this is strange, as in previous Lory volumes Eagle didn’t have to go to such lengths; the infrared feature was apparently already built into the mask’s lenses.

John Eagle himself is a bit different this time. The back cover describes him as a “hired assassin extraordinaire,” and I thought that was mere copywriter hyperbole, but Eagle really does come off this way in The Holocaust Auction. Several times he refers to himself as “Death,” and he appears to relish in killing off the superstitious Gurkha mercenaries employed by Tan, taunting them before killing them. Eagle here also relishes in the act of killing itself, particularly when Tan’s mercenaries murder Veena, the Nepalese whore who stupidly follows after Eagle; he spends pages fantasizing over how he’s going to kill all of Tan’s mercenaries. In a way Eagle’s kill-lust in this novel is almost a callback to Lory’s first Expeditor novel, The Laughing Death, where Eagle worried that he might one day become a “thrill-killer.”

Father Tan turns out to just be posing as a potential bidder, and Chirundhar is merely his employee. Eagle, listening in on the conversation thanks to a high-tech “listening tube,” is first shocked to discover that Tan, a man Eagle thought he had killed, is still alive – and immediately swears to correct his mistake. (It’s also stated in the text that the events of The Laughing Death occurred in 1973.) Eagle also figures out how Goddard’s smart bomb is about to be tested. He sneaks aboard a DC-3 from which it will be dropped for the viewing bidders below, the entire proceedings broadcast for them via a TV camera installed in the plane.

In his interview Lory specifically mentioned “a happily drunken ex-RAF DC-3 pilot” who stood out in his memory of this novel; as it turns out, this character, Captain Ashley Struthers, only appears for a few pages, but he is memorable. Eagle kills off the men in the back of the plane and then orders Struthers to circle back around to the secret bidding location, so Eagle can drop the smart bomb on it, and Struthers eagerly obliges. Eagle almost kills him, too, but then decides to let him live; one because Eagle knows the pilot is harmless, and two because, in a humorous moment, Struthers has misheard Eagle and Tan’s conversation on the radio and thinks Eagle’s name is “Regal.”

The finale goes by pretty quickly; Eagle commandeers the plane, drops the smart bomb, parachutes out, and mops up the Gurkha survivors on the ground. Heeding Merlin’s request that he “spare the whores,” Eagle also ensures that they all get out on a minibus, which leads to a nice martial arts fight where the “round” Chinese henchman poses as one of the whores(!) and gets in a savage brawl with Eagle. As for Father Tan, Eagle achieves his goal of ensuring the Triad ruler is really dead this time, but it’s a little anticlimactic, with Eagle blowing up the plane the old bastard attempts to escape on.

In fact the shortened length of the novel and the quick wrapup prevents another scene I figured would be coming: the Eagle/Flavia shagging that you’d expect would be mandatory. While it does happen – indeed, Eagle gets all seven of the whores – it’s only intimated in the narrative, with a brandy-drinking Mr. Merlin back in Hawaii being presented with a bill from the Indian pimp, due to Eagle and Captain Struthers having absconding with all of the man’s whores for a full week. Also we learn that Eagle’s recommended that Struthers be given a job in Merlin’s organization, which hints that the character might have reappeared if Lory had written another installment.

But this was it for Lory, and the series from here on out bounced back and forth between Stokes and Eiden. While The Holocaust Auction was entertaining, I wouldn’t rank it as my favorite of Lory’s volumes; here’s how I would in fact rank them: The Death Devils (probably my favorite volume yet in the series), The Laughing DeathThe Fist Of Fatima, The Holocaust Auction, and The Glyphs Of Gold.

Monday, June 16, 2014

An Interview With Robert Lory


Have I mentioned lately how much I enjoy the John Eagle Expeditor series? It’s probably my favorite series of all, just a perfect mix of escapist entertainment, adventure fiction, and the lurid elements ‘70s pulp demanded.

The series was written by three authors: Manning Lee Stokes, Robert Lory, and Paul Eiden. Stokes passed away in 1976, and Paul Eiden is practically a cipher; the only thing I can find out about him is that he apparently began publishing under various pseudonyms in the very early ‘60s (ie the pulpy WWII novel Bloody Beaches, published by Monarch Books in 1961 under the awesome pseudonym “Delano Stagg”).

Robert Lory though has had a prolific career in fiction, from the fan-favorite Dracula series he did for Pinnacle to a handful of science fiction paperbacks under his own name. I came across an interview Sidney Williams did with Robert Lory in 2011 on his blog Sid Is Alive, and I want to thank Sidney for putting me in touch with him.

Fortunately, Mr. Lory was willing to answer my geekish questions about John Eagle Expeditor. Here is the interview, as well as details about a new book he has just published. And finally, I’d like to express my thanks to Mr. Lory for taking part in the interview!


How did you become involved with the John Eagle Expeditor series?

Lyle Engel called, saying he'd read one of my Shamryke Odell science fiction books, liked what he saw, and asked if I was interested in doing two John Eagle books. He said he had a writer for the first two books -- which at that point consisted of a mostly-complete manuscript and a rough outline -- but the publisher wanted to get the third and fourth books out as soon as possible. I said yes, and my association with the series -- and with Lyle -- began.

A side note: When I got the materials for the first two books, Eagle wasn't an Expeditor. The series was to be John Eagle, Survival Ranger (or something very close to that). "Expeditor" was my first -- and immediate -- contribution to the series before I'd written a word.

How did Lyle Kenyon Engel's Book Creations company work? Did Engel edit or oversee each of his series publications himself, or did he have a staff of editors?

I'm not sure about Lyle's involvement after a series got underway. His son George did some editing, and I think his wife Marla did also. At various times, other editors were on the BCI payroll, but I have no idea as to how many were working there at any given time.

Was there an Expeditor series template you were asked to follow, or some sort of source document on all of John Eagle’s various gadgets and equipment?

No template per se. Obviously, we all worked the same back story and continuing characters, and Lyle made sure I knew what the other writer(s) were working on in general terms of plot, location, etc. For the most part, this worked well, although there were a few slips. There was no source document or list of gadgets, just basing on previous books and introducing something new if the spirit called.

How much freedom were you given with your volumes of the series? Did you come up with your own plots/concepts, or did Engel or someone else at BCI come up with a plot germ and ask you to deliver a manuscript that followed up on it?

I felt I had close to total freedom. The plots, villains, geographies all were mine.

What are some of your memories of the Expeditor volumes you wrote? Do you have any particular favorites, or ones you wish had come out differently?

The timing of the first book I did [The Laughing Death] couldn't have been luckier. Right after I signed the contract, my daytime job took me to Hong Kong, Singapore and the jungles of central Sumatra. The Laughing Death's first chapters are accurate reflections of both notes and photographs taken.  The Fist Of Fatima's Libyan geography was made easy from my having spent two years living there.

Of my books in the series, I guess my favorite was The Holocaust Auction, which I remember mainly for a happily drunken ex-RAF DC-3 pilot.

I read an interview with you from a few years ago* where you mentioned that another of the Expeditor series authors once complained that your version of John Eagle was "too sexually active for someone who had a steady girlfriend." Do you remember which of the authors this was, Manning Lee Stokes or Paul Eiden? I'm especially curious, because both of those authors featured a John Eagle who was sexually active on his missions, despite his girlfriend back home!

At the time, I had no idea who else was involved in the series. Actually, I thought there was just one other writer. As to the complaint, it seems to me now to have centered on the fact that my plots didn't have much use for the lady. Except for maybe a quick nod to her existence, I pretty much ignored her. I viewed her as an unnecessary distraction to Eagle -- and myself.

Did you have any other involvement with Stokes or Eiden? Did you ever read their contributions to the series?

No involvement. I did read their books, yes, to make sure I didn't change any history.

How much notice did you receive before the series was cancelled? Curious if you have any unpublished Expeditor manuscripts sitting in a closet...!

No prior notice at all. And, no, there are no unpublished manuscripts -- or even notes -- gathering dust at the homestead.

Did you have any ideas in mind for installments you didn't get to write?

No. At the time my Eagle days ended, my ideas were focused on another BCI series featuring a well-known Transylvanian count.


*The interview in question appeared in Justin Marriott's first issue of Men Of Violence, from 2009. In the John Eagle Expeditor series overview, Justin included a “Bob Lory on the Eagle books” sidebar, where he quoted Lory as stating:

“One of the other John Eagle writers was abusively irate that “my” Eagle was too sexually active for someone who had a steady girlfriend. The conversation was short, cut off when I said that, if I heard from him again, the next John Eagle book would have him seeking out the young woman’s rapist/maimer/killer. The series ended before I decided whether I’d do it anyway.”

As mentioned above, Robert Lory has recently e-published a brand-new novel, available now on Amazon. It’s titled Ragnarok, and here’s his summary of it:

This book took more than 45 years from start to completion. The writing began in Tripoli, Libya—a few weeks before the 1969 Ghadafi revolution. It was put aside for more urgent matters then, as was its fate in the years that have followed. There were always new projects that screamed louder for my attention. But when the dusty pages turned up in our latest move, I decided Ragnarok's time had come—for two reasons that I viewed as positive omens. 

First, 1960s Madison Avenue has seen several successful seasons on the home screen. 

Second, Thor and Loki have made excellent tracks on the wider cinema screen, although I have to admit that any resemblance between the Marvel characters and the ones you'll meet here is limited to their names only.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

John Eagle Expeditor #9: The Deadly Cyborgs


John Eagle Expeditor #9: The Deadly Cyborgs, by Paul Edwards
February, 1975  Pyramid Books

Paul Eiden returns to the John Eagle Expeditor series and more than makes up for his unfortunately-padded and boring previous installment, #7: The Ice Goddess. As we’ll recall, that volume had all kinds of potential for being a trashy, lurid masterpiece, with John Eagle venturing into an “Amazon Queendom” ruled by a man-hating temptress of ultimate depravity, but sadly Eiden spent more time documenting boring stuff like Eagle’s time among the Eskimos and overly-detailed games of chess.

But Eiden must’ve taken a college course in “Men’s Adventure Writing 101” or something in the interim, or who knows, maybe he even just read a few of the earlier volumes, which were courtesy Manning Lee Stokes and Robert Lory. Because in The Deadly Cyborgs Eiden once again delivers a pulpy, promising plot, but this time he doesn’t bog the entire narrative down with unecessary detours; instead, he gets right to the good stuff. In this volume, my friends, John Eagle goes up against cyborg Yetis!!

Eagle’s boss Mr. Merlin has a secret research station in the Himalayas: Base One, which is composed of various scientists and is guarded by Anotnio Da Zara, an old commando hand with a fondness for mountain-climbing; he commands a legion of Sherpas. One evening Da Zara comes upon a Sherpa corpse, and the poor guy’s been shredded. Soon enough Da Zara finds the attacker – and it’s an actual Yeti, a monstrous, shambling creature with red-black fur, long arms, and huge claws!

Da Zara blows away two of the creatures with a .44 Magnum, and after a preliminary autopsy the corpses are quickly shipped to Merlin, who as usual runs the show from his high-tech fortress on fictional Makaluha island in Hawaii. Turns out these aren’t just your everyday, garden-variety Yetis; they’re actually humans, but ones who have been cybernetically and surgically altered, with armor plating welded to their joints and thighs and chests. Also their eyes have been replaced by “stereoscopic cameras” and their ears are “parabolic microphones,” and somehow Merlin is able to deduce that they are the work of Dr. Chen Yu, a Chinese scientist who was raised in the US but now has a hatred of Americans because his acupuncture-teaching father was ridiculed there(!).

Finally, John Eagle is called in. His mission is to venture to Base One in the Himalayas, hook up with Da Zara and his Sherpas, and locate Chen’s secret fortress, where he is creating these cyborg Yetis out of the locals. Oh, and Chen is the appropriately-psychotic villain pulp fiction demands…plus he has a gorgeous woman, nude and in chains, captive in his fortress. This is Susan Blackwood, a 27 year-old British Intelligence agent who was posing as a defecting college student in Peking. Elizabeth is kept tied up and constantly naked as part of a psychological campaign on Chen’s part; he wants to break Susan down and then turn her into a female cyborg Yeti! (Also, you’ve gotta love artist Sandy Kossin’s interpretation of Susan, on the lower left-hand corner of the cover; in the immortal words of Sir Mix-A-Lot, “baby got back!”)

Part of the series schtick is a healthy dose of adventure fiction, with Eagle testing himself against the elements. The Deadly Cyborgs is no different, with lots of detail about Eagle acclimating himself to the rigors of mountain-climbing in the Himalayas. Da Zara (who immediately thereafter drops out of the narrative) hooks Eagle up with two Sherpas, Ondi and Ang Dawa, who go off on a few weeks of mountain-climbing with Eagle. As expected this stuff is pretty egregious and uninteresting, but serves its purpose of page-filling. On and on it goes, overly detailed, but at least here this immaterial stuff only lasts for a few chapters, instead of the hundred pages of banal page-filler we got in The Ice Goddess.

After Eagle saves a thought-dead Ondi from an avalanche, the trio returns to Base One and merriment ensues, with the Sherpas breaking out Nepalese hash, “reputedly the strongest in the world.” We learn here that Eagle is “a moderate drinker” and smokes pot and hash “only as a social gesture.” When Anidede, the sexy and mini-skirted English-speaking sister of Ondi, waltzes up to Eagle and tells him she plans to have sex with him, and also that “To make love after hashish is very, very nice,” Eagle obviously makes an exception to the rule, toking right away with her.

Of the three series authors, Eiden writes the most explicit sex scenes. Here we not only get thorough description of Eagle’s shall we say finger-based explorations of Anidede’s sensitive region, but also lines like, “He slammed his shaft into her body and felt the immediate clonic spasms of her vulva.” Or even: “He hammered his shaft into her with stallion vigor until his own release came.” Man, that’s one slammed and hammered shaft! A later sex scene, the expected one between Eagle and the perennially-nude Susan Blackwood, is just as explicit, though Eiden like Stokes and Lory never goes for outright sleaze, instead couching the dirty stuff in a pseudo-“literary” feel.

Eagle’s so caught up with Anidede that he doesn’t learn until the next morning that the cyborgs have again attacked Base One. Here Eagle sees his first cyborg corpse in person, and Eiden does a nice job throughout capturing their eerie appearance, with their glowing “lidless eyes” which are cameras. After this Eagle hooks up again with the two Sherpas and sets off in pursuit; if he can track the surviving cyborgs, Eagle can find the secret base Dr. Chen is operating out of. Despite repeatedly stating that only large-caliber guns can take down the Yetis, Eiden still has the two Sherpas armed with nothing more than their standard carbines, and even more strangely Eagle is merely equipped with his typical C02-powered dart gun. Eagle also doesn’t make use of his chameleon suit, which is also strange given its heating properties.

The dart gun proves effective against the cyborg Yetis, though; Eagle and the two Sherpas come across a few of them as they’re in the process of attacking some helpless natives. Eagle’s steel “flechettes” blast right through the cyborg armor, and his headshots “jelly” their brains. But as expected Eagle ends up alone after this gory battle, and only here does he don his chameleon suit, which Eiden like Stokes fits with a helmet, rather than the hood Lory describes. (This though leads to some unintentional humor, as Eiden will write that Eagle has “locked in” the helmet, but then pages later he’ll have Eagle, his hands full, placing the dart gun between his “strong, white teeth.”)

Susan meanwhile has been going through her conditioning process, transported from a “hard cell” to a “soft cell,” the former the expected dungeon with chains, the latter an opulent bedroom with its own shower and bathroom. In between the drugs and the conditioning, Susan discovers she has a secret accomplice here: Markov, a KGB agent posing as one of the scientists in Chen’s lair. Markov is able to secretly slack off on Susan’s enforced drug regimen; there’s a goofy bit where we learn that Chen intends to dull her senses and play her films of “happy cyborgs” playing in the snow, so Susan will want to become one!

One thing I wish Eiden had exploited more in The Deadly Cyborgs is, well, the cyborgs themselves. Eagle gets in that brief skirmish with them, but then the threat moreso becomes the Chinese soldiers moving in on the area. Eagle doesn’t know it, but Chen has been declared insane by the Chinese government, who is sending in the troops to take over his fortress. Also instead of action we get lots of detail on how Eagle uses plastique to blow his way into an air shaft into the fortress, where he finds himself in a sub-corridor. 

Dispatching the two Chinese guards, Eagle runs into Susan Blackwood, who in true series style is so horny (merely from hearing Eagle speak English) that she throws herself on him, demanding that they screw, right here and now. Only after the “orgaic frenzy” does Eagle chastize himself for this lack of discipline, giving in to his lust in the middle of a mission. But then, we’ll recall that Eagle has often had sex with some random woman moments after infiltrating an enemy base (off the top of my head, there was #2: The Brain Scavengers and #3: The Laughing Death), so you have to wonder why he’s so hard on himself this time – but more importantly, this sort of nonsense, to me, only makes the series such escapist fun.

The climax sees Eagle, Markov, and a still-naked Susan (who despite being nude brandishes a Chinese “burp gun” in true Girls With Guns men’s adventure mag fashion) holding down the corridor while Chen sends cyborgs after them. Here finally we have more Eagle-vs.-cyborgs mayhem, with a handful of the massive Yetis attacking with violent results. Once again Eagle fires his darts point-blank into cyborg eyes and ears, but this time Eagle himself suffers serious damage, his right thumb nearly torn off by a Yeti claw. This lends tension to the finale, where for once Eagle is more desperate than usual, even struggling to load a new clip into his dart gun. (As for the thumb, the novel ends with Eagle figuring Merlin will have “the best surgeons in the world” fix it, but given the lack of continuity in the series, I’m betting the injury will never be mentioned again.) 

Eiden holds true to the other series tropes, with Eagle’s companions suffering even more drastically. Again though, this author shows a strange quirk for focusing on the wrong stuff. Instead of playing out more on battles with the Yetis and Dr. Chen, Eiden instead rushes through all of that and spends more time with Eagle wondering why he has such a strong hatred for Dr. Chen(?!). Eagle continues to ponder this for the last several pages, while we get more detail of how hard it is for him to sneak out of the base with his mangled hand. (Oh, and Eagle realizes on the last page that he hates Chen because Chen’s cyborg Yetis are an affront to nature!) I would’ve preferred more of the, you know, cyborg Yeti stuff, and less of the pointless introspection.

I think I say this every time, but this is my favorite men’s adventure series. Well, this and Andrew Sugar’s The Enforcer. But as I mentioned above John Eagle Expeditor is just pure escapist fun, so much so that you can overlook the occasional tendency to pad out the pages. The three authors more than make up for it with pulpy plotting, a lurid vibe, and lots of sex – and besides, there aren’t too many other series that would feature cyborg Yetis as the villains.