Showing posts with label Manning Lee Stokes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Manning Lee Stokes. Show all posts

Monday, September 18, 2023

The Aquanauts #11: Operation Mermaid


The Aquanauts #11: Operation Mermaid, by Ken Stanton
December, 1974  Manor Books

Well, friends, it’s my sad duty to report that The Aquanauts does not conclude on a high note; this final volume is the most tepid and uninteresting of the entire series. But then Manning Lee Stokes (aka “Ken Stanton”) has struggled with this series from the start; in each of the eleven volumes he’s taken a series that’s supposedly about a kick-ass underwater force and turned it into a sloooow-moving suspense thriller that’s more concerned with esponiage and crime. But at the very least Stokes has seen his vision through to the end; he clearly wrote every volume, as ever peppering the novels with his goofy, self-referential in-jokes. Operation Mermaid for example features a minor character named “Lt. Stokes” who reports to temporary Secret Underwater Service honcho Captain Greene. 

I still chuckle to myself when I imagine series “producer” Lyle Kenyon Engel receiving Stokes’s latest manuscript; it’s just a guess, but I’m betting that Engel came up with the plot for each volume of The Aquanauts, or at least the gist of a plot, and for this one Engel clearly wanted a mermaid. As I’ve mentioned before, Engel must have had a particular interest in this subject, given that mermaids were also mentioned in the earlier Engel-produced series Nick Carter: Killmaster, in the installment Moscow, not to mention the later Engel series Attar The Merman. So the title is “Operation Mermaid” and a mermaid actually appears in the first few pages of the novel, so Engel must’ve been happy…but after that Manning Lee Stokes turns in a snooze fest that comes off like an installment from a completely different series, featuring a new-to-the-series protagonist for the majority of the tale. I mean hell, “series protagonist” Tiger Shark doesn’t even show up until page 114! And the book’s only 192 pages! 

Rather, our hero for the majority of Operation Mermaid is a guy named Matt Baker, a black Navy intelligence officer who has just been assigned to the newly-formed Intelligence wing of the SUS, or SUSI (Secret Underwater Service Intelligence). This, we’re informed, is one of SUS boss Admiral Coffin’s projects, creating an intelligence wing for the SUS, and Baker is apparently the first guy. Oh and by the way, Admiral Coffin never actually appears in Operation Mermaid, other than talking over the phone and such; we are informed he’s still recuperating from his heart attack a few volumes ago, and Greene is still serving as SUS boss in his stead. So at the very least Operation Mermaid dispenses with that “Admiral Coffin and the head of the Navy meeting in mufti” scenario that was repeated throughout the majority of the series. 

So Baker is our star for most of the novel, which makes Operation Mermaid not even seem like an installment of The Aquanauts. Captain Greene doesn’t even show up until page 64. Instead it’s all about Matt Baker, a junior intelligence guy stationed in Hong Kong. We do see the titular mermaid at novel’s start, though; it opens beneath the waters outside Hong Kong, and a crusty old yank diver is up to no good, trying to get hold of some gold he’s learned about via the underworld. Then a nude mermaid – a Chinese mermaid, by the way – swims up, wearing nothing but her fishlike tail, and mouths the words, “Do you want fucky?” Oh plus she has gills that run beneath the breasts to her back. The old diver is all for it, even though it doesn’t seem real…then he wonders how indeed you would screw a mermaid, only to happily discover that the tail is just a costume the girl is wearing, and she’s nude beneath that, too. But then a Chinese “merman” stabs the diver in the back…and that’s all we’ll see of the mermaids until toward the end. 

Instead, that “lost gold” stuff will be the driving plot of Operation Mermaid. A particular Tong wants it, and a British spy named Ian Phillips wants it, plus there are also the Russians who want the mermaid, and the British government, which also wants the mermaid. Humans who can breathe underwater could change the global power structure! Or so we’re told. But none of it really goes anywhere. Instead it’s more focused on Phillips, an openly gay dude, and how he wants to screw Matt Baker, bluntly propositioning him and whatnot. Stokes has also kept the lurid vibe strong throughout The Aquanauts, at least, but there really isn’t much hanky-panky in this one. Hell, even Tiger Shark (when he finally shows up) goes without any action – even turning down an attractive young woman who practically begs him for the goods! 

But man as mentioned, Matt Baker is the star of the show for most of the duration of Operation Mermaid. And he makes for one helluva lame star. The dude is junior level, in way over his head, and spends the entire narrative either worrying over stuff or trying to figure out what’s going on. I wonder if Stokes planned to make this guy a new recurring character. Stokes has focused on other one-off characters in past installments, but Baker truly is the protagonist for a lot of the book; even when Tiger Shark finally appears, in the last quarter of the novel, his entrance is initially viewed through Baker’s perspective. So hell in a way I guess you could say this installment was Stokes’s version of The Spy Who Loved Me

Speaking of which, gay Brit Ian Phillips tries to put the moves on poor Baker incessantly in the novel, and an increasingly-annoyed Baker keeps telling him no. As for Phillips, he’s the British intelligence op in Hong Kong and he serves for the most part as the novel’s villain. He’s the one who puts Baker onto the mermaid business, and Baker goes to the funeral of the man who was killed by the mermaids, and soon enough Baker’s being made to drink by the victim’s loutish friends. Baker is such a loser that he becomes violently ill after being forced to drink some whiskey, because he’s never been much of a drinker – and speaking of which, there’s a lot of vomit-exploitation in the first half of the book, with Baker puking his guts out in the toilet and later having to step in the toilet when making his way into a crawlspace that’s hidden in the ceiling above it. 

Just the typical freaky Manning Lee Stokes stuff. Like later in the novel, Baker has been instructed to play on Phillips’ advances…up to the point of allowing the guy to give him a blowjob. Complete with a nude Baker stroking himself “absently” so as to get Phillips’s attention, and then Phillips going about it, and then Baker using the distraction to knock him out… Each volume of The Aquanauts has been pretty sleazy, but it must be noted that there’s no straight sex this time – except for when Phillips does the mermaid: “She giggled as he entered her from the rear,” and that’s all there is to it. Indeed, Phillips is actually bored as he fucks a mermaid, which should give you an idea of how bored Stokes himself was with this whole series. 

Well, what else? As mentioned a lot of the plot is concerned with planning and subterfuge and Phillips trying to get a coup with both the mermaids and the lost gold, while meanwhile the Russians and the Tongs are closing in. Stokes also works in his trademark crime-sleaze vibe when Baker discovers the corpse of his girlfriend…and we’re informed she’s been raped and strangled, a Manning Lee Stokes staple if ever there was one. For this Baker is wanted by the cops, someone having set him up, but this turns out to be a red herring of a subplot – and also Baker seems to have an easy enough time getting around Hong Kong as “a black man,” despite his concerns. But as usual it’s just Stokes grinding his gears as he pads out the pages. 

As ever, what makes all this so frustrating is that Stokes can still fire on all cylinders when he wants to: there are not one but two underwater combat sequences in Operation Mermaid, both instances featuring Tiger up against Russian frogmen. These are very tense, taut sequences, with Tiger again outnumbered and using his superior skills and resillience to survive. But both scenes are relatively quick, given how much space Stokes has devoted to Matt Baker and Ian Phillips. Hell, Stokes doesn’t even waste the usual time on Admiral Coffin or Captain Greene; the former as mentioned doesn’t actually appear in the book, and the latter only has a few scenes where he talks on the phone or meets with other bigwigs. That said, Greene does get in a shootout toward the end of the novel, the first action I believe he’s ever seen in The Aquanauts

But even this is an indication of how messy Stokes’s writing is. So, the novel climaxes with Baker trying to get the better of Phillips with the aforementioned bj, and then a victorious Baker hears someone coming up the stairs – all this is in Phillips’s house out by the docks or somesuch. Then we have Greene, with some Hong Kong cops, in a shootout with Russians and Tongs, outside the house…and then Greene discovers a beaten and half-dead Baker, and we only learn what happened to the poor guy via dialog. What I mean to say is, Stokes makes Baker practically the star of the show, then just unceremoniously drops him at the end. 

When Tiger Shark, the actual star of the show, finally appears, he too seems to have been changed. As stated in previous reviews, in the past couple volumes Stokes has developed this bit that “Tiger Shark” is only a title to be used when Bill Martin is on duty. Whereas in earliest volumes he was “Tiger” all the time in the narrative, now he’s “Bill,” until he’s in KRAB and on the job and is referred to as “Tiger.” It’s just goofy, and my hunch is it was an editorial request from Lyle Kenyon Engel, who was probably concerned prospective readers would flip through the books and see a bunch of references to “Tiger” in the narrative and conclude the series was for juvenile readers. 

But as we know, this is certainly an adult series – though as mentioned “Bill” himself goes without action for once. This time he’s also been retconned into a secret agent or something, and he shows up in Hong Kong with this hotstuff babe who is an undercover Navy Intelligence officer who is posing as his wife, and she basically begs him for sex behind closed doors, wanting to go all the way with the cover story, but our usually-virile hero turns her down because he doesn’t want to mix business with pleasure. WTF? This is another subplot that goes nowhere; the lady is not mentioned again after she storms off when Tiger turns her down. 

The mermaids, you won’t be surprised to learn if you’ve ever read a single Manning Lee Stokes novel, are pretty much forgotten. Actually, they’re just window dressing. They are introduced in the opening – a mermaid and a merman – and then disappear until toward the end, when they’re just bluntly brought back into the tale without much pizzaz. Stokes does try to go into the science of how the Chinese perfected this technology, of implanting gills in humans, but again there’s really not much to it. I also can’t believe Stokes didn’t have Tiger Shark screw the mermaid; I mean you’d figure that would be a given. Instead, Tiger only meets the girl at the very end of the book, and she does mouth the words “You want fucky?” to him beneath the waves, but Stokes only hints at what she’s said – because it’s all she says, all the time, and by novel’s end Stokes himself has gotten so tired of the joke that he doesn’t even write the phrase, and instead has Tiger Shark wondering if he read the girl’s lips correctly. 

The frogmen battles are cool, though, and fairly bloody: Tiger blows up two guys with his Sea Pistol, and another one he dispenses by jamming a shark baton with a charged end into the dude’s “rear” and it blows him in half. But these fights are over quick. We also get some underwater KRAB action, in fact a humorous part where Tiger shadows a Russian sub and then starts showing off when he realizes the sub can’t hit him, doing fancy maneuvers as he flings his ship around the sub. We also get new technology here that would have certainly played into future volumes: an underwater phone line, upon which Tiger can talk to Greene while Tiger is on missions in KRAB. 

But this was it for The Aquanauts. I would guess low sales killed the series, and it’s not surprising the sales were low. I can only imagine there were quite a few dissatisfied readers out there. But as I speculated before, I have a suspicion that Stokes’s last John Eagle Expeditor novels The Green Goddess and Silverskull started life as manuscripts for The Aquanauts. Not only were both volumes different from Stokes’s earlier Expeditor novels, but Silverskull in particular featured a subplot about a villain with a submarine, which would be in-line with The Aquanauts. But I guess we’ll never know. 

So, this ends my time with The Aquanauts. I still remember the day I excitedly came across a few volumes of this series at an antique store in Haltom City, Texas; I think it was in December 2013. This discovery inspired me to pick up the entire series (for a pittance, as it turned out), and a few months after is when I reviewed the first volume. And while I really enjoy the writing of Manning Lee Stokes, it must be said that The Aquanauts was not his strongest work, and I say again it clearly seems that he struggled with it. Other than the seventh volume, pretty much every volume was a little padded and dull. But also Stokes was truly invested in the writing, same as ever, and for that I’ve always ranked the guy as one of my favorites. He might have padded out the pages, but by God he did it with gusto!

Thursday, January 19, 2023

The Aquanauts #10: Operation Sea Monster


The Aquanauts #10: Operation Sea Monster, by Ken Stanton
No month stated, 1974

The penultimate volume of The Aquanauts finds Manning Lee Stokes taking the series into more of an undersea adventure sort of realm, dropping the lurid crime vibe of the previous volumes. Believe it or not, there’s no sick sexual sadism in this one! Indeed, there isn’t any kinky stuff at all, a far cry from the sleaze of the previous volume. More importantly, the title of this one is not misleading: hero Tiger Shark does go up against a literal sea monster. 

But man…it’s like only now, ten volumes in, Manning Lee Stokes has finally realized he’s writing a series titled “The Aquanauts.” The previous books have mostly been crime novels, only occasionally spruced up with some undersea frogman action. With Operation Sea Monster Stokes goes full-bore with the nautical angle, with all kinds of detail on Navy subs and sealabs and looking at charts and etc. To the point, honestly, that I actually missed the sick sexual sadism of the previous books. The sad truth is that Operation Sea Monster is kind of boring – and the previous ten books haven’t exactly been rip-roaring thrill rides. (Except for the seventh volume, though, certainly the highlight of the series…though admitedly I haven’t read the last volume yet!) 

While the title isn’t misdirection, the actual sea monster – a gargantuan beast which is apparently the result of a giant sea snake mating with a giant octopus – only appears sporadically. The vast majority of Operation Sea Monster is focused on the attempt to find an experimental sea lab and save its inhabitants. And, following the template of the previous books, Stokes does find the opportunity to have Tiger Shark get in combat with a few Soviet frogmen. And as with the previous books this sequence is the highlight of the book. Manning Lee Stokes has a specialty for putting his protagonists through the wringer, and he does so to Tiger Shark in this sequence, adrift in the sea with dwindling tanks and an unknown number of enemy frogmen coming for him. 

There’s a strange change, though; Tiger Shark’s real name is Bill Martin, one of the more unimaginative action-hero names (down there with, uh, Ben Martin), and this time Stokes suddenly insists on referring to him as “Bill” when he’s not on assignment. Only when he is activated for Secret Underwater Service duty does he become “Tiger Shark.” To the point that even Tiger’s boss, Tom Greene, has to remind himself that it’s “Bill Martin” when Tiger isn’t on duty. It just seems rather strange after nine previous volumes where it was “Tiger” all the time, on a mission or not. It’s just another indication of how Stokes has suddenly decided to focus on the red tape of Navy administration and whatnot; much of Operation Sea Monster is concerned with Navy protocol and the like, to the point that the book’s a bit of a slog. 

Another problem is that Tiger Shark’s seldom in the novel. This too isn’t unprecedented; previous volumes, like for example #5: Stalkers Of The Sea, put the focus more on Greene, and also Admiral Coffin, crusty boss of SUS, has featured in his share of the narrative. But as I’ve theorized before, Stokes must have seen this is as “team” series, meaning the “Aquanauts” were really Coffin, Greene, and Tiger Shark, with the latter being the one who featured in the action stuff. This time though, it isn’t even Greene or Coffin who take the brunt of the narrative; it’s a few one-off characters who are trapped on the lost sea lab. Stokes spends much of the novel detailing their plight, to the extent that you feel you’re reading a standalone novel. It seemed clear to me that Stokes was perhaps getting burned out with writing the series and just did something completely different this time. 

I did appreciate the continuity, though; we pick up some indeterminate time after the previous volume, but we are informed that Admiral Coffin, who suffered a heart attack last time, has just returned as head of SUS. Last time much was made of Greene’s shaky assumption of control in the old man’s absence, but Stokes doesn’t spend too much time with Greene in Operation Sea Monster. There’s an interesting-in-hindsight part where Coffin speculates that if he doesn’t take it easy at work he won’t “be around in 1978,” and as it turned out this was true for Stokes himself; he died in 1976. You can almost wonder if Coffin’s various asides on his age and the strain he puts on himself is Stokes musing on himself and his own prolific writing pace. 

One thing Stokes has whittled down on in the past few volumes is Tiger Shark getting lucky while on a mission. Instead, we meet up with him as he’s on leave in the English countryside, getting busy with a thirty year-old hotstuff reporter named Susan: “Thrusting deeper into the deep red channel that you could never chart absolutely.” Here we also get to see Tiger the pickup artist, as he orchestrates a fender-bender to get the beautiful woman’s attention. This will be it for Tiger’s extracurricular fun; he spends the rest of the text either in his submersible KRAB or on a Navy destroyer as it searches for the lost sea lab. 

The titular sea monster, described as “whale big…blobby and diffuse,” appears in the extended opening sequence, attacking the sea lab and its adjoining submarine near the Mariana Trench, which we are informed is the deepest stretch of ocean in the world. It rips the sub apart with its massive tentacles (which have glowing eyes on them) and sends the sea lab off into the depths of the sea; the Navy receives one message from the lost crew: “It’s following us.” Also, a frogman is torn to pieces by the creature, and we're told that part of the monster’s flesh was discovered on his knife, so a lot of the story has to do with Coffin and the Navy admin trying to determine whether there really is a sea monster or if the crew has gone nuts from oxygen contamination. 

Actually, it isn’t just the sea lab much of the narrative is concerned with; Tiger spends almost just as much time trying to locate the torn-apart submarine that was attending the lab. It’s in this section that the fight with the Russians occurs; a Soviet sub has converged on the area where the downed US sub might be, and it’s clear the Russians will pretend to “help” the stricken ship as a ruse to get in there and take photos or whatever. When Tiger Shark is inspecting the wreck he is ambushed by a frogman, and in a later underwater sequence he is ambushed yet again by two more frogmen from the same Soviet sub. Stokes really excels at fierce combat scenes and here we have Tiger blowing apart one guy’s head with his Sea Pistol and knifing the other. 

That’s really it for the action in Operation Sea Monster. The climax does have Tiger up against the titular monster, though. It’s only for a few pages, but we have Tiger chasing after the fleeing behemoth in KRAB and hammering it with torpedos. But yes, Tiger Shark does witness the monster, so he is a believer by the end of the book; the speculation is the beast lives six+ miles down and only comes up every few “generations.” It looks like Stokes continues with the sci-fi element for the series, as the next (and final) volume of The Aquanauts apparently concerns a mermaid.

Monday, June 6, 2022

The Cobra Kill (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #47)


The Cobra Kill, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1969

Within a few pages of this installment of Nick Carter: Killmaster, written by series veteran Manning Lee Stokes, I realized that it was actually sort of a sequel to an earlier Stokes yarn, possibly The Red Guard (1967). I am assuming that earlier volume, which I haven’t yet read, features Nick (as he was referred to in these earlier volumes) in Hong Kong, up against the Red Chinese and some Chinese tongs. The Cobra Kill opens with Nick once again in Hong Kong, this time on vacation, but his cover’s been blown and he’s on the run from various Tongs and Commies who are out to get him – as revenge for the incidents in that previous volume.  Or maybe it was another Stokes volume...maybe even one I’ve read but have forgotten! 

After this establishing setup, though, The Cobra Kill becomes its own novel, with no further references to the events of The Red Guard. In fact the reader doesn’t even need to have read the earlier book; it’s not like the plot of this one hinges on anything that happened in it. Nick will be out of Hong Kong and on into Indonesia and Malaysia for the majority of the novel. But actually it’s not even “Nick” this time…sadly, friends, we’ve now moved into the first-person years of Nick Carter: Killmaster, which would last until the mid 1980s. Nick Carter himself tells us the story, and thankfully he doesn’t prove to be as much of a bore as he was in the other first-person Killmaster novels I’ve read by Manning Lee Stokes, The Red Rays and The Black Death. The action pretty much keeps moving, with Nick not slowing down the proceedings with his incessant asides like he did in those other two books. But then we do get a fair bit of jungle travelogue in the novel, which gives The Cobra Kill more the vibe of something like Joaquin Hawks

Before I get into it though I wanted to note some things I’ve belatedly noticed about Stokes’s take on Nick. For one, Stokes doesn’t refer to Nick’s customary trio of weapons by their goofy nicknames: Wilhelmina the Luger is just “the Luger,” Hugo the stiletto is just “the stiletto,” and Pierre the gas bomb…actually the gas bomb isn’t even mentioned in The Cobra Kill. I can’t recall if Stokes used the weapons nicknames in the third-person Killmaster novels he wrote. Another thing is that Stokes’s take on Nick is that he’s purely an assassin; Stokes takes the “Killmaster” title literally, in that Nick Carter is only ever sent out on assignments that require someone to be killed. So this is sort of like the 007 setup of James Bond, but whereas “007” just means Bond has the approval to kill, Nick Carter is straight-up an assassin…something Manning Lee Stokes makes quite clear in The Cobra Kill

In fact Nick is certain that the fact he’s a professional assassin scares a particular AXE contact this time out. As mentioned though when we meet Nick he’s on vacation in Hong Kong, but it’s as if we’ve missed another story entirely, as we’re informed that within the past few hours Nick has run afoul of Tongs, Commies, and the cops, and he’s hiding in a US embassy…just as a call comes in from his boss David Hawk. Nick is to leave Hong Kong and proceed to Indonesia, where he’ll eventually go to Malaysia; the Malaysian government has worked out a secret deal with AXE for Nick, top AXE Killmaster, to kill commie rabble-rouser Lim Yang, aka The Red Cobra. This Mao-type leader has put together a guerrilla army of red insurgents in the Malaysian government, and since the government has never acknowledged him, they want him quietly killed by an outside party. It’s a bit of a belabored setup, but it’s Nick’s job, so he’s on the case – again, he is a professional assassin, and his job isn’t saving the world, it’s killing a communist leader. (I wonder if Nick has a celll phone number where I can reach him?) 

Seriously though, the anti-communist invective is strong throughout The Cobra Kill; Nick even notes in reluctant admiration how the Red Cobra has gone after college kids in Malaysia, knowing they’d be susceptible to his message, given how they’d want to go against their parents. But Nick, AXE, the Malaysian government, and practically everyone else realizes that communism is a bad idea, so there are no niceties in play; the job calls for the Red Cobra’s death, which would kill off the movement. Nick pays an expat – a former newsman who killed his wife and moved to Hong Kong, we’re informed randomly enough – to safely get out of Hong Kong. Once Nick’s in Indonesia the plot kicks in…the major portion of The Cobra Kill is Nick trying to find the Red Cobra, and most of it takes place in the jungles of Malaysia. The short sequence in Indonesia is pretty much the only part of the novel where Nick’s in civizliation. 

Nick, posing as a boisterous vacationer in a plush hotel, gets a gander at his AXE contact…who of course is a hotstuff babe. Indeed, a sultry “Malay-Chinese” who really turns on the Killmaster. Nick delivers a paean to this girl’s legs that I just had to share: 


The quota for Nick Carter: Killmaster was that Nick would bang at least three broads per book. Stokes as we know would often veer from templates – per Will Murray in his 1982 article on Killmaster, Stokes often went off-course from the setups series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel provided. But of course this leggy Malay-Chinese contact, whose name turns out to be Mora, will be our narrator’s first conquest in The Cobra Kill. Stokes isn’t very explicit this time; again, Stokes’s first-person installments are altogether more tame than his third-person ones, both in the sex and the violence departments. While there isn’t much sleaze, we do learn after the fact that Mora is sort of a nympho…I mean, not a full one, at least per Nick’s post-boink assessment, given that Mora can at least achieve orgasm. She’s just cock crazy is all…not that Nick uses those exact words, being a gentleman and all. Humorously enough, Nick offers to set Mora up with “Doc Saxe, the AXE headshrinker!” 

Nick heads to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Stokes clearly did his research on the flora and fauna of the country – and he wants you to know it. Have I mentioned before that my wife is from Malaysia? I thought about showing her The Cobra Kill to have her vet the details, but then figured the hell with it. One thing I noticed though was that Stokes seems to imply that everyone in Malaysia is Muslim, and this certainly is not true. But then again it could just be the characters Nick encounters. Otherwise Stokes really brings to life the humid green hell of the country, particularly when Nick gets into the jungle with its chittering monkeys, crops of durian, and random cloudbursts. Stokes really did his research on durian, a local fruit which, per Nick, “smells like a sewer” but tastes like heaven. I’d never even heard of durian until I met my wife – she and her family went on about how it was notorious for its bad smell but good taste, but honestly I didn’t think it smelled that bad. 

Actually, Stokes makes one goof: he has Nick flying into Kuala Lumpur Airport. I learned from my own research years ago, during a project I was working on, that there was no major airport in Kuala Lumpur (or “KL,” as the locals call it) until the 1990s – until then all flights went to an airport in Subang, a nearby city. So Stokes, despite his voluminous research, must’ve just winged it (lame pun not intended) when it came to the aiport. But then his intent is to get Nick into the jungle asap. The stuff in KL is over quickly; Nick finds that a colleague has been murdered, and the Killmaster makes his own first kill on page 61 when he bashes the assassin’s head in with the butt of his Luger. This leads to a brutal fight with another assassin, in which Nick “blinds” the guy by jabbing his fingers into the guy’s eyes – though Stokes apparently forgets this incidental detail, as when Nick takes the unconscious assassin off to be interrogated, the guy wakes up and starts “look[ing] around.” 

From here The Cobra Kill gets into the jungle, and will stay there for the duration. Stokes really excels at capturing the vibe of the locale, and as usual he serves up very evocative sequences – like when Nick comes across an abandoned village during a sudden squall, and soon discovers that he’s not alone. But Manning Lee Stokes as ever understands exactly what we expect from the genre: the mysterious figure darting around the ghostly village is a hotstuff native jungle girl named Siti who will serve as Nick’s partner for the remainder of the tale. And of course also per the template, they’ll ultimately get down to some jungle love – with jungle girl Siti (who refers to herself in third-person) insisting that Nick take her from the rear for their first boink: “This way, my way, Siti is comfortable and have all of you, Tuan. All!” 

A curious thing about Stokes’s first-person Killmaster novels is that Nick Carter comes off as a bit obsessive in them. Obsessive about some very unsettling things. In The Red Rays, for example, narrator Nick was obsessed with the fact that, early in the novel, he’d had sex with a triple agent who had been condemned to death; that Nick had, essentially, “screwed a corpse.” This led to periodic asides in the text where Nick ruminated over his bout of necrophilia…even wondering at times if the poor girl was dead yet. Indeed Nick came off as quite the creep in that one. So screwing corpses was his obsession in The Red Rays; in The Cobra Kill his obsession is latrines, and shit. Literal shit. “I went into the latrine and looked at the turds” is an actual line from the book, and in fact I was going to start off the review with that quote but thought it might be a little too off-putting for the more sensitive readers of the blog. 

And why is Nick so obsessed with shit this time? Because he’s tracking the Red Cobra’s guerrilla army through the dense jungles of Malaysia, and by “checking the latrines” of the recently-vacated campsites Nick can get a gauge of how recently the Red Cobra’s army has been in the area. At one point he even goes into a latrine to poke “the feces” with a stick to judge the freshness! He’s also quite interested in how the Red Cobra puts lime on his latrines to cut down the stench. It gets to be a bit much, and honestly made me miss the days when Nick would obsess over screwing a corpse. But this sort of thing makes up a large portion of The Cobra Kill; I mean it’s a lot of jungle travelogue, but Stokes capably captures the setting and brings it to life. Anyway this “latrine checking” is how Nick gradually closes in on the Red Cobra, who despite his colorful name is actually a bland character, an older Malay Chinese with a professorial air. 

But even though he looks harmless, the Red Cobra is truly sadistic, known for wiping out entire villages. Another hallmark of Stokes’s Nick Carter is that he’s a professional, a calm and cool killer, but this time he is driven to hate his target, and for the first time (so Nick tells us), he can’t wait to carry out his assassination. Another hallmark of Stokes’s Killmaster novels is that he’ll take Nick through the wringer, and he certainly does here. Given that the Red Cobra is Chinese, he’s “naturally devious,” and isn’t content to just shoot Nick in the head. Instead, Nick is outfitted with a scuba tank that only has an hour of air in it, and is sent down to a sunken “Jap” sub from WWII (“Jap” is used repeatedly throughout the novel); if Nick can find his way out of the sub, he can live. But of course all avenues of escape from the sub are closed off due to the wreckage, and the Red Cobra has scuba-suited men patrolling the water with spearguns. This is one of the most tense climaxes Stokes has ever delivered for the series, to the extent that the reader himself feels as if he’s running out of air. 

Other than this thrilling climax, there’s nothing really noteworthy about The Cobra Kill, and it almost appears that Stokes pushed himself through the writing by doing a lot of research on Malaysia and jungle survival. Again per Will Murray, it’s quite clear that Stokes was burned out with the series at this point. Whether or not this is true, The Cobra Kill turned out to be Manning Lee Stokes’s penultimate volume of Killmaster. The following year he turned in the aforementioned The Black Death, and that was it for him on the series. It’s easy to see why, as at this point he was also writing Richard Blade and The Aquanauts for Lyle Kenyon Engel. And one can see the kernels of both series in The Cobra Kill: simple jungle sexpot Siti could be any number of the simple barbarian sexpots in Dimension X, and the tense climax with the sunken sub and the empty scuba tank could’ve just as easily featured Tiger Shark as Nick Carter.

Monday, January 3, 2022

The Aquanauts #9: Evil Cargo


The Aquanauts #9: Evil Cargo, by Ken Stanton
No month stated, 1973  Manor Books

Manning Lee Stokes loved his in-jokery, and this ninth volume of The Aquanauts features his biggest in-joke yet, as Manning Lee Stokes himself guest-stars in Evil Cargo. Sort of. I knew something was up when the prologue featured a few quotes on the definition of “karma,” and one of the people quoted was Kermit Welles – a pseudonym Stokes used in the ‘50s and ‘60s. But as it turns out, Kermit Welles actually appears as a character in this Aquanauts yarn, and one can only wonder how much the character is based on Stokes himself. 

The novel occurs between September 1972 and January 1973. There are a few allusions to previous volumes, but the biggest development here on the home front is that crusty Admiral Coffin, boss of the Secret Underwater Service, suffers a heart attack and is taken out of commision for the duration of Evil Cargo. This happens early in the book, as Coffin is briefing Tiger Shark and Captain Tom Greene on “Code Coke,” their new SUS assignment: someone’s stolen a Yankee-class Soviet sub, and it’s being used to run heroin and coke into the US. Coffin has a heart attack before he can finish the briefing – we’ve been told since the beginning of the series that he’s way past retirement age – and control of SUS falls on Greene’s shoulders. He will prove to be a pretty weak-ass boss, and luckily Coffin’s back in action by novel’s end. Given the lack of much continuity in the series, I wonder if Coffin’s heart trouble will even be mentioned in the next two volumes. 

As usual though Coffin, Greene, and Tiger Shark himself almost come off like supporting characters. As I’ve said in just about every Aquanauts review I’ve written, this series has more in common with the standalone crime paperbacks Lyle Kenyon Engel “produced” in the ‘70s, with the “underwater commando” stuff almost an afterthought. This is especially prevalent in Evil Cargo, which doesn’t even bother with the Cold War intrigue at all; it’s really just a crime novel, with the main characters a pair of Mafia creeps who come up with the “drug run via sub” plan. Actually, Kermit Welles is the character who comes up with the idea, but more on that anon. 

The entire novel is almost a prefigure of Stokes’s later Corporate Hooker, Inc., which was in fact one of those standalone BCI paperbacks. It’s got the same setup, with a scheme involving waterborne Mafia nefariousness and a twisted love triangle. Here it’s Dom Caprio, hulking and hirsute New York mob boss, who in a brief opening chapter meets meek Harvard student Harvey Fletcher in 1962. Dom hires Fletcher, we’ll learn, to be his accountant, but Fletcher ultimately doesn’t factor much into the novel; his subplot has him coping with the fact that he’s gay and going to a tough “leather” guy for kicks. After this opening we flash to 1972, and learn that Dom, now a successful mobster, is “banging” Harvey’s wife Anita for kicks – and it was interesting to see that “banging” was being used for sex in 1973. 

This is certainly the sleaziest Aquanauts yet. Dom and Anita get right down to it in full-bore detail, in a crazed matter almost equaling The Nursery. There are some back door shenanigans, you see…that is, after Anita literally measures Dom’s 9 inches with a ruler, and then implores him, “Please, honey, fuck me in the ass!” Stokes was in his early sixties when he wrote this novel – as is Kermit Welles, we’ll learn – so it was great to see he’d only gotten more sordidly kinky with age. But then it’s all even more in-jokery, as we’ll learn that Dom himself is an “inveterate reader of paperbacks,” going through “three a day” at times; he especially likes ones with “plenty of gore and sex,” and judges their quality by how big of a hard-on they give him! 

After this escapade Dom heads back to Manhattan but takes a wrong route and ends up in a “hick town” near Montrose, New York (or perhaps it is Monstrose – Stokes isn’t clear), and, stopping in a bar, meets once-famous author Kermit Welles. Manning Lee Stokes himself lived in Montrose, or near it (according to his Wikipedia page he died in Peekskill, New York, which is just a few miles from Montrose), so it’s clear that he based Kermit Welles somewhat on himself. Further evidence: Dom’s favorite Welles novel is the one where “the lady got her head sliced off by the Jap sword.” Yes, friends, this is The Lady Lost Her Head, the title referenced by Welles himself. In the real world, The Lady Lost Her Head was published under Stokes’s own name, so it’s curious he referenced this book in Evil Cargo and not one of his actual “Kermit Welles” novels. 

But the Kermit Welles of the novel is more successful than the real-world Manning Lee Stokes; we learn that Welles’s The Lady Lost Her Head was made into a movie fifteen years ago, but Hollywood “butchered” it. That was then, though; now Welles is basically a lush, spending most of his time and money in a dingy bar here in this “hick town” in upstate New York. He makes his living off residuals or foreign reprints of his old books, and when Dom meets him Welles is in the process of begging the bartender to accept his check. It’s a down and out caricature of Stokes for sure, or at least I assume so, perhaps along the lines of the self-caricature William Shatner played in Free Enterprise. One must wonder if the description of Kermit Welles matches the description of Manning Lee Stokes:


Unfortunately Welles isn’t in Evil Cargo nearly enough; he pretty much steals the novel as is. He speaks in a sort of highfalutin tone, trying his best not to correct Dom’s poor grammar. He’s also a bit of a coward, but this is understandable given that Dom’s a brawny mobster who has an army of thugs at his disposal. The crux of Welles’s storyline involves Dom coming up with the bizarre idea of hiring Welles to write a novel – for ten thousand dollars – with Dom intending to use the manuscript to come up with schemes for his underworld empire(!). And of course Welles is to tell no one of this, not even the woman he’s “shacked up with.” Stokes’s biggest misgiving is that he doesn’t properly explain Dom’s scenario, and even worse we don’t get to read any of Welles’s manuscript. This would’ve been opportunity for even more metatextual in-jokery, but all we learn is that it concerns a submarine…run, apparently, by a bunch of horny women! 

Given that the novel is told out of sequence, we already know at the start that Dom got this “impossible idea” off the ground (or under the sea, I should say), managing to use some underworld contacts to steal a Soviet sub in Cuba. Welles pretty much disappears from the narrative at this point, and not to spoil anything but he’s still alive at novel’s end; Dom upholds his offer and gives Welles the ten thousand. Welles then ditches the woman he’s been living off of, moves back to Manhattan, and the last we see of him he’s planning to start writing again. “Early sixties wasn’t old, not for a writer.” The same age as Stokes at this time, so one wonders again how much of Kermit Welles here is a reflection of the real-life Manning Lee Stokes; we already know from Will Murray’s 1982 article on Nick Carter: Killmaster that Stokes was “industrious but hard-drinking,” so certainly there’s a bit of truth to Welles’s tendency to be a lush. We also get the tidbit that he doesn’t write as well drunk as he used to! 

And that is reflected in Evil Cargo itself. Because believe it or not the “heroin sub” is kept almost entirely off-page, and Stokes spends more time on the twisted Dom-Anita-Harvey love triangle. There’s a lot of kinky stuff here, all very sleazy ‘70s. For example Dom practically begs Anita to “go down” on him, but she refuses…then one night he sneaks into her place and discovers her giving some other jerk an enthusiastic bj. And meanwhile as mentioned we get some stuff with Harvey visiting his gay acquaintances. In fact, Stokes writes all the sex material for his one-off characters; poor Tiger Shark is celibate this time. We do however get the casual TMI mention that Greene, as ever pining for his wife Evelyn, has had a “wet dream” about her! 

Tiger Shark? I almost forgot about him…even though he’s ostensibly the star of the show. The funny thing is, despite the focus on lurid love triangles and lush pulp writers, Evil Cargo actually contains the best underwater action scene yet in The Aquanauts. Certainly the most brutal. Tiger Shark is sent into Cuban territorial waters to spy on the stolen sub, which the SUS has already tracked down…but at this point Greene’s in charge, and the weak-ass gives Tiger the order to swim over to the sub, pound out a message in SOS on the hull, and tell them they’re all under arrest!! Tiger chafes at this stupid idea, just wanting to blow the damn sub up, regardless of the loss of life – and he’s certain this is how Admiral Coffin would’ve played it. But he’s a Navy man and he follows orders. 

As expected it goes poorly, and for once Tiger Shark is caught unawares. Four frogmen come out of the sub and surprise attack him, leading to a very tense sequence that just keeps going. Stokes, despite his padding, really knows how to ramp up action scenes and take his protagonists through the ringer, and he does so here. In fact Tiger’s so outmatched that he kicks off his gear and races for the surface, 240 feet up, knowing it will be certain death due to the bends. But at least he’ll have a chance, unlike down here. There follows a crazy survival setup where Tiger staggers around a small Cuban isle, finds someone who will help him (in exchange for future payment), and jury rigs his own decompression chamber, using an old car and an air hose. It’s crazy stuff and very tense, but again Stokes pulls this weird gimmick as he always does and, next time we see Tiger, it’s some time later and he’s safely back at SUS HQ. In other words, Stokes completely cuts out the escape sequence itself. 

But then, another tidbit: “Welles had always been good at that – everything first draft and six weeks to do a book.” No doubt more real-world insight into Manning Lee Stokes’s writing method, not to mention possibly explaining why there are often so many missed opportunities in his books. Oh, and not content to sort of feature himself in the book, Stokes also finds the opportunity to slyly reference his own name; we get an off-hand mention of the law firm Birnbaum, Fenster, Stokes, and Engel. Double in-jokery at that; “Engel” of course a reference to Lyle Kenyon Engel. If you can’t tell, I would’ve enjoyed an entire book about Kermit Welles…it could’ve been a more serious take on The Last Buffoon. But as mentioned Welles isn’t in the novel nearly enough, and by book’s end we learn he’s in Federal protection – he himself is innocent so far as Dom’s plans go, as all Welles was hired to do was write a book, with no idea of Dom’s grander plot. And, naturally, it’s a Federal agent named Frank Manning who informs the SUS of Welles’s innocence in the plot! 

The out-of-sequence narrative takes away a lot of the tension of the book, and also Harvey Fletcher isn’t properly focused on, so that his face-off with Dom at novel’s end could’ve been more powerful than it is. Speaking of which, Captain Greene’s foul-up with nearly getting Tiger Shark killed isn’t properly focused on; by the time Admiral Coffin’s back in charge, it’s understood that Greene should have just ordered the damn sub blown, but his plan was “understandable” given that he’s not nearly as cold-blooded as Coffin is. Or something. The helluva it is, Tiger’s finally ordered to torpedo the sub to hell at novel’s end…well, sort of. First, for undisclosed reasons (possibly to pad more pages), he’s ordered to tail the sub in his KRAB submersible, back to the sub’s secret base near Iceland. This is a cool scene at least, with the action taking place on a stormy sea. But at the same time it’s just more padding, as the entire plan for tailing the sub to its base is pointless – and quickly disposed of. 

Stokes scores points by working the title into the novel; we’re told that the sub is carrying an “evil cargo.” Would’ve been cooler if this was the title of Welles’s manuscript for Dom, but as mentioned we don’t get much detail at all about the manuscript. The concept alone though is really out-there; I mean a mobster hiring a pulp novelist to write an entire novel for him, so that the mobster can mine the manuscript for ideas! And Dom wants a full novel, not an outline, as Welles suggests. But what is such a wild concept isn’t properly exploited…I thought Stokes would go all the way with it, and have a fictional underwater service as the good guys in Welles’s manuscript, and etc, but I guess he didn’t want to play it too on the nose. As it is, Evil Cargo is entertaining for the peek at Manning Lee Stokes himself. And also the battle between Tiger and the rival frogmen is the best action scene yet in the novel, or at least one of the best. 

Two more volumes were to follow, and judging from the titles and back cover synopses they get into more of a sci-fi realm, with sea monsters and mermaids(!). Stokes was clearly invested in the series, so I’ll be sorry to see The Aquanauts come to an end.

Thursday, November 11, 2021

The Filthy Five (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #27)


The Filthy Five, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1967  Award Books

One of the things I dig about Nick Carter: Killmaster is that you can take the work of the various authors who wrote for the series and excise their individual volumes into a standalone series. So then the eighteen volumes by Manning Lee Stokes, who wrote The Filthy Five, could be seen as its own series, separate from the installments by the other ghostwriters. Other than the recurring setup of Nick, his weapons and gadgets, AXE, and boss David Hawk, the ghostwriters were free to do their own thing, and I doubt many of them were reading each other’s work. In this regard, then, you could break out individual series runs from the overal series itself to make up various mini-series. 

Look, even I doubt that opening paragraph made any sense, so let me start over. The Filthy Five was written by my man Manning Lee Stokes, and it is of a piece with his other volumes of the series, though in this case it’s among the better ones. It’s also in the much preferable third-person of the early Nick Carter years. But what makes The Filthy Five so interesting is that it is a trial run for Stokes’s later Aquanauts series. I mean it is so similar that you could go through the text and change “Nick Carter” to “Tiger Shark” and “David Hawk” to “Admiral Coffin” and you’d have what could be passed off as a volume of The Aquanauts

To whit, each volume of that later series, which was also “produced” by Lyle Kenyon Engel, follows the same template: there’s some “water” action, usually involving scuba, there are a lot of scenes with “crusty” old Admiral Coffin handling the strategy, there’s a villain with some nefarious plan involving the water in some fashion, and generally there will be an obnoxious drunkard who either serves as a henchman or acts as a villain in some other capacity. All of that is present in The Filthy Five, to the extent that I wondered if Stokes just looked back to this Killmaster for inspiration when he started writing The Aquanauts, or if Engel himself liked this one a lot and decided to spin a series off of it. 

The only thing lacking from the usual Stokes template, shockingly enough, is the typically-mandatory sex scene. Just to drop the bomb here at the start, let me inform you that Nick Carter does not, I repeat does not have sex in the course of The Filthy Five! The book doesn’t even close with him about to get busy! In fact the novel ends with a bald and flame-scarred Nick recuperating in the hospital. This is I think the only volume of the series I’ve yet read where Nick Carter does not get his mandatory booty. So far as I know, Engel established a “three women” standard for each volume, so he must’ve really appreciated Stokes’s work; I know from Will Murray’s 1981 study of Nick Carter: Killmaster that Stokes would often diverge from the outlines Engel provided, and that’s certainly the case here…and I’m not even just talking about the lack of sex. 

If you read the back cover synopsis, you’ll be under the impression that The Filthy Five concerns a plot to assassinate “the new President.” And, judging from the title, “five” people must be behind this plot. Presumably this is the idea Engel came up with. What Stokes actually writes is something wholly different. While the assassination angle is gradually worked into the plot – before being quickly dropped – the plot of the book actually concerns a madman billionaire who wants to fund his own army, conquer Haiti with it, and start up his own country. Stokes so awkwardly works in the assassination angle that it’s clear he was only doing so because he was trying to cater to an outline he’d been given. The same goes for the title, which must’ve been something else Engel (or maybe Award Books) came up with; the reader must do some serious lifting to figure out who the “filthy five” might be. 

First of all, to answer the question I’m sure many of you are asking – no, Pok doesn’t appear in this one!! I am of course referring to the Vietnamese “houseboy” introduced in Stokes’s earlier The Devil’s Cockpit. But then, we don’t see Nick at home in this one; when we meet him, at novel’s start, he’s already on assignment in Puerto Rico, posing as a beach bum along a stretch of beachside land owned by the mysterious Sir Malcolm Drake. And, I should note, The Filthy Five occurs over just a few days, so there’s no point where Nick does go home; he stays in Puerto Rico throughout. This stretch of land, with the wonderful name Gallows Cay, is Drake’s private fiefdom, and is patrolled by armed guards. Nick confronts two of them in the novel’s suspenseful opening. 

The chief guard here is the obnoxious drunkard type who would factor so heavily in later Aquanauts novels. This time the character is named Harry Crabtree; he’s a loudmouthed Australian brute who most brings to mind the similar character Neil “The Walrus” McCreary (who was also a drunken Australian lout) in The Aquanauts #6. When he’s on form, Stokes is one of my favorites, if not my very favorite, and he’s on form throughout the majority of The Filthy Five. This opening, in which Nick tests out how far he can push Crabtree, while still pretending to be a meek drifter, is very effective. And, unlike some of Stokes’s other material, it actually has repercussions later in the novel. 

As mentioned The Filthy Five takes place over a day or two, so Stokes keeps the narrative moving at a steady pace. After the confrontation with Crabtree (in which the sadist shoots at Nick – who is still playing the hapless beach bum – to run him off the beach), Nick goes back to his hiding spot, breaks out the high-tech AXE underwater gear, and scuba dives to a sunken galleon. This is a very effective scene, and again incredibly similar to material that would come in The Aquanauts. Here Nick is to meet Monica Drake, forty-something wife of Sir Malcolm; still hot despite “breasts too large for beauty” and a “tire of fat” around her midsection. There’s actually more underwater action here than the average Aquanauts yarn, complete with Nick fighting a frogman and a pack of blood-hungry sharks descending on the scene. This sequence is one of the highlights of the novel, and here again Stokes demonstrates that his Nick Carter is more “macho” (per Will Murray) than other series ghostwriters. 

Surprisingly, it keeps going; Nick returns topside, slips back to his hideout car (a half-dead heap from the ‘40s, per his beach bum cover), and starts driving off to safety. Stokes seemingly borrows from Kiss Me Deadly, as a naked and screaming woman runs into the path of Nick’s car. This will turn out to be hotstuff native babe Dona, and Stokes settles into a long-simmer sequence in which the girl claims some men were trying to rape her, but Nick certain that she’s lying and really just another agent of Sir Malcolm’s sent to suss out whether Nick’s really a beach bum or not…and soon Dona herself knowing that Nick isn’t just a regular beach bum but continuing the charade regardless. Stokes plays out the entire ridiculous nature of Cold War espionage here, with the two rival agents both aware of who one another really is, but acting on as if they’re just regular folks; of course there’s a sexual angle as well, with Dona trying to put her wiles on Nick, but as mentioned “the AXEman” goes celibate this time. 

The novel gets even more like The Aquanauts when Nick’s boss David Hawk shows up and starts featuring in his own chapters; he’s not deskbound like the character is when other ghostwriters handle the series, but out on the field directing strategy. And yes, it is all identical to the stuff with crusty old Admiral Coffin in The Aquanauts, with Hawk here a cagey silver fox who hides the fact that he wears dentures. And here’s where the “assasination” plot comes in, as Hawk ultimately figures out that Sir Malcolm’s been paid a billion dollars in gold by the Red Chinese to assassinate the newly-elected US President. Sir Malcolm’s hired four Cuban criminals to be his assassins; presumably them plus Sir Malcolm equals the “filthy five” of the title, but that’s really stretching it. As it is, the Cuban criminals never even appear in the text, and the entire assassination scheme is so much red herring. 

Indeed, Nick will determine that Sir Malcolm’s taken the money to finance his scheme to conquer Haiti and instill himself as a new political force, somehow orchestrating WWIII in the process so that the US, USSR, and Red China wipe each other out. Hawk then sends Nick back into Gallows Cay, and this bit is very Aquanauts-esque, with Nick parachuting into the place in the dead of night. He’s painted black head to toe and wears a pair of swim trunks that are “little more than a jock strap,” which is the same curious “outfit” Tiger Shark would often wear in The Aquanauts. This part promises an action spectacle, but instead Nick is captured, true to series template, but escapes in a sequence in which Stokes deftly ties up all his loose ends – Crabtree’s comeuppance and Dona’s determination to kill the man who killed her lover (ie Nick – the frogram he killed earlier being Dona’s beloved). 

Stokes has a knack for taking Nick through the ringer and demonstrating that he’s made of very tough stuff; see for example the finale of Istanbul, where Nick escapes after torture and returns to dish out bloody payback. Here Nick is blasted by a flamethrower, managing to use someone else as a bodyshield. Regardless he suffers serious burns and loses “all of his hair.” But the Killmaster doesn’t stop – Stokes has this pulpish conceit that Nick “becomes Killmaster,” with the concept that when he does he’s basically unstoppable – and instead he goes on the offense. But even here it’s relatively realistic, Stokes not so much dishing out the action but instead having Nick swim onto one of Sir Malcolm’s ships and hiding away to figure out what the madman’s up to. Even the finale takes place on a personal level, with Nick squaring off against Sir Malcolm – who despite being the supervillain of the plot is still quite capable of using his own brawn, even if he’s lost the use of his legs. 

Overall, The Filthy Five was one of the best volumes of Nick Carter: Killmaster I’ve yet read, and certainly one of the best I’ve read by Stokes. He was definitely on form this time, keeping the story tight and reigning in his usual tendency to pad out the pages. He also doles out his usual brace of ten-dollar words: desuetude, incunabula, etc. He also takes the time to flesh out the world of AXE; here we learn of “Mike Henry, second-ranking Killmaster to Nick Carter,” a sort of spare Killmaster Hawk keeps on the side. However the two men, we’re told, have never met. (And Henry contributes nothing to the tale, only appearing in one scene as he’s briefed by Hawk.) An interesting thing about Stokes’s work on the series is that he tones down the usage of gadgets (the only one Nick uses this time is a device that pulls him along underwater), in general going for more of the brutal action vibe of the men’s adventure novels of the ‘70s. 

So again, I definitely enjoyed The Filthy Five, and in fact I was sorry to see it end – though true to the Stokes norm, it’s a lot more dense than its otherwise brief 160 pages might imply. It’s also highly recommended to anyone out there who enjoys The Aquanauts, as it’s clearly where Stokes got his inspiration for that later series.

Monday, January 4, 2021

The Aquanauts #8: Operation Steelfish


The Aquanauts #8: Operation Steelfish, by Ken Stanton
No month stated, 1972  Manor Books

Tiger Shark was bored and restless.” 

This line, which appears on page 73 of Operation Steelfish, aptly sums up the sentiments of the reader; this installment is a dense trawl of nearly unfathomable boredom, Manning Lee Stokes clearly phoning it in. Given that he invested so much wackiness into the previous volume (man what a great one that was!), it’s no wonder we would have to suffer this time, but boy – this one really sucks. I mean there are some cool parts here and there, and Stokes as ever injects some of his patented weirdness into the narrative, but for the most part Operation Steelfish could be used as a cure for insomnia. 

What I still find most curious about The Aquanauts is that Stokes took what was ostenisbly an “underwater commando” setup and instead turned in a lurid crime series with Cold War overtones. Stokes started his career writing crime and mystery so I almost get the impression he just used this series as a vehicle to write about the sort of stuff he himself was more interested in. Apparently series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel accepted this, so far as The Aquanauts went, though he clearly reined in Stokes a bit more with Richard Blade and John Eagle Expeditor. Whereas Stokes hewed a little more faithfully to the setups for those series, in The Aquanauts books there are many, many instances where you get the impression the dude had no idea he was writing an “underwater commando” series. 

Operation Steelfish is a glaring case in point. It opens like one of those crime novels Engel “produced” in the ‘70s, with one of Manning Lee Stokes’s favorite motifs: a strangled young woman. I’m so familiar with this guy’s work now that I was surprised the girl wasn’t raped, as well; the whole “strangle-rape” thing is a recurring schtick in Stokes’s work (another being the “incredibly old woman who looks young” schtick, which doesn’t appear in this particular book). This happens near DC and the victim happens to be the secretary on a top secret Navy program; her killer is a hopped-up addict, and Stokes delivers another of his recurring schticks here, by subtly referring to himself: the murderer’s last name is “Manning.” 

Actually, this isn’t how the book opens. I forgot. The book actually opens on a brief chapter in which we learn that a young black man named Lyman has just had a sex-change operation, and now has become “Lilli.” And also “he-she” happens to be a sleeper agent for the Commies, in particular reporting to Yuri Sobnnikov, that “Russian James Bond” who injects himself with testosterone and who was last seen in #5: Stalkers Of The Sea. Actually, sex-change is yet another of Stokes’s recurring schticks; as we’ll recall, a minor character was going through “the change” back in #6: Whirlwind Beneath The Sea. But we get a lot more detail about it here, with Lilli taking up large portions of the narrative, with a lot of background on the procedure and how she’s coping with it, and also the fact that she’s nervous because she didn’t tell Sobnnikov she was about to have it done. The Russian spymaster takes it in stride, though, figuring that “Lilli” will be more beneficial to his latest caper than Lyman would’ve been – though first he has one of his people “try out” Lilli (off-page) to ensure she properly handles in bed! 

And I mean you look at the cover and you see shirtless Tiger Shark about to knife some scuba guy who has Ringo Starr’s hair, and then you get back to the book – which goes on about sex-change operations and strangled young women – and you wonder what the hell is going on. I should mention here that the cover does illustrate a scene in the book, definitely one of the most taut and entertaining scenes in the entire narrative, but it takes a helluva long time to get there; as ever Stokes fills the pages with tiny, dense print. Eight volumes in a row now and these books only really pick up when “main protagonist” Tiger Shark appears…yet again and again Stokes keeps him off-page for so long that he almost comes off like a supporting character in his own series. This is really taken to absurd levels in Operation Steelfish, which now that I think of it follows the template of the previous Sobhennikov yarn, Stalkers Of The Sea; in that one too Tiger Shark barely appeared, Stokes more content to dwell on a long-simmer Cold War vibe featuring Tom Greene, Tiger’s deskbound commanding officer. 

The first quarter of Operation Steelfish deals with the murder of the young Navy secretary, Stokes clearly filling pages – we even get a redundant transcript of the police interrogation of her confessed killer. What brings the Secret Underwater Service into it (eventually) is that the girl was working on the secret “Steelfish” program, which has to do with a “super-missile” the Navy is developing and is about to try out near Portofima, an island “south of Haiti and Cuba.” The murdered secretary it turns out had a small Russian spy camera on her, which has set the events in motion (no specification of the month or year, this time); after much, much narrative padding we learn that crusty old Admiral Hank Coffin, boss of the SUS, wants to keep the testing of Steelfish in play so as to trap the Russians – he is certain they got hold of the missile’s plans, thanks to the girl’s spy camera. Part of the frustration of Operation Steelfish is that Stokes keeps so much of this from us; Coffin’s plans are a mystery even to Greene, and are only revealed in the very final pages. 

And the bitch of it is, it’s a real boring ride to get to those very final pages; I mentioned above that these books only pick up when Tiger Shark appears, but Stokes was either unaware of that fact or in denial of it. For he keeps Tiger off-page whenever possible, focuing on sundry one-off characters. In addition to that “lovely slim Negro girl” Lilli, there’s also Sobnnikov himself, and we learn he’s burning for personal revenge on Greene and Tiger from the events in the fifth volume. Not that anything comes of this; there’s no personal confrontation among these characters. Greene spends the majority of the narrative on the deck of a ship, and Tiger spends it in KRAB or posing as a “beach bum” on a small boat outside Portofima – a subplot that goes absolutely nowhere and comes off like Stokes just trying, again, to keep Tiger off-page as long as possible. There’s also a 97 year-old American named Hunter who runs a private eye firm, is fabulously wealthy, and takes the job from Sobnnikov to help get the Steelfish missiles because he hates America, given that it’s now run by minorities and such. 

Really, these characters take up more narrative space than the recurring characters; even Admiral Coffin has more narrative focus. Tiger doesn’t even score, which is surprising enough – I honestly wondered if Stokes was about to “go there,” with Tiger having sex with Lilli, unaware that it’s a “he-she.” And indeed, Stokes seems to toy with this, having Lilli meet Greene on Portofima, but he’s such an honest married guy that she just thinks of him as a kind person, and instead sets her sights on some other guy Sobnnikov has told her to entertain. Lilli features in the only sexual material in the novel, the sequence relayed from this guy’s perspective, him unaware that Lilli was previously a man – something he will be informed of, with diastrous consequences, in the final pages. But it’s the usual Stokes weird version of sleaze: “He spurted into her voracious mouth,” and the like. 

At great length Tiger is sent to Portofima, stuck in KRAB for a week or so, then ordered to leave it and board the abandoned boat which is to serve as part of his beach bum cover. Again, we readers are not given any reason for any of this stuff, Stokes keeping us in the dark throughout, so that it not only is boring but frustrating as well. At least here we get some entertaining stuff, like when Tiger finds a couple drunks on the boat, guys who happened to pass by and discover it, and he boards the ship in full “Aquanaut” gear, with the metal helmet and all, making unearthly noise through the speaker grills to scare the guys off. This does have repercussions; Tiger doesn’t kill the guys, despite his hunch that he should, and later Sobnnikov will learn of the incident, thanks to a native guide he hires in Portofima. (A guide named “Sharkie,” Stokes apparently oblivious that his main character is codemaned “Tiger Shark” and that these similar names might cause confusion in his already-confused and bored readers.) 

Again, this sets the stages for some action; Sobnnikov is certain the figure from the deep who scared these two drunks is none other than Tiger Shark, and also that he’s losing his edge given that he didn’t kill them. But there’s no part where Tiger and Sobnnikov ever meet. The Russian spymaster stays on the sidelines throughout, ordering around his various underlings like chess pieces. The highlight of the novel is the event depicted on the great cover; Tiger, upon boarding the boat, tosses his Aquanaut gear into the sea so as to maintain his cover. So wearing only a snorkel and a jockstrap(!), he ventures out into the sea one night to monitor a suspicious boat – one Admiral Coffin suspects might be working for the Reds. This leads to a bizarre bit where Tiger gets his ass kicked by the ship’s captain: a super-fat woman who sneaks up on Tiger from behind and gets him into a bear hug that he barely breaks out of. 

After this Tiger discovers a couple guys in scuba gear on his boat, planting explosives. He trails one of them and, when his boat explodes in the distance, he uses the distraction to yank one of them below the water and knife him to death. A pretty brutal action scene…and the only one we get in the novel. Even here Tiger is stuck on the sidelines by Stokes; he has to swim many miles to get back to KRAB, but has to wait until night, so spends an entire day hiding near an islet. Stokes does like putting his hero through the grinder; there’s a gripping scene where Tiger, uncertain how much air is left in his appropriated scuba tank, must swim one hundred feet below the surface, in pitch black, to locate KRAB. However Stokes sort of blows it by ending the sequence with Tiger about to commit to the final plunge, after which there’ll be no way out – he’s so far below the surface he couldn’t make it back up if his scuba tank were to run out – but next time we see him, he’s safely in KRAB. The final mad dash to KRAB is rendered in quick backstory, ruining the suspense Stokes so carefully constructed. 

This takes us into the finale, which has the Russians spring their plan. A sub comes out of the sea, takes the missile, and Coffin orders it followed by KRAB. Coffin’s plan was to set off a remote-control destruct button on the missile, but it doesn’t work, so it’s up to Tiger to finish the job. This entails him being chased by the sub and scoring a lucky shot, hitting the missile itself. The last we see of him he’s spinning through the sea in a damaged KRAB; we’re informed at the end he’ll be in the hospital a bit but he’ll be just fine and dandy afterwards. The same can’t be said for poor Lilli, though; Sobnnikov has a firm “no witnesses” clause, thus writes a letter to the guy who has been obliviously boffing Lilli these past weeks, informing him that Lilli was once a dude. This does not go well for Lilli; we’re informed she’s tied up and slapped around and then the guy breaks out his “surgical instruments;” he’s a torture artist, and Stokes delights in informing us that the guy’s very mean in the ensuing torture and Lilli takes a long time to die! 

This one was really boring, folks, and came off like a slap in the face after the supremely entertaining previous volume. There are a few more volumes left in the series, so here’s hoping none of them are bummers on the level of Operation Steelfish.

Monday, December 30, 2019

The Aquanauts #7: Operation Deep Six


The Aquanauts #7: Operation Deep Six, by Ken Stanton
No month stated, 1972  Manor Books

Judging from the previous six volumes, I knew what to expect for this seventh installment of The Aquanauts: a lurid crime yarn with some sleaze, some exploitation, and some padding. And that’s pretty much what I got…for the first half, at least. The second half of Operation Deep Six was a taut action thriller with sci-fi overtones, and by far this one was my favorite installment yet. Manning Lee Stokes (aka “Ken Stanton”) was often guitly of turning in overly-padded digressions, but when he was on form he was on form, a la Valley Of Vultures and Liberator Of Jedd, and he was on form for this one.

There’s no pickup from the previous volume (which anyway was set before the fifth volume), and for once we aren’t given the date that all this occurs. Instead we open with Secret Underwater Service honcho Admiral Coffin receiving a typewritten letter warning him that something’s about to happen to experimental submarine J2, and further, that previous experimental sub J1 wasn’t actually lost at sea, last year, but was hijacked. There are enough pertinent details in the letter to convince Coffin that the unknown letter-writer might not just be a crackpot. And by the way we get the usual stuff with Coffin talking the caper over with his equally-old colleague, the head of the Navy, but Stokes much reduces this stuff, this time, and I’m happy to report that he’s finally hit on a template that lives up to the plural of the series name, ie The Aquanauts: Admiral Coffin, Commander Tom Greene, and William “Tiger Shark” Martin. All three get a moment to shine, with none of the non-Tiger Shark sequences coming off as filler, as they often did in the previous six books.

Coffin sends Tiger and Greene to Boatville, North Carolina, the personal fief of reclusive billionaire Harry Janus, who “makes Howard Hughes seem like Tiny Tim.” Janus owns the company that developed the J1 and J2; he swore he had nothing to do with the disappearance of the J1, even though the last received transmission from the sub was that the course was being changed “per orders of J–.” Posing as FBI agents, Tiger and Greene are to see if anything’s up in Boatville, the coastal town in which the final touches are being put on the J2. Also, the anonymous person who sent that warning to Admiral Coffin mailed the letter from Boatville, however Greene thinks the entire thing is a fool’s quest and that the letter was written by a nut.

This first half plays out like a crime yarn, same as the previous six volumes, with zero in the way of “aquanaut” type stuff. Actually, the majority of this part isn’t even crime – it’s the long, long buildup to Tiger having sex with a hotstuff brunette named Millicent “Millie” Carter. He’s introduced to her shortly after arriving in Boatville, informed she’s the town lay, and promptly set up with her. She works PR for Janus Industries, and there follows a nice bit where the assembled Janus employees – the billionaire owns the entire town, and everyone in it works for him – listen as their never-seen leader issues his daily pronouncement from a speaker in the ceiling. Tiger says it reminds him of a séance; he also notices that Janus, Millie, and Janus computer programmer Paul Thomson all have similar-sounding voices, a sort of hoarse quality. Stokes doles out a lot of foreshadowing in this sequence (ie, “When Tiger thought of it later,” and the like), in particular the tidbit that both Thomson and Millie have faint scars on their throats.

Stokes really brings Millie to life – she’s a hardcore drunk and sex maniac and doesn’t care who knows it. She also has the mouth of a truck driver, a humorous reminder of how women were once known for not cursing as much as men. Another interesting tidbit for armchair historians: Millie tells Tiger that some of the people in Boatsville often get together in parking lots and have “trunk parties,” a trend – and phrase – Tiger’s never heard before. Apparently the early term for the modern-day trend known as tailgating. This is relayed to Tiger as Millie, already riproaring drunk, speeds home with Tiger so they can have sex, like within minutes of meeting each other. Stokes again here doles out foreshadowing, particularly that Millie is older than Tiger first suspected. We already know she has the greatest pair of legs he’s ever seen, shown off by a miniskirt – Tiger’s clearly a leg man – but whereas Tiger first thought she was in her thirties, he’s now suspecting she might be in her forties, or maybe older.

Stokes has a lot of repeating themes in his work and the “old man-eater with the body of a young woman” theme is one of the most prominent, as exemplified by such novels as The Golden Serpent and even an earlier Aquanauts yarn, #3: Seek, Strike, And Destroy. This one promises to be wilder than even those earlier instances, as the subtle hints make it clear that Millie’s a lot older than Tiger thinks. There’s also a strange surgery scar around her throat, a subject which Millie refuses to talk about. Humorously so much of this early sequence is devoted to foreplay; Millie’s either fondling Tiger under the table at a bar, in her car, or giving him a few seconds of oral ministration in the elevator, to the point that Tiger’s about to blow, so to speak. But she keeps stalling on the actual meat of the screwing, as it were, either tucking Tiger back into his pants and going for another drink or wanting to tell him more about the mysterious, reclusive Janus. Tiger even says he thinks they’re never going to get around to the actual deed.

I say “humorously” because when the tomfoolery finally happens, it’s for the most part tame, at least so far as some of Stokes’s other stuff is considered, with minimal description like, “[Tiger] was deep in her and stroking” and whatnot. I only say this is tame mind you because honestly about twenty or more pages are devoted to the foreplay, with plot and character-building dialog worked into it. Another recurring theme in Stokes is the brutal murder of a woman after – or during – sex, usually via strangling or such, and again Stokes doles out enough foreshadowing here that even someone new to this lurid genre will know Millie’s not in for a nice future. I mean she’s going for seconds shortly after the first boff and telling Tiger she loves him; the latter in particular is basically a death certificate in the world of men’s adventure. Only it’s going to happen a little more quickly, this time; Millie gets a phone call that seems to disturb her. She says it was Greene, calling for Tiger, and asking that he come back to their hotel immediately. She gives Tiger the keys to her car and asks him to come back soon.

Only, we readers know Greene hasn’t called Tiger; indeed, he told Admiral Coffin he’d leave Tiger alone until the next day. Thus upon returning to his hotel Tiger learns the truth, and that Millie lied to him for some reason. Tiger suspects foul play, Greene says she probably just wanted to go do some other guy! There’s even a subplot about a drunk security chief who lusts after Millie, who shows up to threaten Tiger – turns out this guy went over to Millie’s place shortly after Tiger left, found the apartment in chaos, and blood everywhere. But it won’t be until the very end of the novel that we learn what happened to Millie. As it is, Tiger wonders about her occasionally, but so far as the “babe quotient” of the novel goes, Millie’s it for Tiger this time around; promptly after this sequence in Boatville we jump ahead a few days and Tiger’s on the second leg of his assigment, in KRAB and shadowing the sub J2 on its first test run.

Just as with the ill-fated J1, the J2 receives abrupt summons to change course. Tiger follows along, into the Yucatan Channel near Honduras. The destination turns out to be an island where no island is supposed to be, according to all the maps; but then, Harry Janus is so wealthy he could pay to keep his private domain off any map. Here the novel appropriates a supercool suspense-thriller vibe and doesn’t let up until the end. Tiger watches as the J2 circles the island, rewarded with a brief glimpse of the reclusive Janus, who reclines kinglike atop a sort of metal strutcture that automatically rises from the ground. The J2 then is ordered to dock outside the island while Greene, the captain, and another officer are invited to dine on the island with Janus.

That night Tiger gets in his scuba gear and slips onto the heavily-patrolled island, armed only with a “killing knife” and a .45. He watches in shock as a group of natives in uniforms converge on the sleeping J2, affix hoses to it, and begin pumping gas into it. Tiger somehow knows it’s poisonous gas and everyone onboard the ship is good as dead. This is a tense scene, effectively rendered by Stokes, with Tiger unable to do anything to prevent the massacre; he wants to kill as many of Janus’s goons as he can, but knows if he does he’ll show his hand and soon be caught or killed. Tiger’s best weapon is the fact that Janus doesn’t know he exists. Stokes also tries to brush off the grander question why Tiger doesn’t immediately call in the Marines; instead there’s the reasoning that he needs to prove something is really afoul before he contacts Coffin.

Meanwhile Greene has dined with Janus, who turns out to be short and fat and surrounded by goons. But Greene’s drugged, and wakes up – par for the norm in the work of Stokes – while puking his guts out. After this he’s escorted by hotstuff native babes in red satin hotshorts and bras to a Turkish style bath…after being shown the murdered corpses of the captain and other officer from the J2. Finally he is presented to Janus, who admits to having killed everyone on the J2, as well as on the J1, and wants Greene to tell him everything he knows – Janus has determined that Greene is more than just a Navy overseer, which was his cover on the J2 run. Janus also claims to be able to grant Greene “quasi-immortality;” Janus says he is over 140 years old and in perfect health.

Stokes does an admirable job of playing this plot out in Tiger’s portion of the narrative; while lurking around the jungle Tiger runs into Paul Thompson, the computer engineer for Janus Inudstries who bears the same strange throat scar that Millie had. Tiger catches Thompson as the older man is walking in the jungle and here Tiger Shark again proves his cold-blooded nature, threatening to drown Thompson if he doesn’t tell all he knows – and then actually drowning him, having to do CPR to bring him back to life. Thompson finally claims to have come here to confront Janus, as he suspects it’s not the real Harry Janus who now runs this island and has stolen the J2.

Thompson also claims to be a hundred years old; he’s a member of the Stonehenge Society (aka a “Stoney,”), a pseudo-Freemason sect comprised of just a few individuals around the globe, each who have been granted a sort of immortality. Millie was also a member, and Thompson suspects the fake Janus is also one. And here’s the secret – old heads on new bodies! This is why both he and Millie (who Thompson claims was 90 years old!) have those strange scars on their throats; their original heads are constantly removed and put on fresh bodies. Thompson doesn’t divulge where the new bodies come from. He also says that Stoneys too can die, as the head-transplant thing can’t continue forever.

All this is beyond crazy and Tiger doesn’t much believe Thompson’s story. So instead he strips the guy nude, ties his hands behind his back, and brings him along as he infiltrates Janus’s heavily-guarded compound. This entire sequence is supercool and if only the rest of the series was up to the level. But then who knows, maybe the next volumes will be. Tiger wipes out several guards with knife and gun, including a few guard dogs, and finds Greene drugged in bed with a couple native floozies. True to the series template, though, Greene hasn’t had sex with them – his undying love for his wife and all – and Tiger finds him half-asleep while the two bimbos start going to town on each other(!). Soon Tiger’s gotten Greene sober again – more of Stokes’s patented weirdness where Tiger makes Greene drink some medicine that’s mixed with Tiger’s urine – and the three pull a ruse to gain audience with Janus.

This part is like an old cliffhanger, as Janus has a trapdoor beneath his desk, and he goes down it as soon as Tiger swoops in for the kill. It leads to an underwater bomb shelter, and eventually Tiger’s in KRAB, trying to get into the place. And folks believe it or not we actually get some “aquanaut” stuff as Tiger scubas around, trying to find the location of the bomb shelter, and is attacked by a couple frogmen. We even get to see the Sea Pistol in use here. But Stokes fails to give us a confrontation with Janus; Tiger plants explosives around the shelter, then has to fire all KRAB’s torpedos to set them off. In the ensuing conflagration he only assumes Janus has been killed, but as it is we never do find out – Coffin later even muses that Janus survived – and folks we never even learn who this fake Janus was. Not that it matters, I guess.

All we learn is that Paul Thompson suspected he was a fake because Millie, who occasionally slept with the real Harry Janus, had nomiated Janus for membership in the Stonehenge Society, but after “Janus” returned from the operation (which was done in Tibet), Millie suspected it was an imposter. (Oh, and as for Millie – Thompson also casually admits to having killed her and chopped up her body that night, after Tiger left; it was he on the phone, telling Millie to get rid of Tiger, and then he went over and murdered her, so as to keep her mouth shut about the Stonehenge Society and whatnot…and yes, meanwhile Thompson himself gives away all their secrets, but what the hell, that’s Stokes for you.) Thompson, who further admits to having written the letter to Admiral Coffin so as to get the SUS involved, has come here to confront Janus and determine if he is indeed a Stoney.

The finale is also sort of a copout; everything builds to a grand climax with Tiger fighting frogmen and desperate to get into KRAB to fire his torpedos, and Greene up on the island fending off Janus’s goons with a rifle…then the final chapter is presented as Greene’s typewritten report, which Admiral Coffin reads a few days later! But at this point I was so swept up with Stokes’s weird sci-fi action hybrid thing that I really didn’t mind at all. I mean I really enjoyed this one, and it was a nice reminder of how Stokes can often hit them out of the park. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: he’s one of my favorites. There’s just something so “off” about his plots and his writing that I can’t help but admire him.

So anyway sure, the first couple Aquanauts yarns were subpar. But Operation Deep Six was a different story. Here’s hoping the remaining volumes are up to this level.