Showing posts with label Manor Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Manor Books. 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.

Thursday, August 4, 2022

The Deadly Massage (Kill Squad #5)


The Deadly Massage, by Mark Cruz
No month stated, 1976  Manor Books

The Kill Squad series comes to a close with an installment that promises a lot more sleaze than it ultimately delivers; save for the narrative tone Dan Streib (aka “Mark Cruz”) writes the book in. While Streib is fond of very crude analogies and metaphors in the narrative, the book per se is pretty anemic in the sleaze department, even if it concerns the titular Kill Squad investigating the linkup between a Chinese massage parlor and the slave trade. 

First of all, this is another book I got from Marty McKee some years ago; in fact I’m reading the same copy he reviewed on his blog in 2013. It’s interesting to see a Manor men’s adventure novel from 1976, given that the majority of publishers were whittling way back on their men’s adventure series at the time. I agree with Marty that Streib goofs by once again taking the Kill Squad out of its California stomping grounds and putting it in a foreign country, which is what he’s done for the past few volumes. The entire premise is ludicrous and gives the impression that Streib didn’t know how to properly handle the series. I mean “trio of tough cops killing crooks” seems like a series that could write itself, but instead Streib’s been running on empty ever since the entertaining first volume

But then, book producer Lyle Kenyon Engel himself referred to Dan Streib as “not very good,” no doubt a veiled reference to Streib’s work on the first two volumes of Chopper Cop. As I mentioned in my reviews of those books, Streib delivered an “action hero” who was more of a wuss. And as I’ve mentioned in my Kill Squad reviews, it’s as if Streib had a delayed realization of this and doubled down on making the hero of this series an uber-macho badass…to the extent that main series protagonist Chet Tabor comes off like a hateful prick. Definitely one of the more unlikable heroes in men’s adventure…with the added kick in the crotch that Tabor’s also a screw-up, even though he himself of course doesn’t realize it. 

But the macho drive extends to the narrative tone. In fact one could almost argue that Streib is spoofing the entire vibe of the genre. This is evident in the crudity of the narrative, particularly in such weird word-painting as, “…the [Hong Kong airport] runway extend[ed] like a stiff penis,” or “Malaysia…hung like a penis from the underbelly of Asia.” We learn that Tabor’s old Mercedes has now grown “cranky…like a woman in menopause,” and also that he sometimes takes superior-officer/fellow Kill Squader Maria Alvarez to bed because “she needed that occasionally, so she didn’t forget that she was a woman.” Oh and for the first time, I believe, Streib mentions Maria’s grim ordeal in the first volume: “…a gang rape that had left her nauseated for months when she even thought about sex.” Even the first page is indicative of this uber-macho, almost-parodic tone: 


When we meet them Tabor and Grant Lincoln, the other member of the Kill Squad (aka “the black one”), are moonlighting on the “keyhole-peeking Vice squad,” pretending to be businessmen at the China Doll massage parlor in San Diego, Kill Squad home base. Here’s where Tabor’s dumb-assness comes in; so his and Grant’s task is to get these hookers to proposition them, but Tabor soon discovers his girl doesn’t speak English. So Tabor decides to take his girl – and the two Grant has grabbed for himself (just like Jim Kelly!) – and take them out to dinner!? Right then and there! So he pulls them out of the parlor and some toughs give chase, and in the ensuing shootout one of the girls is killed and the China Doll burns down. 

So clearly this entire plot would be unbelievable even in an ‘80s buddy cop film. Speaking of which, the plot of Deadly Massage is sort of reminiscent of an actual ‘80s action movie: The Protector. But the setup is even more implausible here. Essentlially Tabor, Grant, and Maria bully their “stupid chief” into letting them go to Hong Kong(!) to track down the two massage parlor girls, both of whom were abducted during the shootout and likely have been smuggled back to “the Orient.” The idea is that these two girls could blow the lid off an entire slave-trade operation running out of Red China. Streib even unwittingly brings in some identity politics presience; when the stupid chief denies the entire idea, a fellow cop – who happens to be Asian – shames the chief that he doesn’t care about the girls: “Is it because they’re Chinese?” 

So reality be damned the Kill Squad heads over to Hong Kong. It even gets more ludicrous because the local cops allow them to keep their guns. Some detail is given Tabor’s two new guns: a Webley revolver and a Beretta .380. He might’ve used these in the previous books, I can’t remember, but Streib introduces them like they’re new to Tabor’s arsenal. Not that he will use them much; there are only a few shootouts in The Deadly Massage, and nothing too violent…except when it comes to Streib’s trademark description of a woman being shot in the face. This is a recurring theme in Streib’s novels, complete with the weird constant detail of the cheekbones also exploding: 


But here’s the crazy thing about a novel involving massage parlors and sex-slavery: there isn’t a sex scene in The Deadly Massage! Tabor often thinks about banging Maria – and later in the book we learn Maria gets all hot and bothered by Tabor, too, even though she hates his male chauvinist pig guts. Nothing ever happens, though, however we do learn that Tabor briefly considers becoming a Muslim because he learns that Muslims can have several wives! This is courtesy a local named Low who happens to be “Muslin” [sp] who has four wives, and Tabor can’t get over how hot each of them are. Tabor briefly considers becoming a Muslim to take advantage of this, “before they change the rules.” Indeed Tabor’s male-gazery is so over the top throughout the book that it’s a refreshing balm to the emasculating bullshit of today’s action entertainment. 

Oh, but there’s a dark side, though: Tabor again indulges in his penchant for random racism. This, as ever, is directed toward Grant Lincoln, who curiously receives hardly any narrative space in The Deadly Massage. Tabor is as ever the star of the show, with occasional cutovers to Maria’s perspective. But Grant Lincoln doesn’t get to do much…other, that is, receive some nonsensical baiting from Tabor: “You black bastard! What’s wrong with you, boy?” Oh and we also have the “Jap killer” the Kill Squad chases to Hong Kong – meaning he’s a killer who happens to be Japanese, not a killer of Japanese. 

Streib also works in a half-assed mystery subplot on who exactly is behind the slavery ring, even though it will soon be clear to even the most unengaged reader…though of course the members of the Kill Squad take forever to figure this out. They do a fair bit of traveling around “the Orient” as well, from Hong Kong to Malaysia to Bangkok. The action climaxes in a snake temple, but as Marty notes in his review Streib does precious little to bring the scene to life. Marty’s also on-point with how a major villain is killed off-page, which also sucks. But by novel’s end the Kill Squad has cracked the case and is happily heading back to San Diego – where presumably the three of them will continue acting as a team. 

So in other words, there’s no real finale to the series here, no indication that this was the final volume. One can’t be too upset that there were no more volumes of Kill Squad, though, as Dan Streib never really figured out how to handle the concept. Which is curious, because he did a better job on the similar Death Squad series. But on a random note I found it interesting that Streib used the term “sci-fi” in The Deadly Massage, in reference to “the sci-fi sound of Hong Kong police sirens.” This might be one of the earliest appearances of this term I’ve seen in a mainstream novel…well, not that Kill Squad was mainstream. But you know what I mean. 

Finally, I’m calling bullshit on the cover blurb by “Bestsellers.” There hasn’t been a single damn volume of Kill Squad that’s been “painstakingly well-plotted,” so either the entire review is fake (the most likely scenario) or it’s been lifted from the review of an entirely different book.

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, May 6, 2021

Dead End (Kill Squad #4)


Dead End, by Mark Cruz
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

Dan Streib returns as “Mark Cruz” for this fourth volume of Kill Squad (around this time Manor Books dropped the volume numbers from their series, but the Manor ID number at the top right of the cover indicates this one was published after Dead Wrong). He continues with the schtick of previous volumes: removing his titular trio from their San Diego stomping grounds and making them do stuff that falls outside the boundaries of police work. This time they serve as bodyguards for a wealthy Arab as he travels around Europe. 

But really it isn’t even much of a trio this time. Chet Tabor, blond-haired lunk with the scarred face, has always been the main character of Kill Squad, with co-cops Grant Lincoln and Maria Alvarez serving as supporting characters. But while those two have at least had some share of the plot in past, this time they’re really incidental, only there to occasionally trade dialog with Tabor and then disappear into the background again. In fact they’re only along on the Europe trip because Tabor demands that they come along to back him up. Otherwise Tabor is the star of the show, featuring in all the action scenes and calling all the shots. 

There is no continuity in the series, so no pickup from the previous volume nor any other volume. About the only “new” development we have is that Tabor now carries a .44 Auto Mag, meaning Streib must’ve been reading The Executioner. This gun is built up at great expense, used a few times, then lost in England (there is an apparent bitterness toward the British ban on guns – Streib rakes the Brits over the coals throughout the entire England portion of the narrative). Otherwise another change is that Tabor is even more uber-macho this time around, constantly thinking of sex (even during firefights) and planning to “get a woman in bed” no matter what. He also mouths off a lot, gets in people’s faces, and doesn’t listen to othes. It’s as if Streib wanted to go the exact opposite direction of the wussified Terry Bunker he delivered in the first two installments of Chopper Cop

Yet for that matter, we are often told how “afraid” Tabor is. This is so recurrent in Streib’s work that it doesn’t even come off like him adding characterization. Constantly Tabor will be ducking for cover and fighting down panic, then forcing himself to get up and fight back. Or just as often he’ll wonder why he’s even in the line of danger; there’s a part early on where thugs attack people at a park, and Tabor – a cop!! – wonders why he’s even risking his neck to save them, given that they’re all strangers! Of course all this is similar to Terry Bunker’s attitude, with the only difference that Tabor bullies through his fear and gets in a lot more fights, shootouts, and chases. He doesn’t come off as the most likable hero, though. I mean in that part where the thugs open fire at the park, Tabor hides in a gondolla and lets Grant and Maria handle the action, only coming out when they start screaming for his help! 

This opening action scene will be the only sequence in San Diego. Tabor, Grant, and Maria (we’re told only the press has dubbed them “The Kill Squad”) are serving as bodyguards for visiting Arab Ali Saud, an uber-wealthy oil guy who is here with his two daughters and half brothers. Of course the daughters are in their twenties and smokin’ hot; this is the pre-radicalized early ‘70s so the girls are very westernized, going around sans face coverings and wearing revealing clothes. In fact the youngest of them, Zainab, is a definite tease, and went to college in Berkley. Saud is “a billionaire with petrodollars burning holes in his robes,” and the city has rolled out the red carpet for him, hence the personal police protection – and much to the dismay of “stupid chief” Chief Jackson, Tabor and team have gotten the job. 

Turns out there’s a bounty on Saud’s head, and sure enough a group of would-be assassins hit the entourage during an idyllic gondolla ride. Here’s where Tabor hides, of course with the two girls, one of whom falls on him for cover – Tabor enjoying the “soft, full mounds” on his back and taking the opportunity to cop a feel! As I say he is particularly infantile in this one. In fact we’re informed he’s “thirty-one with two marriages behind him.” Tabor’s also a bit of a loser in the hero department. He finally gets out to fight, and one of the attackers takes a little girl hostage. Tabor chases after – again wondering why he’s even bothering to – and takes a darkened stairwell up the tower the attacker has fled, hoping to sneak attack him. But like a dumbass Tabor overlooks the fact that the bright sunlight will hurt his eyes, which have grown used to the dark, thus he’s temporarily blinded…and in the gunfight the little girl is killed. 

Streib has this weird schtick, in just about every book of his I’ve read, where he has a female character getting shot in the face and killed. Usually the eyeball is blown out, too. This happens here, but having it happen to a five year-old girl is a bit too much, I’d say. Chief Jackson yells at Tabor good and proper, and even Maria and Lincoln are upset he didn’t try harder to save the kid. When it turns out that Ali Saud wants Tabor to accompany him on the Europe – he was impressed with Tabor’s ass-kicking, we’re told – Tabor says the little girl’s memory will fuel him, as he wants to nail the bastard who hired those thugs. Ie, the person who hired them was responsible for the little girl’s death. As with the previous volumes, Chief Jackson is just happy that his three most problematic officers will be out of his hair for a few weeks. 

Also fueling Tabor is the opportunity to get in the pants of either or both of Saud’s daughters. Zainab is the saucy younger one and Hayat is the slightly more conservative older one. A running subplot is that Saud intends to take his daughters back to Saudi Arabia after this Europe-America jaunt and return them to “the old ways.” In particular he feels that Zainab is “disturbed,” her brain rotted by American decadence. There’s actually more meat here than you’d encounter in a book of today that might cover the same topics; I imagine most American authors of today would be afraid of being branded Islamophobic. But Tabor has no problem with chastising Saud that Muslim men “keep their women as virtual slaves,” and he also doles out such impossible-today gems as “You didn’t learn that behind a veil,” when Zainab gives him a sultry kiss. 

For Zainab, we learn, is the one who really hired Tabor – she wants a piece of that uber-macho hunk. When Tabor learns this he takes umbrage; he’s no “hired stud.” Indeed he goes out of his way to talk down to Zainab…and when she goes off in a huff he wonders if he should wake up Maria for some quick sex, given how turned on he is! (For those taking notes, Tabor and Maria are a nonevent this time; she really does nothing more than deliver a few lines and shoot a few people, more on which anon.) Tabor’s muleheadedness is especially hard to understand, given how determined he is to get either of the girls in bed; there’s a later part where Zainab comes to him again, this time in lingerie, and an angry Tabor gives her a paddling! “Here’s what I think of Women’s Rights,” he tells her before bending her over his knee, casting doubt on his entire anti-Muslim tirade. The funniest bit here is Tabor’s shock to discover that Zainab isn’t nearly as turned on by the paddling as he is! In fact she screams and fights him so crazily that she wakes up the entire hotel. 

Streib is fond of female villains – I think every book of his I’ve read has featured one – and Zainab’s anger at being forcibly returned to “the old ways” should set off alarms. Instead Tabor constantly rebuffs her…while he meanwhile wonders how he can get her in bed on his terms. Or better yet her sister, whom we’re told Tabor finds hotter. Meanwhile we get some of the England-bashing I mentioned above. Streib has practically every British character quake in fear at the sight of Tabor’s gun; even some guys from Scotland Yard come by and say that, if he were to use one of those guns, the full weight of the law would hit him. Of course he has to use it, most memorably in a long-running action sequence in Stonehenge, where more would-be assassins come after Saud’s party. 

During this battle Tabor learns that an infamous contract killer named Purcelli is behind all the attempted hits on Saud; this will be a character Streib doesn’t much build up. Streib attempts to develop tension later when the entourage is leaving the hotel and Tabor suspects Purcelli is going to spring an attack. This part sees more wussified Brits panicking as the action goes down, particularly when a bomb goes off on the premises. This part also has an unexpected outcome in that a character in the entourage is suprisingly killed off. The bigger outcome so far as Tabor is concerned is that he loses his Auto Mag, having to hand it over to the authorities. Unbelievably Saud continues on his European journey, despite his personal losses; turns out it’s really a business trip, as Saud is meeting in private with oil contacts at these locations, to talk away from spies. 

The action moves to Monaco, where Tabor finally has his way with Zainab…or, “entering that dark and welcoming place,” as Streib puts it in a fairly non-explicit sequence. After which the two go on a boat ride, where Purcelli tries to take out Tabor; an action scene that just keeps to go on and on, and ends with the infamous assassin again running off. This part sees another character outed as a villain – the reveal isn’t much of a surprise – and as Tabor struggles with her for control of a gun he grabs “the tender V between her legs” in a brutal move. This takes us into the climactic action scene, as Tabor races against time to stop Purcelli from killing Saud in a villa. 

Streib isn’t done killing kids, though; one of Purcelli’s men, we’re informed, is a “young boy” who comes at Tabor with a gun, and Tabor almost casually blows him away…only to later discover that the kid was merely holding a target pistol! This revelation doesn’t seem to faze our hero in the least. But then he and his comrades are particularly brutal in this finale; there’s a part where Maria “carefully” shoots another of Purcelli’s goons in the crotch, and if I had a fancy doctorate in literature I’d suggest that this might be due to residual hatred she has for all men, given her gang-rape in the first volume

The finale seems to come out of a Hollywood blockbuster, with Tabor and two of the villains on a runaway train. It occurs to me that Streib has a firm template for Kill Squad, as each volume features the trio outside of San Diego and each ends with Tabor recovering in the hospital, with Chief Jackson paying him a visit. So happens here, with Jackson again telling Tabor to take an extended vacation to stay out of his hair. Otherwise Dead End didn’t hit the lurid heights of the first volume, but it was definitely more entertaining than the third volume, which mostly featured Tabor and Lincoln sitting on an airplane. One more volume was to follow.

Thursday, January 7, 2021

The Dynamite Freaks


The Dynamite Freaks, by Donald Ryan
No month stated, 1972

This is another of the short-lived “Now Books For Today’s Readers” series, book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel’s vain attempt at catering to the counterculture market of the day. Hawk’s Authors’ Pseudonyms credits William Crawford for this book, but I’m thinking Pat Hawk got bad info (maybe it was a sting operation!). While another of the Now BooksThe Cop-Killers, was clearly written by Crawford, this one doesn’t bear his trace at all. If I had to guess from Engel’s “stable” at the time, I’d suspect George Snyder or Jon Messmann, but even then I’m not sure. Perhaps Hawks was just under the assumption Crawford wrote all four of the Now Books

But all those Crawford staples we know and love – grizzled cop protagonist, arbitrary backstories, characters shitting themselves – are missing in The Dynamite Freaks. Crawford as we know was a cop himself, and also of a different generation than the protagonists of this book; whoever wrote it was clearly a little more familiar with the “Youth Movement” of the day, which is why I lean toward Snyder – he was, after all, the guy Engel was paying at the time to write another counterculture cash-in, Operation Hang Ten. But again Snyder’s typically surly narrative tone isn’t glaringly evident here. What is evident is an almost pseudo-Burt Hirschfeld narrative style, a la Jon Messmann. All of which is to say I don’t really know, other than that William Crawford didn’t write it. 

Well anyway, just a few short years ago a book like The Dynamite Freaks, with its plot about left-wing hippie terrorists and their riots and bombings, would’ve seemed dated. But given how our recent “summer of love” inexplicably turned violent, the book now seems quite timely. It’s also another sad reminder of the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just as most of Antifa (and even a lot of BLM) seems to be composed of suburban white kids from wealthy families, kids who have no personal stake in the plight of the downtrodden people they claim to be “protesting” for, so too are the hippie terrorists of The Dynamite Freaks. I saw at least three videos on social media this past summer of black people yelling at all the white Antifa and “BLM” protesters who claimed to be there to “represent them,” telling them they weren’t even from the area and didn’t know shit. This sort of thing is prefigured in the novel as well – there’s a part where a Martin Luther King-type civil rights leader basically tells the white hippie terrorists to get the hell out. 

I’m very interested in this project of Engel’s; it seems he was trying to tap in on topical youth issues of the day, yet the books aren’t packaged that way…it seems more like The Now Books For Today’s Readers were intended for older readers who wondered what the hell was going on with those crazy kids. Both this and The Cop-Killers have a very conservative tone; even though The Dynamite Freaks focuses on younger characters more than Crawford’s book did, the youth still come off like violence-prone savages who lash out against an establishment they don’t understand, let alone appreciate. What I mean to say is, judging from the two novels in this “series” I’ve read, these books are nowhere in the league of true “movement” books like Trashing; they’ve clearly been written with an older or at least more conservative audience in mind – any hippie head who picked up The Dynamite Freaks would no doubt consider the whole thing reactionary. 

Our main protagonist is a case in point: young Carol Warring, 19 and beautiful, about to graduate as the valedictorian of her college. She’s innocent, naïve, and a virgin to boot – clearly not the type of protagonist you’d expect in a novel titled The Dynamite Freaks. But we know the direction she’s headed, as the novel opens with a creepy chapter in which a girl runs screaming from a downtown tenement building that’s just exploded; the firemen arrive on the scene and exclaim stuff like “Look at them boobs!” as they gawk at the “full young breasts” of the naked female corpses strewn about. (The clothing, incidentally, was apparently blown off by the dynamite which destroyed the building.) Curiously Ryan will not return to this opening chapter, so that we readers must infer who is who among the victims – and the mystery of who the girl was who ran away isn’t played out at all like I suspected it might be. 

From there we jump back just a few weeks and meet Carol as she’s about to drop a big surprise on the audience at the graduation ceremony: not only is Carol wearing a bikini beneath her gown, but she’s also planted an explosive on a famous statue on campus grounds. All this occurs in Minnesota, in a subburb of Minneapolis, a “straight” town that Carol now rails against. Predictably she comes from wealth; her dad is a successful businessman, one who is just as successful with the ladies…and Carol herself has a thing for him (a twisted subtext that Ryan admirably doesn’t dwell on too much). But this past summer, we learn, Carol spent some time in Europe, where she met expat American Kurt Hoeffer, a long-haired hippie her age who radicalized Carol into the various socialist movements of the day. Carol is now prepared to use the knowledge she’s gained as part of her degree in Chemistry to strike various blows for democracy and the downtrodden peoples and etc. 

Carol with her innocence is our guide into the violent world of the hairy freaks; the novel in this regard is a Morality Tale in that Carol will gradually change from a peace-loving virgin to a bomb-planting radical given to gang-bangery, not to mention the occasional injection of heroin. But it should be mentioned that all this is done to her against her will! No, Carol doesn’t want “anyone to get hurt” by her bombs, and also she’s peer-pressured into the gang-bang scene, veritably forced by Kurt to lie there while a whole bunch of hairy freak hippie guys form a line to have their way with her, one at a time. As for the heroin, that’s just introduced to let Carol “calm down” after it turns out one of her bombs actually, you know, kill someone. So as you can see, Carol isn’t only incredibly naïve, she’s also incredibly dumb at times, and there were many parts in the book where I was laughing when I shouldn’t have been. 

Kurt Hoeffer is the character who makes me wonder if George Snyder wrote this; he’s an arrogant, loud-mouthed jerk, and seems to have walked out of one of the Operation Hang Ten books. After Carol blows up the statue she rushes from the graduation ceremony and into Kurt’s waiting VW bus, which we’re informed is brightly colored and decorated with the expected leftist signs – “Legalize abortion now,” and etc. Later Kurt will hand Carol a joint and then force his hairy body onto hers, ultimately taking her virginity; a masterfully-relayed scene in which Carol can’t get over how Kurt is nothing like the men she’s often fantasized about, clean-cut men who smell of cologne and aftershave…men like her father. Ryan leaves this sex scene (and all others) off-page; there’s even a conservative tone to the narrative, with “breasts” only occasionally mentioned (a male readership was clearly in mind) and curse words only infrequently appearing. Again, it’s nothing like Trashing, a book that was written by someone involved with the whole “resist!” movement. 

Carol really is dumb, and it’s hard to feel any sympathy for her. We’re often reminded that she got into this whole thing due to her desire to help the “poor black kids” of the cities, the “subjugated American Indians,” and also of course “the Mexicans.” (?!) Yet at the same time we’re to believe she morphs into the figurehead of the “Bombers of America” movement, the new SDS-type hippie terrorist faction she starts with Kurt. Carol is desperate to belong, you see, to have a family – and she believes she’s found one with Kurt’s inner circle. This itself is comical, as one of these people is a “big-breasted” girl named Vicki, who constantly mocks Carol and calls her “Rich Bitch,” taunting her that she doesn’t belong, that she isn’t a true revolutionary, etc. Carol also soon gets a glimpse of how little these people care about each other, stupidly wondering if she herself would so easily be forgotten were she to get arrested or die for the cause. 

We get more of an understanding of who the novel is intended for via the introduction of Bob Arnett (we’ll just assume he’s Will’s father), a ‘Nam vet in his early 20s who attended college with Carol and likes her, but wanted to wait until he’d graduated and gotten a job and such before he asked her out(!?). He approaches Carol’s distraught parents and offers to find Carol for them, given that she’s run away with a bunch of hippie creeps and all – a plot that mirrors an actual Burt Hirschfeld novel, Father Pig. Arnett then is the true hero of the tale, a short-haired conservative type who is there to serve as the intermediary for the (presumably) older readership; he may be of the hippie generation, but he’s not part of it. Actually there’s a minor part with Arnett that makes me think “Donald Ryan” might’ve been an older writer, after all; Carol later accuses Arnett that he “never made love” to her, and this same phrase is used by Arnett himself earlier in the book when he wonders why he didn’t immediately “make love to Carol” when he first met her. While this phrase initially seemed jolting, I recalled that in earlier years “make love” had the same connotation as “romance.” I’ve heard this phrase in movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s and you can sure bet they didn’t mean “have sex” in them! Joseph Breen and his censors would’ve cut that out in a hot second. So in other words, earlier in the 20th Century Carol’s “you never made love to me, not even once” line to Arnett would’ve meant that Arnett never asked her out or otherwise tried to romance her or whatnot. But I think for a young person writing in 1972, “make love” would have the same meaning as it would today – hardcore shenanigans of the adult variety. So, to end an overlong paragraph, this could be more indication that Ryan was indeed of an earlier generation. 

Anyway, Arnett proves to be incompetent. We learn late in the novel that not only is he a ‘Nam vet, he was also a Green Beret. This sets the expectation for some Rambo-esque violence, Arnett wading into hippie territory and bashing hairy heads, but all the dude does is ignorantly walk around and get himself knocked out. In fact there’s no real action in the book, other than the bombs Carol plants, and as mentioned she always ensures no one gets hurt by phoning in bomb threats to the target locations. This doesn’t work out very well in a gripping sequence in which Carol plants a bomb at an Army recruiting office in Chicago but is unable to get anyone on the line until seconds before the blast. A young officer is caught in the explosion; Carol sees his body flying like a ragdoll and is haunted by the image. Later she’ll be informed the kid’s dead, and this will as mentioned lead her into the beginnings of heroin addiction. 

But Carol’s route to bomb-planter is a gradual one; her first big moment is at a march in Minneapolis, Kurt and comrades protesting an urban development that threatens the tenement buildings occupied by lower-income blacks. Reverend Mills, the MLK-type mentioned above, resents the presence of Kurt and all the other hippies, given the bad press they bring – remember, this is back in the days when actual “peaceful protests” were attacked by the media…those sadly-gone days in which you would never see a so-called reporter standing in front of a burning building and claiming he was in the middle of a “fiery but mostly peaceful protest.” Back then the media was the Establishment…actually today the media is still the Establishment, it’s just of a different political orientation. Reverend Mills also resents that Kurt and his fellow hippies don’t really give a damn about the blacks in those buildings, and are just using the protests as an excuse to wreak havoc and cause trouble. No doubt more indication of the reactionary tone of the novel, but no doubt pretty much true as well. 

At this Minneapolis march Carol realizes that protests don’t cause anything to happen, so she takes matters into her hands and blows up one of the buildings that have been put up in the cleared area. This makes her a hero of the movement, not that Vicki still doesn’t taunt her as “Rich Bitch.” From there things progress to the Bombers of America initiative, with Carol designing bombs and Kurt’s people planting them in various locations. Locations which, Carol eventually learns, are being supplied by an infamous conservative politician who is running on a Law and Order campaign. He not only gives Kurt the locations, but money as well, and Carol can’t understand why they’re taking money from the enemy. Kurt, who becomes increasingly deranged and “evil” as the short novel races for its conclusion, claims that “cash has no politics” and that he’s taken money from conservatives to liberals, all of it used to blow up stuff – and also, he happily reveals, he doesn’t even give a shit about the various causes he’s rioting for, it just makes for good publicity. Especially if a child’s killed in one of the blasts, as one is in a nail bomb Kurt places in a bank lobby. 

This is the final straw for Carol…I mean the forced gang-bang and heroin addiction were one thing, but this is another! She once again decides to take matters into her own hands, which leads us to the events that started the book. Meanwhile Carol’s 15 year-old sister, Anne, has also caught the revolutionary bug, planting a bomb at her high school. (Mr. Warring puts his head in his hands and wonders where he went wrong with his two daughters…!) She then runs away from home, finds Bob Arnett in Greenwich Village, and after coming on to him (he turns her down) demands that he take her to Carol, whom Arnett has finally found. The book ends with Anne announcing she’ll continue Carol’s bomb-making work, asking Arnett to join her…a ridiculous finale that has no setup, as it makes no sense. Arnett of course turns her down and walks off into the sunset, making for an anticlimactic ending to what is, at only 160 pages, a very rushed book. 

Overall The Dynamite Freaks is marginally entertaining, particularly in how it predicts the situation of today; it was very strange reading this book, given current events. Actually it was kind of depressing, because all this shit is coming back up again. I read the book last week and wrote the majority of the review then, but today as I am finishing it up and setting it to post on the blog, protesters from the right are storming the Capitol Building.  I have to say, I find it incredibly ironic that they’re being denounced as domestic terrorists by the very same pundits who defended the Antifa and BLM riots this past summer. (Of course these are the same pundits who spent the past four years telling us Russia interfered with the 2016 election, but now say there’s absolutely zero evidence of any fraud in the 2020 election...but such hypocrisy is expected in what currently passes for the United States.)  So I guess the main difference is that Donald Ryan was writing in a more rational, more sane world – the country wasn’t on the brink of another civil war due to irreconcilable ideological differences.

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.