George Snyder: Nick Carter: Jewel of Doom

 

I've been going through my forth-coming book (well, forth-coming maybe next year or in 2024) about American paperback crime and suspense writers published in Finnish, but I haven't found time to actually read any of the books. I managed to squeeze in a Nick Carter by George Snyder, who died in 2018 after self-publishing his new crime books during the recent years. 

The Jewel of Doom came originally out in 1970, when Lyle Kenyon Engel was producing the series for Award. The publishing house forced Engel and his writers to use first person narration, which may not be suitable for Nick Carter (though later efforts by Dennis Lynds and Robert Randisi proved it could be done*), and there's no reason for it in here. Nick Carter is not more alive in The Jewel of Doom than he is in those novels that are narrated in third person. 

The plot of the book deals with the Fabergé eggs. Now, this piqued my interest, since Peter Carl Fabergé lived in the Czarist Russia when Finland was still a part of the empire. He didn't have Finnish roots, but his mentor Peter Pendin was Finnish, and many Finnish smiths worked for the Fabergé family, producing lots of beautiful golden eggs. In Snyder's book, one of the eggs is being used in smuggling the plans for a new US military device out of the country. Nick Carter of course prevents it from happening. He also gets to spend some quality time with different babes throughout the novel.

Sad to say, the book wasn't very good. It's not badly written, from what I can gather from the Finnish translation, but the scenes go on and on. Especially the erotic scenes seem endless, and yet nothing much happens. The action scenes are handled deftly, but even they are too long. I didn't actually finish the book and started another. 

Here's Paul Bishop on Snyder, and here's also a German interview with Snyder.  

The Finnish cover from 1974 above. It has nothing to do with the book, since the lady in the photo seems to hold a copy of Mao's Little Red Book in her hand. 

* At least Lynds did Nick Carters in the first person narration, and I seem to remember Randisi did too. Correct if I'm wrong. 

Robert Crane: Born of Battle

Robert Crane was really Con Sellers, a steady writer of low-grade paperbacks working through the sixties and seventies for the small publishers, and finally finding some mainstream success in the eighties and early nineties. It seems his breakthrough novel was the novelization of the Dallas TV series he did in 1980. He died in 1992. Here's a link to the Finnish translation of the Dallas book - it came out here in hardcover, with a very non-pulp cover! 

I read now one of Sellers's war paperbacks as by Robert Crane. Most of the Robert Crane books are about one Sgt. Ben Corbin fighting in Korea, but this one, called Born of Battle, tells about an Army old hand Ernie Kovacs and a war reporter called Saxon, who must be Sellers's self-portrait, since he started writing for the war papers (I don't know the actual term here) in Korea. The book came out in Finland under the title Sankarit ovat kuolleet ("The Heroes Are Dead"), which doesn't make any sense. The cover is also misleading.  

Born of Battle doesn't contain many action or battle scenes, it's more like a love novel, since Saxon's romance with a South Korean woman takes so much place in the narration, and the book is pretty episodic. But I didn't mind, since Crane/Sellers writes convincingly and effortlessly about his characters and their endeavors. The book came out from Pyramid in 1962, but there's not much pulpiness that was so prevalent in the books Pyramid usually published. 

Axel Kilgore (Jerry Ahern): Death Lust

Jerry Ahern was known mainly for his post-apocalyptic series like The Survivalist and The Takers. I haven't read any of those, but I read one of the books in his other series, about the one-eyed mercenary Hank Frost, written as by Axel Kilgore. I'd read one before, called The Terror Contract (1982). It wasn't bad, straight-up action that has no pretenses of literary merit. Even the gun porn that you hear Ahern having been guilty of is minimal. 

The other Hank Frost I recently read, called Death Lust (also 1982; Cosa Nostra! in Finnish), wasn't as good, though it had its moments. There's even a hint of great adventure in the air, when Hank Frost is posing as a gun dealer somewhere in the Mediterranean, and when the ship he's travelling in gets attacked, he saves a young woman and when it's revealed she's the daughter of a Mafia don, he wins the father's ever-lasting gratitude. The Mafia helps Hank Frost attacking the gun dealers led by Frost's long-time enemy, Eva Chapmann, whose father he's killed in the past. There are lots of attacks and battles in the book, and I got actually kind of lost amongst them, but all in all this was a pretty entertaining men's adventure paperback. The end in which Eva Chapmann is dressed as a nun, was a bit weird, though. 

Elliott Lewis: Two Heads Are Better

This is no men's adventure paperback, instead it's a private eye novel that came out in paperback in 1980. The publisher was Pinnacle that was famous for its men's adventure books in the seventies and early eighties, but seems like they were ready to publish books from different genres. 

Elliott Lewis was a radio actor who sometimes appeared on TV and film. When he retired from acting, he wrote seven private eye books for Pinnacle from 1980 to 1983. The first one is weirdly named Two Heads Are Better. The antihero of the book is one Fred Bennett, an ex-cop leading a lousy life and working as a private eye. The book starts off with a headless corpse being found on the trunk of his car, and Bennett has to flee and solve the case at the same time. 

I really didn't like this book. It seems hasty and the plot is too convoluted. Bennett is not very likable character, though I usually like unsympathetic private eyes. This is not the case here. Bill Crider said it better here. 

David Hagberg: Nick Carter: The Istanbul Decision

I've never read any books by David Hagberg, though he seems to have been prolific and at least somewhat appreciated writer of spy thrillers, mainly in the 21st century. He started out in the mid-seventies, penning Nick Carters and Flash Gordon paperbacks without a byline and several one-off horror/SF paperbacks, such as the cult favourite Croc. He died in 2019. 

I've now read one of his Nick Carters, called The Istanbul Decision. It came out originally in 1983, and Hagberg's titles for his AXE novels are all pretty similar: you have your The Ouster Conspiracy, The Vengeance Game, The Strontium Code... This one is about Nick Carter trying to lure a Soviet spy into a trap by using a double for the spy's daughter who the Americans have kidnapped. It's very complicated, but not very intriguing. The book races on, but I didn't feel much for the characters. The climax takes place in the Orient Express. I don't remember much about the book anymore. 

Someone said that Hagberg was one of the writers who made the Nick Carter series too realistic and humorless in the early eighties. There's lots of action, but none of it is zany or far out. 

I'm still intrigued by his other Nick Carter, Death Island (1984), that was published in Finland as "Blood-Hungry Man-Eaters" (Verta janoavat ihmissyöjät, that is). 

James Fritzhand: Nick Carter: Sign of the Cobra

As I said, I was going to post short reviews of some paperbacks I'll be reading in the coming months as I'm making a sequel to my original Pulpografia (2000, in Finnish only), a reference book on American crime and mystery writers published mainly in the pulp and paperback format. Many of the books I'll be reading are men's adventure, a genre I'm not very much interested in, but which seems quite popular nowadays. When I was writing my first book 20 years ago, it was mainly about noir and hardboiled stuff, but the wind has changed, at least according to the sites like Paperback Warrior and Facebook groups like Men's Adventure Paperbacks of the 20th Century. 

Okay, off to the book I was going to write about. It's a Nick Carter/Killmaster book, written by James Fritzhand. The title is Sign of the Cobra, and it's one of the three Nick Carters Fritzhand wrote in the mid-seventies. All the books take place in Asia, and in them Nick Carter is fluent in taekwondo, which, if I'm not mistaken, he's not in the earlier books. I read on the Glorious Trash blog that the continuity of the Nick Carter series was gone when the series was taken out of Lyle Kenyon Engel's hands, and the writers came up with their own versions of Nick Carter. 

That said, Sign of the Cobra isn't a bad book. It's fluent and readable, and there's just enough old time pulp bravado to keep things interesting, though this isn't as crazy as some of the sixties' installments in the series, for example the books by Manning Lee Stokes. The villain has an artificial arm that looks like a cobra, and it's equipped with poisonous needles! The action scenes are quite good, except when Fritzhand makes someone say something aloud in the middle of a taekwondo strike which makes for a very weird reading. Just how slow is Nick Carter moving? 

Robert Ackworth: Young Doctor in Town

I've been lately writing a sequel to my first non-fiction book that was called Pulpografia. The working title has been "The Shadow of Pulpografia", but it won't probably be the final name. Well, you could call many of my books sequels to Pulpografia, but this one is made with the same premise: it's a reference book on American crime and suspense writers whose books and short stories were published in Finland in a paperback format or in a pulp magazine or similar periodical publication. 

I've been doing this work on an almost daily basis, with digging up some biographical and bibliographic information on the authors, but now I've been browsing the books and writing something about them. The first one happened to be Young Doctor in Town by Robert Ackworth. Who he? I don't know much about Ackworth, but he was born in 1923 and is most possibly dead by now. He wrote some short stories for the digests in the late fifties, and at the same time he published some erotic-cum-romantic paperbacks (i.e. The Moments Between, 1959). He published as late as 1978, when the novel The Takers came out. It seems to be about Hollywood. Ackworth wrote also some Dr. Kildare novelizations for Lancer. There's also a war novel by him in Finnish (called "One Moment from Hell"), but seems like it was never published in the US or UK. 

He penned also this one-off medical romance. As it was not a crime novel, I didn't feel the need to read the book and thought browsing should suffice. It's about a young doctor called Garner coming into a small town and getting mixed up with the possibly mentally ill wife of the town's big man. There's also romance, but also some critique of the state of medical care in the small town. 

The book was published in 1963 by something called Medical Fiction Books. Does anyone know anything about this outfit? 

I have other work to do and other books to read, but I think I'll try to squeeze some vintage paperbacks in and try to write about them here at Pulpetti. Next up a Nick Carter by James Fritzhand, and another one by David Hagberg!