Now, that's a great name for a book, isn't it? This is one of the better Nick Carter paperbacks from the early seventies, published in 1972 in fact, and known to have been written by Martin Cruz Smith early in his career, before he hit it big with Gorky Park and other thrillers. I haven't read any of those, but I've read two of his Nick Carters, but this was the first I read in English. And it's good I read it, since it's a lot better book in its original language. The Finnish translation may be abridged, but I didn't check, since my Nick Carters are somewhere away in a box.Martin Cruz Smith's Nick Carter narrates his own adventures, which brings the book closer to the hardboiled school of writing (Dennis Lynds's Nick Carter is also a first-person narrator). Smith's style is hardboiled in its own right, and Nick Carter gets to make some pretty good wisecracks. The action scenes are crisp. The setting is a pretty inventive one in the series, Chile just after Salvador Allende was elected president. Carter: "I just wonder if there will ever be another election." Just year after this Pinochet killed Allende with help from CIA - irony of history there, huh?
Smith reveals his fascination towards the Soviet Union that's prevalent in Gorky Park: the bad guy in the book is a Soviet minister who makes a deal with AXE that Nick Carter escorts him during his trip in Chile. Smith is also able to make some sense out of the series stablemate, the beautiful and willing ladies with whom Nick Carter makes love every moment.
What about the Incas? There's a great battle scene with an Inca warrior, but I didn't think Smith made the best possible use with the Inca angle. After the battle the Incas just vanish and no one seems to discuss them anymore. Nick Carter even finds an ancient tomb, but tells no one about it, even though one of the characters is a museum director. Salvador Allende, by the way, makes some brief appearances throughout the book.
I'd like to quote some passages from The Inca Death Squad, but I don't think I have patience for trying to find some. I read this on our trip to my mom's, and I can guarantee it served its purpose very well. And it goes on to show how the old-fashioned pulp literature (yeah, yeah, I know, not real REAL pulp, but you know what I mean) enabled many writers to hone their skill before hitting it big. And what's best, this is only appr. 160 pages.
The picture accompanying this post is the British edition (Tandem, 1973). More Forgotten Books here.
5 comments:
Well, of course, Nick Carter the character in his initial form is so old, he predates the pulps, and was a star of the dime novels that preceded them, as well as being a stalwart of the real pulps and radio drama in the first half of the last century (in an ever-evolving manner) before bursting into paperbacks...
I used to love those Nick Carters.
Some of them seem to be quite good in their own genre, but feels like the quality deteriorated in the eighties, am I right? Except for those that Dennis Lynds wrote. And didn't his wife, Gayle Lynds, also write Carters? Are they any good?
I have a blog dedicated somewhat to my extensive collection on Nick Carters at http://suspenseandmystery.blogspot.com/
That's a great site, Scott!
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