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. 

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? 

Friday's Forgotten Book: Martin Cruz Smith: Nick Carter: The Inca Death Squad

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.