STEVE CARROLL WRITES

Legion of the Damned  (1953)   by Sven Hassel Sven Hassel was the pen name of Danish-born Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen, who wrote a total of fourteen novels based in large part on first-hand experience he gained as a soldier for Germany in WWII.  Legion of the Damned  is considered the most autobiographical of Hassel’s works, detailing in first-person narrative the exploits of a young soldier who starts off the book convicted of desertion and placed in a concentration camp.  The inhumanities of the camps are presented in a blunt, matter of fact manner that only adds to the horrors being described. We follow our protagonist through his harrowing time as part of a bomb disposal unit before being assigned to a penal combat unit. The cast of characters expands from this point with much camaraderie and even room for a little ill-fated romance for our narrator before the war intrudes again and our group ends up on the Russian front under the leadership of their sadistic Commander, Meier.  Th

The Laramie River   Crossing  (1973) by Jack Ehrlich After a career as a lawyer, a district attorney, and a reporter for Newsday, Jack Ehrlich started writing fiction late in life. Thank God, because  The Laramie River Crossing  is stunning—a lean, mean, hard-edged adult-oriented western that left me hungry to read everything by the author.  This is a genuinely literary novel that takes the time to craft characters of real depth with myriad shades of gray. Smith (no first name given), and Preacher are bad men with a history of violence and crime. The first half of the book has a classic “men on a mission” set-up as Preacher goes about putting their previous crime ring back together at the behest of The Limey, their old handler and heist mastermind.  Preacher is not above bushwhacking his former colleagues or breaking them out of jail to force their involvement. The plot itself is deceptively simple: The Limey wants to go legit and reunites the old gang to protect his investment as he b

Soldier of Fortune #11: Yellow Rain  (1984) by Peter McCurtin After a several years hiatus Peter McCurtin resurrected the Soldier of Fortune title with #10,  Yellow Rain , in 1984. A few authors are known to have taken on the McCurtin mantle to write this series, among them men’s adventure stalwart Ralph Hayes.  Yellow Rain  however is fully attributed to McCurtin personally, so I was excited to dive in, especially since I had never read a Soldier of Fortune book.  Please forgive me for wading into this slim book with the expectation of wall-to-wall action with little character development or depth of political shading or geographic and cultural detail. Instead I discovered a slow burn of a rescue operation with more of an espionage vibe than a military firepower one. In fact, I was reminded of the master himself, Ian Fleming, in the way McCurtin takes the time to make the various political and social cultures of Russian-occupied Afghanistan in the early 80s a character every bit as de

The Death of the  Führer   (1972) by Roland   Puccetti If pure literary pulp essence could be distilled and ingested in book form,  The Death of the Führer  by Roland Puccetti might very well be the end result. An outlandish tale relayed in breathless first-person narrative, this book isn’t simply fast-paced, it hurtles relentlessly with reckless abandon from one set-piece to the next, never allowing its reader to dwell on the last preposterous development before throwing its protagonist into the next level of escalating danger.  Our hero is Karl Gisevious, a doctor prior to WWII, who is now a reporter investigating a lead gleaned from a Russian doctor’s deathbed confession. The doctor claims to have been a participant in the autopsy of Adolf Hitler and was a witness to the fact that the body’s brain had been previously removed. This of course means that the Führer may still be alive, his brain now powering a different body.  It becomes quickly apparent that our ostensible hero is not

Rio Desperado  (1962)   by Gordon Shirreffs As  Rio Desperado  opens, gunslinger Burke Dane cuts down the lynched body of his half-brother on the outskirts of a town where the young family man had gone to buy cattle. Dane’s only clue is the unique style of braided rawhide  reata  that was used to hang his brother.  Armed with basic knowledge of the town and the power-hungry cattle baron who runs it, Dane sets out to find those responsible and exact justice. He also intends to retrieve the $5,000 in poker winnings that was stolen from his brother’s corpse so he can give it to his brother’s widow and children.  This basic set-up is all that is necessary in the hands of a pro like Shirreffs, who wrote over 70 novels in his day. There is a depth of character and a literary flair to this book that belies its pulp roots. Dane saves the life of Jesse, a hot-headed young hired gun working for the town’s dictator-like boss. A friendship slowly develops between these two in spite of the fact tha

Texas   Fever  (1960) by Donald Hamilton While best known for his excellent Matt Helm espionage series, Donald Hamilton also wrote a fair share of westerns and it becomes obvious within the first few pages of  Texas Fever  that he was a genuine master of the genre. There is an immediate grasp of setting, characters, and purpose that sets the story into motion as we’re introduced to young Chuck McAuliffe following his hardened Civil War hero father on a cattle drive from the McAuliffe Ranch in Texas through Indian Territory to Kansas.  We enter the story in mid-drive and are alongside as their team runs into all manner of obstacles, from deadly bushwhackers in its opening pages to brutally enforced quarantines against potentially disease-carrying Texas longhorns in the border towns. Driving the narrative is a constant revenge-fueled feud with the leader of the bushwhackers who murdered Chuck’s brother and the sadistic and corrupt deputy enforcing the quarantine.  Throughout the book, Ha

A Badge for a Badman  (1967)   by Brian Wynne (Brian Garfield) This is the 6 th  of 8 westerns featuring Jeremy Six, marshal of   Spanish Flat, written by Brian Garfield under the pen-name of Brian Wynne.  A   Badge for a Badman  kicks off in fine   form with an excellent and suspenseful sequence detailing how Marshal Six, his   deputy, Dominguez, and a small   group of devoted friends go into covert action   upon realizing that Burl Marriner and his gang have arrived in town to steal   the   Reservation consignment from the town bank.  Burl is a hard-case whose son,   Cleve, and a nephew, Wes, both share a history with Jeremy Six. It   all ends   with Six outgunning the elder Marriner and capturing an injured Cleve.  The real   villain of the book though is the now widowed Ma   Marriner who immediately pulls   together a large group of outlaws and sets off to free her son and kill Marshal   Six. Realizing that this will   endanger the entire town, Six decides to hit the   trail with C