STEVE CARROLL WRITES

Though it is set during World War II, it would be somewhat disingenuous to refer to  The Hill  as a war novel. Written by Ray Rigby, a veteran of British television of the 50s and 60s,  The Hill  deals not with enemies on the battlefield but instead focuses on the escalating battles of will between disgraced British soldiers held prisoner in a Libyan wartime prison, and the authorities who lord over them within these barracks.  The title refers to a manmade structure, 60’ high and 200’ long hill of sand, that has been built in the middle of the grounds in order to provide a grueling challenge for the prisoners who are forced to march up and down its sides under the intense blaze of the desert sun. Our main character is Joe Roberts, a warrant officer imprisoned for insubordination for refusing orders that he felt would get him and others killed. Our protagonists consist of the other 4 prisoners in R...

I bought this book on a whim but was slightly reluctant about starting a noir crime thriller with a length of over 400 pages. Noir crime thrillers in my experience are best when they are lean and stripped of padding (like the Parker thrillers by Donald Westlake or the Quarry series by Max Allan Collins). The mistake was mine though in assuming that  Five Decembers  was just a crime thriller, as it is far more than simply that. Five Decembers  is simultaneously an action-packed period-set noir crime thriller, a murder mystery police procedural, a hard-edged unflinching view of war, a tragic love story, a multi-cultural adventure, and an espionage-infused cat and mouse chase around the globe. In a word, this book is genuinely EPIC! It’s 1941 and Honolulu cop Joe McGrady is getting his first big case after five years in the police department, investigating a particularly brutal double murder in which one of t...

Resistance #2: Magyar Massacre (1982) by Gregory St. Germain   After much online research I have been unable to determine   whether Gregory St. Germain was a house name or not, though I suspect it was.   Regardless, that is the name given to the author of  Magyar Massacre , the second in the  Resistance  series, published in the early 80s by Signet. The hook here is that Phoenix, the Dirty Dozen-style team of multi-national soldiers, is operating against the Nazis throughout Europe in secret missions that pre-date America’s official involvement in World War II. Led by stalwart American Scott Gideon, Phoenix is tasked with getting into Nazi-occupied Hungary and eventually Yugoslavia in order to recover a Count’s stolen art treasure that will be used to further fuel the Nazi war machine’s onslaught through Europe. It’s a nonstop action romp with stereotypical characters who are best remembered by their nationa...

Mac Wingate #2 -   Mission Code: King’s Pawn  (1981) by Bryan Swift (Bill C. Knott) Although three writers took on the name of Bryan Swift to pen the Mac Wingate series of World War II adventures, I started with the second one, credited to Bill C. Knott.  Mission Code: King’s Pawn  finds our hero, special agent and demolition expert Mac Wingate, tasked with putting together a small munitions team to parachute into Albania for the purpose of arming, training, and assisting Islamic anti-Communist guerrillas in their efforts to blow up a German gasoline and munitions dump. The plan hinges on Mac’s ability to successfully unite the disparate factions of the rebels under the leadership the Albanian king’s cousin.  The plot hops effectively from Cairo to Malta to the mountains of Albania. Clearly films such as  The Guns of Navarone ,  The Dirty Dozen , and  Where Eagles Dare  had...

Play Dirty   (1969)   by Zeno Zeno (real name Gerald Theodore La Marque) was a veteran of the 1st Airborne Division and wrote 5 books, nearly all of which were authored while serving a 10-year prison sentence for homicide in London.  Play Dirty  is a novelization of a screenplay by Melvyn Bragg and Lotte Collin for the film starring Michael Caine.  This is a classic “men on a mission” type story of a ragtag group of soldiers forced to work together to achieve a seemingly impossible task during the North Africa campaign of WWII—blow up a heavily protected German fuel depot in the desert.  Our main protagonist is Captain Douglas, an employee of British Petroleum serving in the Royal Engineers, who is strong-armed into leading a raiding unit of criminals on what could be a suicide mission. His second-in-command is Leech, a sociopathic (and potentially psychopathic) convicted...

Commando #1:   Operation Arrowhead  (2019) by Jack Badelaire Author Jack Badelaire describes this series as military adventure pulp fiction, and what a fitting description that is. Set during Hitler’s blitzkrieg across Europe,  Commando  deals with a crack unit of elite light infantry raiders capable of taking the offensive to the Nazi troops in occupied territories.  The action in this first installment takes place in France with very little backstory or history beyond a prologue that grounds us geographically and explains the formation of the Commando units. Our main character is Lance Corporal Thomas Lynch and we’re introduced to him and his team in heavy action as they engage the Germans immediately.  From there the entire book is virtually a non-stop minute-by-minute account of battle with small but tense reprieves. There’s not a lot of character arc, but that is not to say...

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 intr...

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...

The First Blood  (1971)   by Lou Cameron Prolific author Lou Cameron wrote books in almost every niche of the men’s adventure spectrum. His lean, uncluttered style, coupled with casual profanity and violence is easily recognizable. Cameron served in Europe in the Army’s 2nd Armored Division during World War II and that experience infuses some sense of reality to  The First Blood , which is set during the African campaign of that war.  The “men on a mission” plot features a ragtag group of soldiers under the command of a suicidal lieutenant who are sent to take control of an ancient desert fortress currently under the control of French legionnaire forces in Algiers. They have 24 hours to accomplish this goal ahead of a Panzer tank column that must be delayed or stopped if at all possible.  The entire setup occurs within the first few pages and the mission is immediately underway. Things go...

Runner  (1975) by Milar  Larsen (Lance Jensen) Lance Jensen (aka Milar Larsen) was a decorated World War II paratrooper (11th Airborne) who had four published books—two under the pen name of Milar Larsen and two more under his real name. His experience as a paratrooper in Europe comes through in every detail of  Runner . This book does an amazing job of placing the reader in the frozen forests of France and Belgium during Nazi occupation.  Our main character is 18-year old Jefferson Wainwright, a green recruit just arrived in the European battle theater prior to the Battle of the Bulge. It is through his eyes that we experience what separates this book and makes it unique: Sergeant Jay Runner, a full blood Dakota Sioux who doesn’t suffer fools, even when they are in command.  Runner is larger than life, bigoted, and seems to have stepped right out of the 19th century. He st...