STEVE CARROLL WRITES

Mad River  (1956/1967)   by Donald Hamilton Before he solidified his reputation as the author of the Matt Helm   espionage series, Donald Hamilton wrote several westerns, some of which   started   life as serialized stories for Collier Magazine . Such is the case with  Mad Rive r originally printed by Collier   in 1956 and then lengthened   into a novel and republished by Gold Medal in 1967.   While Mad River is well-written (I’ve yet to read anything by Hamilton that   wasn’t) and   features a few standout action sequences, it bears the tell-tale   signs of a shorter work that was padded to hit a required word count rather   than a   justifiable plot expansion.  Boyd Cohoon is released from Yuma prison   following a 5-year stint for a crime he didn’t commit; he agreed to serve in   order to protect the brother of the woman he loves, who has pledged to wait for   him.  However, nothing goes...

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...

Bitter   Sage  (1954) by Frank Gruber Frank Gruber was a highly prolific writer of pulps and various novels, including many westerns. 25 of his books were made into movies and he created 3 different western TV shows, in addition to writing 65 screenplays and 100 television episodes. I note all of this because reading  Bitter Sage  is like watching a classic Hollywood western movie from the heyday of the 50s.  Wes Tancred is one of the best gunslingers in the old west, but he’s running from a violent past and a lie about who he is and what he’s done that has taken on mythic proportions. Following a fateful intervention that sees him gun down 3 would-be thieves, Tancred ends up in Sage City, Kansas, a cattle town owned and lorded over by the crooked mayor, Jacob Fugger.  Taking a job as a printer at the local newspaper, Tancred is inevitably pulled into a growing war between the uprigh...

Lassiter: Funeral   Bend  (1970) by Jack Slade (Peter McCurtin) The Lassiter series, credited to house name Jack Slade, was written by a variety of authors over the course of numerous books with multiple publishers in the US and across Europe, although deciphering information on actual authors and correctly numbered editions is a bit daunting. Most consensus seems to land on  Funeral Bend  being the work of action/adventure stalwart, Peter McCurtin.  We are introduced to our anti-hero, Lassiter, as he arrives in the town of El Dorado, formerly known as Funeral Bend. It’s a violent mining town with no law to speak of and plenty of intermingling immigrants (Welsh, Irish, and Chinese). Lassiter takes out 3 troublemakers in one of the town’s saloons early in the book and is offered a job as marshal, which he takes. However, we soon learn that Lassiter has a plan to steal the town’s gold reserves ...

The Last Ranger #9:   The Damned Disciples  (1988) by Craig Sargent (Jan Stacy) Jan Stacy was a post-apocalyptic series juggernaut, penning not only all 10   volumes of  The Last Ranger   series but   also co-creating and co- authoring many of  The   Doomsday Warrior  series with Ryder Syvertsen under the pen name of Ryder   Stacy.  The Last Ranger  centers on   Martin   Stone, a young man whose father had the foresight to build an   impregnable underground mountain fortress prior to an obliterating nuclear   attack   by the Soviets. It’s from this high-tech compound that he trains young   Martin in survival, martial arts, and weaponry so he can emerge after the   old   man’s death to search for his kidnaped sister—a quest that stretches across the   series. He is always accompanied by his faithful pit-bull,   Excalibur.  In  The Damned Disciples ,  Stone is summo...

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 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...

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 ...