The Executioners Nick Carter Killmaster #55

The Executioners was number 55 in the prolific Nick Carter Killmaster pulp spy thriller series. It appeared in 1970. All the books in the series were credited to Nick Carter. This one was written by Jon Messmann.

Nick Carter is a secret agent for the top-secret U.S. spy agency AXE.

Of course you know that there’s going to be a nefarious plot to destroy or undermine western civilisation, a plot hatched by one of America’s enemies. But it does come as a surprise that in this book the threat comes from - the Australians! The book opens with an Australian aircraft carrier sinking an American guided missile cruiser, with the loss of most of the crew of the cruiser.

Undoubtedly the inspiration for this book was a real-life incident in 1969 when the Australian aircraft carrier Melbourne did indeed sink an American destroyer in an accidental collision.

But in this novel it is no accident. Then those damned Australians drop live bombs on American troops doing an exercise. And, oh yeah, the Australians also blow up a whole bunch of British soldiers in another training exercise.

These incidents are officially written off as accidents but Hawk, the chief of AXE, doesn’t believe it for a second. Those American and British servicemen were killed deliberately. So what’s going on? Have the Australians become the latest of America’s enemies or is there some mysterious sinister scheme behind all this? Could it be the commies? AXE’s ace agent Nick Carter is sent Australia to find out.

Nick follows up a number of leads. Most of the leads involve women. He discovers that Australian women have very impressive breasts. Nick doesn’t notice too much about women’s personalities or emotions or motivations but he always notices their breasts. In order to get more information from these women Nick naturally has to sleep with them.

There are three women who play key roles in this story. There’s the assistant to the chief of Australian Intelligence, Mona Star. Mona has jutting breasts. There’s Judy, who works in a bar that seems to be linked to the case. Judy has round full breasts. Then there’s the Lynn, the girlfriend of one of the Australian soldiers involved in those accident. She has thin breasts. Yes, this book really is largely taken up by loving descriptions of women’s breasts. And steamy sex scenes.

Nick manages to find time (in between bedding Aussie women) to get beaten up, almost incinerated in a blast furnace and to get thrown out of an aircraft and stranded in the Outback. Where he encounters kangaroos. There’s no point in setting your novel in Australia unless kangaroos are going to play a part in the story.

You’ll have no difficulty whatever in guessing what is behind all this mayhem. It’s pretty much spelled out for you in the first few pages of the book. There is an amusing implication however that if those Australians start thinking about leaving their alliance with America they’ll need to be slapped down hard.

Even more amusing is that the author manages to get every single thing about Australia totally and ludicrously wrong.

There’s quite a bit of sex but (surprisingly for a book published in 1970) it’s not at all graphic.

It sounds like I’m mocking this book. It’s certainly very trashy, but I like trashy books. I like trashy overheated spy thrillers and I enjoy good old-fashioned paranoia (and there’s plenty of Cold War paranoia here). I also have no objections whatsoever to having generous amounts of sleaze added to spy thrillers. I don’t even have a major problem with thrillers in which all the female characters spend most of their time naked. I know it’s not politically correct but if you’re worried about political correctness you’re not likely to be considering reading a Nick Carter KiIlmaster book (or reading a review of such a book).

What this series did provide was lots of mindless action and sex, and those are good things. On the whole The Executioners delivers what readers of this series were looking for. The revelation of the nefarious scheme is just a bit too obvious.

The front cover promises babes in black bikinis and scuba gear. And yes, there are indeed black bikini-clad babes in scuba gear. And a brief but pretty effective underwater action climax.

The Executioners is not a great Killmaster book but it’s reasonable enough entertainment.