J.D. Masters' Cold Steele

Cold Steele, published in 1989, is the second of the Steele books by J.D. Masters.

I went into Cold Steele expecting a violent but fun pulp action thriller in the men’s adventure mode. It is in fact a very successful adrenalin-rush pulp action thriller but it’s also a surprisingly smart and interesting and somewhat complex cyberpunk science fiction novel.

The hero is a cyborg, but he’s not a robot with a human brain. He’s a partially robotically enhanced flesh-and-blood man but the twist is that he doesn’t have a human brain. He has a computer brain. Well, it’s sort of a computer brain and sort of a human brain.

Donovan Steele was (and maybe is) a cop who got badly shot up. His body survived. It was badly mangled but with bionic enhancements it was made fully functional. His brain however did not survive. Not on organic form. His personality was however uploaded and used as the basis for the software that drives his electronic brain.

This personality uploading idea was very fashionable in the cyberpunk sci-fi of the 80s. It’s an idea that always struck me as very unconvincing. Masters however handles it rather deftly and in a genuinely provocative and interesting way. Donovan Steele doesn’t know if he’s human or not. He has his human memories. He experiences human emotions. Or at least he thinks he does. But he knows he’s not human in the way other people are human.

And he has some problems, which psychiatrist Dev Cooper is supposed to be helping him work through. Steele has nightmares. These seem to be memories. Very vivid memories. He is convinced that they are real memories. The trouble is that they’re not his memories.

Dev Cooper has problems as well. Ethical problems. He’s been working with a digital copy of Donovan Steele’s personality. This is a Donovan Steele who exists only in digital form, with no physical existence. Dev’s problem is that he has to decide if this digital copy is alive. Does it have rights?

This is also a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. The world has been devastated by viruses and nuclear war. Large parts of the United States are nothing but radioactive wastelands. Significant parts of the country are controlled by crime gangs who are essentially warlords. Texas has declared its independence. Nobody knows if anybody is still alive in California because nobody has dared to investigate. The federal government wants to reassert its authority and sees cyborgs like Donovan Steele as a way to do this. One cyborg is as effective as a whole squad of cops, and much cheaper. The government doesn’t care about the ethical issues. It just wants power and control.

Donovan Steele’s assignment in this novel is to take down the Borodini crime family which controls much of New York. It would take a small army to deal with the Borodini family. They live in a fortress. Steele figures he can do the job himself.

He has some help. Ice is a black former gang leader who has agreed to help in return for immunity from prosecution. Steele and Ice don’t trust each other but they both have something to gain from working together, and Ice can certainly handle himself in a tough spot. Steele’s other ally is Raven, a young hooker whom he rescued. She can be trusted insofar as she has a personal grudge against the Borodinis.

A weird emotional bond develops between Steele and Raven. Steele doesn’t care that she’s a hooker. Raven doesn’t care that he’s a robot. They’re both broken inside but they find, to their own mutual surprise, that they’ve started to care for each other.

Of course this book is part of a series so some issues are left only partially resolved, presumably to be dealt with further in later books.

There’s as much action and mayhem as you could possibly desire, combined with a strange love story and some surprisingly deep emotional, moral and intellectual speculation. Some of these issues would also be dealt with a few years later in the excellent Japanese sci-fi anime movie Ghost in the Shell.

I enjoyed this novel enough to leave me quite open to the idea of buying the next book in the series.

Cold Steele is highly recommended.

Charles Runyon’s The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed

Charles Runyon’s The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed was published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1965.

Charles Runyon (1928-2015) was born in Missouri and wrote science fiction as well as crime fiction.

This could be described as a serial killer story and that’s probably my least favourite literary genre but this is a very unconventional and interesting serial killer story, both thematically and structurally.

I’m going to be more vague than usual about the plot since I don’t want to risk giving away even the mildest of spoilers.

The novel uses first person narration but with more than one narrator. At first the switch in point of view may seem puzzling but if you stick with it you will find out why Runyon chose such an approach.

The novel begins with a man telling us how he murdered a woman after manipulating her into an affair. She is not the first woman he has murdered. Not by a long way. He tries to explain his odd motivations. It has something to do with playing a game. Games are an essential part of this story. Sometimes people know they are playing a game and sometimes they don’t.

Then the point of view switches to Velda. We already know that Velda was important to the killer but we don’t know why.

There was a murder many years earlier. A man was convicted. He may or may not have been guilty.

A man returns to a small town called Sherman, for somewhat enigmatic reasons connected with that murder.

There have been several murders. Possibly many murders. There is no way of knowing how many. There have been many violent deaths, some of which may have been murders but some of which may have been accidents or suicides. It’s possible that most of these deaths really were accidents or suicides. It’s also possible that they were all murders.

There is madness here, but the identity of the mad person is uncertain. At times we have reason to doubt the sanity of a number of characters. We certainly have cause to be suspicious of the motivations of a number of characters. There is plenty of paranoia and suspicion.

It will of course occur to us that we may be dealing with an unreliable narrator, or even two unreliable narrators. We can’t be sure. We can’t be sure if any of the characters knows what’s going on. We can’t be sure how many of the characters understand their own motivations. This applies not just to individuals. The paranoia and suspicion infects the whole town. Groups of people as well as individuals can go mad.

There are three, or possibly four, people who are cast in the role of investigators. There is no shortage of evidence, but all the evidence is hopelessly ambiguous. There are witnesses to certain events, but those witnesses may be lying or deluded or confused or stupid. They may have failed to mention crucial details.

These investigations are all conducted by amateurs. There is a sheriff, but his investigations are of no significance. His only interest is in being re-elected sheriff.

Runyon really does take an intriguingly unconventional approach and the result is a novel that initially doesn’t seem all that interesting but that becomes more and more fascinating as the reader is drawn into the author’s clever and devious game. Highly recommended.

This is one of three novels in the Stark House Noir Classics volume A Trio of Gold Medals, along with Dan J. Marlowe’s The Vengeance Man and Fletcher Flora’s Park Avenue Tramp.

Hal Clement's The Lunar Lichen

The Lunar Lichen is a science fiction novella (or possibly novelette) by Hal Clement. It was originally published in Future Science Fiction in February 1960.

Hal Clement (1922-2003) was an American science fiction writer. He had a real science background and tended towards the hard science fiction end of the spectrum.

A geologist named Ingersoll has made a curious discovery on the Moon. He’s one of ten members of a lunar expedition. The Moon has not yet been colonised. When their research projects are completed the expedition members will return to Earth in their spaceship.

Ingersoll has discovered lichens on the Moon. They couldn’t possible exist there, but they do. Or at least Ingersoll claims to have discovered them. Dr Imbriano is sceptical. He suspects that Ingersoll is perpetrating a scientific fraud and that the lichens are terrestrial, brought to the Moon by Ingersoll. The expedition leader, Kinchen, isn’t so sure. Fraud is a possibility but he’s not about to leap to conclusions.

The expedition soon has other problems to worry about, such as getting back to Earth. That may not be easy, and it may not be easy staying alive on the lunar surface.

There’s a chase, of a sort, across a gigantic lunar crater.

There’s also a possibility that Ingersoll discovered something much more startling and unlikely than lunar lichen.

This is not a shoot ’em up space opera. There’s no real action as such. There is however some suspense, with survival hanging in the balance for the spaceship crew. There’s a touch of paranoia as well.

This novella was published very early in 1960, only a few months after the first unmanned space probe (the Soviet Luna 2) had reached the Moon. The Moon was still somewhat mysterious. The possibility of any form of life existing on the Moon seemed very remote but nothing could be entirely ruled out.

There’s plenty of technobabble here but given Clement’s preference for hard SF it’s possible that much of it really is scientifically at least vaguely plausible. Clement does go to great lengths to demonstrate just how harsh an environment the lunar surface really is, and to point out just how alien a world without an atmosphere is. With low gravity, a hard vacuum and incredibly extreme transitions in temperature you just can’t assume that anything will work the way it works on Earth. When your lunar tractor runs short on fuel the refuelling process isn’t straightforward. Storing anything from water to food to fuel requires considerable care.

There’s also the problem that when you get to the Moon you have only so much fuel for expeditions in those lunar tractors. Use up too much fuel and you’re never going to be going back to Earth.

It’s also nice to encounter a lunar adventure that makes use of the very limited horizon on the Moon. Something can be quite close and yet quite invisible.

The Lunar Lichen is an intriguing attempt to treat lunar exploration fairly seriously whilst still telling a tense and exciting story. It’s an attempt that succeeds quite well. My preference is for outrageous fun science fiction that doesn’t worry too much about realism so this is a bit outside my comfort zone but I enjoyed it. Highly recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novella with Henry Kuttner’s novel The Time Trap in a two-novel paperback edition.

Orrie Hitt’s Trailer Tramp

Orrie Hitt’s Trailer Tramp, published by Beacon Books in 1957, falls into the trailer camp sleaze sub-genre. Trailer tramps had mushroomed across the United States in the 50s and gained a reputation as dens of iniquity. These were artificial non-permanent communities. The goings-on confirmed all the worst fears of small town America about the depravity that must invariably flourish when people don’t live in tight-knit communities in which their neighbours act of moral policemen to keep them on the straight and narrow.

Joan runs a successful trailer camp. She isn’t married. She was thinking of marrying Luke, until she discovered that Luke wanted to sleep with her. She was of course deeply shocked. Joan is a decent girl and decent girls don’t do such things. And she caught him with Nora, and Nora clearly isn’t a decent girl at all. Nora lets men do things to her. Shocking things. Nora is the type who allows men to Go All The Way, which no decent woman would ever do.

Joan does however need a man to help her run the trailer park, so (perhaps unwisely) she hires Luke. Also, perhaps unwisely, she allows Nora to rent a trailer to use for her massage business. It sounded harmless enough. With the members of a construction crew currently staying in the trailer camp Nora will get plenty of customers. The idea that a massage business could be anything but respectable has never occurred to Joan. Joan has led a very sheltered life.

The head of the construction crew is Big Mike, and she finds herself attracted to him although naturally her attraction to him is entirely innocent. She’s a decent girl. Then she discovers that after a few drinks even decent girls can become shameless tramps. She is paralysed with guilt and shame, but all is not lost. Mike will marry her. He said he would. She is sure he is really a decent guy and when a decent guy sleeps with a girl he marries her. That’s how life works.

There are all kinds of potential complications. There’s Sally, an old flame of Mike’s, but that’s nothing to worry about. She knows that Mike isn’t interested in Sally any more. He told Joan this, and she knows she can trust him.

As you may have gathered Joan is as dumb as a rock. As a character she presents a slight credibility problem. It’s impossible to believe that anyone as naïve as Joan could run a trailer camp successfully. She is entirely oblivious to the possibility that anything immoral could possibly happen there.

Orrie Hitt was at his best when his books combined mild sleaze elements with very definite noir fiction elements. Hitt was very strong when it came to creating a noir atmosphere of overheated passions and betrayals.

There is some noirness here, as seemingly harmless incidents start to point to more sinister possibilities and Joan finds herself increasingly trapped. There’s no way out for her without a scandal. And in 1957 scandal was a fate worse than death.

Joan is torn between Luke and Mike and she is tortured by the knowledge that, as awful as it may seem, she feels physical desire for both men. She is sure that she can trust one of them but not the other. One of them is lying to her, the other is telling her the truth. Her problem is that she can’t figure out which of them is the one she can trust. And Hitt manages to keep the reader unsure on this point as well.

The sleaze factor here is so mild as to be almost non-existent, but in 1957 the very fact that unmarried people are having sex, even if the sex happens offscreen as it were, was enough to make a book titillating. And there are hints of prostitution, always good for a moral scare in the 50s (in fact rather depressingly it’s still good for a moral scare today).

This is not a crime novel, but eventually there is a crime, and a serious one.

This is not one of Hitt’s better books. It’s still fairly enjoyable and recommended to Hitt fans, and to full-blown trailer camp sleaze aficionados.

The Cheaters, the genuinely sleazy Wayward Girl, the very noirish The Widow and She Got What She Wanted are all better places to start if you’re new to Orrie Hitt’s work.

Trailer Tramp is included in Stark House Cult Classics’s three-novel Trailer Tramps paperback, along with Doug Duperrault’s Trailer Camp Woman and Tom Harland’s Love Camp on Wheels.

The Sea Trap - Nick Carter Killmaster 44

The Sea Trap, published in 1969, was the 44th of the Nick Carter Killmaster novels.

Nick Carter as American as super-spy Agent N3 was the last of the radical re-inventions of a character dating back to the 19th century, with each new re-invention having zero connection to earlier versions.

This particular title was written by Jon Messmann. It begins with sleaze and sadism, and there will be more of both to come.

This time Nick is once again up against Judas, a villain who makes many appearances in the series. Judas has had major plastic surgery. His face has been reconstructed and he has a mechanical hand which is also a singe-shot pistol. He has acquired two very creepy henchmen. Harold is a scientific genius. He is also impotent and gets his jollies from torturing women. The Tartar is a huge Mongolian with the mind of a child but with insatiable sexual urges.

To keep Harold happy Judas has arranged a supply of women for him. The women are fooled into thinking they’re applying for a job looking after an elderly recluse who owns a private island in the Caribbean.

Judas has other things on his mind. His latest master plan involves stealing submarines from the navies of various powers, for the purposes of high-stakes international blackmail. He has now stolen a top-secret US research submarine, the X-88.

Nick has five days to get the X-88 back. AXE, the shadowy US intelligence agency that employs Nick, is convinced that Judas’s secret headquarters must be in the Caribbean (although I confess I still don’t understand how they came to that conclusion). Nick is off to the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean, his cover story being that he is part of a marine biological expedition.

Despite having only five days to accomplish his mission Nick finds time on the way to the Lesser Antilles to have sex with Betty Lou, a cute girl he met on the plane. She then disappears in circumstances that should have started alarm bells ringing in Nick’s heads, but he shrugs it off.

The leader of the marine biological expedition is of course a young beautiful lady scientist. Nick immediately sets out to seduce her.

Nick takes the expedition’s seaplane out to look for traces of the missing submarines. He encounters a rather battered ketch being sailed solo by a young woman named Joyce. Joyce’s sister vanished in circumstances eerily reminiscent of the disappearance of Betty Lou. Nick has picked up an important lead from Joyce. Naturally, despite being on a very tight schedule, he finds time to seduce her.

Joyce has also given Nick an idea as to how those submarines were hijacked. It’s a crazy idea and he has no evidence for it but he assumes it’s the correct explanation and of course it is. Nick’s ideas always turn out to be correct.

Nick is James Bond exaggerated almost to the point of parody but this is no spoof. We are expected to accept that Nick Carter is the most super of super-spies - tougher, smarter and more irresistible to women than regular super-spies. Nick Carter can bed more women in a weekend than James Bond can manage in a year.

Nick has an extraordinary fixation with breasts. Fortunately all the women he encounters have firm thrusting breasts and prominent nipples that are always erect. Almost every page of the novel contains something that will offend the over-sensitive and have them spluttering about how problematic and dated it all is. In 1969 nobody minded if a book was problematic as long as it was entertaining.

Judas is a very villainous creepy evil super-villain. Harold and Tartar are vicious nasty henchmen.

This is a very sleazy novel with a brutal edge to it. It’s also a very exciting and relentlessly fast-paced novel. There’s some underwater action as well, always a major bonus in my opinion.

The Sea Trap really is very pulpy and hugely enjoyable. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other Nick Carter Killmaster novels - the excellent The Bright Blue Death, The Executioners (also by Jon Messmann and also featuring underwater action), the slightly disappointing The Mind Poisoners, the outrageous Web of Spies and the fine Spy Castle.

Carter Brown's Where Did Charity Go?

Australian author Alan Geoffrey Yates (1923-1985) wrote more than two hundred novels as well as around seventy-five novellas under the name Carter Brown. His books sold well over a hundred million copies. He created several series characters, including Hollywood troubleshooter/private eye Rick Holman who features in thirty-five books. Where Did Charity Go? is a 1970 entry in the Rick Holman series.

It begins with Rick being told he’s about to be offered a job and if he knows what’s good for him he won’t take it. He gets a beating to make sure the message gets through.

He takes the job anyway. Big-time Hollywood star Earl Raymond has mislaid his daughter Charity. He wants her found. The story told to Rick by Raymond isn’t consistent with the story told to him by Raymond’s personal assistant Sarah Manning. And the stories keep changing. Maybe Charity just ran away from home. Maybe she was kidnapped. Maybe it’s a fake kidnapping. Maybe it’s a real kidnapping. Rick doesn’t like the sound of any of it but five grand with the promise of another five grand if he’s successful is enough to persuade him to take the case anyway.

It’s a complicated family situation. Earl Raymond divorced his wife Mary to marry glamorous movie star Claudia Deane. Rick has four women to to deal with - the first Mrs Raymond, Claudia Deane, Sarah Manning and Charity. And then Daniela enters the picture. That makes five women. And there are all sorts of jealousies and romantic and sexual complications.

Rick can’t trust any of these women. He can’t trust Earl Raymond either. Perhaps Rick would have been wise to avoid sleeping with any of these women, but he sleeps with at least three of them. Rick is that kind of guy.

Every time Rick starts to figure things out he discovers something that doesn’t add up. Like the dead body at the cabin. In fact nothing really adds up.

The problem is that no-one seems to have a motive that would explain anything that has happened. It’s only when motives start to emerge that Rick finally starts to see some chance of solving the case. And the motives could be motives for murder, or just as easily be motives for double-crosses.

The plot is solid enough with reasonable twists.

Rick isn’t really a typical hardboiled protagonist. He’s not a two-fisted hero type. He carries a gun but he prefers to use his brains to get himself out of trouble, rather than his gun or his fists. He doesn’t care too much about justice or any of that kind of thing and he hopes to keep the police in the dark for as long as possible. He’s not crooked but he does like money. And he does like the ladies. Seducing Rick is not exactly hard work for a woman.

Rick is not a tortured hero or an anti-hero. He’s an easy-going guy and he enjoys his work, especially if attractive women are involved. He’s no alcoholic but he likes a drink. He’s not what you’d call a model member of a society so he’s no sleazebag and he’s definitely not a loser.

This is typical Carter Brown stuff. It ain’t literature. It’s very pulpy and it belongs towards the trashy end of the pulp spectrum. Brown however understands this type of writing perfectly. He includes all the right ingredients and he keeps things moving.

Where Did Charity Go? was never going to win critical plaudits but it delivers the pulp goods. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed a number of Carter Brown’s Lieutenant Al Wheeler crime thrillers - The Stripper, No Harp for My Angel, Booty for a Babe and Eve it's Extortion. They’re all trashy but highly entertaining.

Henry Kuttner’s The Time Trap

Henry Kuttner’s novel The Time Trap was published in Marvel Science Stories in November 1938.

Henry Kuttner (1915-1958) was an American science fiction/fantasy writer who was married to C.L. Moore (one of my favourite weird fiction/science fiction writers).

As the title suggests The Time Trap is a time travel tale. A young archaeologist named Kent Mason discovers two strange metal monoliths in the ruins of an ancient city, Al Bekr. He is transported back into time, to a time when that city was no ruin but was something much stranger. It was the centre of an incredibly advanced civilisation. Impossibly advanced. Such technology could not have existed five or six thousand years ago.

The ultra-advanced technology in the city is from the distant future. This is the work of the Greddar Klon (known as the Master), a time traveller who seeks unlimited power. At some date in the distant future he built a time ship.

Mason makes a friend, a Sumerian named Erech. He battles robots. And he encounters a woman. Nirvor is astonishingly beautiful. Especially when she is naked, and she is indeed naked. Nirvor wants something very badly. She wants a man. Mason was more than happy to oblige, until he noticed something very disturbing about her eyes. There is also something disturbing about the eyes of her two pet leopards. Towards the end of the story both Mason and the reader will find out the secret of those eyes. And the secret of the leopards.

Mason encounters another woman, Alasa. She is a queen and she is encased, unconscious but alive, in a transparent capsule. The Master has stolen her city.

There is another time ship, built by someone other than the Master, or there will be if Mason can help Murdach to build it. Mason and his friends (including the beautiful queen Alasa, now revived) will have countless adventures in various time periods. They will come up against giant bugs, zombies and intelligent plants. They will come close to all kinds of horrifying fates. They will find themselves in a world of endless illusions. They will battle impossible odds.

And Mason will find out Nirvor’s secret.

The pacing doesn’t let up. There’s always some new danger just around the corner. Kuttner displays plenty of skill in providing weird and fairly original dangers for his protagonists to overcome. Each new time period is in effect a different world, briefly sketched but always interesting.

Mason is a pretty stock-standard hero although he’s a man with brains as well as brawn. Alasa is an appealing heroine. Greddar Klon is an effective villain whose motivations are just mysterious enough to make him interesting. Nirvor is dangerous and sexy.

The female characters spend most of the story naked, with Kuttner contriving plenty of reasonably plausible excuses to have them shed their clothes. This is a novel that aims to be lurid, and it is lurid although it’s mostly a tease. Every time Mason and one of the women are about to get to know each other really well some new crisis intervenes.

The action scenes are quite satisfactory.

The plot is nicely put together.

The book doesn’t get into time paradoxes in any substantial way. It’s just a wild romp through time with plenty of exciting adventure. I enjoyed it immensely. Highly recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Hal Clement's The Lunar Lichen in a two-novel paperback edition. 

I reviewed another Henry Kuttner novel, Crypt-City of the Deathless One, a while back. It’s thoroughly entertaining as well. Henry Kuttner is a writer I’m starting to like more and more.