Conan the Raider (1986)

Conan of Cimmeria is back and this time he's after a shiny trinket that could fetch him a king's ransom worth of gold. But in order to get his hands on his treasured prize, he'll have to join a band of sneaky tomb robbers, survive palace intrigues, and combat a vile prophet hellbent on raising an army of the dead. Snake wrestlers! Necromancers! Fat kings! S&M queens! Exotic dancers! Tomb raiding! Crom, if you do not like this review, then the hell with you!

Conan the Raider is one of eleven Conan novels produced by Leonard Carpenter, who has the distinction of publishing more Conan related material than even Conan's creator Robert E. Howard. I honestly don't know what the fan consensus is on Carpenter's work, although I can surmise he's not thought of as highly as the creator and some of the other pastiche authors, because I rarely see much discussion of his work on the series despite his prolific output.

Stranded in the desert after a botched attempt to recover the Star of Khorala, a jewel worth more than he could possibly imagine, Conan happens upon a band of tomb raiders led by the roguish innkeeper Otsgar and joins in their cause more out of survival rather than taking any great joy in skulking around ancient burial grounds for baubles. Also included in Ostgar's retinue are his second-in-command Isaiab, the firebrand youth Asrafel, and Ostgar's main squeeze, the exotic Stygian dancer Zafriti. After an Indiana Jones-style episode in a tomb rife with lizardmen, our group reconvenes at Ostgar's inn located in the city of Abaddrah. There, the group conspires to loot the nearly completed tomb of the cruel King Ebnezub... the only problem is, the corpulent Ebnezub isn't quite dead yet. It is, however, a poorly kept secret that the wicked Queen Nitokar is likely poisoning her husband every day, so the king's time is short. What the rumor mongers don't know is that Nitokar is aided in her scheme to take the throne by a dark prophet known as Horaspes, who has his own plans for Abaddrah once Nitokar is installed as solitary ruler. Conan stumbles onto a means to get himself hired on as a digger for Ebnezub's tomb, and the intrigues and turns only spiral from there...

One thing that immediately stands out about this novel is how episodic the structure is. Conan the Raider would make excellent serialized fare back in the heyday of pulp magazines, because Carpenter opted for several different stories all weaved into one longer narrative. I think this evokes Howard's originals more than a reader might first suspect. The initial foray into the desert tomb is akin to a James Bond film's pre-title sequence, then we have an adventure inside Ebnezub's almost-completed tomb, then we shift to a long sequence of Conan spirited away to the palace to perform as a gladiator and meet Ebnezub's legitimate heir Princess Afrit (who obviously has a built-in rivalry to the death with her stepmother Nitokar), then we have Conan actually working in the tombs and gathering inside knowledge of the layout and design of the place, then an escape and reunion with Ostgar's crew, the subsequent raid of Ebnezub's tomb, and a final act where Horaspes steps forward from the shadows and reveals what his sinister plan was all along. This was a novel where I appreciated the less traditional structure and was genuinely surprised at a few of the twists the plot took.

Concerning our hero, it's not the best characterization of pastiche Conan I've ever read, but it's not the worst either. I found Carpenter's Conan to be a little too wordy at times, doubly strange when you consider this is intended to be set not too long after Howard's short story "The Tower of the Elephant", which would mean Conan is still in his younger years and thus still learning the ropes and adjusting to the travails of the adventuring life. There are certain speeches Conan gives to the supporting characters that read more like a world-weary and experienced soldier of fortune than a younger man exploring the world for the first time. Personally, I wish some of the pastiche authors could have resisted the whole Conan chronology pushed by the likes of L. Sprague de Camp (among others) and simply presented us with standalone adventure yarns without concern for where the story truly fits in the character's chronology, but that's just me and my position on the endlessly autistic 'Conan timeline' debate.

Now onto the sex and violence front... well, I hate to disappoint you ravenous dogs, but Conan the Raider is more of a PG-13 affair, which again is not too far removed from Howard's style. There are plenty of battles and there are a few moments of extreme violence, but Carpenter doesn't revel in the gory or stay with it for too long. There's something truly terrible that happens to one minor character, but it occurs off-screen and the reader only briefly learns of the after-effects. The sex scenes are entirely glossed over and we're only treated to the 'smoking cigarettes in bed' kind of aftermath. There are some elements of mild eroticism on display; Carpenter must have had a thing for powerful women practicing extracurricular liaisons without their partners, because there are two of them in this novel. Queen Nitokar is clearly a sadist who openly taunts Conan about enjoying employing her whip on her playthings behind closed doors with the king's consent. And Zafriti is pretty much openly cuckolding Otsgar with some frequency, including at least once with Conan halfway through the novel. It's an interesting quirk in their relationship that Otsgar seems resigned to. I suppose Carpenter added it to either make readers think Otsgar was extra pathetic or that Zafriti was wanton and slightly wicked, but we kinda already knew these things from the moment we met them. The whole Otsgar/Zafriti/Conan situationship is made even more bizarre when we learn very late in the novel that another character has been pining after Zafriti from afar the entire time.

Nitpicks aside, I would definitely recommend Conan the Raider to anyone looking to explore some of the Conan novels if they've exhausted the originals. There are a few nadirs in the Tor series of Conan novels from what I remember, so this is one that easily sets itself aside from those thanks to its quick pace and sense of unexpected adventures. Hail and kill, Conan. Hail and kill.

Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks (1976)

Cast your eyes back to a time when the Daleks were still scary! The notorious genocidal pepperpot monsters return to bring the Doctor more grief - and this time they have their madman of a creator in tow. Guns! Mutants! Climbing rockets! A Bohemian looking hero with a long scarf! Just add a few more pithy remarks and the usual wise-ass intro is finished. But have I the right... to review Genesis of the Daleks?

What can really be said about Genesis of the Daleks at this point? It often wins fan polls as the greatest Doctor Who television story of all-time (or at least ranks somewhere in the top five) and has been discussed ad nauseum over the decades as arguably the most important Dalek story since their introduction in the 1960's. Terry Nation's story is dark, exciting, and shocking even on repeat viewings. It's filmed like a high production action movie by David Maloney on an extremely limited BBC budget. And Tom Baker, still early in his long run as the Doctor, truly settles into the role and finds an extra layer of gravitas to add to his characterization. All things considered, Genesis is one of those lightning in a bottle moments in the show's history. So when it came time to do the novelization of this story, could any of the on-screen magic truly be captured by the written word or would it simply be a pale imitation?

Intercepted from a transmat beam at the end of his last adventure, a baffled Doctor emerges onto a fog-covered battlefield and meets with a shadowy emissary of the Time Lords who tasks the Doctor with a dangerous mission of utmost importance: travel back in time to a point in Skaro's past before the Daleks become a dominant force and either subvert their development or thwart their creation entirely. Upon accepting the mission, the Doctor finds his companions Harry Sullivan and Sarah Jane Smith have been sent along with him by the Time Lords. The three friends quickly become embroiled in the seemingly never-ending conflict between the Thals and the Kaleds - and also run afoul of the unfortunate 'Mutos' - the wasteland dwellers who are descended from the first wave of unfortunate souls mutated by chemical weapons at the outset of the war. However, nothing can prepare the Doctor for his first encounter with a scarred, wheelchair-bound Kaled scientist who has invented a seemingly indestructible living tank that will surely end the war with the Thals decisively...

For this read I went with the Pinnacle Books edition. In case you're unfamiliar, in the 1970's there was an attempt to bring the Doctor Who novelizations to an American audience shortly after the television show first started making appearances on various US based TV stations. Only ten novelizations were produced before Pinnacle canned the project, but the resulting books have nonetheless lived on as fun curios for Who enthusiasts and collectors. They are almost identical to the original Target Books novelizations, barring three things: one - new cover art and a new, unique Doctor Who logo that never appeared on any other merchandise throughout the show's history, two - a text introduction from science-fiction luminary Harlon Ellison in all of the books essentially introducing what might otherwise be an unfamiliar audience to the concept of Doctor Who and what the character entails (while also gleefully offending Star Wars and Star Trek fans like only a top-tier troll could), and three - various Americanizations of words or turns of phrase throughout the texts. The word 'trousers' becoming 'pants' is often cited as one such example, but the most infamous of these text alterations are the Doctor's bag of Jelly Babies becoming 'jelly beans' because American kids wouldn't know anything about Bassetts confectionary foods. It does kind of fascinate me to think that somewhere out there is a tiny subset of older American Doctor Who fans who's first exposure to the show was actually through these books.

Regardless of which version you're reading, Terrance Dicks is at the helm for this novelization, and his writing style is simply perfect for a fast-paced and action-oriented story like Genesis. In years past I used to eschew Terrance Dicks novels because I was a youthful snob who thought Dicks' writing was too basic and simple to offer anything of substance. Now older (but probably only slightly wiser), I understand why Terrance Dicks was so prolific in his day. Dare I say, Dicks is like the Elmore Leonard of science-fiction writers: he'll never use ten words in a sentence when only three or four will do. Brevity and pace are the cornerstones of his writing style. And that's what makes his novelization of Genesis of the Daleks a joy to read. You could easily blast through it in a long afternoon if you really wanted to. Even if you're like me and you've seen the television serial dozens of times and generally know what's going to happen, you may still find yourself rapidly turning pages to get to the climax.

Like many of the Who novelizations, there are some small deviations from the televised material: some longer fight scenes, some altered lines of dialogue, a brief glimpse at rejected Dalek designs, a scene between two of the supporting characters that was never filmed, and perhaps most tantalizingly, the incident which crippled Davros (a Thal nuclear strike) is given a brief mention here. Davros is arguably the main attraction of this book. Yes, he would later become something of a butt-monkey in the series (and apparently the current skinwalker version of the show that I refuse to acknowledge as legitimate won't even use him anymore because showing a villain in a wheelchair might upset a disabled person... or something? Excuse me while my eyes roll into the back of my skull...) but in his introductory adventure Davros is one mean, deranged, and obsessed son of a bitch. I particularly love the dialogue exchanges between Davros and the Doctor where their differences as both scientists and men are brought to the fore. And the Doctor inadvertently giving Davros knowledge of future events adds a brilliant wrinkle into an already well-layered story with unbelievably high stakes.

I haven't read all of the Target novelizations yet, but of the ones I've read so far, this one rates fairly high on the list. iIf you're only ever going to dip into a few of them, I would definitely recommend Genesis of the Daleks to be in that pile.

The Legacy (1992)

Dark elves, goblins, ettins, and more! Get ready to cast Magic Missile against the darkness, it's time for some Dungeons & Dragons themed fiction with your second or maybe third-favorite white haired dual wielding warrior: Drizzt.

Ready to be chronologically confused? The Legacy is technically the seventh novel by R.A. Salvatore featuring the exploits of the dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden, although it is the beginning of a new series of four novels known as the Legacy of the Drow. This series follows after the events of the Icewind Dale Trilogy chronologically. However, Salvatore wrote three novels known as the Dark Elf Trilogy after the Icewind Dale Trilogy was published that serve as a prequel series. Are you keeping up with this? I know I'm not. Can these fantasy authors just keep their shit together for a change? Regardless, seeing as how this is the start of a new series featuring the same cast of characters, one could probably start with The Legacy if they really wanted to, because the events of previous novels are routinely recapped by the author when necessary.

The drow elf edgelord Drizzt is on his way to Mithral Hall for a reunion with the dwarven king Bruenor Battlehammer and to attend the wedding of two former companions - the barbarian Wulfgar and plucky archer lady Catti-brie. Dubiously tagging along is the halfling thief Regis, meaning the whole gang from the previous adventures are back together again. But this reunion may be short-lived, for Drizzt's deranged sister Vierna is hellbent on capturing her wayward brother and sacrificing him to the spider goddess Lolth. Forming an alliance with the mercenary leader Jarlaxle and the assassin Artemis Entreri, Vierna leads her dark band through the subterranean tunnels underneath Mithral Hall. A clash between Clan Battlehammer and the drow elves marching upon dwarven lands now seems inevitable. Perhaps the wedding won't be happening after all...

I'd tried a Drizzt novel many years ago in my adolescent years and bounced off it extremely early on because it never seemed to grab me, but I still wanted to know what all the fuss was about with this character all these years later, especially since I've read and enjoyed a number of other books set within the Forgotten Realms series. Happenstance brought me to The Legacy, but to be honest I found it to be a bit of a chore to get through. I'd always heard that one of R.A. Salvatore's fortes was writing action scenes, but I found the non-stop minutiae of every battle to be absolute torture to sift through. The paperback edition I was reading was roughly 330 pages and I can almost guarantee if one were to strip this book of all of the myriad swordfights and army clashes you'd only be left with about a hundred pages of text. There's not a whole lot of meat to the plot here other than 'evil sister leads a dark band through some tunnels to get at her wayward brother'.

That's not to say The Legacy is a total waste, because it does have its moments. The character of Drizzt himself wasn't nearly as insufferable as I was led to believe he was (although you can clearly see the character has more than a little Elric influence about him). For me, the novel was carried by Drizzt's clashes with the assassin Entreri, who is utterly obsessed with besting Drizzt. The interplay between the band of villains was fun too. It's all too obvious the main players can't stand working with one another in their bid to capture Drizzt and it seems only a matter of time before one of them tries to defect and turn on the others.

What I didn't care for outside of the endless battle scenes were most of Drizzt's companions, in particular the girlboss Cattie-brie. She's written to be smarter and wiser than all of the males around her who have far more experience in war and she's apparently always right. So basically she's Rey in Disney Star Wars before that was even a thing. It's clear that the author has a thing for this character and, perhaps accidentally writing himself into a corner in previous outings by pairing her with the barbarian Wulfgar, wanted nothing more than to get the muscleheaded lunk out of the way so he could push Cattie and her annoying Irish accent towards becoming Drizzt's new waifu. Thus, poor Wulfgar literally gets a tunnel dropped on him without much fanfare in order to set the stage for a new romance.

As an aside, I think Salvatore also has a thing for killing off the brute characters by crushing them to death. I recall reading the first novel in the New Jedi Order series and facepalming as Chewbacca was killed off by having a freaking moon dropped on him. What's up with this recurring theme, Bob?

Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm going to delve into the next book in this series any time soon. Drizzt himself and his extraplanar panther friend are cool, but everything else around them in this novel was like a wight in D&D catching me with their energy drain. Not recommended.

Star Trek: Here There Be Dragons (1993)

It's the basement dwelling nerd from the 1990's ultimate fantasy - Star Trek meets Dungeons & Dragons! Gather the party - Riker the swordsman, Troi the buxom wench, Data the whip-wielding rogue, and Picard the bard. (Look at me, I made a rhyme.) Prepare thyself for the crew of the Enterprise to get medieval on your ass!

I mostly know of John Peel from his work within the Doctor Who range. He famously wrote Timewyrm: Genesys, the first novel in the Virgin New Adventures series, and was tapped to pen novelizations for some of the early Terry Nation Dalek stories such as The Chase and The Power of the Daleks in the 90's. So venturing into Here There Be Dragons I was interested to see what Peel could do for another storied sci-fi franchise.

While on a routine cataloguing expedition of a nebula, the Enterprise encounters a pleasure vessel that bizarrely opens fire on the Federation ship before self destructing. An escape pod reveals the only survivor from the cruise ship to be a long-haired rogue who got stuck with the name Castor Nayfack - presumably when the name generator website his parents were looking at crashed. Mr. Nayfack claims to be an undercover Federation intelligence agent tracking a group of big game hunters poaching large reptilian creatures said to resemble dragons from ancient Earth's mythology on a remote class M planet located inside the nebula.  Nayfack informs Picard that the planet is populated by humans apparently scooped up from 13th Century Germany ahead of the Black Death and placed on this remote world by the Preservers. Unable to resist a mystery and an apparent visit into a version of Earth's past, Picard leads an away team onto the surface to the settlement known as Diesen. Picard's team is only in Diesen for mere minutes before Nayfack gives them the slip and Graebel - the local black market man posing as an honest wine merchant - has drugged them and is preparing to sell the team into the slave trade. However, it is quickly revealed that Picard suspected treachery from Nayfack's too good to be true storytelling all along, as a second away team led by Riker materializes and begins following the tracker covertly placed on Nayfack's person by Dr. Crusher...

So it's not quite a fantasy novel as may have been initially teased by the setup, but many of the trappings of generic fantasy are there, including evil rulers, grim castles, dank dungeons, and the aforementioned 'dragons'. The dragons are revealed to be less the flying and fire-breathing variety and more like giant-sized cousins of the Komodo dragon, but they turn out to be a deadly obstacle nonetheless. As we get deeper into the novel, we discover the game hunting angle is only one aspect of criminal enterprise carried out by the gang Nayfack belongs to. This gang of ne'er-do-wells is also running a scam in the art world too - selling off goods purported to be from medieval Europe as artifacts to otherwise clueless collectors across the galaxy. For some reason, both the plot and the medieval flavoring of Here There Be Dragons reminded me of certain episodes of Stargate SG-1 where the SG-1 team would inevitably meet a human society still stuck in the distant past on a planet that looks remarkably like the forests of British Columbia.

As in many episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, there is a B-plot included here as well. Perhaps realizing a clash with a gang of thieves to be a relatively low stakes affair, the author included a subplot about the gang's leader bombarding the Enterprise with gravity bombs that threaten to tear the ship apart, which the likes of Geordi, Worf, Dr. Crusher, and Barclay have to deal with.

Yes, this is apparently a rare Trek novel featuring both semi-regulars Lieutenant Barclay and Ensign Ro as part of the main cast of characters. For the most part, Barclay is portrayed as the goofy and anxiety ridden geek from this era of TNG, but Ro on the other hand... I'm thinking John Peel must've had a thing for Ro's actress Michelle Forbes, because not only is he keen to point out how attractive other characters think she is (Riker I can see, but Picard would not give a shit), but when Picard's team is taken in by the slavers, Ro is separated from the others and sent to the evil Duke's private chambers to be kept as a sex slave. No, seriously... Ro literally mulls over her potential future as a living "sex toy" at one point. Now, this is still in a mostly PG-era of Star Trek, so nothing too terribly explicit or raunchy is allowed to happen, but Peel makes sure the reader knows Ro is stripped naked and given nothing but a too-short and too-tight dress with no shoes or underwear to parade around in for most of the rest of the story. I guess if you're looking for some good Ro fan service gooning material this book will be right up your alley.

We also learn in this novel that it's not just Sherlock Holmes that Data has an obsession with, it's also Indiana Jones, as he manages to snag one of the slavers whips and does some android ass kicking with weapon in hand. The part in the aftermath of battle where Data begins to autistically pontificate about the history of 20th Century film and Indiana Jones in particular and Picard facepalms and rudely cuts him off to save himself from a migraine is probably the most on the nose example of Peel perfectly capturing these characters in prose form.

I had a good time with Here There Be Dragons and found Peel's fast paced, no nonsense prose to work in accord with the Star Trek formula. Not only would this have made for a good standalone episode of the TV series, but it's a story that could have conceivably worked within the show's budget and special effects capabilities at the time. (The dragons would probably have to be dodgy CGI, but that was to be expected on occasion.) I give this one a Captain's commendation and recommend it be enjoyed alongside a cup of Earl Grey. Hot.

Hawk: The Deadly Crusader (1980)

Michael Hawk, a lecherous globe-trotting journalist with a knack for meddling in order to ferret out a good story, finds himself in an idyllic Greek island paradise and brings all kinds of mayhem and destruction in his wake. Unbeknownst to Hawk, he has both the KGB and the CIA up his ass on the island, and the only way out might involve the trusty Mauser in his hand! Gear up for some sex, gunfights, boat chases, exploding heads, killer dogs, and dead bodies galore - it's time to go Deadly Crusading!

Hawk: The Deadly Crusader is the first in a line of men's action novels written by Dan Streib, an author who produced a steady stream of such books in the genre between the 70's and 80's. Both The Deadly Crusader and the Hawk series in general seem to have a lowly reputation with aficionados of men's action and adventure books, but I gotta be honest, I had a decent time with this first book in the series. Yes, it gets off to a rocky start with the first few chapters and I'm not sure whether I want to root for our 'hero' or punch him in the fucking face half of the time, but in persevering with this novel I found myself caught up in some of the escapism and the action, which is all you can really ask for from this genre. The prose can be slightly clunky in places and Streib has a knack for briefly putting the reader in the point of view of completely superfluous background characters every so often (I suspect as a means of buffing up the word count), but the novel was nowhere near as terrible as I was warned it might be.

After spending two months in a Soviet jail, Hawk is unceremoniously released onto a cruise ship headed for international waters. You see, our man Hawk decided to get himself arrested on purpose so he could write an exposé on the terrors of Russian interrogation techniques. Hawk is either too naive or too addled from the months of intensive questioning and doesn't realize the KGB are still tailing him to determine if he really is just the smarmy journo he claimed he was or is secretly a CIA asset. Meanwhile, Hawk evades the inevitable paparazzi, customs officials, and US embassy agents screaming bloody murder at him in the cruise ship's next major port of call - Athens - by skipping off the ship when it swings by the island of Skiathos. There he finds a yacht said to be owned by a Russian billionaire but is actually manned by a group of Hispanic gentlemen that are attached to a reclusive villa where all the money on the island seems to flow from. Thinking he has his next major scoop and envisioning a former Mafia capo or some other nefarious sort in hiding at the villa, Hawk begins snooping on the place. All the while, his KGB tail is getting closer and closer to his mark...

The plot is not too bad and I could easily see something along these lines in a 70's or 80's action B-movie, so let's discuss this then: our protagonist Michael Hawk. Good guy or complete douchebag? The jury is still out in my mind. He's implausibly a world travelling freelance journalist that gets into various hair-raising situations either because he's just that damned dedicated to rooting out injustice around the world or he wants a nice payday from the front pages he'll inevitably get from such stories. Hawk is also the object of desire from most of the ladies in any room he enters and can improbably fuck like a jackrabbit until dawn without the aid of Viagra despite being in his 40's. Author Streib tells us that Hawk went to journalism school in middle America but also alludes to some vague form of military experience to explain how and why he knows how to handle guns so expertly. The character flits in and out from being this cold, detached hunk that's selfish in bed with his carnal conquests to blubbering on about how he loves a girl he just met about five minutes ago towards the climax of the story.

It's tough to get a read on this dude and maybe that's a side effect of being a debut novel, but I wasn't always sure what to expect out of Hawk from chapter to chapter. He has 'friends' in the various locales he's travelled to, but the way they treat him and he treats them in The Deadly Crusader you could've fooled me that they were buddies. Hawk also seems to do precious little writing or investigating for a supposed journalist. Instead, Hawk spends his time on what appears to be his favorite hobby: death.

If Hawk shows up at your door, make sure you having your affairs in order, because you're probably going to be taking a dirt nap with baby Jesus sometime soon. I'm not even referring to the goons Hawk guns down - he actually doesn't do as much killing as you might expect from a men's action novel protagonist - no, I'm simply referring to the number of people Hawk gets murdered from his sticking his nose into things. The author even has Hawk partake in a moment of reflection at one point where the character wonders if he's like a Typhoid Mary. Roughly 90 to 95% of the named characters in this book get themselves killed because of Hawk's actions. A simple picture that Hawk takes at one point ultimately results in an entire squad full of otherwise innocent exiles in hiding from a banana republic killed by a KGB man and his hired help. This guy is a walking death sentence, man.

It kind of makes Hawk's windfall at the end of the novel seem almost unearned for a guy with so many deaths on his conscience, but at the same time, it's also something of a curse for him to deal with, and presumably sets up the rest of the novels in this series, so let's see where this goes. I'm probably not going to rush to read the next in the series, but I will eventually give it a whirl.

Mildly recommended.

Scorpius (1988)

The body of a young lady washes ashore from the Thames, and 007's number is on it. Baited into the murder mystery, Bond buddies up with a SAS man and a rogue agent from the... American IRS (guh?) to take on a lunatic cult leader who may or may not have been a notorious arms dealer in a previous life. Oh, Jimmy... you're always getting tangled up in this barmy situations, aren't you? Suicide bombers! Killer snakes! Sham marriages! The bloke who played the Irish cop in The Untouchables? Da-da-DA-DA!

We're now onto John Gardner's seventh Bond continuation novel, and at this point I personally believe that Gardner received a raw deal from fans who derided his work over the years. Yes, there have been a couple of duds in the run thus far and Gardner had that weird penchant for Bond driving a Saab early on, but for the most part I'm finding the Gardner Bonds are perfectly acceptable espionage-tinged adventure stories, and I'm especially enjoying the ones I never had a chance to read before, such as Scorpius. (Yes, I know it drops off towards the end. We'll get there...)

Bond villains usually only come in certain flavors - the egomaniacal dictator, the disgraced former do-gooder, the gluttonous or greedy master criminal, and so on, but in Scorpius John Gardner presents us with something different in the form of Father Valentine (aka Scorpius): a religious zealot who has an army of radicalized true believers at his beck and call. We see some hints of these kind of adversaries for Bond in the film series, such as Professor Joe in License to Kill (who is only a minor minion of the actual villain) and I suppose some elements of the voodoo cult in Live and Let Die might qualify as such too, but on the whole, religion in any form is something the Bond novels never tended to delve into very much until this point.

For what it's worth, I thought Valentine to be a formidable and suitably creepy opponent for Bond. He's a villain who appears to enjoy placing his male and female followers into arranged marriages and playing a perverted mix of god and voyeur towards them, I only wished Valentine was actually in the novel for longer. What our intrepid British agent is going up against for the bulk of the novel are Valentine's true believers, a cult so diabolically brainwashed they're willing to act as suicide bombers to carry out Valentine's plans of assassinating politicians of all stripes and sewing chaos and discord during the elections of world powers. Even though this novel was penned in the late 80's, this method of terrorism sadly brings the Bond novels into the modern world, as we have all likely become more accustomed to seeing such acts of violence and brutality in the news over the last several decades.

Something that threw me off about Scorpius was that Gardner chose not to send Bond out on his usual globetrotting path to far-flung exotic locations. In fact, I was almost convinced the entirety of the novel would remain in England, due to the fact that Bond hadn't traveled more than a hundred miles outside of London by around the 200 page mark. However, Father Valentine manages a daring escape from the British Isles and retreats to his secret lair... in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

It's at this point that I had to stop and laugh for a few minutes. Hilton Head is a stone's throw away from where I live and I have an incredibly hard time imagining this lazy tourist trap of a town as a base of operations for a demented cleric (with a small army in his pocket, no less). I'm aware that John Gardner actually lived in the United States for many years, so my guess is he either visited with his family or came to play golf in Hilton and thought it might be remote enough or have a slightly exotic sounding name enough for readers back in England who may not be familiar with the southeast coast of the US. What's tragic is Gardner barely describes the flavor of the area, simply noting that there's a lot of beaches and golf courses nearby. Gardner does mention nearby Savannah and Bond does briefly travel there - albeit only to Hunter Army Airfield to catch a military flight - but as a resident for several years now I'm convinced the city of Savannah, Georgia would have made for a far more suitable location for a Bond villain to lurk around. There are innumerous freaks, geeks, and general weirdos abound in Savannah, in addition to a plethora of supposedly haunted locations, swamps, marshes, palm trees, Spanish moss... and shitloads of restaurants of all varieties. Hell, nevermind John Gardner... Ian Fleming himself would have loved Savannah for the amount of food on offer if he knew about it in his day. Alas... missed opportunities.

The conclusion of Scorpius is also worth mentioning. Bond is whisked away to Washington D.C. to save both the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain in one fell swoop. What I love about this slightly preposterous finale is how the stakes could not be higher and Bond just goes about this task as if it were as routine as brushing his teeth. Perhaps that's a bit of movie Bond creeping into the Gardner novels again (you can easily imagine Roger Moore mugging for the camera during this part), but I couldn't help but be entertained by how nonplussed the character was about saving two of the most important world leaders at the same time.

Recommended.

Doctor Who: Instruments of Darkness (2001)

The Doctor, Mel, and Evelyn are up against an ESP wielding spy network, Amazonian assassins, sinister albinos, death cultists, and an elusive lunch schedule in one batshit crazy turn of the millennium sci-fi cum espionage romp. Grab your multicolored coat and pour yourself a glass of carrot juice, we're going Auton hunting!

There's no other way to say this: Gary Russell's Instruments of Darkness is a bloody train wreck. A whirlwind, highly readable in most places train wreck... but a train wreck nonetheless. Where to even start with this one? I believe this novel is certainly an endurance test for avid Whovian readers. One might be tempted, as I was, to put the book down before getting through the first few pages. The opening pages are dedicated to scenes of grisly murder and several attempted rapes, which is more the kind of edgelord milieu you expect to see in Doctor Who's Virgin New Adventures series. The Doctor (ostensibly our main character, no?) also does not appear until some 30 pages deep into the story. That's when I started to realize Gary Russell is indeed enough of a madman to basically try and re-create a Doctor Who season 22 story in novel format.

If you haven't watched for a while or you're a lapsed fan, season 22 is where script editor and ingratiating gobshite Eric Saward thought it would be a great idea to take the leading man Colin Baker out of the story for the first twenty-five minutes or so of almost every serial while turning the amount of nihilistic violence in the show up to eleven while the show's producer John Nathan-Turner was probably too busy sipping martinis to notice.

That divisive style is what Gary Russell chose to partly emulate here. But our fearless author doesn't stop with his delusions of being a mad scientist there, oh no. Instruments of Darkness is actually the third in a loose trilogy of Doctor Who novels, one of which is from a completely different book series from a completely different publisher with a completely different incarnation of the Doctor! Confused yet? To be fair, thanks to the 'wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey' nature of a series like this and some quick recapping of events, it's probably okay if you come into Instruments of Darkness without reading the prior novels.

And then there's the seemingly never-ending parade of side characters in this book who are introduced on a whim and then disappear into the ether for ten or so chapters only to make a sudden return later in the narrative when convenient to the plot. Meanwhile, the side characters that actually are given a fair amount of print and character development are abruptly killed off in random acts of cruel violence that are - again - not too far removed from the Saward stewardship of Doctor Who on television.

Gary Russell clearly wants to be writing an espionage-tinged 007 continuation novel here, so much so that in an eye-rolling, groan inducing passage we learn that the Doctor is great chums with author Ian Fleming and, naturally, he introduced Fleming to an ornithologist friend of his with a familiar namesake that would go on to inspire the spy novelist. I can only assume this is a nod to the Doctor influencing H.G. Wells in the serial Timelash, but my goodness, is it really necessary to be that cute? Does the Doctor have to be responsible for every cool thing in history?

DID I ALSO MENTION that Instruments of Darkness serves as a crossover with the Doctor Who audio adventures by providing us with the prose debut of a previously audio-only companion character?

Is anybody following this?!?

So you're probably thinking this whole book sounds like a complete disaster up to this point (and you'd be mostly right), but there's something about this wonderful mess that just... works. In addition to Bond, there's a heavy X-Files flavor about the proceedings as well, and this meshes well with the Sixth Doctor's more 'action man' style. But what really takes Instruments of Darkness to the next level - and what makes this a recommended read for Whovians - is the author's insertion of Evelyn Smythe into the proceedings. Amidst all the mayhem and spider's web of plot twists is a touching and oftentimes hilarious repartee between the Doctor, Evelyn, and Mel, the latter of which cottons on fairly quickly that there is a love affair always simmering beneath the surface between the Doctor and Evelyn. She is, in many ways, the perfect companion for the brash and arrogant Sixth Doctor, because her no bullshit schoolmarm demeanor is always capable of keeping this version of the Doctor in check and she appears to finally be an intellectual equal of the Doctor. The Doctor and Evelyn quarrel throughout most of this story like an old married couple and poor Mel is usually caught in the role of referee trying to separate them. Russell's handling of this is so infuriatingly charming you can't help but root for these two to somehow break the chains of forbidden love and retire to some groovy space bungalow on a distant planet. Alas...

Recommended...?