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...?