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.
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