24 Declassified: Head Shot (2009)

Jack Bauer is sent to Colorado to deal with cultists, gunrunners, crooked cops, and stereotypical bikers from Hell - any and all of whom could be ready to take down a whole conference full of big business tycoons. And if you couldn't have guessed, it's gonna be another long day for Jack. Crazy vagrants! Shootouts in ghost towns! Hallucinogenic gas! Grizzly bears! My name is trashy book reviewer Dr. Mattaconda. And today... is the longest day of my life.

Well, despite the title, I found out rather quickly that Head Shot is sadly not a porn novel. Typical. Instead, it's part of a series of novels based off the hit espionage series 24, the show where everyone is double crossing everyone and regular characters are routinely killed off in order to save on paying the actors more for going past a certain number of appearances on screen... I mean... for the surprise factor! Yeah, that's it! It's long been a favorite show of mine and in all honesty is probably the last 'event' television series I actually watched as it was being transmitted. The novels were, to my estimation, a complete afterthought, were poorly advertised, and never seemed to generate much in the way of fan enthusiasm.

Set in a nebulous time before season one of the show, Special Agent Jack Bauer is dispatched to the mountains of Colorado to oversee potential security concerns surrounding a major business summit of high-powered industrialists. The mysterious disappearance of a cult making their domicile in the same proximity of the conference is bad enough, but then two ATF agents who were tracking said cult also turn up missing. On top of this, Jack's boss Ryan Chappelle has detected what he believes to be a stock market scam where someone with inside knowledge is rapidly selling off stocks of all the companies represented at the industrialist conference. Suffering from a bad case of altitude sickness and a killer headache, Jack prepares to unravel a conspiracy to destabilize the American economy and upend the status quo forevermore...

I can't find a whole lot of information on the David Jacobs that wrote this particular novel. He wrote a few of these 24 novels and he's also credited with a few true crime books, but other than that, information is scant. I suspect it may be a pen name and I might also guess he's British based on certain word choices ('trousers' instead of 'pants', for instance). I believe his take on the 24 novels are somewhat different than other authors in the series because instead of trying to follow an ensemble cast around like the television series did, Jacobs focuses strictly on the main character. This makes Head Shot read more like a typical adventure novel, which in my estimation is a good thing. In fact, I would go so far as to say despite the occasional moments of the laughable or absurd found in this book, if you could somehow rip out all of the 24 references and stick a schlocky piece of artwork featuring some beefsteak dude with a gun on the front cover, Head Shot would read as a perfectly acceptable men's action novel from the 70's or 80's.

Unfortunately, all of the 24 books I've read thus far seem to be shackled by the gimmicky notion of trying to mimic the television show's format of each episode taking place throughout an hour of 'real time', thus each chapter is supposed to be one hour of the day. Even as a diehard 24 fan, I don't think I would be offended if the format was abandoned for the novels and we just had traditional chapters that play out naturally. The reader really has to suspend disbelief in several chapter breaks to pretend the real time format is also at play in this book. For instance, one chapter ends with a character announcing to Jack that the bodies of two unfortunate agents were found. The very next chapter - the beginning of the next hour - sees Jack already at the crime scene doing his investigating thing. Studious fans have observed Jack and other characters making miraculous time on the freeways during the seasons of the show set in Los Angeles, but Jack is just straight-up teleporting in certain parts of Head Shot.

In keeping with the credo of the television series where any character could die at any given moment, plot armor be damned, Jack's initial partner, a member of the Denver branch of CTU, is quickly dispatched by the enemy. That character's replacement is a by-the-business blonde named Anne Armstrong who is perhaps more shockingly also dispatched after it seemed certain she was going to be Jack's backup throughout the rest of the novel. Instead, Jack's real backup arrives in the form of two rough and tumble bikers named Griff and Rowdy. No, I'm not making this up. Yes, it is incredibly goofy. But we get a little taste of what 24 might be like if it was crossed over with Sons of Anarchy in this novel, and that is a form of goofy I can get on board with.

I also learned in this novel that Jack Bauer takes his coffee black. I knew I always liked Jack for a reason.

I can't imagine anyone other than an ardent 24 fan ever picking this book up, but if by some chance you like the show and you're down with men's action novels, you might consider giving Head Shot a whirl.

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.

Time Warriors No. 1 - Fuse Point (1991)

Black Jack Hogan - no, wait, I'm goddamn serious, that's the main character's name! Yes, Black Jack Hogan is an ass kicking troubleshooter carrying out secret ops for the United States of America. You know he's a true tough guy because his base of operations is a hidden monastery in the depths of Cambodia. Anyway, Hogan kinda-sorta may have possibly gotten himself killed on his last mission, except his soul wasn't... ready to depart but somehow got entwined with the soul of Brom, a barbarian warrior from another... who may have also kinda-sorta... not died... and... look... look... all you need to know is: badass modern day mercenary teams up with badass barbarian warrior to take on evil dictator from the real world and vicious warrior queen from the fantasy world. I'm so glad we could get through my usual pithy intro section without any confusion this time.

I believe it was the ever-awesome Paperback Warrior that initially put this novel on my radar. "The Time Warriors" is a sadly short-lived series by David North and published by the now-defunct Gold Eagle (they of Deathlands, Mack Bolan, et al fame) that chronicles the adventures of the aforementioned Black Jack Hogan and Brom. This novel, Fuse Point, introduces us to the concept of two warriors who can transport themselves through time and space in order to help one another in their own individual battles against the forces of evil. Readers are also acquainted with two dictatorial villains - the hilariously named Colonel Saddam (yes, we're in the early 90's, folks) and the evil Queen Raikana - both of whom have their own sinister plans to take over their respective worlds. Naturally, the only two dudes bad enough to rescue the President stop them are Hogan and Brom.

Something I found amusing here is North introduces the main character as 'John Hogan' at the outset of the novel and informs us that the 'Black Jack' is a nickname he earned during his brief boxing career, but the author seems to forget his original first name for the character about halfway through and refers to him as 'Jack Hogan' sometimes. Or maybe the first instance of 'John Hogan' is a typo or misprint. I don't know, man. I don't make the rules for these things. I just know that in my head as I'm reading this I'm going back and forth between Terry Bollea because of the character's name and Matt Hannon from Samurai Cop because of the silly-cool cover art whenever this character speaks and I kinda like it. There are several tongue-in-cheek references to wrestling peppered throughout the book, with the author describing Black Jack as having "wrestler's arms" at one point and even an impromptu wrestling match between Black Jack and one of Brom's brethren that Black Jack only survives by the skin of his teeth. David North might have been a Hulkamaniac, brother.

If you've read these kind of men's adventure novels before, you usually know you're getting workmanlike prose, and that's what we have in Fuse Point. You're not going to find anything particularly poetic here, but I will say the author is quite adept at handling the action scenes, be it the modern gunplay of Hogan's world or the Conan-esque sword and sandal stuff in Brom's world. The level of violence is definitely in the deeper end of the rated R section and there are naturally a few buxom wenches around for the Time Warrior twins to bed down occasionally. This is 1000% dude fiction and there's nothing wrong with that.

Overall, Fuse Point is a fun diversion and I'm genuinely looking forward to continuing the adventures of Black Jack and Brom in the near future. (Or maybe in the past?) Recommended.