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.

The Fraudulent Broad (1958)

Dan Slick is a big lug who works a miserable 9 to 5 as a vacuum cleaner salesman. He has his eye on the soon to be vacant manager's position and the cute front office lady, but laments his lot in life and wonders if he'll ever get ahead financially. Things take a turn when Dan somehow manages to sell one of his cleaners to Cleo, the young wife of the chairman of the entire company. Taking more than a passing interest in Dan and his plucky charms, the chairman hires Dan for a very special job: fucking the living daylights out of his wife with a photographer hiding in the bushes so he can divorce the gold digging hussy and leave her with nothing! The only catch? Dan seems to have fallen in love with Cleo, and the only way out for them as a couple with the chairman's millions intact is for the chairman to die...

James L. Rubel, who also wrote under a plethora of pen names, produced a decent amount of novels ranging from crime to westerns during the heyday of pulp between the 1930's to 1950's. Unfortunately, his name doesn't seem to be talked about as much as some of the luminaries of the genre and the majority of his work existed for decades only in used bookshops, but perhaps that can change with some recent reprints from publisher Cutting Edge Books. One of these reprints is The Fraudulent Broad from 1958, a sleazy sex and murder tale with more than a hint of Double Indemnity in the mix.

While the press for this book warns the reader it's for "adults only" and there's some loose, adulterous women and themes of cuckoldry abound, Rubel never actually ventures into true erotica here. Beyond some scenes of heavy making out and implied sex off-screen, The Fraudulent Broad is actually rather tame by today's standards.

What the novel does have going for it is its sleaze factor. If this were a movie it would have been made in the 1970's on super 8 with that greasy, muddy hue of the cheapest film stock at the time. Every single character in this novel - from the lughead main character to the conniving chairman to the drunken money hungry wife to the flamboyant family attorney with his own agenda - they are all complete slimeballs. Even the minor characters like Dan's office rival and the police officers who show up towards the tail-end of the story are still dripping with sleaze. I honestly struggled to find a likeable character throughout the entire novel.

However, I don't necessarily see the lack of likeable characters as a drawback in a story that's intended to be this dark and salacious. As a treatise on greed and what the pursuit of easy money will do to already damaged people, The Fraudulent Broad is a home run. It doesn't have anywhere near the hypnotic poetry of something like a Chandler novel, but I still found Rubel to be a competent wordsmith who seemed to have a knack for pacing that the likes of Elmore Leonard would perfect to a science in the decades that followed.

And like any crime novel of this era, there's also plenty of twists and double-crossing to be had. Some you'll see coming, some you may not...

Recommended.

Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse (2008)

Mortimer Tate is a former insurance salesman who holed up in a cave while the world went to shit. When he emerges nine years later, the land he once knew has changed forever. Armed with several cases of whiskey that survived the apocalypse, Mortimer embarks on an epic journey to the fabled ruins of Atlanta to find his ex-wife and a damn good cup of coffee.

Just to give you an idea of the level of sleaze author Victor Gischler has on offer here, after a modestly violent introduction, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse really gets the action going with the main character tied up, forced to watch his future love interest being raped, then receiving a very unwanted golden shower from said rapist... and this might not even be the most fucked up part of the novel. What we have here is the most edgelord version of a Fallout video game you could possibly imagine. And I'm here for it.

There was a period of time in the mid-oughts when Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse was published where everything in the post-apocalyptic genre had to be dour, grimdark, and serious. For me, that got old in a hurry. While this novel definitely pushes the boundaries of darkness and violence to extreme levels, there is an undercurrent of irreverent humor that helps the piece stand out from the overabundance of Cormac McCarthy clones out there. The material never ventures into full slapstick mode, but you can't help but laugh sometimes at Gischler's Texas Chainsaw Massacre style redneck cannibals populating his version of a post-apocalyptic southern United States, or the women in bikinis who are improbably armed to the teeth popping caps in fools. It's a completely absurd and violent cartoon version of the end of the world, but there is just enough grit and realism to keep the story from careening out of control.

It helps that the main character is just your average joe everyman kind of guy. He's not especially strong, he's not the best shot, he's got some brains but he's not necessarily a genius... Mortimer is a great foil for the more colorful characters shaped by the apocalypse that he encounters and eventually travels with. There is some light commentary on what the fall of the United States could mean to your regular nine to fiver closing in on middle-age and still clinging to the vestiges of the American Dream like Mortimer, but again, Gischler knew he wasn't going to be competing for overwrought literary awards with this one and quickly moves on to the next gunfight before anything can get too introspective.

As a final thought, some have argued this book is sexist. And they're probably right. But who cares? It's a good time. Have some fun in your escapism for a change. Recommended.