This time out, as the headline suggests (and if you don’t get the reference, you should be ashamed), we have three books with a common theme: Nazis! They’re the ultimate bad guys, from books and comics to movies and, unfortunately, real life. Is there any more apt portrayal of evil incarnate? I don’t think so.
HAWK #6: THE SEEDS OF EVIL by Dan Streib – This 1981 book is part of the 14-book series featuring reporter/investigator Mike Hawk. Definitely one of the cooler covers is featured here; I just wish the book could have lived up to it. I know I harp on books being predictable, but this one was so obvious; the big “shock” was more “ho-hum” than “oooh, did not expect that.”
SEEDS opens with a 1945 prologue set in a certain bunker, from where a nurse is escorted with a package to a plane leaving Germany ASAP. Fast-forward to present-day Venice (or at least 1981 Venice), where a journalist is on a lake with a team of Italians. They’re searching the bottom of the lake – for what, we don’t know – when all of a sudden, another ship turns up and kills everyone there.
Enter Mike Hawk, reporter, called upon by an editor who wants the scoop on the death. This sets Hawk off to that region, where he meets a former Mafia princess, whom he will bed later on, this being just typical men’s adventure stuff. She’s staying in Venice with a man called Attila La Scala. Once they introduce him into the story, I knew exactly what was on the bottom of the lake and why people were killing over it. This book easily fits the mold of the PENETRATOR or Mack Bolan series, the latter of which Streib served as ghostwriter. SEEDS is just some mindless fun with no big surprises if you have half a brain.
HORSE UNDER WATER by Len Deighton – Sometime the answer is staring at you the whole time. Case in point: the title to this 1963 book. No, it’s not about Seabiscuit swimming in a pool. It’s the other kind of horse; you know, the one that usually involves a needle. HORSE is part of Deighton’s no-named spy series (others of which will be covered in a future column).
We’re not really told what the spy’s mission is – just that he is being trained in scuba diving so he can travel to Portugal. So for about the first 100 pages or so, they are scouring the sea for a sunken German U-boat where a steel canister was recovered. Said canister must be really important, since someone blows up the spy’s car, then later sinks the boat they were using for scuba diving, killing one of his team.
It turns out the U-boat carried a huge cache of heroin, plus there is an ex-Nazi spy operating under an assumed name and blackmailing some Brits for their actions during the war. He is also under the belief he has come up with a way to melt ice and freeze ocean-sized amounts of water. Our protagonist also stumbles upon a drug trafficking ring, but he’s more interested about the blackmail operation. But once all is said and done, he’s just gathering info for his own government to use. See, folks, not all spy novels have huge body counts or exotic locales.
Deighton’s hero is a blue-collar spy more concerned with making sure the scuba gear is accounted for so he won’t be charged for it. And then bedding as many women as possible. HORSE is probably the weakest of all the Deighton I’ve read, and I’ve read plenty. Still, even weak Deighton is better then some of those other big-name storytellers.
SECRET MISSION #20: THE BAVARIAN CONNECTION by Don Smith – For a book called SECRET MISSION, this 1978 offering is more private eye then spy. The first of this series I’ve ever read, the book opens with Gunther Vogel, a son of a former German who fled to Brazil after World War II. Gunther arrives at a Swiss Bank to cash in some bonds his father left him in a safety deposit box. It seems the bonds were stolen in the war from a Jewish man, whose son Werner wants to find out what really happened to his father. Being the neighbor of our spy, Phil Sherman, Werner asks Phil to go over there and find out anything he can. See, more detective story, then super-secret mission.
Once Phil makes it over to Europe, Werner’s father’s real past becomes more apparent, as Dad ran to Brazil after the war not for war crimes, but to hide from other Germans who wanted him dead. Gunther is killed, a crime made to look like a robbery. This sets Phil on the trail of a group of old-time Nazis who want to bring back the Fourth Reich. Phil runs into all sorts, including corrupt art dealers, two Swedish female backpackers, corrupt police and more Nazi-loving Germans.
I really did not know what to expect from BAVARIAN CONNECTION, but was amused for the whole afternoon it took to read it. It’s more in the vein of a Sam Durrell novel than the Nick Carter books they name-check on some of the covers.
Next time, spy vs. spy. –Bruce Grossman
Buy it at Amazon.
Discuss it in our forums.
MISS EARLIER INSTALLMENTS OF ‘BULLETS, BROADS, BLACKMAIL & BOMBS’? REGASM THESE:
• #18: Watching the Detectives
• #17: Lights! Camera! Action!
• #16: Go West
• #15: Speedy Reading in the Summertime
• #14: Direct from the Death Cloud Peril
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THESE AUTHORS:
• AN EXPENSIVE PLACE TO DIE by Len Deighton
• FUNERAL IN BERLIN by Len Deighton
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }