A book you very likely don’t have on your shelf #526 & 527
Both 1973
Weird Tales October 1933
K'ing crane kicks his way to Round Three
The Zone 1
Hard Target
by James Rouch
The Zone is a then-future war series set during World War III in the Zone, a stretch of Europe blighted by chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Interestingly it’s not exactly post-apocalyptical, maybe more mid-apocalyptical.
A brief novel, we open with a tank battle, the middle has half the cast reconnoitering a refugee whorehouse while the others hang around, and ending with a raid on an underground tank garage.
The crew are a combined force of American and British troops fighting Russians in a hovertank called the Iron Cow. It’s presumably written from the British point of view, or at least by a Brit, what with the US Armoured Infantry Division.
Like historical exploitation fiction, a lot of war fiction uses real life historical atrocities as a cover - “war is hell” and “that’s the way it really was”. Some of the more vicious stuff you get the feeling that the author, or the intended audience, have more of an attitude of “I wish I was in a war so I could do atrocities.” The Zone is that kind of book.
The characters are similar to the Piccadilly Cowboy characters, ranging from amoral to psychopathic. They all have disdain for non-combatants and refugees and bemoan the fact that they can’t mow them down. A good chunk of the text takes place in a whorehouse with descriptions of how diseased and disgusting the women are taking as much space as how horny the men get. I wonder if that’s a particular British thing. I saw it in the Commander Amanda series, where they felt the need to counterbalance the sex scenes with shame and STDs.
When the series was reissued around 2012 it was marketed as alternate history
K'ing Kung-Fu 1
Son of the Flying Tiger
by Marshall Macao (Thaddeus Thallejah or maybe Sandy Sidar)
1973, Freeway Press
Cover by Barry Smith
Chong Fei K'ing is the orphaned half-American, half-Chinese son of the Flying Tiger, an American pilot who assisted the Chinese in World War II. He’s being trained in Kung Fu by master Lin Fong, mostly just hanging around the desert.
K'ing is joined by another boy, Kak, who is more impulsive and has a dark side. They are challenged by an evil American master and things get very Jedi. There’s a backstory involving an Atlantis/Shangri-La city destroyed in a war between the good Blue Circle and evil Red Circle. Fong warns the kids not to kill the Red Circle challengers or they will turn to the dark, um, red side. This despite the fact that they’ve killed scores of Stromtr-, er, opium smugglers.
It’s all very, very Star Wars, three years early. I doubt very much that Lucas was inspired directly like he was by, say, Far Out Space Nuts. I imagine both were influenced by episodes of Carradine’s Kung Fu.
We’re in origin story mode, with little else going on, so I suspect future installments will have more plot. The fight scenes worked well for me, not quite blow for blow, but it didn’t rely on one-strike kills like Mace. The fight prose combined exotic martial arts moves with brutal violence, can’t go wrong with that.
This series was advertised as having monthly releases. There were six in the series, with a phantom seventh that was announced but never released.
Years ago this was one of the first books I bought for Kindle, probably available as a bootleg in the more wild west days of ebooks.
From Amazon
Matthew Scudder 1
Sins of the Father
by Lawrence Block
HarperCollins, 1976
Scudder is a former cop turned unlicensed private detective. After a sex worker is killed and raped by her roommate, who promptly kills himself, her estranged step-father hires him to find out more about her life. I’m torn on this one, as it has excellent writing and characterization and horrible plotting.
Scudder is the tormented alcoholic type, upset by an accidental death, though also unashamed of being corrupt (accepting bribes, framing suspects, etc). Instead of dark secrets, Scudder’s digging seems to make the situation less sordid as he went, and the accompanying dime store Freudianism didn’t help.
The mystery, such that it was, was a complete cheat - no evidence, not even motive, just pulled it out of thin air.
Last Ranger 4
Rabid Brigadier
by Craig Sargent (Jan Stacy)
1987 Warner Books
Martin Stone and his dog Excalibur join forces with an insane military dictator, who in a shocking turn of events turns out to be the wrong kind of insane military dictator. Stone starts a war with the mafia and biker gangs and has to stop a nuclear missile.
More restrained this time, with most of the story stalling during training sequences and Stone being tempted by the illusion of stability. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that it takes some plot convolutions for Stone to end each story with his bike and dog intact.
Kung Fu
Year of the Tiger
by Lee Chang (Joseph Rosenberger)
Eurasian martial artist Mace is visiting from Hong Kong to find his uncle is being forced to pilot his boat for mafia drug runners. Mace and his cousin decimate the gangsters with their Kung Fu skills and recruit the Coast Guard to make a rescue, leading to a Rosenberger trademark of a fight on a large boat.
Mace’s style is to use exotically named moves that maim or kill in one strike. At one point Mace kills his enemy by screaming at the right pitch, which hits a vibration that melts his enemy’s brains, which begs the question of why he doesn’t just do that all the time.
Strange Talents
by Bernhardt J. Hurwood
1967, Ace Books
Two different people predicting world wars and getting the dates wrong. A psychic IDs a coat thief, unconfirmed as it was return anonymously. A psychic directs a man to where he can buy a treasure map which he then doesn’t dig up. A mom who worries about her child constantly happens to be right a couple times.
A couple move from house to house, mysterious fires following them wherever they go that have no rational explanation. The book leaves out their kids.
Captain Gerald Lowry was the first soldier blinded in World War I, but can steer a boat, play cards, and walk around unaided. Almost like he wasn’t blind. He became an osteopath and claimed to have special healing powers, which didn’t help when he lost a malpractice case for breaking a girl’s leg.
Alexander Jacob is covered here for his magical abilities, including generating grape vines and being able to stab swords through people with no effect. No mentioned is his claim to fame in the mundane world, being involved in a scandal selling the 7th largest diamond, an affair that inspired the novel Kim by Rudyard Kipling.
A book you very likely don’t have on your shelf #526 & 527
Both 1973