Book Review: The Sergeant: Death Train

The Sergeant: Death Train
Gordon Davies, a pen name for Len Levinson.
Piccadilly Publishing eBook
Originally published in the UK as a Corgi paperback

in 1980

I remember seeing these novels on the shelves of my local bookshop (Tonypandy's Wishing Well) alongside the westerns that I so loved - that was back in the day when paperback original men's adventure novels were a thing. Though I'd never read this particular series until now - I was always more drawn towards the westerns of George G. Gilman during that period, so it's great that digital publishers like Piccadilly are bringing these books back for a modern digital audience.

Online I've seen people calling this series a pulpy war series - but the word pulp when applied to fiction is often derogatory, at least in a modern sense. The true definition of pulp literature comes from the low quality paper used in the production of the cheap mass market magazines and books produced from the late 1800's up to the mid to late 1950's. By contrast the more expensively produced magazines were known as slicks. Though the term pulp literature is now bandied about to often mean low grade or poor quality. To be pedantic though the term pulp literature can not be applied to digital books, that is without altering the true definition of the term. Still, I am being overly pedantic here and the way the word Pulp is used in the modern world does, I suppose, apply to this series. Think of Pulp to mean cool rather than disposable and we'll get along just fine.

Saying that it is hard to read this book without laughing- the sex scenes (and there are many) are absurd and come across as silly rather than anything else -

She moved closer to him. 'You want me to show you?'

'Yeah.'

She reached over and grabbed his joint, caressing it through the material of his pants.

He pulled back, but she held onto him.

'You act as if nobody ever played with your little doodle before.'

Doodle? WTF! These scenes come across as absurd given the hard hitting style of the rest of the brutal well paced narrative - the title character is Sergeant Clarance J. Mahoney, a hard drinking, chain smoking, whoring, Nazi killing machine of a man, who is working with the resistance in France in the lead up to the Normandy landings that would eventually turn the tide of the war against the Axis powers.

The plot of this first book in the series sees Mahoney and his team targeting a bridge that will allow the Germans to get troops to the beach-heads quickly when the invasion starts. And it really is a great yarn once you get used to the bastard that is the central character.

'Mahoney knew that you shouldn't get too close to people at wartime, because you never knew when they were going to bite the dust. But he hadn't thought he'd been that close to Celestine. He just thought she was the best available female to screw. But now his heart ached whenever he pictured her sprawled on the road with her eyes closed and blood pouring out of her side.'

The Sergeant does, after all, it seems have a heart and he moans the death of a female comrade early in the book, but he soon seems to be getting over it when another woman meets his eye.

'Mahoney felt Odette's body next to his and he started to get an erection. He wondered if he had time to knock off off a quick piece before going to the bridge, and then cursed himself for having these thoughts when Clestine hadn't even been dead for a full twenty-four hours yet.'
 
 Maybe back in the 1980's, when this book first saw print passages like those above wouldn't have seemed so ridiculous, but they certainly stand out to the modern reader. That's not a criticism though, after all the story is still excellently told, but these sections do stand out. As does Mahoney's entire attitude towards women. He has fought, we are told and shown, alongside several incredibly brave women and yet that doesn't stop him thinking along these lines:

'Mahoney didn't like going on operations with women because he tended to worry about them. It was true that any women, if pushed too far might slug her husband with a frying pan, but guns and grenades. What did women know about guns and grenades.'

Turns out quite a lot, and some of the female characters who populate this story are indeed strong and resourceful, and not just somewhere to dip your doodle. In this book the men are hard, the woman are all sexy, the Nazis are murderous scum and the action comes thick and fast. And I'll certainly be checking out more books in the series - there are nine in all, and I'm told that the series improves as it goes along. Though in fairness this is not a bad book - yes, it's ridiculous, but as a piece of all action storytelling it succeeds just fine, though a little more depth would have been nice.

Think the Dirty Dozen, Inglorious Bastards (the original Italian version) and you pretty much have the feel of this novel. It's trashy in places, with attitudes very much of the time it was written, and great fun for a quick no nonsense read.

Still, I can't believe anyone ever called it a doodle!