Now that's what I call a Rampant Rabbit

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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!

Bond is about to return

The new James Bond novel, due this May, from Anthony Horowitz will carry the very Bondian title of Forever and a Day and will again feature unpublished material from Ian Fleming. I'm looking forward to this having enjoyed the author's previous Bond novel, Trigger Mortis - find my review HERE.






 Several authors have taken a stab at the Bond franchise over recent years, but to my mind it was Horowitz who more closely captured the true spirit of Fleming's creation, so it is great news that the copyright holders have retained the author for a second title.

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Vintage movie review: The Heroes of Telemark

1965
Directed by Anthony Mann
Starring Kirk Douglas, Richard Harris and Ulla Jacobson.

A large screen TV, a good sound system and a pristine cut on DVD - add a bottle of scotch and a cheese board and you've got all the ingredients for a truly cinematic experience in the home.

I watch a lot of old movies like this and so I thought it would be a good idea to add a VINTAGE MOVIE REVIEW section to the Archive, where titles would not be categorised by genre but rather included because they are what we would define as vintage. And you know, by and large, the old movies are usually the best - well, they are in the opinion of this grouchy old timer. You can stick your expensive CGI where the sun don't shine and muscle bound fools in latex merely bore me. Give me a slice of classic celluloid and I'm happy.

The Heroes of Telemark, filmed all the way back in 1965 (the year the Beatles released Help, cigarette advertising was banned on Television, Ian Fleming posthumously published The Man with the Golden Gun and I was born.) and takes its story from factual events.Namely the sabotaging by the Norwegian resistance of the German heavy water plants. These actions may have actually cost Germany the war, since prior to this audacious act of sabotage the Germans were closer than both the Americans and the British to producing a workable nuclear bomb. The story was also filmed in 1948 under the title   Kampen om tungtvannet, and that Franco/Norwegian version even featured four of the original commandos who took part in the actual sabotage playing themselves - that movie is available on You Tube and is embedded below. There is also a newspaper article HERE that tells of the death in 2012 of one of the last surviving saboteurs.




   Kampen om tungtvannet The movie as available on You Tube



Anthony Mann's movie is quite faithful to actual events, but the veteran director of many classic westerns, is at all times aware that he is producing an entertainment and he delivers a spectacular movie, excellently paced and full of excitement. Reviews at the time said the characters were wooden but I can't agree with that and whilst Kirk Douglas may come across as a cross between Indiana Jones and James Bond, Richard Harris' Nazi hating character is superbly nuanced.

The action scenes are excellent and the ski chase in the movie is as good as anything seen on the big screen, the suspense is also ramped up and the end scene in which Douglas tries to save a group of children from a ferry that is about to blow up is a master-class in edge-of-the-seat viewing.

If you enjoy movies like Where Eagles Dare and the Guns of Navarone, then you will certainly enjoy Heroes of Telemark. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Streets of Laredo: a fitting conclusion to the legend

'More worrisome to him was the fact that the joints of his fingers had started to swell, when it got cold. For most of his life he had paid no attention to weather; weather was just there. He never let it interfear with his work or his movements. In time, the weather would always change, but the work wouldn't wait. Now it seemed, weather was interfearing plenty. When the cold struck his wrist joints became swollen, and the joints of his fingers even more so.'

The Streets of Lardeo is the sequal to the Pulitzer Prize winning, Lonesome Dove and where it was the second book published in the series it is actually the fourth book chronologically. The author would follow this novel with   a couple  of prequel novels (Dead Man's Walk and Commanche Moon) that looked at the early days of Captain Call and Augustus McCrae. This book though is a direct sequal to that first novel and not to be confused with that TV movie, Return to Lonesome Dove which is a poor substitute to this, the real conclusion to a beautifully written, painfully realistic western tetralogy . In The Streets of Laredo, McMurtry adds the final strokes to the story of Captain Call, and gives the character a worthy if somewhat depressing send off.

The book is all about growing old - as the Wild West that needed men like Captain Call slowly fades into history then so too do men like Call. McMurtry's westerns have never been about gun blazing heroics, although there are plenty, but more about presenting in as vivid and truthful a fashion as possible the real cruelty of the period. The book opens many years after the events told in Lonesome Dove and when we meet up with Captain Call he is an aged character, someone better suited to spending his days in a rocker whittling away at pieces of wood, but Call doesn't pay much attention to his growing old and has long as he can still do what he sets his mind to he doesn't really think about the changes age brings to his once strong body.


'When she looked out the door of the rooming house and saw Captain Call coming, she had been shocked at how decrepit he looked. Pea Eye had mentioned, casually, that the Captain wasn't as spry as he had been, but the comment hadn't prepared her how the man actually looked.'


Call find himself hired by the railroad to track down the youthful bandit, Joey Garza who is making  a name for himself by striking trains across the Mexican border. Call is teamed up with Brookshire,  a man of the East who is really not suited to the harsh conditions in the West - he spends much of his time either chasing his hat which blows off in the Texas winds or pining for his bossy wife, Kate. Soon they are joined by  yound deputy, Plunkert who is no more suitable that Brookshire and also spends much of his time thinking of the young wife he felt behind in Laredo. Both of these men will lose their wives during the long journey ahead of them.

As well as Joey Garza, Call has to contend with Mox Mox, the manburner, a truly sadistic character who takes great pleasure from burning people alive - man, woman or child it matters not to the runty bandit and some of the scenes concerning the character, although largely told in flashback, are truly stomach churning. It's not all grim though - there are many great character moments. The Indian tracker, Famous Shoes offers some great comedic relief and there is a scene where a group of whores are talking about the first men in their lives that displays the author's incredible skill with character and dialogue.


In the end Captain Call is a legend and the author skilfully weaves his story around several real historical characters, Charles Goodnight, Hanging Huge Roy Bean and John Wesley Harding for instance play major roles in this wonderfully written epic of the old West.

'Call was no longer the man who had lived in the old times; he was no longer even the man who had killed Mox Mox. That man was not the cripple who lived in a granery, in a barn on the Quitaque. That man lived back somewhere in memory, across a canyone, across the Pecos; that man had been blown away, as Brookshire feared he would be, on the plains of time.'


To sum up - a wonderful book that must be read. Absoluely astounding - lyrical, elegiac and jaw dropping!


Like the other books in the series, Streets of Laredo was made into a TV mini-series, this time with James Garner in the role of Captain Call.

Hot Lead - The new journal of the wild west.

I've read a fair few fanzines in my time, contributed to many, but the one thing most of them have in common (apart from the enthusiasm for their subject matter) is the way they were  cheaply produced, often printed on A4 sheets and simply stabled together, with artwork poorly reproduced. Sometimes fanzine producers would splash out and produce a magazine in A5 format, but by and large  they still looked like a poor relation (even if the writing was sometimes superior)  to the professional magazines that dominated.

That ain't the case these days. And the premier issue of Hot Lead, the fanzine devoted to western fiction paperbacks, can stand up alongside any professional publication - excellently produced, using Amazon's own CreateSpace system, with artwork that is clean and vivid and words that are well edited and wonderfully written. Hot Lead then proves that there is little difference to what a group of enthusiastic fans can produce and the glossy magazines that fill the news-stands. Though in fairness Hot Lead does benefit from having Justin Marriott the man behind the excellent Paperback Fanatic in the editing chair.

The first issue comes in at a respectable 60+ pages and is dedicated to a group of western writers known collectivelly as The Piccadilly Cowboys. There is an interview with George G Gilman, the man responsible for the ever popular Edge western series, and regular readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of this series - indeed, I was responsible for bringing the first of the Edge books to the digital world of eBooks, before Malcolm Davy took over and has since brought virtually the entire series into digital print. Paul Bishop gives us an article that explains  the origins of the Piccadilly Cowboys, and Steve Mayall, a name well known to western fans, bring us the first of his regular review section, The Cowpoke Critic. These are just some of the highlights to this magazine which is  positively bursting with wild west goodies.

'Each issue of Hot Lead will have a theme running through it', explained co-editor Paul Bishop. 'Issue #2 will be Western cover art...Issue #3 will look at the Adult Westerns...#4 Western paperback series with women main characters...#5 current Western wordslingers from William W. Johnstone's and Ralph Compton's fiction factories to Ralph Cotton, Cotton Smith, and more (all of this is subject to change)...'

Me, as a  lifelong fan of the western genre can't wait for the second issue, nor those that are to follow and would like to stand both Justin Marriott and Paul Bishop a drink (a whiskey in a dirty glass) for producing my new favourite magazine. The best place to score a issue of this excellent publication is from Amazon and I do urge fans of the western genre to do so.