Mountain Girls and Swamp Rats

I had to pause in my reviews of the Matt Helm series when I discovered I didn’t have the next book in line. Luckily, finding the books out there isn’t as hard as it used to be. Not sure if anyone cares or not, but I’m having fun going through them from the beginning. Anyway, it’s not like I haven’t been keeping up with other things in the meanwhile.

For example, a couple of old Gold Medal nuggets featuring primitive lusts, passion, greed, gators and girls you don’t take home to mother.

Gold Medal Books and Black Lizard Books

And the swamp continued to rot and to wait for the end, and everything was as it had been in the beginning. - Robert Edmond Alter - Swamp Sister

Swamp Sister, by Robert Edmond Alter, was published in 1966. It’s the kind of novel that’s like sour candy for me. Even the name is irresistible. I don’t know much about its author, but I remember reading Carny Kill some years ago. How is that for another great title? A pair of titles like Carny Kill and Swamp Sister and, brother, you’ve got yourself a fine double feature ahead of you. Both books were republished by Black Lizard Press in the 80’s and shouldn’t be too hard to find now. Swamp Sister sets up a classic plot of missing loot lost in a Florida swamp, a pair of swamp rats with larceny in their hearts, a lusty young man looking for a better life, a sexy babe in cut-offs and not much else, and a crooked insurance investigator, all mixed into a sweaty brew somewhere in the wilds of Florida. The place isn’t specifically named, but I’m calling Florida purely because gators turn up all over the plot as our hero, Shad Hark, navigates his way to the missing payroll loot through a pair of hot sisters named Margy and Dorry, and a couple of murderous swamp rats named Sam and Jort. Seems our pal Shad can’t get a break after he foolishly spends some of the missing loot in the local general store. In no time flat he’s got the whole town all up his ass trying to get their sweaty mitts on that money. It’s a pretty good yarn all in all. My only complaint is the cornpone dialog gets a little weary after a while. A little goes a long way when it comes to people speaking like cottonmouth snakes. But that aside, it is well worth checking out if you have a hankering for a sweaty chick with loose morals sitting on a pile of ill-gotten swag.

“Ben, they’ll kill you for sure. Ain’t nobody around here ever stands up to them. If a man’s too big, they come at him from two sides. They have guns—they’ll use them and they don’t care none if they kill. Please, Ben, let’s get out of here now. I know some of the way—we can guess at the rest.” - Norman Daniels - Something Burning

Promotional flyer found in my copy of Something Burning

Something Burning, by Norman Daniels from 1963, has never seen a reprint as far as I know. I found it in a used bookstore with a small promotional flyer by Barbara Hendra, publicity director with Gold Medal at the time, asking for a review. It’s a neat little artifact folded into the pages of the book. I don’t know anything about writer Norman Daniels, but see that he’d written some westerns back in the day. Something Burning could easily have been a western as well. Ben Medford, our lead protagonist, is deep in an alcoholic state of mourning for his recently deceased wife, Sandy, and winds up wrecking his car off a mountain road one night. He’s found by a mountain girl named Ora and is nursed back to health. In the process of recovering, he and Ora are confronted by a pair of mountain hillbillies named Roy and Joel Gallison. Roy and Joel are right out of a casting call for Deliverance, as they take pleasure in killing and raping whomever they please. Ben uses his anger and screw-it-all attitude to his advantage and beats the hell out of Roy and Joel. Unfortunately he lets his civilized upbringing get the better of him and doesn’t kill the brothers. Bad mistake! The brothers return and kill Ora as she and Ben attempt to leave their mountain hideaway. Now Ben is on the run, blamed for Ora’s death and for setting a string of recent forest fires as well. He’s an outsider stripped of civilized mores, dealing with psychotic hillbillies and firebugs as he attempts to make it out of the mountains alive. Halfway through the novel, it changes course and becomes a stranded survivor plot as Ben and others are held hostage by the real firebug in a lookout tower as the flames surround them. It’s not a perfect novel, nor a lost classic. There are some lapses in logic happening, and Ben’s sudden attraction for another mountain girl so soon after the death of his wife doesn’t make a lot of sense, but all in all, Something Burning was an entertaining way to pass a few hours. That said, I wouldn’t necessarily go out of your way to find this book. But if you see it out there, it’s probably worth a couple bucks of your hard-earned dough.

So that’s about it for missing a couple weeks. I’ll probably be back in Helm’s world. Who knows?

The Shadowers - Donald Hamilton

The little .22 settled on a point of aim and his finger put pressure on the trigger. I was aware of the strangled breathing of Harold Mooney watching fearfully and making no effort to intervene. That was all right. I didn't want any help. I just wanted to get my hands on Karl Kroch. At that moment he had no information anybody wanted. I didn't have to treat him gently. I didn't have to catch him and preserve him like a delicate scientific specimen. I could smash him like a cockroach, and I was looking forward to it; and I didn't care how big he was or how many guns he had. He was dead.

The Shadowers, from 1964, is the 7th novel in the Matt Helm series, and picks up several months after the events which occurred in The Ambushers. Matt Helm is on vacation in Florida under the guise of Paul Corcoran, a reporter from Denver. He's supposed to be spending a month of fun and sun with his girlfriend Gail Hendricks. You may remember Gail Hendricks as the spoiled Texas socialite from the 4th novel, The Removers. I wasn't much of a fan of Gail Hendricks, and couldn't see why Matt Helm would fall for her. Well, turns out someone else wasn't much of a fan either, because as this novel starts up, Gail Hendricks has been killed in a car accident. Helm is taken to the scene of the accident by the police and looks for signs of foul play but is unable to determine any. Speed and alcohol seem to be the only cause.

Shocked and saddened by Gail's death, Helm calls up his boss Mac and asks for an assignment. Mac obliges by sending Helm to New Orleans, where he follows through on a series of elaborate maneuvers, signals and pickups, all to determine if he is being shadowed, as he makes his way back to Pensacola Florida. Helm's trip to New Orleans and back to Florida is something of an elaborate ruse in preparation for his assignment, to find and kill a man known as Emil Taussig. Taussig is responsible for multiple shadow operations throughout Europe, and has now been spotted in the United States, in Pensacola Florida. It's believed that Taussig's current target is Dr. Olivia Mariassy, an aerospace physician.  .

Mac said, "The exact nature of the Pensacola target is irrelevant. The important thing is that there is one, and that a number of valuable people, Dr. Mariassy included, are in danger, and that we must find Taussig and stop him before he gets all his agents in a position to act."

Helm's assignment is to stick by Dr. Mariassy's side and find out who is shadowing her. "You will determine if she is being shadowed. If she is, you will lead the shadower into a suitably isolated spot, safe from interference by the police or anybody else, and learn from him, or her, the whereabouts of Emil Taussig." Accomplishing that, Helm is directed to kill Taussig.

It's determined the best way for Helm to accomplish his assignment is to marry Dr. Mariassy while keeping his guise as Paul Corcoran. Dr. Mariassy agrees to the marriage charade. Mariassy is described as one of those "schoolmarm librarian types" and has a way of instantly annoying Helm, providing many opportunities for him to act like a bastard toward her. This is a recurring theme through all the books so far. Helm has to work with a woman who may or may not be on his side, and he treats her like shit in the process. It's his way of impressing upon them the ugliness of his world. And of course, it never really works because without fail, the women respond to Helm's brutal charms.

Events in The Shadowers are linked to the previous novel, The Ambushers, but you don't necessarily have to read that book first. There are also a lot of references back to the earlier novels, particularly in reference to Helm's relationship with Gail Hendricks and his wife Beth, from Death of a Citizen. The Shadowers features a great villain named Karl Kroch. Kroch is one of those sadistic Nazi bastards who takes pleasure taunting Helm throughout the novel whenever he isn't raping and killing the women who are unfortunate enough to orbit Helm's world. Kroch's vendetta against Helm relates back to Helm's previous assignment. As in all of the novels before, Helm can't really trust anyone completely. Not even his new "wife" Dr. Marassy, who seems to have too many secrets. Tagging along on the assignment is Mariassy's former lover, Dr. Harold Mooney. Mooney plays just enough of a wild card in the deck to throw the assignment off the rails more than once. Also joining into the mix is Antoinette Vail, a young woman whom Helm pulls in as a decoy early on in the case.

Continuity plays a bigger role in this novel than the ones before it. We also see Helm beginning to express misgivings in his abilities as an agent. More than usual, he makes mistakes in The Shadowers which result in deadly consequences. There is even a moment of reflection, considering the death of Gail Hendricks, and the events resulting in this current assignment, where Helm thinks of leaving the game. Such moments are brief, however.

This novel was published in February 1964, and by this time Gold Medal Books had found a niche publishing series novels featuring Travis McGee, Chester Drum, Sam Durell and Matt Helm. The popularity of series characters like Matt Helm meant something of an end to the stand-alone, noir paperpacks that Gold Medal was known for in the 50's. Writers like Dan J. Marlowe, Steven Marlowe and Edward S. Aarons, along with Donald Hamilton, began turning out espionage adventures rather than straight crime novels as they'd done in the 50's. John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee was an exception, considering that McGee stuck to the basic "private eye" formula. So did Richard Prather with his detective hero, Shell Scott. Dropping off the paperback shelves were writers like Gil Brewer and Harry Whittington and Day Keene. The series character had arrived and was here to stay. 

The Ambushers - Donald Hamilton

"In case they didn't tell you in Washington or you weren't in condition to listen closely," I said, "it's a misplaced Russian toy known as the Rudovic III. It has a nuclear warhead and a twelve-hundred-mile range. That gives it a choice, from here, of any big U.S. city from Los Angeles, California,to Houston, Texas. Maybe further. My geography is a little sketchy. And controlling this pleasant gadget is our scar-faced ex-Nazi general, with his pocket-sized army and his dreams of greatness, past and future. 

Fawcett Gold Medal Books

With this, Matt Helm essentially sums up the plot-line in The Ambushers. Doesn't the Cold War sound like a lot of kicks? I mean we thought we had enough on our plate dealing with the commies, we had to deal with lunatic ex-Nazi generals to boot!

This is a 2nd time reading The Ambushers for me. First published in 1963, and the sixth novel in the series, The Ambushers shows a Matt Helm at his most ruthless yet. I think he kills at least a dozen guys in this novel. He also gets to play nursemaid to another operative, a female, if it matters, and face down a nuclear warhead in the process. So yes, it's full of action and has all the classic Matt Helm ingredients one could want.

The novel starts off in South America in a place called Costa Verde with Helm on assignment to assassinate a rebel leader known as El Fuerte. One agent has already attempted to kill El Fuerte and failed. Helm is aided by a Colonel Jiminez who, along with a rag-tag band of guerrilla soldiers, leads Helm deep into the jungle, to El Fuerte's lair. We get a detailed look at how a sniper operates in these early chapters, as Helm explains rifles, telescopes and distance to the doubtful Colonel Jiminez. The killshot is about 550 yards, and Helm doesn't have any opportunity to miss. The previous agent, known as Sheila, had tried and failed. It's Helm's hope that Sheila is still alive, and that he can extract her from El Fuerte's jungle if possible.

In the process of killing El Fuerte, Helm notices another white foreigner. Something about this one is familiar. He's a face from the files back in Washington. Just who he might be, Helm doesn't remember, but he throws a few bullets at this white stranger anyway, figuring if he's in cahoots with El Fuerte, then he's worth killing as well. Unfortunately he misses the stranger. With the assassination of El Fuerte successful, Helm and Jiminez's soldiers beat a retreat. Helm soon learns that the woman, Sheila, is rescued during the attack on El Fuerte's camp. Sheila is barely alive though, having suffered repeated rape and torture at the hands of El Fuerte and his men. She's able to inform Helm about a missile hidden in the jungle. Helm gets an opportunity to see the missile, but is unable to identify it or disarm it. He assumes it's of Russian origin, and may have been stolen somehow.

Back in Washington, various agencies are all bent out of shape to learn that a missile is down in South America. Matt Helm learns that the mysterious stranger he saw with El Fuerte is an ex-Nazi general named Heinrich von Sachs. Matt Helm's boss, Mac, suggests that it's too bad Helm wasn't able to kill von Sachs when he had the opportunity. Now he's going to have to go back and finish the job. Oh, and while he's at it, find out just what Heinrich von Sachs has to do with the missing missile, a Rudovic III, as it turns out. Oh yes, and find the missile and disarm it, if possible.

And with that, we're off on another deadly and treacherous adventure. Helm takes the traumatized Sheila down to a secret convalescence ranch in Arizona. From there he'll follow another agency's tip to a place outside of Tucson where a foreign agent was captured and killed before they could glean anything from him. It's believed that Heinrich von Sachs is also a mystery person known only as Kurt Quintana, who is gathering soldiers somewhere in Nacimiento Mountains. At the ranch, Sheila pleads with Helm to not abandon her there, to give her another opportunity to prove her worth to the agency and the country. Against advice from Mac, Helm agrees to let Sheila assist him in following the leads to Heinrich von Sachs. Along the way, Helm is kidnapped and tortured by apposing agents who are also after von Sachs. One of those agents is mystery woman known only as Catherine Smith, who lays a honey trap for Helm that he deliberately falls for. Sheila proves her worth by rescuing Helm from Catherine Smith and her partner. An uneasy alliance is formed with Helm and Catherine Smith both going after Heinrich von Sachs.

Like I said at the top, Helm doesn't mess around (too much) in this novel. He kills with deliberate necessity, using rifles, handguns, and even a machete to eliminate his enemies. And he also gets to sleep with a couple deadly babes along the way. All in the line of duty, you know. This is also the first novel in the series we're introduced to Vadya, a beautiful and deadly enemy agent.

The Ambushers is the third movie in the Dean Martin series. That movie involved a flying saucer somehow, and nothing from the novel. The movie was released in 1967 and is pretty terrible, as far as movies go. Unless you like over-the-top spyjinks. Me, I'll stick with the books, thank you!