Paperback Spies Part Three

PAPERBACK SPIES
Part Three

James Dark’s COME DIE WITH ME, THE BAMBOO BOMB, and THE SWORD OF GHENGIS KAHN all featuring Agent Mark Hood of INTERTRUST
James Dark was the pseudonym of James Edmund MacDonnell an Australian Navy man (ever notice how many spy series authors served in the Navy? What the Army and the Air Force aren’t inspiration enough?)who had made good success with a series of novels about, what else, naval officers. Dark was a ‘house name’ of the publishing company that printed his Hood novels. Unlike most ‘house name’ companies, MacDonnell was the only author of the Hood books, unlike say the Nick Carter series who had maybe thirty or so different authors. James dark wrote twelve Mark Hood thrillers between 1965 and 1970 thats more than two a year. This was in addition to his 50 other novels he wrote in the Horwitz Naval Series. Thriller writers nowadays are slacking.
Hood’s an American, educated at Oxford and received a Bachelor of Medicine but he never finished to become a doctor instead he served as an executive officer on an American destroyer during the Korean War. He’s described as “a bear of a man” with large shoulders and torso. He also holds a black belt in Karate and his sensei Morimoto is featured in several books, often serving to give Hood a cover of being a karateka attending tournaments. Dark’s description of karate and it’s terms were realistic and authentic. When asked about his knowledge his knowledge in an interview he replied that he simply bought a book on karate and used it reference.
After the war Hood was snatched up by organization called INTERTRUST. Why we really don’t know, it’s not written that Hood had any previous intelligence experience. INTERTRUST was created by the four (at the time) nuclear powers. America, Britain, France and Russia to keep nuclear weapons from proliferating and to combat’s threats to the status quo of world security.
His cover is that of an international race car driver, cricketeer, and womanizing playboy. (Hey, this was the 60’s) He of course looks good in a tux, drives sports cars and drinks hard liquor. Here’s where his path diverts from Bond’s. Hood often plays the irascible drunken lout or obnoxious, overbearing American.
He treats women like crap and sometimes sends them off to fend for themselves. In THE BAMBOO BOMB: He breaks into Gauss’s garage steals one of his powerful cars and gives it to the girl to escape in. When she tells him she can’t drive, he tells her to walk. In SWORD OF GENGHIS KHAN he seduces Khan’s daughter which is considered defilement just to throw Khan into a violent rage that leads to his doom.
He’s got a tough job and in it sometimes innocent people die. There’s not a lot of introspection from Dark. Hood never sits in the Miami Airport drinking double burbons and thinking about life and death. At least not in the few novels I’ve read. In THE BAMBOO BOMB in order to infiltrate a Indonesian plot to set off a nuke inside a volcano he is required to fight and kill two other men who are ‘interviewing’ for a spot with villain’s group. The chief villain is not your typical spy baddie. He’s nothing more than a Cabinet Minister in the Indonesian government who wishes to show the world that Indonesia has become a nuclear power and should be treated with utmost respect. Some of Hood’s other opponents are right out of Fleming or Sax Rohmer. In THE SWORD OF GHENGIS KHAN, the bad guy is a Mongol chieftain who claims to be a full-blooded descendent of Ghengis Khan. He’s holding a tournament for martial artists at his castle in Outer Mongolia. This was long before Bruce Lee entered as the Dragon and challenged Han on his island fortress.
Khan has developed and launched a satellite that can focus our sun’s rays into a deadly heat beam. In COME DIE WITH ME, Herr Gauss is a former Nazi living in Brazil who has hijacked three American torpedo boats that are equipped with nuclear torpedoes. (Never knew we had such things.) He plans to incinerate a troopship carrying American soldiers. Why he couldn’t just sink them with a regular torpedo is never explained. Besides this was 1962 we still thought if you were far enough away from the blast, you would never be exposed to the radiation. Gauss is the archetype Nazi villain, all he needs is a cigarette holder a peaked cap and a monocle. Both Gauss and Khan have Hood ‘join us for dinner’ and then give the de-riguer tour of the control facility. Hood of course escapes and turns the baddies’ weapons against them. In BAMBOO he steals one of the torpedo boats and nukes Gauss’s seaside retreat. He even wonders briefly if the gril got to safety. In SWORD he recalibrates the space based heat ray to fire on Khan’s castle.
That’s all right out of the 60’s spy playbook and in the case of 60’s spy paperbacks that is exactly what is demanded by the reader. It’s in THE BAMBOO BOMB that Hood really shines. As mentioned he commits a double murder to join the villain Subandu’s organization. Then he has to make his way from Singapore to Sumatra to report for work. This is complicated as there was small conflict raging between the Indonesians and the Malays and the British Navy were stuck in the middle. Hood gets stopped crossing the Strait of Malacca by the British Navy, so he hijacks their patrol boat, shooting one sailor and fracturing an officers arm in the process. Not what you’d ever see British or American agent do. Once in SUmatra he meets with Subandu who is a small and thin functionary in the Indonesian goverment who thinks his country should become a part of the atomic bomb club. Only one hitch, he doesn’t have one. He’s managed to locate a large amount of plutonium but lacks the technology to utilize it as an atomic weapon. He plans to seed a massive TNT explosion inside a local volcano, this ‘dirty bomb’ would put enough plutonium in the air for other countries to decude that Indonesia did indeed have atomic capabiity (I like how the old thrillers used atomic as the term for their bombs. Perhaps it wasn’t until we started manufacturing hydrogen bombs that we initiated the nuclear term for all such weapons? Something else I didn’t get the memo on.) Of course our hero literally goes through green hell to stop the Subandu who ends up getting blown up with own his TNT after Hood had absconded with his plutonium.

Of the three I read THE BAMBOO BOMB was the best. It had a cool change of pace and Hood was absolutely ruthless when it came to fulfilling his mission. BAMBOO was a welcome departure from the spy genre formula. Of course I enjoyed the other two novels immensely. I have almost all of the Hood series except for two. I would whole-heartedly reccomend the Mark Hood series for anyone who enjoys this genre.

Ratings as follows
COME DIE WITH ME: Three out of five stars.
THE BAMBOO BOMD: Four out of five.
THE SWORD OF GHENGIS KAHN: Four out of Five.

Mark Hood appeared in 12 novels. They are: COME DIE WITH ME, THE BAMBOO BOMB, ASSIGNMENT HONG KONG, ASSIGNMENT TOKYO (not to be confused with the Sam Durrell book of the same name by Edward S. Aarons), OPERATION SCUBA, THE SWORD OF GHENGIS KHAN, THRONE OF SATAN, SPYING BLIND, OPERATION OCTOPUS, OPERATION ICECAP,
THE INVISIBLES and SEA SCRAPE.

NEXT: Desmond Cory’s Johnny Fedora in UNDERTOW

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