18 replies to this topic

[chrisno1]

MICHAEL HAWK

 

These action adventures appeared in en mass in the early eighties. While not exactly spy material, Hawk's stories do possess some of the pizzazz of Bond: the exotic locations, beautiful women, crazed villains with crazy world threatening schemes and over the top moments of suspense.

 

The Deadly Crusader

 

I first saw The Deadly Crusader on the bottom shelf of my local W.H.Smith. The cover was bright and gaudy with an exciting illustration, full of explosions, a beautiful woman and the hero, Michael Hawk, shooting his gun from the hip like he’s escaped from a TV western. I immediately determined to save up the £1.25 I needed to purchase the novel, which I did, and when I got it home, I devoured the story in a couple of days. I soon returned to purchase the other three available adventures [more on those later].

 

My recollection is that I wasn’t over impressed with the novel the first time I read it, chiefly because I didn’t really understand the plot, but it had a great climax atop the Galata Tower in Istanbul and a smattering of sex, violence and profanity which made me feel I was reading an adult story much like the OO7 hardbacks I borrowed from the library. Hawk mind, is nothing like James Bond. First he’s an American journalist come millionaire who gets caught up in scrapes he really ought to leave well alone. His natural curiosity, allied to a noble streak in his character, constantly leads him into danger and into the lives of dangerous and powerful people.

 

The initial novel, The Deadly Crusader, is predominantly set on the Greek island of Skiathos where Hawk, still grieving for his wife Lisa, is recovering from six months incarceration in a Soviet prison, a stay he deliberately perpetrated for a lunatic scoop. He is not alone. The CIA have sent a maverick young agent, George Pollock, to monitor him; the KGB sent Arbatov, a ruthless assassin; and the sexual predator Julie Paragon is trying to dig her claws in for a scoop of her own; but it is the luxury yacht and the handsome villa and the mysterious female who lives there protected by men armed with machine guns which most intrigues him.

 

She turns out to be Brandi [I’m not sure her surname is ever mentioned] the daughter of El Sargento, fallen dictator of a rogue Central American state and heiress to Crusaders International, a multi-state funding organization which has spirited millions of dollars away from the state economy. She is in hiding from her father’s usurpers and the men who want the money back.

 

Throughout the story Michael Hawk acts like a sort of overgrown high school boy. His manners are terrible. He likes a fight and a f***. He swears a lot. Where ever he goes women chase him and men seem to die. I’ve read the novel several times now and it’s fair to say Hawk isn’t a particularly pleasant character. He’s very self-absorbed and more often than not this puts those around him in danger. The female characters are quite shallow. The villains (of which there are many) come and go, get shot, knifed, punched, you name it. It’s quite a brutal story.

 

The author is Dan Streib, whose only previous literary offers were a couple of Nick Carter adventures in the early seventies. He’s got a nice flair for description, though he has a tendency to overuse metaphorical comparisons, and he creates for Skiathos and its inhabitants a feasible environment of fear and intimidation. I don’t believe the novel straddles any true merit. It’s very short, about 65000 words, and easily digestible.

 

Where it does succeed is in the action stakes. The novel is peppered with dramatic violent high points. I particularly enjoyed a scene where a swimming Hawk is menaced by a speeding yacht and there’s a suspense-filled escape from the island. The final helter-skelter chapter is set in Istanbul and serves as the introduction to the remainder of Hawk’s life as the dying Brandi relates the account numbers for her father’s secret slush fund.

 

As introductory story’s go, The Deadly Crusader is pretty good. It has verve and excitement. Despite obvious flaws, it’s much better than I remembered it.

 

Edited by chrisno1, 24 June 2015 - 09:54 PM.

[chrisno1]

The Mind Twisters

 

The Mind Twisters, the follow up to The Deadly Crusader, really is a bit insane.

 

A dying professor’s last words send Michael Hawk chasing after a bunch of cultists in thrall to the mad and terminally sick Reverend Denny Garner. Only this cross nation brain washing cult is thousands of followers strong and they all seem to want Hawk dead. There are some ridiculous scenarios here, like a whole town besieged by chanting Buddhists and a sky scraper rigged to detonate live on TV designed to allow the world to witness the Reverend’s second coming, and it’s all hung on the slimmest of premises.

 

Thankfully Dan Streib seems a little more interested in his lead character this time around. There are the already familiar hallmarks of Michael Hawk’s life and attitude: drink, swearing, women, punch ups, deep personal regret housed inside seething anger at the world’s injustices. His inadequacies’ are neatly juxtaposed against the guilt he conceives for having attained the fortune of a dead dictator from a woman he briefly loved. It’s always women causing psychological problems for Hawk. This time it’s the TV reporter Wendy Ross who tickles his fancy, but like Julie and Brandi in the previous novel, she too can’t seem to stay alive long enough to cure him of his ills.

 

The novel starts off replaying the closing scenes of The Deadly Crusader. We learn how Hawk escaped from Galata and how, during a well-constructed visit to sleepy, creepy Liechtenstein, he obtained his first funds from Crusaders International. We learn how he wants to spend it. These early chapters are more interesting than the remainder of the tale which veers wildly from episode to episode and rarely seems to draw conclusions let alone breath.

 

This one is a struggle to finish. Its villain is dull. He’s so ill his megalomaniac wife, La Belle, is creating fake speeches for his worldwide audience of crazies and launching murderous unnecessary vendettas in his name. The plot is a hopeless mess and the denouement an unintelligible dirge. It was only the rare moments of Hawk’s fledgling conscience which kept this tale interesting and gives it some much needed honesty. Overall it’s a bit of a drag.

 

Edited by chrisno1, 28 June 2015 - 10:54 PM.

[dtuba]

Interesting.

It reminds me of the old Mack Bolan Executioner series I used to read back in high school. Each one of those featured the title character fighting the Mafia in a different location. Sometimes there was a location-specific action sequence (i.e. skiing in Colorado) that satisfied my Bond cravings (back when the pickin's were slimmer).

 

I was also a big fan of Remo Williams/The Destroyer, but that's another story.

[chrisno1]

Thanks for reading, dtuba.

[chrisno1]

The Power Barons

 

The third installment in Dan Streib’s Hawk series is an action packed adventure set around a global energy crisis agitated by Andre Tovarro, nominal head of a cartel of power barons who consider energy supply as a means to control worldwide governments. Sounds awfully familiar and contemporary and this was written over thirty years ago.

 

Hawk is chilling out on his new yacht, the Lisa, moored in Acapulco Bay, when a call comes in from a shift worker at a nuclear reactor nearing meltdown. The energy plant was bought as an investment by Crusaders International before Hawk got his hands on El Sargento’s money. Because Hawk wants to keep his name out of the papers, he takes charge of the situation at San Carlos and thus prevents a media storm. It does not however stop his attention being drawn to the beautiful environmentalist Sabra Tamberlane, who seems to know more about the radiation leak than she’s letting on. After thwarting a nuclear catastrophe, Hawk is amazed to discover Sabra tailing him to Acapulco. She has become an unwitting pawn in Tovarro’s plans.

 

The early chapters are intriguing and packed full of tension. The opening scene introduces us to Tovarro and his madcap plot, delivered to an audience in a night shrouded football stadium, and we immediately have a sense of his power and authority. This is something Hawk’s previous adversaries lacked. The reader genuinely considers Tovarro menacing; his character is defined and his motives clear. He’s an excellent villain. In fact all the characters are more believable than those of first two books. Sabra’s vulnerability is particularly striking and thus her rape becomes a shocking, torturous moment for the reader to digest. It also reveals the sinister envious possessive nature of the villain. There are small cameos from Porfirio, Hawk’s yachtsman, who adds local flavor, and a mean, threatening villainous henchman Andaluz, who has designs on his master’s fortune. George Pollock is on hand to offer Hawk humour, assistance and hindrance in equal measures. He seems a mature individual now, understanding his sometime friend a little deeper each time they cross. Hawk too has started to become a more rounded person, reflecting on his life before and after becoming a multimillionaire, before and after the death of his wife, the death of Brandi, the death of Wendy. He wonders earnestly when the violence will stop and the killing end.

 

Of course it doesn’t. The Power Barons is his toughest tale yet. The action rarely lets up. We have an underwater knife fight, a parascending pursuit, exploding yachts, speedboat chases, fisticuffs and a climatic gunfight at an oil refinery. It’s a supercharged story and fairly rollocks along with hefty doses of violence and sex, some well described exotic locations and a barrel full of suspense and intrigue. I thoroughly enjoyed it. This is a well-constructed, fast and furious piece of action. I’d recommend it.

 

[chrisno1]

The Predators

 

It’s fair to say The Predators is a bit of a step down from the previous Hawk adventure, but it retains much of that episode’s shadowy intrigue and tension, even if the set pieces are not as well enacted as before.

 

Michael Hawk is attempting to flee the attentions of various hoodlums and mafia types who all seem to want a slice of his bacon. A nasty scrap in Grand Cayman determines Hawk to disappear, bagging a berth on the first cruise liner he can, the Sun Chaser. Unfortunately, he hasn’t covered his tracks well enough and the mysterious Pangaea is still in pursuit, hoping to acquire El Sargento’s riches for his own government. The problem is Hawk doesn’t know which of the guests Pangaea has impersonated.

 

The neat touch in Dan Streib’s story is to shift the point of view from Hawk to Pangaea without ever revealing to the reader exactly who the assassin is. It’s a very good piece of writing. Even on third reading, I couldn’t remember or tell who the villain was. Among the assorted odd ball passengers are a drunken priest, a nympho American and her cute daughter, a piano playing showman and a host of likely and unlikely suspects. The book has a couple of highlights: Hawk is kidnapped by the terrorist Maroons and machine guns his way to safety; the tour visits an eerie voodoo ritual which turns from entertainment to murder. Unfortunately the climax aboard a cable car is confusing beyond belief.

 

Hawk seems to find a semblance of peace at the end of the tale. He’s spent most of the 180+ pages worrying about killing people, about staying alive, about protecting the innocent as well as his multimillions, but with the predators dead and the beautiful Annette on his arm, things may just start to settle down.

 

This is a solid yarn which delivers most of the goods most of the time. The dialogue is sharper than ever and Streib revels in some good natured misogynist humour. He’s had to create a long cast list for this story and brings each character to life with a quick smattering of sentences that tell us the essentials of a persona without the detail; that comes if and when necessary. The action is both tension filled and horrifically blood filled. It is only the daftness of some of the set pieces which rankles. Streib did excellent work in making the action realistic in The Power Barons, but here some of Hawk’s crises seem too contrived.

 

Nonetheless, The Predators is a good story on which to end the first phase of Michael Hawk’s adventures.

 

[chrisno1]

California Shakedown

 

The first four of Dan Streib’s Hawk novels were published simultaneously in 1980 [1982 in Britain]. The next set of ten were all published in 1981. This shows a phenomenal work rate. I can only assume the author had already written the novels before his initial publication deal and merely had to edit and revise them. I believe only novels five and six were given a UK release as I’ve been unable to trace any more of Streib’s novels.

  
California Shakedown suffers from a terrible title and fairly rum cover art and things don’t get much better inside. Michael Hawk and his young girlfriend Annette are travelling the world spending El Sargento’s millions and having sex wherever and whenever they can. But Hawk is bored. Annette senses his frustration. When an old friend begs for help and is subsequently killed, Hawk is left with a score to settle. He’s also left alone as Annette leaves him. The violence appalls her and she leaves with good memories of her love, fearful he will soon become a corpse.

 

It’s a salutary moment and there’s precious little like it in the novel which is a ridiculous picaresque tale surrounding nothing more than unpaid share dividends. It starts with two badly described chase scenes, one on boats, the other on foot. These were both so confusing I had to read several sentences twice to figure out what was happening. Hawk’s friend is an unpleasant Dutchman Arty Stuyvesant who suffers from gastric wind, syphilis and gout and Dan Streib seems to use this information to poke fun at his character. Even Hawk’s impassioned defense can’t raise our sympathies for this awful man who is the butt of heavy handed humour. I was dreadfully disappointed by this beginning. The characters and situations did not get better.

 

I was dumbfounded by so many scenes: a gang of crazed bikers cuts it up rough in small town California, a jet plane menaces a turboprop, Hawk makes love to a woman on a film set while a wrap party goes on around them, Hawk tries to detach a bomb fixed to the cars of a rollercoaster with his shoe, half the bad guys are dosed up on cocaine; I could go on.

 

The whole story is a disaster zone, much like the burning dilapidated film set which is the scene of the confused climax. I don’t quite know what else to say - so I’ll quit.

 

Edited by chrisno1, 12 August 2015 - 04:04 PM.

[chrisno1]

The Seeds of Evil

This novel kicks off with a prologue set in 1944: Dan Streib’s imagining of a strange true life occurrence which took place in war torn Berlin just before Hitler’s suicide. Two Junker aircraft land at a makeshift airstrip and depart hours later having delivered and picked up no cargo. In Streib’s hands this becomes the starting point for another of Michael Hawk’s deadly adventures.

 

This time Hawk is holed up in Venice hoping to write a quick magazine article to maintain his cover as a journalist. His luck, his bad luck, is in, for a local reporter Grissen has died in dreadful circumstances and left clues to a curious and dangerous secret which ties to both a worldwide terror organization and the fascists of Nazi Germany.

The first half of the novel is very good. It builds the scenario and the characters nicely. There are moments of mystery and intrigue. I particularly enjoyed a sequence where Hawk breaks into a Venetian mansion and discovers a scarred, dumb and half blind old woman residing on the top floor like some refugee from Jane Eyre. There’s also a tension filled scuba dive to sunken wreck which becomes a trifle over wrought. It’s at this point, as Hawk impetuously sheds his diving suit and gets lacerated by broken glass, risking infection from the brackish Venetian waters, when I began to lose interest in the story. The author too seems to lose sight of the arc of his plot and instead concentrates on the sensational. It’s fairly obvious where he’s heading for the suave Count La Scala, the old world rich Venetian at the centre of the intrigue, has been christened Attila, which of course rhymes with Hitler. La Scala doesn’t feature much in the story and when he does he spends much time ranting at people, just like the dead Fuhrer.

There’s an unlikely romance for Hawk in the shape of an Italian-American, the daughter of a Mafia Don, Regina Tirelli, and George Pollock reappears to lend a welcome hand and ransack the CIA annals for information. While it is more coherent than California Shakedown, the final confrontation between Hawk and La Scala leaves a sour taste in the mouth, basically because we know La Scala could never have existed and the idea Hawk is preventing the rise of a Nazi terror group is pure fantasy. There’s also an unseemly edge to the tale as it seems La Scala may have impregnated Regina during a rape: his doctors have been monitoring her ovulation cycle to ensure the perfect moment for coitus. The Count rather likes the idea of his son being both a Nazi and a Mafia off spring. I found this angle distinctly unsettling, which may have been the author’s idea but it doesn’t make me enjoy the novel anymore because it’s an exploitive unnecessary angle.  

A disappointing second half drags this novel down and by the climax it hits a low ebb, much like the silt ridden Venice lagoons the story is set around.

 

[dtuba]

Man, these books just sound awful.

 

I must read them one day.

[chrisno1]

The Death Riders

 

While most of Michael Hawk’s adventures have proved faintly preposterous, they have at least been fairly exciting and worthwhile stories. Author Dan Streib has always allowed his hero to inhabit a realistic vision of the world, albeit one populated by rich villains, gorgeous women and down at heel drifters – of which Hawk could so easily be one. In The Death Riders some of that reality takes a backseat as the errant journalist becomes involved with a daredevil motorcycle stunt troupe. Of itself that wouldn’t be an issue, except in this episode the reader is left with several ponderable sequences which don’t seem to stack up.

 

Firstly, and most importantly, we are to accept that Michael Hawk once spent enough time in the company of Whip McComb, leader of the stunt circus, to learn the ropes of his fearless trade and be compared to the very best stunt jumpers of all time. Secondly, at the very opening of the novel, Hawk is pursued by two gun-toting cyclists for what seems a mighty flimsy premise. Lastly, he deduces who perpetrated the murder of his friend McComb without ever having a shred of admissible evidence; he basically frightens them into making a rash move which [spoiler alert] kills them. Throw in a whole host of unsavoury suspects, including a hunchback dwarf, a Chinese widow, a blonde teen temptress and a mentally disabled mechanic, and you have a rum old mix.

 

There is some action, most of it revolving around a series of repetitive motorbike stunts, and an inch or two of love interest, but it’s basically a very dull unimaginative detective case, which throws Hawk into an awkward situation. The fun ought to be in how he extricates himself, but it’s a tedious journey barely enlivened by the thrills and spills of the stunt track. The hero isn’t even particularly pleasant in this one; he takes a distinct dislike to almost everyone and treats them all like serfs, reserving his lowest regard for George Pollock, who returns reluctantly on CIA duty and is the butt of Hawk’s infantile humour. That an author’s main protagonist should fail to endear himself to his readers is a serious flaw which this book fails to negotiate.

 

Dreadful is a good word to use, but it doesn’t quite sum The Death Riders up.

Edited by chrisno1, 04 June 2016 - 08:49 PM.

[chrisno1]

The Enemy Within

 

At the end of The Death Riders, Dan Streib’s hero Michael Hawk is fleeing a motorcycle stunt circus pursued by two men on motorbikes, who he believes may be Chinese Mafia. We never find out what happens next. Instead we find Hawk has mysteriously lost his tails and is holding out in a Canadian fishing lodge with his native North American guide, Little Turtle. Into this temporary Eden drops the US President, taking a sabbatical of his own.

 

It’s at this early moment that The Enemy Within veers to the faintly ridiculous. President Warren Stone is going mad. He’s hearing voices, making bad decisions and has lost the faith of the electorate. In an hour of need, he learns his old fishing buddy Mike Hawk is up at the old lodge and decides to visit him for advice. So we are led to believe – yet again – that Hawk has a past of many colours, so many in fact that he once used to go fishing with the President when he was a cub reporter and Stone only a congressman. This isn’t the first time Hawk’s past has crept up on him. Given that he’s a mere thirty six years old he’s certainly packing an awful lot into his formative years. I mean, how did he meet all these people, how does he maintain these friendships, why do they like him so much when he’s basically an arrogant impulsive asshole, if a well-meaning one? It keeps happening over and over again. I can take the journalists having his ear, that makes perfect sense given his profession; but why do these others want to share their precious time with him? The question rankles and isn’t answered by the frenetic story which follows.

 

A basic rehash of The House of Usher, Stone has a crisis on his hands and isn’t in a fit state to cope with it. Is he really going crazy or are circumstances conspiring against him? As the Soviets prepare to march into Syria, Iraq and Iran and a full scale nuclear war looms even his diligent friend Michael Hawk begins to favour the former. The whole knotty mess gets resolved in a bloody finale at the White House and a speech of patriotic zeal. What bothered me most wasn’t the action [prerequisite dumb and generally pointless at best] or the overall arc of the story [spies infiltrating Capitol Hill] but the fact Warren Stone is such a useless President. He’s incapable of making a decision about anything. He breaks down in tears. He’s impotent, which isn’t a crime in itself, but a symptom of his malaise. He’s even deliberately allowed himself to be locked into a loveless marriage in the pursuit of riches for his election campaigns. Manipulated by everyone around him, he hasn’t a strong spine to his back, and is a pitiful, unsympathetic character. This is a man too dumb to figure out where the voices which invade his thoughts both day and night are coming from [I won’t spoil it, but if you read the book or have any knowledge of Edgar Allen Poe it’s as obvious as a slap in the face].   

 

Major gripe aside, what happens then? Well, there are several forgettable gun battles, a devastating fire at the lodge, a few grisly murders, an icky-some seduction scene, a lot of soul searching, a tiny amount of detective work, a feisty beginning and an unsatisfactory and too naïve a resolution. Did I enjoy it? Not really. Less said.

 

[Jim]

Oddly enough, I do now want to read these. They sound oddly marvellous.

 

Thank you for these reviews - very entertaining!

[chrisno1]

Oddly enough, I do now want to read these. They sound oddly marvellous.

 

Thank you for these reviews - very entertaining!

Like mar-mite, something of an acquired taste.

[chrisno1]

Down Under and Dirty

 

Michael Hawk has sensibly relocated himself to Australia. It seems a smooth move. He is away from the prying eyes of the CIA and is relaxing doing a bit of skin diving off the Barrier Reef. He should have stayed there. Deciding on a whimsical trip to Sydney, Hawk witnesses a Mafia hit and, once again, as his journalistic instincts take over, he’s thrown into a maelstrom of bullets, beauties, baddies and bullies.

 

Despite the dreadful title, Down Under and Dirty is a comparative success compared to other recent entries into the series. The novel kicks off with an unlikely but incredibly exciting and well-described public assassination of the big time pimp Dingo Dugan. Set in a restaurant atop a skyscraper and packed with quick incident and tiny detail, this scene sets a standard the novel seeks to emulate with its many moments of danger, intrigue and interest, facets these adventures have generally lacked since The Predators.

 

Early on Hawk witnesses the killers escape the restaurant by abseil and out of curiosity follows the only other man calmly observing the daring feat. This umbrella wielding gentleman turns out to be connected to Tony Santoni, an Italian American mafia don seeking to take over the gaming racket and infiltrate Australia’s unions. His subtle tactics are not paying off, so more strong-arm stuff is required. Initially Hawk doesn’t give a monkey’s. He’s more interested in trying to seduce Santoni’s squeeze, the actress Ryanne Kaye. This doesn’t go too well, which makes a nice change from girls throwing themselves at him. I enjoyed Hawk’s impractical and over the top methods of introduction and impression. They really shouldn’t work on a girl and Ryanne is right to call them creepy, but how their relationship develops is an enjoyable diversion from the chaos which surrounds it.

 

Having rubbed Santoni’s face in it by stealing his gal, Hawk now discovers he must confront and foil whatever scheme his nemesis has dreamt up – chiefly because George Pollock and the CIA want him too. They can’t be involved in preventing mafia activity in Australia, but Michael Hawk, as a lone crusader can. While the story unfolds in Dan Streib’s cursory style – incident every chapter, sex, violence, seediness, weird supporting characters – this time he’s trying harder to impress. The descriptions are good, the atmosphere terrific. We have some great set pieces: a chase and fight on the Harbour Bridge, a shootout in the Opera House, a gun battle in a lantern lit Chinatown, arson attacks on both a waterside mansion and later a crowded downtown pub.

 

We also have a less shallow heroine, the raven haired Ryanne, a woman who finally has the measure of our Michael, and a gutless villain who is flawed and [at last] genuinely believable. If his cowboy act stinks of Fleming a la Diamonds Are Forever, I’ll forgive that as Santoni cuts a hopeless, abject figure, a flamboyant playboy who lacks the guile to be what he really wants to be: an underworld kingpin. As a point of interest there is also a secondary character who reminded me of John Gardner’s David Dragonpol, that curious actor-impersonator-murderer who bestrode so ineffectively Never Send Flowers. Here a similar role is given the mystery and purpose Gardner’s lacked and provides a fitting finale, although Streib rather lets himself down by having the explanation come after the event. This is probably the only sour point in what is a tense and rapid read [I consumed the book in two sittings].

 

While at times the prose lacks finesse, it does have the redeeming feature of humour. Hawk’s effort to understand Aussie slang and their misunderstanding of his Yank charm is a running joke which I enjoyed. Even the rather stereotypical supporting cast of barkeeps, bouncers and theatre types raised a smile. George Pollock for once isn’t treated with scant regard and there’s another running joke that while Hawk does the killing, the CIA man sorts the escape plan. Pollock’s appearances are likened to ‘constantly arriving, like hemorrhoids’. He also keeps taking weapons off our hero, reminding him you can’t carry a gun in Australia. He’s got a hidden agenda, but won’t allow Hawk in on the secret. He even has a well-stocked and armed safe house in the Blue Mountains.   

 

Overall, Down Under and Dirty is a cut above the usual Hawk fare. I enjoyed it a lot and while it certainly won’t win any prizes for originality or penmanship, it’s certainly a whole heap better than most of what came before it.

 

[chrisno1]

The Cargo Gods

 

You need to suspend all sorts of belief to really get into Michael Hawk’s tenth outing The Cargo Gods. Once you’ve passed the notion that Hawk has been duped into buying a South Sea island, you then have to believe he’d continue the ruse even after discovering his sometime sidekick and pain in the ass George Pollock of the CIA set him up and that the whole adventure on said island takes place during a cataclysmic tornado which causes floods and tidal waves but never seems to kill anyone. There are machine guns for that.

 

The Cargo Gods (a title I failed to understand; it is explained, I simply didn’t take it in) starts back in Sydney with the murder of an innocent tourist, bitten to death by a deadly snake. Hawk is still romancing Ryanne Kane, Pollock is trying to hit it off with his CIA colleague Cory, who turns out to have a deadly secret of her own. There’s a hopelessly unbelievable sequence where Hawk immediately buys an island simply by spotting a handily printed ad in a newspaper. This is so unlikely I lost all interest in the story from here on. Now Hawk can dream of being a king or a saviour to the people of Valhalla, as he names his little fiefdom. At the end of the novel, via shoot outs and a sympathetic KGB agent, he appears to have got his wish and is planning on opening the dilapidated hotel for business and importing beautiful girls to shag. Lovely. Ryanne may as well never have existed.

 

There was a plot somewhere, something to do with a deep water harbour which the Russian navy wants to utilize and the CIA wants to prevent them from doing so. There was a lot of ‘lost world’ style trudging through junglescapes with the chief of the tribe and his warriors. Cubans were involved. It was turgid stuff, dull at best and best forgotten.

[chrisno1]

The Terror Merchants

 

The eleventh novel to feature Michael Hawk, some-time journalist and most-time adventurer, is most unsatisfactory. Reclining safe on Valhalla, his Pacific island, and enjoying the fruits of ownership – including making love to Polynesian teenagers – Hawk has little need to be involved in any more daring-do. That he is, is once again thanks to an old acquaintance, this time a Puerto Rican journo called Juan Esquevera who wants Hawk to help him uncover the ringleader behind the Puerto Rican Freedom Council, a disparate group of terrorists who have taken to committing atrocities in New York in the hope of securing full independence for their country. Hawk really ought to know better. He was hooked into the previous saga by a dodgy ad in a newspaper and a letter to his favourite rag, The New York Times, does the same for him here.

 

Author Dan Streib is at his appalling worst this time out. The plot is faintly ludicrous. It is glossed over that the terror activity witnessed would hardly help the PRFC cause; given the few Puerto Ricans that live in New York they’d hardly have a public voice. Juan, a journalist with a social conscience as well as a frat-pack past, seems to be as much a one-man band as Hawk, but he lacks the hero’s deductive capacity and you wonder how he ever made it in investigative journalism. Only once is any other staff on his paper mentioned – other than his sister (the heroine, who writes a beauty-tips column) and a curious addled Vietnam veteran who deals with the subscription service.

 

The descriptions of death and destruction are vividly, pornographically over the top. They don’t chill the blood so much as swell it with anger at how low brow this series has sunk. Perhaps to emphasize the point the character of Michael Hawk is once again framed as a dreadful misogynist cliché, made even more unbearable by the heroine, Madelaina, being a successful, gorgeous, but inexperienced [unbelievably so] model, who has a fantasy apartment, a brother who owns a newspaper and photo-ops every day. Her deductive powers seem better than Juan’s and so does her detective work, slinking around empty warehouse after clues. I didn’t believe it for a minute and their relationship borders on the ridiculous. Hawk may give her grudging respect, but it doesn’t stop him acting like a twat, by calling Madelaina a variety of pet names and constantly thinking of her in sexual, sensual terms. There’s a dreadful scene where she distracts a guard with a topless pose, which is bad enough, but when Hawk pauses in mid-escape to kiss her nipples I shut the book and had to cool off my ire at such twaddle.

 

I can’t bear to describe what else happens. Most of it, other than the incidents of terror, takes place in the offices of The Puerto Rican Voice as Hawk, Madelaina and Juan try to unmask the madman behind the crimes. He might be in on the action, but this one is plodding at best. It doesn’t help the author has already told us the answer in the opening chapter, so there isn’t even a mystery to unravel. The Terror Merchants is a wholly unsatisfying 178 pages.

 

 

[chrisno1]

The Virgin Stealers

 

It is very rare that I have a gut wrenching sense of horror when reading a novel. Not a lot fazes me. However in the middle of this crass and perfunctorily written and constructed mess of a novel, a hapless overweight corporate banker is blackmailed by a ruthless gang of illegal pornographers who have secretly filmed him having sex with an underage girl and then, using a chainsaw, have murdered said prostitute on camera. The description of the making of this ‘snuff’ film is repulsive both by its inclusion and its exposition.

 

A corrupted politician runs the show, but he’s only an afterthought. The main protagonists are a bunch of brutes whose motives remain shaded only in dollars. I won’t bother to name them because they really don’t matter and neither, frankly, does anyone else in this book. Even the author shares this disregard for his characters. Hawk is at his misogynist worst and turns gigolo to pump information from the villainess; the CIA man George Pollock is again deceptive, creepily voyeuristic and ruthlessly dedicated to the law as written by Mister C, I, A; and the nominal heroine Pamela Lynch is described like a porn star, behaves like a jealous wife and gets a machete in her guts for her sins [no need for a spoiler, I can’t imagine you’ll be reading this tosh].

 

What bothers me is that, if there is a plot, it is designed only to hang one obscene chapter after another on its bare bones. It starts in challenging style with the kidnap of a teenage girl. The initial idea of selling virgin flesh to foreign dictators has legs [witness the ‘Taken’ series of movies] but the ‘snuff’ angle which rears its head a third of the way in is nothing more than a charlatan idea, an excuse for blood, guts, gore and supposed titillation.

 

It’s the very worst of subjects and is presented in a sensational, intestine splattered fashion which quite turned my stomach, not because it was gross – that’s a given – but because it was so unnecessary.

 

I’m not rating the Hawk series, but this sits comfortably at the bottom of the pile. I’d go so far as to describe it as s##t. But that might just be plummeting to the depths Dan Streib has already reached. Let’s call it ill-conceived garbage and leave it at that.

 

 

[chrisno1]

The Hawaiian Takeover

 

Michael Hawk turns vigilante in this crazed adventure set in Hawaii. A Chinese crime syndicate called The Way is threatening to take over the state and it seems only Hawk can stop it, although his methods appear more criminal than the villain’s.

In this one he endlessly shoots people, chases people and hits people. The sheer angry repetitiveness of the piece makes it an extremely heavy going tale. There doesn’t seem to be much plot to hang all these violent actions on. The scenarios are unbelievable, the characterisations appallingly stereotyped and the dialogue so banal that, at one point, the heroine Soo Lin describes her day thus:

“..routine. Kidnapped, incarcerated in a whore house where I knock out a guy with a gun, steal his.38, pistol-whip him with it, tie him up and stuff him under my bunk, shoot off the lock to my crib-cell, and then get rescued by a tall stranger who machine guns the guards as we run out, get lost in a parade, hide in a furious tail-wagging dragon and escape the killers. Dull, dull, dull.”

This breathless sentence might summarise the novel’s ridiculously fast pace, yet despite there being plenty going on it’s so yawningly described I struggled to digest it, sometimes consuming only one chapter at a time. Sadly, this is a genuine penny-dreadful thriller; that’s about what it’s worth.

 

Dull. Dull. Dull.

[chrisno1]

The Treasure Divers

 

I had a forlorn hope that Dan Streib’s final adventure for Michael Hawk might be a nostalgic throwback to the earliest books in the series. Sadly it only repeats recent mistakes and demonstrates (perhaps) the error of writing and / or publishing so many novels in such a short timeframe and clearly without much editorial revision.
 

The premier quartet of novels had drive and ambition to help propel the episodic narratives. They were not brilliant adverts for the thriller genre, but they occupied the niche market in pulp throwaways. Violence, suspense and sex mixed with healthy doses of profanity and intrigue coupled with some fairly successful characterisations made those books half-way successful. The remainder, which veered towards the ridiculous, lacked some or all of these facets.
 

The Treasure Divers suffers from many of the issues which befell its immediate predecessor: too many pointless and repetitive moments of derring-do and not enough plot or character development. In this one Hawk has written a rare journalistic article and inadvertently endangered the life of ex-US Marine and full time alcoholic Gar Bradley. This unsympathetic drunk claims to be the sole survivor of a Japanese hospital ship, Haiku Maru, torpedoed off the Philippines in 1943, which actually contained a colossal horde of stolen gold and jewels. You’d like to think the author would concentrate on the dangers of salvage operations – I had memories of Wilbur Smith’s classic yarn The Eye of the Tiger, as it covered similar ground – or even a revealing insight into post-traumatic stress – Bradley fought jungle guerrilla wars for two years and this (surely) explains his penchant for the bottle. But no; alas here we have a convoluted chase involving a kidnapped father, a sensual daughter, a psycho Japanese, a suddenly co-operative George Pollock, a crazed Pilipino freedom fighter and a horny Michael Hawk.
 

The latter aspect infuriated me. While sex has always loomed heavily in Streib’s books the frequency of copulation and the excessive number of erections and sculptured breasts made me quite queasy. I’m not a prude, but I got the general picture after the first time and this was simply distasteful, leaning towards full-on pornography and not very good pornography at that.
 

Add into this unsavoury mixture the shoe-horning of violent and unnecessary incident into the narrative and I got a sinking feeling as deep as the sand the Haiku Maru was buried in. Yet again a water borne Hawk is menaced by a charging speedboat; yet again men wander the streets of Honolulu armed with pistols, submachine guns or Samurai swords; not once, but twice a gang of hoodlums attempts to board the salvage boat; yet again we have chase after inconsequential chase; I could go on but I fear I’d become exhausted by the tedium. So, sex or violence: no difference: just a nasty pallid aftertaste to the reading.
 

There was one brief moment of respite towards the centre of the book when Streib takes us back to 1943 and the sinking of the hospital ship. These two chapters offer more concise storytelling than the flabby padding which surrounds it and it’s disappointing that The Treasure Divers fails to maintain, or even attain given the dreadful first dozen chapters, this standard.
 

That Hawk still cannot find any solace at the conclusion of his endless tales seems to be his unspoken epitaph and sums up nicely the general feelings of this reviewer. What started as an interesting, worthwhile, if somewhat crass series has descended into the smutty pointlessness of virulent implausibility. Acres of potential have turned into yards of pigswill. It’s all very disappointing.
 

I bid farewell to Michael Hawk and Dan Streib with merely a passing note of goodwill to The Power Barons, The Deadly Crusader, The Predators and some aspects of Down Under and Dirty. The rest frankly aren’t worth the paper they are written on.