Death Merchant #42: High Command Murder

The set-up: Towards the end of World War II, a group of American soldiers under General Patton's command stole 100 crates of Nazi gold bars and, with the assistance of members of the French resistance, hid the gold in an abandoned mine shaft in northern France.

The Nazi treasure has been hidden for nearly 40 years, but information about its existence recently came to light thanks to an interview by one of the Frenchmen. He was soon found dead. Now several groups of French terrorists, an association of ex-SS men, and the CIA are in a frantic race to find the gold, now worth upwards of $500 million.

But even before the story begins, we get a unique dedication from author Joseph Rosenberger: "To the best friend humanity will ever have - the Cosmic Lord of Death." (Also, Pinnacle changed to a different (and less appealing, to me, at least) cover layout with High Command Murder, published in December 1980. Dean Cate is still doing the artwork.)

Richard Camellion begins his work in Paris, meeting with members of the ARC (Action pour la Renaissance de la Corse). The CIA says they will pay the ARC $5 million for its assistance in finding the gold, and the group believes it has discovered another man who helped hide the gold and that he may be willing to talk. Camellion is forced to work what he terms a terrorist organization because the other group looking for the gold is Odessa, a group of ex-Nazis who have thrown in with the FLB, who are also trying to find any Frenchmen who assisted the American gold thieves).

Before that, though, the Death Merchant has to fight his way out of a gunfight at a safe house in Montmartre. (Rosenberger provides nice descriptions of both Saint-Villeneuve and Montmartre.) After escaping the mayhem, they drive to Place de la Concorde and meet three ARC members, who they take to another Parisian safe house. Their next move is a long drive to Lamballe to meet the top leaders of the ARC. (The town is frequently misspelled Laballe in the book.)

The 250+-mile drive - which for some reason is spread out over two whole days - gives Rosenberger the opportunity to have the eight passengers engage in wide-ranging political discussions, always voicing right-wing opinions. The narrator - speaking from Camellion's point of view - notes:

[T]here is an international group of power brokers working toward a one-world government.

The evidence was all there, particularly in the new patterns in political corruption and subversion affecting the United States and its Western allies. Bribery of elected and appointed government officials with money, gifts and sex had long been a staple of American political life. A sizable minority had been for sale to the highest bidder, as proved by the FBI's ABSCAM operation. In the past that bidder had been American-based corporations, labor unions, wealthy families and other well-heeled groups with interests to serve and money to spend.

Camellion's face became hard, ruthless. But now, the rise of international corporations has led to a situation where American politicians are now being bought to protect interests that are outside the U.S. and are seldom compatible with the voters. Analyses of political trends show that multinational corporations operating at the level of the Trilateral commission believe national governments are obsolete and cannot be trusted to create a stable world order. This loose international group, based in the USA, Europe and Japan, will attempt to handpick all party candidates for president, prime minister, etc. - Dummies who can be manipulated toward international ends. While the taxpayer is still saddled with the enormous expense of a feeble bureaucracy, every attempt will be made to condition the voter that the government is powerless to act decisively. This will preserve cushy political jobs and ensure support from those in office. What a setup! The present coalition of blacks, women, homosexuals, and all the rest of the minority crap is over fifty percent, and will keep this disaster going for years. Only at the ballot box can this trend be reversed. But it won't. The average voter is too damned stupid to realize that all current officeholders should be voted out, regardless of party.

Personally, the Death Merchant didn't give a damn. In his opinion, the whole human race was just one big pack of savages - Too bad a cosmic Hitler can't wipe out all three billion of them.

So even though Camellion's face turns hard and ruthless as he ponders these thoughts, he actually doesn't care at all? That seems odd. And the ballot box is supposedly the answer, yet the people running for election are being handpicked by the international ruling group, which would seem to make voting irrelevant, so ...

Then, two pages later, after someone refers to the French people as "a bunch of lice" that couldn't hang onto Vietnam, Camellion (who is using the alias Leonard Kidd) notes: "We didn't do so well in Vietnam ourselves."

Jordan glanced at the Death Merchant and grinned. The dour Gerstung [a CIA agent] was not amused. "Remind me to laugh in the year 2000," he growled. "We lost in 'Nam for the same reason we're losing everywhere else in the world. Because of the greedy politicians, the moronic do-gooders and the half-witted unrealists who refuse to see the handwriting on the wall. Screw the American government. It's composed of idiots, traitors, gun-grabbing hypocrites and first-class swine. Fuck the American government ten times over." ...

[Jordan pipes in:] "Did you know that there are more than fifty Soviet-backed 'front' committees operating in Washington? And the majority are located on the one hundred block of Maryland Avenue in Capitol Hill. Most are funded from U.S. taxpayers' dollars through 'study grants' procured by witting and unwitting dupes in Congress. Systematically, their propaganda and lobby efforts - and many of these organizations are allied with the anti-gun groups and would dearly love to see all of America totally disarmed - attack the FBI and the Company for 'civil-rights violations and invasions.'"

Gerstung, who had just taken a slug of wine, belched loudly. "I'll tell you something, Kidd. If you think we in the Company have it rough, you should see what those poor bastards in the FBI have to contend with. The commie front people scream like hell about 'civil-rights violations' every time a poor fed questions one of the slime balls about a federal crime; then the media picks it up and the feds get another black eye." ...

The realistic Death Merchant, who couldn't have cared less about American sheep and their Judas shepherds in D.C., changed the subject ....

Again, the Death Merchant supposedly cannot be bothered with these thoughts. However, in most other books, he often leads these types of discussions.

After having fought an ambush along the way, the group reaches their destination. The ARC states that it knows one of the men who helped hide the gold, a man named Philippe Castile. The location is deep in an abandoned mine shaft near Saint-Brieuc. (As it turns out, the Odessa/FLB team is also converging on the site of the mine.)

The Death Merchant's group finds the gold - behind several walls of rock and wood - and hauls it up. They are in the process of loading it onto boats to take out to a submarine when the Odessa/FLB team arrives at the beach. A fierce shootout ensures, and Camellion and the ARC prevail.

There are two other subplots mentioned a few times in the book: the possible murder of Patton by his own troops because he found out about the gold heist and disapproved and a cryptic comment made by Castile. Rosenberger does not return to these story strands at the end of the book.

Regardless, High Command Murder is well-paced, though I miss the goofiness of the first 20 books (or so) of the series. And once again, of more interest to me than the main plot are Rosenberger's odd turns of phrase and his political/social offshoots.

Camellion talks some more about being able to see people's auras and, judging by what colour they are, knowing if they are going to die soon or not. (Black is a bad colour!) As one footnote states: "The human aura can be seen with a photomultiplier tube under certain conditions. Psychics can see the human aura with the 'mind's eye.' So can men and women who have lived very close to death." (I presume Camellion falls under that final category.)

Etc.:

"And Grojean, he's so paranoid about security, he's more close-mouthed than a clam with lockjaw."

"This is about as bad as trying to plow a potato field with a dull-bladed plow."

"[E]veryone - except Camelllion - was, nonetheless, surprised with the suddenness of the assault when it did come. The Death Merchant wouldn't have been amazed is Adolf Hitler had pedaled by on a tricycle."

"It was the same with Jordan and Capeau, slugs buzzing around them like bees enraged with bronchitis."

"Those morons in England are so dumb they think the Bermuda Triangle is a musical instrument."

"What we need is a rabbit's foot, but not the kind that was carried by General Custer."

"If I wanted to talk to a fruitcake, I could have gone to a bakery!"

"I'll be a jackass on rollerskates! ... If I had half the sense of a moronic doodlebug I wouldn't even be here!"

Death Merchant #41: Shamrock Smash

Someone - or some country - is supplying the IRA with all sorts of weaponry and it's up to Richard Camellion (the Death Merchant) to find out who.

Joseph Rosenberger goes into a huge amount of detail about the political/religious situation in Ireland circa 1980 (when this book was written and published). At one point, Camellion is driven around South Belfast in an armoured car with a military official who provides a running commentary/guided tour. (The official also refers to "a certain well-known Irish-American U.S. senator" as a "gasbag", although Rosenberger does not identify Ted Kennedy for another 11 pages. Much later in the book, Rosenberger notes a Death Merchant-led rocket barrage causes the the IRA's "spirits to sink faster than Ted Kennedy's car off Dyke Bridge". Rosenberger also makes a Chappaquiddick wisecrack in the next book, #42.)

The Death Merchant's goal in Shamrock Smash is to get Keenan McGuire, the IRA leader, who is expecting delivery of a big weapon. Camellion and CIA agent Chris McLoughlin first meet with Liam O'Connor, who poses as a diehard Protestant but is feeding info to the British SIS. Through O'Connor they learn about an important Provo base to the north: Lha-Beul-tinne Castle.

So - in what is becoming a serious cliche in this series - Camellion and a British fighting force go off to storm the castle. But McGuire is not there. Through some amazing deductions, Camellion figures out that McGuire - now in possession of a small atomic weapon that was delivered by a Russian submarine - can only escape to the northeast. He takes a wild guess that the only place to hide out is Teamhair na Riogh, "an ancient pagan site [abandoned in 1021] that was supposed to have belonged to the druids". You'd think this might be an historical site, but apparently not, as Camellion orders a helicopter to shell both ends of the large mound with heavy artillery before he and his force of 13 men race inside. McGuire and five others are captured. Facing execution, one of the prisoners blurts out the location of the bomb.

Camellion is extremely sadistic in this book. On two separate occasions, when questioning prisoners/captives and not getting immediate answers, he simply shoots the uncooperating captive dead. In one case, he ties an IRA guy to a pillar and stuffs an L-flare in his waistband. The guy basically burns to death in front of everyone else, as Rosenberger notes the sickening smell of charred flesh, etc. Camellion is not usually so ruthless.

At several points, Camellion is described as something other than human, presumably living on some higher plane. Working under the name Ringgall, Camellion "seemed to have a mystical covenant with death". And as usual, a character "detected a strangeness about Ringgall, an eerie quality he couldn't quite put his finger on, yet the weirdness was there, and it was frightening".

Towards the end, during the final firefight, a thought floats through Camellion's mind:

Silly humans, with their "if only" kind of mortality. It was the fomes peccati of the Latins and the yetzer-ha-ra of the Hebrews. Camellion laughed to himself. Be as gods knowing good and evil, so says the myth. But it forgot to add: capable only of evil when man is left to himself.

In talking about old age, Camellion hints that he knows when he will die:

"It's the same with old folks the world over," Camellion said, thankful that he would never experience the miseries of old age. "It's that constant sense of being superfluous, of being useless, that causes so much depression in the frigid years of life - that and the solitude."

"The young also become depressed," McLoughlin said, "and kill themselves."

Camellion agreed with a nod of his head. "Yes, but generally speaking the young can bear solitude better than the old because passion occupied their thoughts. For the elderly, ailments and anxieties have replaced passions as the only avenue of escape from the melancholy that usually accompanies a retrospective cast of mind."

More deep thoughts from the Death Merchant:

"[Camellion] lay there on his stomach, listening to slugs cut the air several feet above his head, and feeling sorry for the young paratroopers and for Ford, Grimes, and Lieutenant Merriweather. They were all so terrified of death, none of them realizing that it was this "life" that was the only real "death". Once a person learns that life is the transitory illusion - no matter how real it appears during its duration - then he has mastered dying ..."

"Death is not darkness, but light, liberation, and freedom."

"In his own personal philosophy, existing in a three-dimensional continuum (four when one considers time) in a flesh-and-blood-and-bone body was definitely a horse-and-buggy was to travel through the universe."

In a bizarre (and completely superfluous scene), the men witness an apparition, dressed in clothes from the 1700s, descend a partially destroyed staircase, floating on air when coming to the missing steps. He cross the room and disappears through a wall. The men are shocked at this sight, but Camellion matter-of-factly explains what just happened: "We're seeing a memory pattern. ... It all has to do with time and the brain. ... It existed outside of space and time, outside of our time and our space, both of which are relative in our continuum."

At one point, Camellion muses:

A realist knows that every human being is born alone and dies alone. So he never loves anyone or lets anyone love him. He remains an observer, but never becomes one of the observed. ...

Only wise men seek the truth, just as wise men never seek to return to the past and take the risk of excavating forgotten pain while looking for remembered happiness.

Rosenberger has not (to date) provided an origin story for Camellion. We have received no hints about why Camellion does this dangerous work. There has been no mention of a former girlfriend or wife, but it almost sounds like at one time Camellion experienced happiness, but it ended, putting him on the lonely road he now travels, never looking back.

Etc.:

"Seven of the Provos couldn't have asked for more trouble if they had tried to smoke sticks of dynamite for cigars."

"The Irish idiot in the truck ... was attempting to lean around the side of the cab and get a Soviet PPsh41 submachine gun into action, but he didn't even get off to a good start. His head and chest exploded as if a grenade had gone off inside his torso, blood, rib bones, chunks of heart and lungs flying into the spring wind."

"The Provo next to the woman was dusted next, three charges of .24 caliber shot popping him in the left side of his head and shoulder. Head, neck, and shoulder exploded into a pulpy mass of flesh, blood, and bone, his Adam's apple jumping out of his torn-apart throat and hitting the inside of the metal windshield like a bloody ping-pong ball."

"The Death Merchant made up Shannon's mind for him. He used the last bullet in his left auto mag to explode Shannon's head and send blobs of his think machine rocketing in all directions."

"Both more enraged than a hornet with the hiccups, Camellion and McLoughlin fired with precision, never wasting ammo."

"A long, long time ago, he had learned that it was always unrealistic to fight evil with goodness. The trouble with goodness was that it went to bed every night and slept soundly. Evil was an insomniac, forever awake, forever active."

The Death Merchant almost never curses. "Tiger turds!" he exclaims at one point.

The British troops conform to stereotype, saying things like "old chap", "jolly good", "by jove" and "Dash it all, man!", and they beginning sentences with "I say, ...". A general with a Cockney accent remarks, "We'll give them blokes 'ell, we will." Once the fighting is complete, he sums up: "We got them all, we did."

Death Merchant #40: Blueprint Invisibility

In October 1943, the United States Navy allegedly made a battleship disappear and reappear hundreds of miles away.

In Blueprint Invisibility, Joseph Rosenberger treats that story - known now as The Philadelphia Experiment - as fact, and has a U.S. agent, mind-controlled by the Red Chinese, steal the top secret file that includes the formula to duplicate the experiment, which "opened the portal to another dimension, another time-continuum or another universe".

In this book, Camellion hangs around the CIA's main headquarters in New York City, which is located on the 12th floor of the Payson Arms, on Payson Avenue in upper Manhattan - a short walk from where I lived for 15 years! (As far as I know, there never was a hotel on that small street.)

The CIA believes that ONI agent Mason Shiptonn, who lifted the file, was somehow seduced by one of the call girls working at Soraya Duncan's escort service; Duncan, who has ties to a couple of New York mobsters, also may be working for the Red Chinese. Camellion, in disguise as a southern gentleman named Jefferson Davis Hafferton, arranges a date with Duncan - and actually ends up in bed with her! Rosenberger, who so far has had no sexual content in the Death Merchant books whatsoever (outside of the DM having a lewd thought every 6-8 books or so), spends four pages on Camellion getting laid!

After surviving a shootout with the mobsters while trying to break into, and grab some files from, Duncan's office, Camellion decides to invade the a 26-room Manhattan brownstone that the Chinese are using as their embassy. They kidnap a few people for possible interrogation and escape in a helicopter, evading the New York police.

After drugging the embassy employees and questioning them for hours, they learn that Chinese scientists are close to finishing a working model of the invisibility device on Chelsworth Island, off the coast of Maine. An all-out assault is planned, with Camellion knowing it's vital that he and his fighting force of SEALs capture Dr. Chou Wen-yaun - a specialist in mind-murder - alive, so they can learn his mind-programming secrets.

During the final battle, we get narration which reads more like Rosenberger's outline than the actual story:

The firing of pistols and submachine guns! Coughing! Then metal clanging against metal! Shouts! Grunts! Groans! Now it was man to man, with neither side having time to reload, even though some of the Chinese and the three American gangsters tried.

Rosenberger also includes about seven pages of intense martial arts fighting - with every twist and turn described to within an inch of its life (including footnotes!):

[Camellion] used a left-elbow Empi stab to wreck the celiac (solar) plexus of Yeh Bo L'ang trying to come in behind him, a high Fumikomi front stamp kick that landed solidly on the sternal angle23 of Wang Wen-hung, one of the top men of the Red Chinese 3rd Bureau in the lab. The pain didn't do anything to Wang Wen-hung. The sudden shock did. It killed him. He was still falling when Camellion used a Mawashi Geri rear roundhouse kick that barely reached Nanki Hiso, who jumped back ... At the same time, as Camellion's left hand shot out to grab the wrist of Liu Ki Cho'i'pi, who was coming at him with a knife, he used his right hand in a very fast Seiken, the blade of the Deadringer slicing through the jugular notch of the man's neck. Blood spurted. Cho'i'pi gurgled, wished he had stayed home in China and started to fall into the final blackness.

23. The sternal angle is the point where the manubrium (the upper part of the breastbone) and the body of the sternum come together, about 2 inches below where the collar bones meet at the base of the throat. This is a weak spot in the sternum, and if attacked with a powerful blow to the "sternal shield" over the heart ... bronchus, lungs and thoracic nerves can be broken, producing intense pain and shock to the circulatory and respiratory systems.

Nanki Hiso, although an expert in Hsing-i and Shaolin - Chinese boxing - was no match for Bill Fieldhouse, who was not only a past master in Pentjak-silat (the national defense form of Indonesia), but an expert in Kun-Tao (Chinese: "fist-way") and in Okinawa Karate-jutsu. ...

[Fieldhouse] let Hiso have a right-legged Patagonian purr-kick, the piston of his foot caving in Hiso's left side and forcing broken ribs to stab into the man's left lung. Fieldhouse began using his legs and feet the way a boxer uses his fists. A blink of an eye! He powed Hiso with a left-legged Ko-ja dynamite kick that landed on the side of the man's head and broke his neck - spun with the speed of a top and kicked another Chinese full in the face, the rubber sole of the coral shoe breaking the goof's jaw, nasal bones and the orbital bones around both eyes. ...

Gene Thompson went to work on the other goon, landing a left-handed Haito ridge-hand chop to the man's right cheek. A right Seiken forefist to the man's stomach. And when Kung Ji Kang doubled over in agony, Thompson finished him off with an expert Tsumi-Saki tip-of-toes strike kick that landed squarely in the middle of Kang's solar plexus. The dog eater would be with his honorable ancestors within a few minutes.

In 1973-74, Rosenberger penned five books of a series called Kung Fu: Featuring Mace, which are apparently extremely light on plot and feature one fight scene after the next after the next after the ... I look forward to reading those later on.

Oops. Rosenberger uses the same phrase within a span of 13 pages:

"... sneered Oscar Yehling, a creep who would have wasted his own mother if the contract price were right." (86)

"He'd kill his own mother if the contract price was right, then lay bets on which way she'd fall." (99)

There is also some good stuff about Camellion, a superman who "could easily get by on as little as four hours sleep" and was "used to thinking in fourteen different languages". ... His breakfast: "black coffee, a small glass of honey, and two vitamin pills." ... Throughout the series, while explaining his seemingly-suicidal attack plans, Camellion often eats dried fruit: in two instances here, he is "eating kumquats and drinking cocoa" and later enjoying "candied apple slices".

"He was something else! There was an unreal unnatural quality about him, a kind of perternaturalism that made one sense he had done this type of covert work many, many times. What made Swain [Camellion's alias] so eerie was that he seemed to understand Death as well as Life."

"[T]here was that strange 'something' about the man named Swain ... a certain chill, a certain type of warning ... something alien there, something that didn't belong."

The Death Merchant is a 5th-degree black belt with "a very personal arrangement with the Cosmic Lord of Death". It is strongly implied that Camellion actually knows the time when he will die. "The Cosmic Lord of Death is active, but He'll stick to his agreement."

Etc.:

"The rap sheets ... were longer than the weekly grocery list for Boys' Town."

"He was an ugly as a ten-car pile-up ..."

One goon gets shot and falls across a desk. "He reminded the Death Merchant of a taco!"

"Gindow's body shuddered from the impact of the big bullet and he slumped dead, a large bloody hole in his lower right chest. He had eaten of bread baked in blackness and had paid the price."

(Joe Kenney of Glorious Trash reviewed Blueprint Invisibility here.)

Death Merchant: Fruits & Vegetables

Joseph Rosenberger's action-adventure books of the 1970s and 1980s are known for having pages and pages of intricately-described action - both firearms and martial arts - coupled with a commensurate amount of gore. In reading Rosenberger's Death Merchant series, I've found that he regularly used fruit and vegetables as metaphors in his extremely graphic - and sometimes darkly humourous - descriptions of the carnage a high-velocity slug can produce.

#2: Operation Overkill

"Man, I'd have to be a hermaphrodite to do that," Luther grinned - and put a couple of slugs into St. Clair's head, opening his skull like an overripe peach.

#3: The Psychotron Plot

Trying to draw a bean on Camellion with a pistol that resembled a German Luger, the Egyptian bodyguard looked incredibly alarmed when a couple of the Death Merchant's slugs burst his head like an orange that had been stepped on. Instantly, he found himself in the Mohammedan version of heaven, ogling the virgin Houris and wondering how in hell he had gotten there!

#5: Satan Strike

His best wasn't good enough! The Comité tried, failed and died when a .357 slug parted his Adam's apple like a pear split down the middle!

#6: The Albanian Connection

The Death Merchant's first two slugs knifed into the white-coated morons to his left. One slug opened its victim's head like a tomato hit with a ten-pound sledge hammer, while the second caught its man in his open mouth, blowing out the back of his throat and neck.

#7: The Castro File

He was about to make a success of the yell when he flopped over dead from the three slugs which had crushed his skull like a rotten tomato, exposing the convoluted windings of his brain ... some pink, others grayish blue.

There were no screams, but bone, blood, teeth, and bits of brains exploded with all the force of a rotten watermelon dropped from the top of the Empire State Building!

His face twisting in panic, the KGB agent raised up, just as another tornado of slugs hit the windshield, this time shattering it, several of the slugs blowing the driver's head apart, like a melon hit with a bust of shotgun pellets!

#8: Billionaire Mission

The stream of hot metal flowed all over Captain Weidamier, bursting him open like a watermelon that has lain too long in the boiling sun ... Yumio Nama followed a moment later. Cursing in Japanese, Yum-Yum lifted the Ar-16 rifle with amazing speed and snapped off two shots at Camellion, who jumped sideways and triggered the .45 M-3, the shower of slugs raining all over the Jap jackass, turning him into instant sukiyaki, but without the chicken and vegetables.

#9: The Laser War

The third man caught the third slug in his forehead, the steel opening up his skull and splitting his brain the way an axe would cleave a melon!

#11: Manhattan Wipeout

He blinked, look surprised, and fell on his back, his eyes wide open, a hole the size of a bean in the middle of his forehead. The back of his head resembled a burst pomegranate ...

#12: The KGB Frame

Dyudin's head exploded from the impact of the Super-Vel .357 slug that split open his skull like a watermelon kicked by an angry mule.

#13: The Mato Grosso Horror

Walther submachine guns roared! A 9mm slug caught Stein in the left hip. Five more hit him in the stomach and almost cut him in two! Three more opened up his chest and split his skull the way a macana would chop apart a kisva melon!

#14: Vengeance of the Golden Hawk

Kaouki died faceless and brainless. The Death Merchant's chain of 7.65mm slugs exploded his head, which flew apart like a rotten melon.

#15: The Iron Swastika Plot

The Death Merchant checked the luminous dials of his depth gauge - 492 feet. The E.P.E. and I.P.E. were working perfectly - Or I'd be dead! Crushed to death by water pressure - like an orange in a vice!

#17: The Zemlya Expedition

Bogaty's 7.62 mm slug burned very close to Camellion, but the big Russian didn't get a second chance to ice Camellion. His skull popped open like an overripe orange as Richard's two 9mm pieces of steel stabbed into his forehead and scattered his think-tank in assorted directions.

#19: Armageddon, USA!

Knowing that Kane's next smash would shatter his skill like an already cracked eggshell, Boggs pulled the Auto Burglar from underneath his coat ... The 20-gauge shell exploded, the weapon whoomed, and the charge blew a hole in Kane's midsection the size of a grapefruit.

One man caught several slugs in the face; the high-velocity steel erased his features, popped apart his skull like a cucumber hit by a sledge hammer and scattered his brain within a radius of two feet ...

McAulay's second P-38 Walther slug caught Teague far down in the left side of the neck, almost to the collarbone. Ordinarily a man so full of energy that he could hardly sit still, Teague dropped his two S&W automatics, his face looking as if his neck were trying to blow bubblegum!

#20: Hell in Hindu Land

Thinking that the coast was clear, Gitanjali shouted, "DON'T FIRE, MADHU! I'M COMING TOWARD YOU!" and began running toward the end of the cube, at the same moment that Suslev leaned around the right end of the parallelogram and stitched Dutt with a burst of 7.62mm slugs that splattered Madhu like a squashed melon against the side of the cube.

There was a big wooommmmm! A .44 JMP bullet hit Bublik between the eyes and exploded his skull the way a stick of dynamite would blow apart a head of cabbage!

#21: The Pole Star Secret

At the sight of the Death Merchant, two of the Russians stared at him as if petrified while the woman yelled "There are -" into the phone a fraction of a second before a .44 Jurras Hollow Pointed bullet bored into her temple and exploded her head like an overly ripe watermelon.

Neither man had a chance to fire. There were more tremendous BOOMs from the twin Auto Mags and two thudding sounds as though someone had hit a melon with a hammer. Camellion had split open the two skulls of the Russians, scattering their brains and head bones all over the place. Definitely an untidy mess!

#24: The Kronos Plot

The weapon sounded like a hand grenade; yet because of the Mag-Na-Ported barrel, there was very little muzzle climb and no loss in muzzle velocity. Proof was the man in the doorway. Very suddenly he was without a head. The .44 Magnum jacketed soft-point projectile had exploded his skull like a grapefruit hit by a blast from a double-barreled shotgun.

A stupid look fell over the German's face. The .44 Magnum projectile blew a hole in his chest the size of a grapefruit, tore out his back, and ripped all the way through six sacks of what could have been some of A&P's best coffee.

#25: The Enigma Project

Again the AMP in the Death Merchant's hand boomed like a cannon. There was a sickening plop, the kind of sound that resembled a sledgehammer hitting the side of a pumpkin. The man trying to raise the automatic rifle was suddenly without a face and without a rifle.

Borodin tensed, his ruddy face, harsh and furrowed, becoming hard when Camellion said, "Now, pig farmer, we are going to have a truth and tell-all session." The Russian's face seemed to swell, as though it might burst like an overripe tomato.

#26: The Mexican Hit

Unconscious from the terrific impact of the bullet, the ugly-faced mobster dropped the .41, fell against one of the stateroom doors and sagged to the floor. With a hole in him the size of a grapefruit, Catura was only a few seconds from infinity.

#28: Nipponese Nightmare

Domei Mutsu was a man of courage welcoming his own death. He did make a feeble attempt to grab Brown's throat with a herbasami inside-ridge-hand squeeze, but Brown stepped back, jerked heavily on Mutsu's left arm, and, with his left foot, kicked the man between the legs, the end of his foot crushing the scrotum the way a sledge hammer would flatten a walnut.

#34: Operation Mind-Murder

One of the Death Merchant's Auto Mags roared and the head of the KGB man exploded with the kind of sound a hammer makes when it hits a watermelon.

#37: The Bermuda Triangle Action

In a low crouch, the Death Merchant fired the AMP and the Ingram. A swarm of 9mm Ingram projectiles erased Jose Matar's face and popped open his skull like a lemon hit by a blast from a double-barrelled shotgun.

Death Merchant #39: The Fourth Reich

This volume begins six weeks after the previous book, The Burning Blue Death, ended. Richard "Death Merchant" Camellion has destroyed the Transmutationizer, the human combustion weapon developed by the neo-Nazi group, The Brotherhood, that could turn a person into a small pile of ashes in mere minutes. Camellion also smashed the West German chapter of the Brotherhood.

When The Fourth Reich starts, Camellion is in Scotland. trying to rescue agent Loren Korsey from a ruined abbey. Korsey has infiltrated another segment of the Brotherhood, but has not reported in as scheduled. (This portion of the Brotherhood is led by a fanatic named Sir Hugh Kilsyth MacLean, who believes that the people of Scotland were also part of the Aryan race.)

After the Death Merchant rescues him, we learn about the Brotherhood's latest plans: triggering an atom bomb (twice as powerful as that used on Hiroshima) in Cairo, a blast which will be blamed on Israel. They also plan on assassinating the president of the United States using three Cuban pasties to implicate both Castro and the Soviet Union.

Right away, in the first five pages, we get several turns of phrase and asides that could only come from the mind of Joseph Rosenberger:

"Korsey reported that arms and ammo are hidden beneath the ruins of the abbey. Unless they are buried, that means some kind of room. And I'll wager that's where they're holding Korsey - if they haven't already killed him. Damn, it's quiet. I can almost hear my toenails growing."

"Kingman? He's a natural-born killer and a ten-carat survivor. He could take care of himself in the middle of south Chicago!"

"In spite of all the preposterous rubbish about the human species being gregarious, an individual was born alone and died alone - and if he has the sense God gives to retarded frogs, he'll realize that he lives alone."

The main plot of the book - Camellion hunts down MacLean and his henchmen (which includes a super-wealthy ex-SS officer who is bankrolling the plot) - unfolds like most Death Merchant books. Camellion assembles an attacking force of three other men and invades MacLean's mansion. This time, they are captured, but Camellion leads a wild escape that begins when he removes his handcuffs with the tools of the lock-picking Plan he keeps lodged in his rectum. The shootout throughout the mansion is one of the better action sequences from Rosenberger in the last few books. However, as they emerge into the sunlight, they see MacLean flying off into the distance in his private plane.

That simply necessitates another assault, this time on Bracadale Manor, a secluded castle that MacLean inherited from his late ex-wife. This is also the location of the bomb shelter where MacLean and his trusted aides will stay when the Cairo A-bomb goes off. (How many castles and/or manors has Camellion attacked/destroyed so far in this series? It seems like five or six by now!)

What is more interesting to me than the battle scenes - though the description of the gore is often darkly humorous and the hand-to-hand fighting is mind-numbingly detailed - are the unique asides that Rosenberger throws into his manuscript.

Camellion muses - as he did in the last book - that "the United States, along with the rest of civilization is doomed":

The 6,000 year old era was coming to a close. It was all a matter of cycles. Time cycles repeat because human nature does not change. That is why wars occur at regular intervals. For the same reasons, civilizations rise and fall.

Already the United States was in the Indian Summer of its culture, a "summer" that would be of very short duration. The time was drawing near for mobocracy, to be followed by dictatorship, by Caesarism.

All the elements were present, but Americans would never recognize them - of course, the human species is self-destructive. We can expect no less from Americans, who are emotional about petty things, addicted to hero worship, and are used to bosses and regimentation in their daily lives. Without realizing it, they permit themselves to be conditioned by government and corporate bureaucracies and indoctrinated by the standardized mass media. Gregarious, they join clubs, councils, leagues, associations, lodges, fraternities and societies. They follow but seldom lead. They do not realize that there is no deadlier form of self-deception that forcing the worthy elements of a civilization to become the servants of the drones ...

There were other signs of the approaching fall of democracy the savage class wars that would erupt between 1980 and 1985! A leader who was a naive idealist, who had convinced himself that only he knew what was good for the nation.

Equally dangerous was the growing role of women that had led to many changes in public opinion. The desire for freedom had been replaced by a desire for security. As if freedom were compatible with security. Security can best be maintained in a prison. Or a hospital. There was the tendency to focus on the child; there was the youth worship syndrome, the desire to avoid risks at all costs, and the emotional personalization of issues and the high suspicion of individualism. The same as in ancient Rome, mused the Death Merchant.

I wish I knew how much of this was Rosenberger's actual opinion/outlook. Since slight variations of it appear in multiple books, I have to assume a lot of it is the author's belief.

Rosenberger also uses the gathering of nine agents to present some discussions on gun control, jail sentences, and idiotic liberals, with the German BND agents being "verbally outgunned" (as everyone eventually is!) by Camellion's iron logic and common sense. ... The Death Merchant eats a box of dried figs while he lectures the group.

Etc:

"The TNT impact blew a hole in him the size of a Florida Sunkist orange."

"... stitched him from tailbone to tonsils"

"By ourselves, we'd have as much chance on the first floor as worm-eaten apples hanging in a high wind."

"The explosion made Camellion and the other four feel like they were locked in a metal drum while a dozen midgets pounded on the sides and each end with sledge hammers."

"... ten .45 caliber projectiles blew out Woofs stomach, leaving a hole big enough to stuff in a football!"

"Camellion muttered, "Your father passed out blindfolds when you were born!" and took out the German with a left legged Mae Geri Kekomi ..."

"The swarm of 9mm Parabellum missiles stabbed into Hahn's throat and chest, the tremendous impact spinning him around. The windmills of his mind turned to a billion splinters. Life and all reality became plastic models and the delusion ended."

"Today we learned again what the human race has known since recorded history, that every battle must have its dead. (And only the Cosmic Lord of Death is always the real winner!)"

Also: Some of the Scottish enemy are labelled "bagpipe boobs", while the Germans are referred to as "Hitlerheads" and "Nazi halfwits"; Rosenberger has done far better than this in the past. ... Camellion calls someone's Blackberry brandy "giggle-water".

Death Merchant #38: The Burning Blue Death

The Burning Blue Death's back cover states: "When U.S. Senator James Franklin Wilder is burned to death; when several months later a scientist goes up in smoke, with no explanation; when a key government employee in West Germany bursts into flames, and there is no official comment; when in eight months, twelve people, all connected to high government posts spontaneously combust, the Scientific Research Division of the CIA becomes concerned."

The Company hires Richard Camellion, the Death Merchant, to investigate. Posing as a scientist named Justin O. Bystrom, Camellion places ads in newspapers around the world, soliciting information about the phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion. (It is thought that some nefarious group (or nation) has figured out how to induce SHC and direct it at a specific person and these ads are merely a ploy to draw whoever is responsible for these fiery assassinations to Camellion.)

Thus begins a rather meandering story of tracking down the group with the SHC machine (later called a Transmutationizer). After we read about some Dutch goons attempting to kidnap Camellion in Amsterdam and watching the Death Merchant busts in on some IRA members being held in the basement of a tobacco shop, the story finally settles in on a neo-Nazi group known as the Brotherhood. In some underground rooms on the estate of Baron Fredrich von Hammerstein-Equord, a Nazi doctor is continuing work on a weapon he initially devised during Hitler's days that can turn a human being into a small pile of ashes within minutes.

While the overall story is somewhat flat, author Joseph Rosenberger (thankfully) is still Rosenberger.

After that aborted kidnapping effort, in which Camellion lays waste to seven of the Dutch goons, their deaths are reported in the newspaper as "murders", a description which irks the Death Merchant.

Killing another human being in the pursuit of preserving freedom for one's nation was not murder. Somebody had to protect American freedom and the nation's position in the world community. The jelly-backboned liars in Washington weren't doing the job. ... Washington was an expert at saddling people with more and more taxes and more and more invasion of personal privacy, not to mention giving the rich all sorts of tax breaks.

Besides the statement about the job of protecting American freedom being the exact opposite of what Camellion usually claims - he accepts jobs solely for the big bucks - the bit about rich people getting tax breaks is extremely amusing, because only 11 pages later, Rosenberger writes (in the mind of the CIA's Director of Operations): "Camellion made a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year from the Company - all of it tax free, since IRS wasn't aware of his services for the CIA; he earned another 100 Gs or so playing the stock market; using legal loopholes and reinvestment techniques, the clever son of a bitch payed damned little taxes on that."

Inconsistencies aside, Rosenberger is just getting warmed up, rant-wise:

There was a lot wrong in the United States, much of it due to stupidity, the power of payoffs, and hypocrisy. But how does one talk to people with closed minds, with millions who insist on treating certain subjects as sacred cows? All too often, honest criticism of the legitimate religions met with screaming accusations of religious "bigotry." To ask what church-owned motels, hotels and other numerous businesses had to do with religion, and why these businesses should not pay taxes was to invite fanatics to scream "Atheist!"

Camellion knew the real truth: The concept of religious tolerance had been stretched to the outer limits of stupidity, implying freedom from any criticism and from the payment of honest taxes. The right to worship can never be a justification for the suspension of all reason, he thought. The American people must stop equating religion with nonpayment of taxes, normalcy with numbers, sanity with conformity and individual eccentricity with craziness. Yet none of this is going to help me solve the riddle of the burning blue death.

(Yet none of this ... is going to be cut from the manuscript!)

Early on, Camellion also discourses on the dangers of smoking versus alcohol, gun control, Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, the rights of criminals, liberals ("a lot of them tinged with a commie pink"), and the death penalty - all in one page-long rant. "The way American society is falling apart, I seriously doubt whether we'll have a working nation twenty years from now." (This book was published in 1980.) ... After Camellion makes a bloody mess of the would-be kidnappers, Rosenberger says that Bystrom (i.e., the DM) "was about to vanish quicker than Carter's campaign promises".

About one-third of the way through the book, we get - completely out of the blue - some more of Rosenberger's weirdness regarding human auras, complete with a footnote:

By no means was the Death Merchant the risk-taking oddball that Reeder suspected he might be. Camellion had charged the trapdoor opening for two very good reasons. Earlier in the afternoon, psychic conditions had been just right and he had caught sight of Reeder's aura.1 The bioelectric emanations had been a pale blue, tinged with deep green and some yellow, this type of radiation indicating that Reeder would not die in the near future. Since Camellion would be with Reeder, he reasoned that hem, too, would be safe.

1 Invisible electrobiochemical radiation, sometimes called the Od, Odyle or Odic Force. Although the human aura can be detected by sensitives and some clairvoyants, it was not until 1911 that W.R. Kilner devised ways of showing it experimentally: First by looking at the human body through a dilute solution of a dye called dicyanin; second, by looking at a very bright light through a strong alcoholic solution. The aura must not be confused with the etheric double, which is a part of the physical body, or with the astral body - the inner you.

The action stops a bit later so Camellion can have a pages-long discussion with Dr. Cottier of the CIA about SHC, "biorhythms", human auras, and various metaphysical thoughts. To wit:

The Death Merchant [said], "Would you agree that each human being is related to all life and, through the earth's magnetic field, influenced by changes in the electrical fields of the sun and moon?"

Dr. Cottier nodded vigorously. "Oh, yes. Definitely. We are indeed a part of the universal whole and are constantly being influenced by the ceaseless ebb and flow of the various energies of the infinite all."

And during the copious amounts of violence, we get a few anatomy lessons:

An eye blink later, Steinhauser was well on his way toward being turned into a dead man from Camellion's two bullets. One had bored into his upper chest, severed the left innominate vein and lodged against his backbone. ... the Death merchant had not missed the targets with his right browning. A bullet had slammed into Max Weill's right hip, shattered the ilium, then plowed its way through the descending colon and the jejunum, stopping only when it hit the inner side of his left hipbone. ... Weill lost his grip and started to fall backward, along with Fisher who had taken a Browning hollow-point in the right buttock. The high velocity projectile had passed through the large gluteus maximus and lodged in the ischium ... It had all happened in eight seconds!

When the Death Merchant's force finds the main entrance to the underground rooms in which the Transmutationizer is being developed, Camellion uses tetryl and termate to blow the metal doors off their hinges, and follows that by tossing in various types of grenades. Once Camellion and his forces are in the same large room as the Nazis, the usual violence ensues, pages and pages of gunplay and (when everyone's guns run out of ammo - all around the same time, oddly enough) hand-to-hand combat. Rosenberger notes that Camellion, in the heat of battle, thanks to his mastery of Oriental martial arts and Eastern Indian yoga techniques in breathing, remains "as tranquil as a sleeping oyster".

In the end, Koerber is killed and Camellion and Klaus Hahn of German intelligence have drawn weapons on each other, both wanting to claim an intact portable Transmutationizer for his government. However, Hahn realizes that there are times when a man must think beyond loyalty to his country and he and Camellion agree to destroy the machine.

At the book's end, Camellion remarks (again) that mankind will not survive another 20 years:

[In] the long scheme of things, you and I are going to live to see the end of civilization as we know it. This six-thousand-year era in history will close in less than twenty years, and there isn't anything that anyone, anywhere, can do about it. The destiny of the US, all of Europe, all of the Middle East and the Soviet Union is to become a radioactive wasteland.

***

"I'd just as soon put in a bullet in your belly as bounce a bedbug off a baseball."

"Balls of blazing bumbrush!"

"The Director had to talk like an Israeli trying to set up a bagel factory in Yassir Arafat's home town."

"Another big brrrooommm, and Barry Huttas got the perfect gift for the man who has nothing. His head exploded, and skin, bone, blood and scrambled gray brain matter went flying in every direction of the compass. Camellion pumped the Savage so fast it was a miracle the 12-gauge didn't jam. Brrooommmmm. 'Chuckie' Blomquest's head vanished like a pumpkin hit by a grenade."

"Both Auto Mags roared with all the crashing sound of two small cannons. A flat-nosed .41 bullet hit Koster in the chest and blew away his entire breastbone before it zipped through his torso, pulverized several vertebrae and tore a hole in his back the size of a Golden Delicious apple."

(The cool artwork on these books is by Dean Cate, about whom the internet knows absolutely nothing.)

Death Merchant #37: The Bermuda Triangle Action

This may be the first Death Merchant book that doesn't begin with whatever Richard Camellion is doing. In Chapter One, we meet some Russians/Cubans working on a construction project off the U.S. coast in the general vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle.

Camellion first appears on page nine, doing some reconnaissance work related to the Russians' project. The pig farmers are up to something in the Atlantic Ocean and the U.S. has called on the Death Merchant to find out what it is. Along with CIA man Josh Forran, Camellion scuba-dives up to the Russian installation, killing four Ruskies along the way. There is a gigantic domed structure, as well as nine buildings/modules connected by huge pipes.

It seems clear that Camellion's earlier guess about the purpose of this activity was totally on the mark: the Russians are drilling along a fault line, and a few well-placed hydrogen bombs could cause catastrophic floods and damage along the U.S. east and south coasts. (Non-Spoiler Alert: The undersea complex is eventually destroyed.)

The Bermuda Triangle was more of a cultural phenomenon in the late 70s, so I was wondering how Rosenberger would play it (this book was published in early 1980). It is taken for granted by both the American and Russian forces that something mysterious and deadly is happening in this part of the world. Rosenberger recounts the disappearance of various ships (including a US sub with a crew of 320 men that vanished three months only earlier) and airplanes in the area also known as the Devil's Triangle. Camellion expands on this topic, talking about the disappearance of large groups of people from other parts of the world.

The Death Merchant explains his beliefs regarding the Bermuda Triangle:

"We're crawling around on a speck of dust that's revolving around a middle of the road star in the boondocks of our galaxy; yet we still have the nerve to think we're 'special.' It's that kind of stupidity that forces scientists - most of them - to close their eyes to the true secret of the Bermuda Triangle. ...

"My own hypothesis is that the Bermuda Triangle and other maritime areas are 'points of entry' into a different reality, probes controlled by aliens that employ techniques involving manipulation of space and time. ...

"This world appears real to us because we can sense only one microscopic slice of this underlying reality at any particular time. This mode of reality would also explain the mechanism operating behind telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance and other paranormal activity. ...

"The problem is that we don't have the right kind of instruments to detect these alien energy forms."

So: (1) What is "the true secret" of the Bermuda Triangle to which science has thus far been blind? (2) And how will Rosenberger treat this possible entry point "into a different reality"?

Answers: (1) We are given absolutely no idea. (2) He won't. It's yet another instance of the author introducing and then ignoring an alien/supernatural subplot.

On their way in a small sub to initially check out the Russian underwater construction, Camellion and three others encounter a huge craft in the water, which turns slightly to face them before zipping away at a high rate of speed. The men immediately assume it must be otherworldly life, but once the craft leaves, Camellion immediately forgets about it, and is focused only on getting the job done. Upon returning from his mission, Camellion finds a strange pyramid and a box in the sub, two items apparently left by the aliens. I was wondering how the aliens (or the large craft) would figure into the final clash with the Russians, but Rosenberger never mentions the craft (or the two objects) again.

***

Various snips: "The average pig farmer is so dumb he runs around his bed to catch up with his sleep." ... "Our schedule is tighter right now than the tail feathers on the rump of a prairie chicken." ... "Richard Camellion was not only the most cold-blooded man he had ever seen, but he was the twin brother of catastrophe, a man whose natural habitat was the bleak and dark landscape of Death." ... "Whoever or whatever Richard Camellion was, he didn't need anyone. Nor did he seem to feel anything. And one always had the impression that there was something alien about him ... another kind of presence staring out through his eyes."

Rosenberger goes overboard on describing the mayhem with food metaphors:

"The other Cuban, Andres Fonseca, took the .357 Magnum slug from the right AMP just below the hollow of the throat, the impact of the dynamite-powered slug opening a hole in him the size of a lemon ..."

"Calcines' head exploded, parts and portions of skin, skull and brain making like shooting stars."

"The PPS in his hands roared, the muzzle flashing fire. Koloviev jumped on the driver's seat, and his hands left the steering wheel of the fork lift as his head exploded like a melon hit by buckshot."

"The 150-pound hook, swinging from the end of the boom on 4 feet of steel cable, pulverized their heads the way a sledgehammer would splatter an egg. Skull bones exploded, and gray-white brain matter shot in every direction, at the same time the bottom girders made pulp of their shoulders, backs, and chests."

"In a low crouch, the Death Merchant fired the AMP and the Ingram. A swarm of 9mm Ingram projectiles erased Jose Matar's face and popped open his skull like a lemon hit by a blast from a double-barrelled shotgun."

"Camellion had shot Chevsky; at the same time he had kicked in the scrotum of the cockroach who had tried to smash him with the butt of a Stechkin, the toe of the Death Merchant's weighted Neoruperine boot flattening the man's testicles like a pancake."

Also, in the aftermath of a battle in which Camellion used several incendiary grenades, the dead bodies "gave off the strong odor of a barbeque at a family get-together."

Rosenberger was not a big fan of Jimmy Carter, referring to the former U.S. president as stupid, "weak and an unrealist", and accusing him of taking the side of Communist revolutionaries in Rhodesia (an actual issue back in 1979) "to obtain the good will of American blacks". This is an obvious sore point with Rosenberger, as he has in previous books criticized U.S. politicians for basing their decisions on how to best appease blacks in America.

Rosenberger/Camellion ridiculed Nixon in the early books (towards the end of his second term and mostly over his resignation from office) and now Carter gets slammed. I'm curious what Rosenberger will make of Reagan as this series moves into the 1980s.