Showing posts with label Mind Brothers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mind Brothers. Show all posts

Monday, December 4, 2017

Men Who Die Twice (Mind Brothers #3)


Men Who Die Twice, by Peter Heath
No month stated, 1968  Lancer Books

Okay, consider me officially confused. Supposedly the third and final volume of The Mind Brothers, Men Who Die Twice instead comes off like a standalone spy thriller, one that’s only connected to the previous two books in that it features the same protagonist, Jason Starr. Otherwise it’s as if Peter Heath (aka Peter Heath Fine, who actually died in 1995 and not 1975, as mistakenly reported in my review of the first volume) has distanced himself from the series concept.

As we’ll recall, the first volume was mostly sci-fi, about Jason Starr dying in ‘Nam and being reborn via his “mind brother” identical twin Adam Cyber, who came from 50,000 years in the future to see what the world was once like (and to also help fight the Commies, let’s not forget!). Then the second volume sort of jettisoned all that; Jason Starr was more of a regular ‘60s spy type, complete with all kinds of fancy gadgets and gear, and Cyber was relegated to supporting status, off-page for the majority of the narrative. The “Mind Brothers” concept was barely even discussed. A new character, teenager Mark Brown, was introduced – but in the climax of the book, we learned that Mark had been sent into the future by that volume’s villains, and also that Cyber had been sent to the Earth’s core “five minutes ago.” And the book ended on this dual cliffhanger.

Given this, the reader of the third volume would understandably want to know what happens next. Well folks, you can forget the hell about all that. All of it!! There is zero, zilch, nada pickup from the previous volume, or even the first volume. Neither Adam Cyber nor Mark Brown appear, and they aren’t even mentioned. The phrase “Mind Brothers” appears nowhere in the text. Again, the only tie-in to those earlier books is the appearance of Jason Starr, who here appears to be retconned into a “self-employed mathemetician,” one who has lots of Intelligence-world background.

So what the hell?? My assumption is Heath turned in the first book and got the request to turn it into a series, which he fumblingly did with the second volume. But maybe he had a hard time of it, or lost his interest. All the sci-fi wankery of the previous two books is gone in this one – honestly, it’s just your typical ‘60s spy-pulp, and not a particularly good one at that. It’s beyond frustrating for the reader of those first two novels, though. I guess we’re to assume Adam Cyber really did die in the climax of the previous book (an off-page death at that?). So much for his much-ballyhooed voyage across the millennia to come help Jason Starr.

Anyway when Men Who Die Twice opens, Jason is in a stopover in London, on his way to a vacation in Greece(!?). He’s stopped by a phone call in which some dude named Harry Brentwood pleads with Jason to come see him at some hospital. This guy somehow knows Jason and claims it’s a life or death sort of thing, etc, but when Jason gets to the place, they claim there’s no Harry Brentwood there. Plus there’s a stooge who throws Jason out on his ass. The whole place seems mysterious, and Jason tries to figure out the puzzle.

Meanwhile Heath hopscotches all over the place with random incidents and events. For example there’s a doctor named Derby in an underground research lab somewhere in the Midwest, a place where hallucinogenics and germs are being studied for warfare; Derby contaminates the area, massacring everyone, before he escapes – and we get an overlong sequence in which the military wonders if they need to nuke the area to prevent outspread of the contamination. There’s also a nuclear sub commanded by a dude who reports to Derby – who in reality turns out to be a former Nazi spy named Rudi Vreelander.

Jason, still in London, meets pretty young Moira, who claims to be Harry Brentwood’s fiance. At great length we’ll learn that Harry was a scientist at this very same underground lab we just saw – an eerie subplot has it that the scientists, upon their eventual release to the world, have their minds swapped, so that they have no memories of their research beneath the ground. Jason goes around London and over to Scotland in his research, getting in the occasional action scene, and also at one point briefly captured by a bumbling pair of CIA agents, one of whom Jason knows from his (apparent) past life with the agency.

Our hero does get to use at least one gadget this time around; captured again, midway through, Jason’s on a private plane, when he pushes his way free and jumps right out into the night sky. Turns out he’s wearing an experimental “balloon” on his back and thus makes his leisurely descent to the ground. But otherwise Jason is in pure investigative mode this time around, with none of the action-pulp of the previous two books. The majority of the novel is given over to one-off characters; even the President features in an endless subplot in which he wonders if his military commanders are trying to pressure him into what could be an unjust war against Russia – the USSR being set up by Vreelander, who hopes to spark WWIII.

The action eventually climaxes aboard that nuclear sub, which has gone rogue under the command of Vreelander’s henchman. It’s off the coast of Sardinia – where Vreelander himself has been anticlimactically dispensed with – and about to fire off a salvo of nukes. Jason alone storms the ship and tries to stop its insane commander, but here the novel does veer into sci-fi: DC gets nuked! Vreelander’s dude manages to fire off one rocket, and Heath ends the tale with DC a radioactive ruins. Jason, finally setting off for Greece, hopes that mankind “learns something” from the catastrophic event, but figures it won’t.

And that’s it – for the book and the series. Really, this novel was so unconnected to the previous two that you might as well just figure this “Jason Starr” is not the same guy who appeared in those other books. Sort of like how Daniel Craig isn’t playing James Bond, but another character of the same name. I enjoyed the first two books to some extent, but Men Who Die Twice left me cold – and confused.

Monday, March 7, 2016

Assassins From Tomorrow (The Mind Brothers #2)


Assassins From Tomorrow, by Peter Heath
No month stated, 1967  Magnum/Lancer Books

The second volume of The Mind Brothers is an interesting departure from the first volume; whereas that one was heavy on the psychedelic sci-fi, this one is more of a streamlined pulp tale. Also of note is that the plot concerns the mysteries surrounding the JFK assassination, which is pretty unusual given that the novel was published just a few years after it happened – not to mention a year before the RFK assassination.

However, Assassins From Tomorrow ultimately has nothing much at all to do with the various JFK conspiracy theories; in this novel you will read nothing of multiple Oswalds or grassy knoll tramps, let alone any umbrella men. The Kennedy assassination serves as the impetus of the events, sort of, but the book instead becomes more of an adventure thing with vague sci-fi trappings before finally dispensing with the Kennedy stuff in the very final pages, and arbitrarily at that. So despite what the cover and back copy imply, the novel is not in any way a conspiracy theory sort of deal.

Anyway, the spine of Assassins From Tomorrow is labelled with a “1,” as if implying that this is the start of the series and not the second volume of it. What’s interesting is that “the Mind Brothers” don’t play nearly as great a part in this book as they did in that first book. Rather, Assassins From Tomorrow is more of a solo piece, focusing for the most part just on Jason Starr, blond-haired super-genius and sometimes CIA spook who now, two years after the first book, runs Consultants Unlimited in Washington, D.C.

Heath doesn’t really pick up many threads from the first book, and to tell the truth he acts like most of it never happened! There’s hardly any recapping or scene re-setting; the book comes off as the start of just another ‘60s spy series, with as mentioned only slight sci-fi trappings. This comes mostly due to Jason’s “mind brother” (the phrase never actually used in this book), Adam Cyber, a bald clone of Jason (his twin-like similarity to Jason also ignored this time), who as we’ll recall is from 50,000 years in the future and is now stuck in the past. Not that any of this is really mentioned here; only Cyber’s future history is dispensed with in a paragraph or two.

One other thing has changed since The Mind Brothers; I think Heath started to watch Star Trek. For Cyber has become Mr. Spock in all but name; you can’t help but hear Leonard Nimoy delivering every single one of his lines. Like Spock Cyber is now an ultra-logical sort-of human who acts as the straight man to Jason’s Kirk. But here’s the big problem – Heath basically removes Cyber from the novel, and we hardly get to see him. Seriously, he’s like in twenty pages of the book. He disappears around page 80, abducted by the villains of the piece, and we don’t see him again.

Heath introduces a new character to the series, 16 year-old Mark Brown, a sort of hippie-type smart guy who is the son of a scientist friend of Jason’s and is currently on his way to Dallas to get to the bottom of the JFK thing. Instead Mark runs into a weird group in a bar, including a muscle-bound dude and a pretty lady who identifies herself as Consuelo Blake, and then he’s beaten up when he asks about JFK and finds himself in lockup. Escaping the prison detail he’s been put on, Mark manages to get in touch with Jason, whom his father had told him is a person to trust when in need – Mark’s dad being out of touch.

Jason lives in wealth in D.C. and has a special wall in his office that’s really a goofy sci-fi sort of magic hidden entrance that leads him into Cyber’s secret area. There the two decide to…I don’t know, do something. Heath is not very good at connecting various plot threads, though he is a very competent pulp writer. We also learn here that Jason has gotten a girlfriend, Hillary, but she is absent for the entire novel, and when we do see her she’s under mind control and doesn’t even recognize Jason. But anyway Jason and Cyber team up with Mark to find out what’s going on – Consuela Blake gave Mark some coordinates before she was taken away that night, and Jason realizes they are positions for an orbiting satellite.

Heath also injects more action into this one, getting away from the world-building (and character-building) of the previous volume. But again it’s all just Jason, like when he almost casually kills a few thugs with his martial arts skills and when he later escapes a miniature thermonuclear missile that’s been fired at him. We do get some of the sci-fi stuff of the last one, mostly through Jason’s science geekery – not to mention Cyber’s post-human brilliance, and also Mark I forgot to mention is a budding scientist himself. Jason even has a LearJet that’s got this fancy future-tech computer in it, but after building it up so much Heath just drops it, having Jason take the plane apart and cannibalize its parts.

The thermonuke was fired from Mexico, and Jason, along with Mark and a pair of Mexican brothers named Mendez and Ramos, goes out into the jungle waters near Puerto Vallarta and calls down the mysterious satellite at great page expense. Inside it they find the preserved corpse of an astronaut. The satellite was for spying and was launched on the day of Kennedy’s assassination. Eventually we’ll learn that the perpetrators of this plot put in orders for this “spy in the sky” not to be called back down that fateful November day, as he’d taken photos of the JFK killing, photos that could disprove the official story, or something.

Now Jason, Cyber having been kidnapped off-page, finds himself surrounded by a Hollywood movie crew(!?), shooting a movie down here in Mexico. Meanwhile he’s gotten in combat with a remote control nuclear sub which he took down with a top secret nuke-firing handgun thing…! A blonde bimbo starlet offers herself to Jason one night, but he turns her away (no sex in the novel, by the way). And meanwhile he finds down here – none other than Hillary, his girlfriend who by the way was kidnapped too, also off-page, earlier in the book! But Hillary acts dazed and doesn’t even recognize Jason.

The novel climaxes in the ruins of Tuxtilatan, an ancient pyramid deep in the jungle. Inside Jason finds a metallic underground structure in which the villains make their home. One of them is Consuella Blake, who Jason never met but who he somehow recognizes. The sexy, evil lady reveals that she and her fellow villains are all humans from 5,000 years in the future, and to escape their nuke-ravaged hellscape they’ve decided to invade the past. This by the way was the exact same plot of the excellent fifth (and final) season of Fringe.

So yeah, we have villains from 5,000 years in the future and a co-hero who is from fifty thousand years in the future, even though he’s off page and Heath denies us the chance of seeing Cyber take on these freaks. But Heath doesn’t really elaborate on any of this, and seems unable to understand the basics of time travel fiction – if the people from Conseula’s time were using time travel to escape their reality, then how did their world evolve for another forty or so thousand years to become Cyber’s – and why didn’t they go into the future, which as described in the first book is a sort of artificial paradise that’s barren of any humans?? I mean they could’ve just moved right on in, rather than wasting resources on conquering the 20th century.

And for that matter, it’s quickly mentioned that JFK was killed because he could’ve stopped this future-invasion, somehow; other potential disruptors of the plan have also been killed. Like Cyber, who is being sent to the earth’s core “five minutes ago,” and Jason watches and does nothing as Cyber is in fact sent to the friggin earth’s core! So is he dead or what?? Heath doesn’t even bother to tell us. Oh and Mark’s also been sent somewhere, I think three years in the future or something, but Heath doesn’t bother to follow up on that plot thread either.

Instead, the finale is an overlong sequence of Jason, assisted by the deus ex machina Mendez and Ramos, taking on the future-invaders in their high-tech complex. Consuela is about to tell Jason where the other hidden time-travel places are when she’s shot dead by none other than Dr. Brown – Mark’s dad. But it’s revealed that the real Dr. Brown and Consuela herself are really dead and these people Jason is fighting are just walking automatons with the brains of the future-invaders, or something.

Anyway, it ends with Jason at least saving Hillary, who comes out of her mind control stupor in the very last sentence and thus is at least given a single line of dialog. Meanwhile Jason smokes a couple cigarettes and figures the FBI will now be after him as a “murderer.” Why? I guess because they’ll think he killed Dr. Brown, or somehow all of these events will be pegged on him, but all of it happened in Mexico, and Jason doesn’t seem to realize that the FBI has no jurisdiction there, so the finale left me plumb friggin’ confused, as did most of the rest of the book.

Only one more volume was to follow, Men Who Die Twice, and it appears to tap into the folk-rock craze of the time. I’ll get to it eventually.

Monday, June 9, 2014

The Mind Brothers


The Mind Brothers, by Peter Heath
No month stated, 1967  Lancer Books

A strange product of the Swinging Sixties Spy genre, The Mind Brothers was the start of a three-volume series, churned out by Peter Heath* between 1967 and 1968. What sets this particular series apart is that it veers into science fiction, with a superhuman from fifty thousand years in the future(!) who travels back in time to the 1960s to help fight Communism!

Jason Starr is our hero, a young computer programmer who worked for the RAND coproration before being contracted by the Air Force to work on a psyops warfare project in Vietnam. This kind of cred would normally make for a villain, but Jason’s a good guy who just wants to end the war. Experiments on lab rats prove that his psyops work, as the rats run in fear whenever the gear is turned on. So the equipment is hooked up to the bottom of a military aircraft and Jason rides along to oversee a field test.

Instead the plane’s shot out of the sky, ambushed by a Chinese patrol which apparently was lying in wait, as if the Chinese knew the plane would be coming by. Jason Starr dies in the ensuing crash, but here begins the sci-fi angle. A portal appears in the air and pulls his corpse into the far-flung future, where it is cloned and reconstituted. Jason is sent back to the ‘60s, where his unharmed but unconscious body is discovered by the puzzled crash investigators. He wakes up in the Navy hospital in Pearl Harbor, with no memory of having died nor of having visited the future.

Jason learns he’s been framed; researchers discovered that the equipment on the undercarriage of the downed plane was useless junk, with no affect on anything. Now Jason is discredited, with the implication that he swindled the government. He’s returned to civilian life, but many doors are now closed to him. Then one night he’s visited by a strange figure who looks much like Jason himself, only with no hair and sort of superhuman features – this is Adam Cyber, from 50,000 years in the future, the last surviving human, and the man who saved, rebuilt, and cloned Jason.

In a weird flash-forward we see that computers became so powerful that eventually humans turned the entire Earth over to them, leaving the planet to colonize other worlds. Adam Cyber chose to stay behind, and was dissolved into a sort of fluid state (exactly like the protagonist of Another End) for several thousand years; when reconstituted into human form, he discovered that the computers had recreated the planet down to the smallest microbe. Even the grass was robotic. A crying Adam Cyber realized mankind had taken a wrong path, and decided to go back in time to prevent this future.

Through some reasoning that Heath doesn’t really explain, Adam decided upon the late 1960s, and as a host Jason Starr, claiming Jason was a scientific genius on par with the greats. Since he’d need a body of the era to travel back in time to inhabit, Adam transported Jason’s body forward in the future so as to recreate a copy for himself. Or something! Now Adam Cyber (his last name chosen from a book on cybernetics, and the “Adam” of course for being the first man of that future world) is Jason Starr’s “Mind Brother,” here in the late 20th Century to ensure hummanity doesn’t make the mistakes that caused his world to become a reality. 

As if all this wasn’t enough, Jason also discovers he was set up – the Chinese patrol that ambushed him in ‘Nam no doubt stole away his psyops equipment, replacing it with junk, but was also tipped off by someone where the plane would be in the first place. It’s payback time! Jason and Adam sneak into CIA headquarters in Virginia and Adam puts a bug in the CIA’s main computer (one of the old, wall-spanning types), blackmailing the CIA into helping them; Jason and Adam will repair the computer if the Agency will give them its support in finding the culprits behind the psyops theft. This leads them to Bombay, India, but not before Jason picks up a pretty gal named Maria and takes her back to his hotel for a little vaguely-described sex.

While sitting on the tarmac in an Arabian country during a layover, Jason spots some dude plant a bomb on his plane. Yet for unstated reasons he waits until the plane is in midair to inform the captain there’s a bomb stowed somewhere aboard. An incredibly unbelievable sequence follows in which Jason and the pilots unscrew the floor panelling, get into the luggage compartment, and find the bomb with minutes to spare, Jason having deduced that the bomb would be set to blow within an hour or two after takeoff. He ends up tossing the bomb overboard and the plane continues at a low altitude to avoid decompression. The sequence was also unintentionally eerie, given the recent MH370 mystery, Jason’s plane even flying over the Indian Ocean.

In Bombay, Jason again nearly gets killed, this time by a taxi driver who tries to set him up. A weird chase ensues, with Jason running through the refuse-festooned streets of Bombay, including an unsettingly-bizarre bit where he thinks he steps on “the belly of a dead woman.” After this he reconnects with Adam Cyber, who’s chilling at the Punjabi Hotel, and the reader can’t help but wonder how he got there. I mean, did he teleport? Why didn’t he fly there with Jason? It’s not explained. Once the “brothers” get hold of Mr. Chatterji, aka the taxi driver who set up Jason, they discover that “The Brotherhood” is behind all of this nonsense. It all appears to be a plot by wily Chinese scientist Dr. Lau and Otto Krupt, a former Nazi.

The final quarter of the novel comes off like a proto John Eagle Expeditor, with Jason and a team of Sherpas navigating through the icy dangers of Tibet. Here in appropriate pulp style Dr. Lau has a hidden fortress, from which he’s perfecting the psyops gear he stole from Jason. The pulp stuff is really piled on here, with even cells filled with creatures, locals who have been mutated by Lau in various experiments. Heath writes the action with tongue in cheek; it’s not outright comedy, but it toes the line, as Jason blows away various stooges and Heath documents it all in deadpan style.

Heath takes us into the homestretch with the revelation of who was behind the plot to frame Jason, and former friends turn out to be enemies. By novel’s end, Jason has regained his professional stature, and he figures Adam will soon return to the future, now that this current business has been dealt with. However Adam reveals that he’s stuck here in the past, which of course sets the stage for ensuing volumes. Lancer doesn’t mention this is the start of a series, though.

Anyway I enjoyed The Mind Brothers enough that I’ll eventually check out the second volume, if for no other reason than I happen to already have it.

*Some sources state that Peter Heath was the pseudonym of an author named Robert Irvine.  However according to Hawk's Authors' Pseudonyms III (1999), Peter Heath was the pseudonym of an author named Peter Heath Fine, who was born in 1935 and only had the three Mind Brothers novels to his credit.  According to this site he died in 1975, at the young age of 40.