Showing posts with label Sam Durell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sam Durell. Show all posts

Monday, March 16, 2015

Sam Durrell #39: Assignment Quayle Question


Sam Durell #39: Assignment Quayle Question, by Edward S. Aarons
May, 1975  Fawcett Gold Medal

With a cover that could come off a ‘70s sweat mag, the 39th volume of the Sam Durell series picks up “shortly” after the events of the previous volume, though be assured that reading Assignment Sumatra isn’t a prerequisite for enjoying The Quayle Question. Plus, this one features a Fu Manchu-style supervillain who runs a Satanic cult!

Our taciturn hero Sam Durell is in rural Virginia, on an assassination mission. Teamed with a few FBI and DIA agents, his assignment is to take out a Japanese terrorist named Tomashita, who we gradually learn is one of the minions of Eli Plowman, “sanitation squad” leader of Durell’s K Section. Plowman, who appared in the previous volume, has gone rogue, and for vague reasons Durell’s been selected by K Section to take him out.

But first he must take out Tomashita, who is apparently in the US to kill the recently-selected head of a Japanese business conglomerate, one that has been steadily buying out media outlets around the world. (The novel is very prescient in how it predicts the coming trends of the ‘80s, by the way.) In particular this conglomerate, or zaibatsu, now has its sights set on the global media kingdom of Rufus Quayle, a notoriously-reclusive mega-billionaire who rules from his own private castle and is never seen in public (read: Howard Hughes).

On the job with Durell, against his objections, is the lovely Deidre Padgett – the only woman Durell has ever loved, to cue the old cliché. Apparently she appeared more frequently in earlier volumes; we learn that now, in this later volume, she works in an admin capacity for the DC-based K Section, to at least be somewhat a part of Durell’s world. It seems the two broke off their heated relationship because Durell couldn’t allow himself to “go soft” by falling in love. More importantly, he doesn’t want someone he loves to be harmed by his untold enemies around the world.

But here Durell learns something new about Deidre: she’s the niece of Rufus Quayle. And now she’s the man’s only living relative, or at least only one who can be found: Quayle’s daughter, Deborah Pentecost, has gone missing, as has old Quayle himself. The K Section theory is that they’ve been kidnapped by the henchmen of the zaibatsu. Not that Deidre has much to do with her reclusive, wealthy uncle; she claims to have only seen him once in her life. But still K Section fears she might be on some Japanese hit list.

We can already tell this novel will show a more personally-involved Durell, as when Deidre goes missing in the assassination attempt he’s frantic, but hides it beneath his professional demeanor. He finds her, though, tied up beside the hippie van she was using for cover as she trailed Tomashita’s rental car. And the Japanese terrorist himself has gotten away, not only escaping Durell’s sniper round but also butchering the zaibatsu head and his entire family, including his little kids.

Meanwhile Quayle’s attractive daughter, Deborah, is held captive in a dank dungeon, constantly questioned by some evil presence she never sees. Deborah has the mind of a computer, able to predict industry trends and whatnot, but this is more of a curse; “My talent is like ashes in my mouth,” as she memorably puts it. Her unseen interrogator constantly asks why Quayle’s second-in-command (and also Deborah’s ex husband) wanted to recently meet with her; when Deborah refuses to play ball, she’s shown the poor bastard’s carcass, which is mutilated and hanging from a meathook!

Durell eventually figures Tomashita and Eli Plowman are not only working for the Japanese but that they can be found in the Ca’d’Orizon, Quayle’s castle on the Jersey shore. He also figures the old man is there. Durell’s biggest clue is a bit of sand left in his supposedly-top secret safehouse, near DC; he figures the sand was planted there by Plowman, in the expectation that Durell would see the sand and connect it to the Jersey shore – and thus go to Quayle’s private castle.

Aarons really has a gift for word painting, so there’s lots of colorful description of the scenery and terrain of the places Durell visits. This does add a literary flavor to the book, but detracts in that it gets away from the action and lurid thrills. But then again, the argument goes that the Sam Durell books were never really considered part of the men’s adventure genre. If so, someone forgot to tell the publisher and the cover artist. As it is, one gradually begins to wish that less was being described and more was actually happening.

Things pick up with a firefight in an amusement park, where Durell and Plowman have a brief face-to-face. Here Plowman plays Darth Vader, asking Durell to join his cause. Of course, Durell refuses. He’s worried about this zaibatsu, which, if it takes over Quayle’s company QPI, will have a “world-wide network of media outlets,” and thus be able to sway public opinion. Again, it’s very interesting how prescient Aarons was. The novel’s big threat isn’t nuclear war or anything of the like, it’s about how the media can be misused.

Rufus Quayle is in fact hiding in his castle, and his scenes too are memorable. Bedridden, surrounded by armed henchmen, Quayle has recently lost his voice due to throat cancer and thus “speaks” through a teleprompter. He has no intention of selling QPI to the Japanese, even if they have his daughter – even if they threaten to kill her. Durell thinks the man is a “monster” but can’t argue with him; Durell too realizes what ramifications might ensue if the zaibatsu were to gain access to Quayle’s global networks.

Aarons seems to want to hedge his bets; I know he passed away not long after The Quayle Question was published, but at any rate he appears to want to leave Eli Plowman’s fate vague; the wily villain plunges into the ocean after a gunfight with Durell, and is wiped out by a big wave. Durell later bluntly states that Plowman’s dead, though he has no proof, and is himself uncertain. But at least Aarons wraps up the Dr. Sinn character, who also apparently had a run-in with Durell in an earlier installment.

Unfortunately, it’s only in the homestretch that Aarons begins to ramp things up. The book also gets more lurid here, with Deborah getting raped by one of Sinn’s more grotesque henchmen (one with a deformed member, naturally) – that is, after she’s had her finger cut off. And true to the genre, Deidre is soon after captured, taken to Sinn’s secret hideaway of a temple. This turns out to be in Baja, California, a Maharana temple that Sinn has rented from a drunk old lady who owns the property.

Even here more time is spent on scene-setting, so that when Durell finally goes to save Deidre (and have his final confrontation with Sinn), only a handful of pages are left. Dressed like one of the monks (the robes hiding electronic gear which is necessary to keep Sinn’s security devices from going off), Durell brazenly walks into the villain’s lair, where he’s promptly captured. The cover image comes to life, with Deidre shackled before an enthroned Sinn, who has ten black candles lit; when the final candle goes out, one of his henchmen will slit Deidre’s throat.

Aarons cheats on the finale, with one of Durell’s colleagues coming to his aid at the last second. While it’s realistic, I feel that this goes against the grain of heroic fiction; the protagonist should always save himself. Instead, Durell’s left standing there powerless as the love of his life is about to die, and some random DIA agent bashes in the window and starts shooting. You’re almost like, “Jeez, maybe that guy should’ve been the star of the book.” But anyway, the fireworks here are rather muddled, with even Sinn’s comeuppance barely dwelled upon; Durell just shoots him, and that’s that.

So while The Quayle Question was moderately enjoyable, it just didn’t have the spark of Assignment Sumatra, and I got a bit frustrated with the inordinate amount of word painting. I wanted a bit more exploitative verve than Aarons was willing to deliver.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Sam Durell #38: Assignment Sumatra


Sam Durell #38: Assignment Sumatra, by Edward S. Aarons
October, 1974  Fawcett Gold Medal

I’ve never given the Sam Durell series much consideration, though I’ve heard good things about it. The series started in 1955 and ran until the early 1980s; the creator and sole writer until his death in 1975 was Edward S. Aarons (after he died the books continued on for a few volumes, published under the pseudonym Will B. Aarons). Recently at a bookstore I came across several of these books at half off the cover price, with an additional 20% on top of that, so I couldn’t say no – especially when the cover price on some of them was 90 cents!

I mostly picked up ones from the early to mid ‘70s, given the bias (which even I myself don’t fully understand) that I have for that era. I chose this 38th volume in particular as the one to start with, what with the back cover copy stating that on this assignment Durell works with a “lethal lady” who basically gets off on murder. To my pleasure, Assignment Sumatra turned out to be a great read. These books are only marginally part of the men’s adventure genre, in that there’s a series title and volume numbers, but the writing is several steps above the genre norm and the feel of the books is more in the espionage arena. But it still packs in enough sex and violence; there’s just a bit more mystery and suspense than you’d get in, say, The Executioner.

Durell is known as “The Cajun” given his Louisiana heritage, but we really don’t get much background information on him in Assignment Sumatra. No wonder, given that this is the 38th volume in the series! At any rate he works for K Section of the CIA, and is your basic James Bond type. Durell comes off as pretty taciturn and more concerned with seeing the job through as cleanly as possible – in other words, he doesn’t go out of his way to get into scrapes or to kill as many enemy agents as possible.

This last fact in particular forms most of the conflict in the novel – Durell has been assigned to work his current mission with the beautiful Lydia Morgan, aka the “lethal lady” of the back cover. Lydia is a 27 year-old assassin with Q Clearance, apparently the operatives of the CIA who have clearance to kill. She really enjoys her job, and Aarons does a great job making her character so fascinating – her complicated backstory goes that she was a hippie girl who had a bad “back to nature” scene in which the two guys she was with ended up dead.

After more mental breakdowns Lydia was contacted by the creepy Eli Plowman, head of the CIA’s “sanitation squad” and one of the people Durell most hates (it’s obvious Plowman has been in previous volumes); Plowman took Lydia under his wing and turned her into a master assassin, one who can use any weapon or her hands and feet to kill. However as mentioned Lydia enjoys it, something Durell suspects at first but gradually learns to be the truth. (He witnesses it, in fact, during a later scene where Lydia demands to have sex with Durell right on the battlefield, and turns to look at one of their slain foes as she orgasms.) Durell himself is disgusted by Lydia, and not just because of her affiliation with Plowman; despite her beauty Durell instantly distrusts the woman, and resents the command that he work with her.

Their mission is to cart around a decoy who resembles moderate Indonesian leader Hueng, Premier of Salangap (another person Durell has dealt with in a previous book). The decoy, Tu Fu, is a Hakka country bumpkin who bears enough of a resemblance to Premier Hueng that Plowman and Lydia hope he will make for a suitable target while the real Hueng makes his way in secrecy to the SEACROP conference, a meeting of South Asian leaders in which Hueng is expected to make an America-friendly speech. However out to stop him is K’ang Wu Chien, Hueng’s co-ruler who is attempting to take over the country and oust Hueng; K’ang wants Hueng dead so that he can make the SEACROP speech and unite the South Asian rulers against the US.

So begins the suspense and treachery, as Durell and Lydia try to escort Tu Fu across Sumatra in the hopes that K’ang’s assassins will spring forth and kill the guy. Durell begins to feel sorry for the Hakka decoy, and instantly grates against Eli Plowman’s exploitative scheme. The novel starts off heavy on the action as the trio are attacked shortly after Durell arrives on the scene, Lydia killing off the attackers with ease. Her trademark weapons are a two-shot, heavy caliber derringer she carries between her “ample breasts” (we learn that the handle has been specially formed to fit there) and a thin, needle-like blade she straps to an inner thigh. She is also competent with her hands and feet and butchers their attackers with relish.

Durell and Lydia take an immediate dislike to one another, though Aarons as expected builds up a gradual chemistry between them, leading to the mandatory sex scenes. However Durell never stops distrusting the woman, or treating her roughly. Aarons capably walks an unusual ground because he makes Lydia such a monstrous person, capable of cold-blooded murder and deceit, yet at the same time he makes us feel compassion for her, as she’s obviously mentally unstable due to her rough background, plus she herself is aware that she is “sick.” As the two get in more danger Lydia begins to cling to Durell, sometimes begging him for sex, saying that only Durell can make her human again. Durell tries his hardest not to fall completely for her, so this makes for an added layer of suspense.

Aarons has a definite command of his craft, and his writing is masterful in how he doles out topical details about his exotic settings yet still keeps the action moving. He also has a gift for characterization and dialog. The action scenes are all compelling, and very well staged, though Aarons doesn’t dwell on the graphic aspect. True, we get several mentions of exploding blood and brains, but for the most part Durell only kills when he absolutely must. The sex scenes as well are described enough that we know something happened, but again Aarons doesn’t dwell on the details. So again, the book has more in common with a more “respectable” series like say Fleming’s James Bond novels than it does with the average men’s adventure novel.

I guess my only problem with Assignment Sumatra is that Aarons doesn’t really tie up everything, so far as the main characters go, and he tends to build up characters and then drop them. K’ang for example has a grand entrance, complete with the genre-mandatory bit where he tortures Durell, but after that he disappears, and his comeuppance at the end is perfunctory. Tu Fu also disappears from the narrative, and Aarons leaves Lydia’s fate a mystery – Durell sends her off with the brother of a man Lydia killed earlier in the book, though Lydia doesn’t realize this. Personally I found it hard to believe that the guy would be a match for her, so I suspect Lydia probably reappeared in a later, Will B. Aarons-penned installment (or at least perhaps Aarons himself planned to bring her back).

Anyway I really enjoyed the novel, and I’m happy I picked up so many volumes of the series. These books are deserving of a rediscovery, and luckily enough it looks like they can still be gotten for cheap in most second-hand bookstores.