Category Archives: Espionage

Action, Adventure, Espionage, Military

Book Giveaway: Hell and Gone

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I’m giving out 10 free copies of my first novel. The giveaway lasts for a month, so you have plenty of time to enter once it is approved on Goodreads.

I’m getting close to finishing the first draft of the third book in this series. Yet, when I wrote this first one I didn’t intend to write a trilogy. In fact, not even a sequel. I considered Hell and Gone a one-off novel.

It was a blend of modern “military thriller,” old-school men’s adventure, and war novel. I tried to give it as much realism as an adventure story could handle and still be entertaining. It was never a bestseller, but it gained some enthusiastic fans. To my pleasant surprise, a few of them were veterans recently back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Vietnam veterans liked it, too. It received comments like “a man’s book, through and through” which was welcome praise, since masculine themes of honor and brotherhood are intended in most of my fiction.

Anyway, some fans asked for or suggested a sequel. At first I dismissed the idea out of hand, wanting to work in other genres. Plus a whole wave of younger veterans were breaking into military fiction, armed with up-to-date knowledge of military technology I didn’t think I should compete with. But a friend around my age (a veteran of the South African military now working as a “security contractor”) told me I should write a novel about combating modernday piracy. I’m pretty sure he was dealing with that very kind of thing during some of the long periods of silence in our communication; but he was understandably OpSec-conscious and never divulged details over the Internet.

Despite myself, the seed of an idea began to form. In time it took over, pushing everything else out of my brain, and became Tier Zero–a full-bore paramilitary men’s adventure, with a Mack Bolan-esque cover, busty nubile wenches and the whole nine yards. My South African buddy made a cameo appearance, with his name changed, of course. This time I deliberately left an opening for a sequel.

Here’s the book trailer for Hell and Gone:

Enter the giveaway for a chance to win a free paperback edition with the original cover. The link is on the right sidebar, and should go active soon. If you’re on Goodreads, then there are no strings attached. (An Amazon review after reading it would be appreciated, though.) If you’re not on Goodreads, it costs you nothing to join. Like any other public forum it has been dominated by feministas and leftards (both readers and authors), but there is a growing subculture of red pill readers; even some authors like me offering an alternative to the chick-lit, romance, paranormal, and other typical pinkshirt pap with Marxist themes and pixie superninjas.

After this giveaway, I plan to do the same with 10 copies of Tier Zero, so stay tuned. By the time both giveaways are complete, the third novel in the series should be ready for prime time.

BTW, if you would like advance warning when the book is about to go live, click here.

Action, Adventure, Espionage

007 In Film and Fiction

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Thanks to Books on Tape, Blackstone Audio, et al, and now Audible Audio for my Kindle, I’m tearing through books at a steady rate during work-related travel.

After paying for my subscription to Audible Audio, I decided it was finally time to read the source material for the spy movies I grew up with. I had previously read Casino Royale and You Only Live Twice which were fairly good reads, but were quite a different flavor from the Bond flicks I’d seen. So anyway, I set out to go through the rest of the Bond canon in the order the novels were written. So far, in addition to the two mentioned above, I’ve read Live and Let Die, Moonraker and From Russia With Love.

The first Bond I ever saw on screen was Roger Moore. It wasn’t until my teen years I began to see some of the Sean Connery flicks. I knew nothing about the literary Bond, and didn’t favor one actor over the other, but I liked the Connery flicks better. My favorite became Thunderball. How can you go wrong with an underground battle between frogmen using spearguns and submerged jet skis?

My senior year in high school I got a chance to see Dr. No and I really liked it. Not many cool gadgets, but the feel of it was groovy, and Connery’s Bond in this flick was one cool customer (closer to Ian Fleming’s character, in my opinion, than any actor has come until Daniel Craig or perhaps Timothy Dalton).

Speaking of Timothy Dalton, I just saw License to Kill this month. Hollywood finally did to Felix Leiter what Fleming did to him in the second Bond novel. I was shocked to read about the fate of Bond’s CIA counterpart in Live and Let Die, not just because it was gruesome, but because Felix Leiter had been a healthy, able-bodied staple in just about every Bond movie.

I’m sure this topic has been analyzed to death, so I won’t ramble on too long. But reading the books does take some of the Bond mystique away.

The silver screen Bond is a supercharged exaggeration of the character in nearly every way, as are his adventures. The literary Bond has only used his “license to kill” a couple times in his career. The movie Bond kills anywhere from three to a dozen times in any given story.

One of those kills to Bond’s credit, by the way, occurred during the war if I remember correctly. What war? Fleming’s Bond got into intelligence work during WWII, and continued serving in that capacity into the Cold War. In the movies, he was strictly Cold War, and we were never given any indication how he got into the business. He was conceived in a test tube by M for all we knew. With all the reboots, I think even the Cold War origin will soon be swept back (if it hasn’t been already). And with the Daniel Craig films delving more into the Bond character than any previous flicks, we’ll probably get his background filled in, too (retrofitted, of course).

Hmm. Just checking the canon, I realized I skipped Diamonds Are Forever. Have to remedy that. I was actually checking because From Russia With Love ended in an almost cliffhanger fashion and I wanted to see what followed it, guessing it would be You Only Live Twice.

Nope. Dr. No.

My least favorite Bond is, hand’s down, the Pierce Brosnan dynasty. That’s when the writers and directors transformed our favorite sexist pig superspy into just another action hero franchise. Along with that, the amazon superninja has become as obligatory in OO7 flicks as in every other action movie.

I’ll be glad to watch Halle Berry strut up out of the ocean all day long, but watching her out-macho the male lead is about as interesting as an old Wonder Woman rerun.

Look for Bond to get a sex change in the future, much like Thor, the Terminator, etc. “Bond. Jane Bond. I’ll take a sloe gin phiz, shaken, not stirred.” Maybe some “Bond boys” with names like Dick Steel, Bolt Upright and Hardin Cox.

Well, my Bond education will continue. Though the books are interesting, I don’t like them enough to make them a priority. So this could take a while.

 

Espionage, Reviews

Operation Perfida–Len Levinson’s Take on the JFK Plot

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Since I began blogging, I’ve been fortunate to meet some of the authors of my favorite books, including Jim Morris and the late Jerry Ahern. It should be no surprise  that high on that list is Len Levinson, one of the best action adventure authors from the 1970s and ’80s. I’m very familiar with his work in the war genre, but hadn’t delved into his other dabblings until recently.

Since I’ve long been fascinated with the JFK assassination, and Piccadilly Publishing has released a Levinson novel with a connection to that historic turning point, I just had to get this book on my Kindle.

A strong main character makes this one too engaging to put down.

 

True to Levinson form, Operation Perfidia is a really fast read and hard to put down. He is a master storyteller and the first two thirds of the novel just crackles along. Last year I read two novels of cold war intrigue–Ken Follett’s Code to Zero and Ian Fleming’s Moonraker. There are many similarities between this story and Follett’s, but to me this was the most enjoyable of the three books and I attribute this to the main character, David Brockman. The CIA field agent is tough, smart, and good at his job. His Achilles’ heel is the mile-wide blind spot he has for the woman he loves.

This book supports the most popular spin on the facts and rumors surrounding the mystery of the JFK snuff–the “vast right-wing conspiracy” theory. It is fairly obvious just from reading the blurb that the culprits will turn out to be anti-Castro Cubans. Of course anti-Kennedy CIA good ol’ boys collaborate. Nothing new here, but then this book was originally published in 1975, 16 years before the Oliver Stone film would make this hypothesis a household assumption.

But it does leave room for improvement…

 

The most disappointing aspect of the book was in the climax and ending. I don’t want to ruin it for anyone, but I read the last words wishing there was more to it. Not that the reader needs more concrete plans for the hero’s future–best to leave it uncertain as-is. I guess I wanted a little bit more expose` on Brockman’s wife Mirallia. Flesh out that angle a bit more. After all, Brockman only stumbles upon the JFK plot as a side-effect of chasing his wife, anyway. She’s his primary motivation through the bulk of the novel; then when he finally tracks her down, it unfolds a touch on the anti-climactic side.

All in all, this is a nice espionage thriller to cuddle up with. You can get it for your Kindle here or by clicking the cover image at the top of this post.

Action, Adventure, Espionage, Reviews

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

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I was not prepared for what happened at the theater. Knowing full well the sequel factor, and having seen a poster for a movie about Cesar Chavez on the way inside (a bad omen if there ever was), I was expecting Hollywood business as usual.

(In fact, it’s kind of surprising Captain America wasn’t turned into “Captain Global Village” long ago, replacing his stars-and-stripes motif with rainbows and olive branches. Well, Marvel did turn him into “Nomad” for a while in the 1970s, but I guess the fans wouldn’t stand for it.)

I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised. Marvel Studios has stuck to the formula that has made most of their cinematic efforts so successful, including some great lines, a funny cameo by legendary Stan Lee, and an extravaganza of spectacular destruction surrounding a plot that ties in nicely to the rest of the Marvel Movie Canon.

Where’s the red and white, by the way?

Of course there were annoying themes, too, like the mask removal fetish. (Question for Marvel’s creative Czars: if secret identities are now public, why do your superheroes wear masks at any time whatsoever?)

Winter Soldier is an enjoyable flick for the whole family, but there’s some interesting themes under the surface, too.

Here are some tasty morsels for conspiracy theorists: SHIELD, a pseudo-secret government agency with an unlimited budget and power that Hitler’s Secret Police could only dream of, has itself been compromised–infiltrated to the very highest levels by Hydra (a super-secret international organization bent on enslaving the world). SHIELD has developed a preemptive crime stopping program which is ready to go online, and I almost choked on my popcorn when they mentioned Operation Paperclip. The predictive algorithm explained in dialog also sounds a lot like PROMIS. Through this new program, SHIELD can prevent crimes before they happen by identifying potential criminals.

In effect, SHIELD (with Hydra pulling the strings) is on its way to becoming the Thought Police that George Orwell warned us about. Keep in mind that in the constantly evolving Newspeak of the dominant ideology, “thought crime” is now called “hate crime.” And the method chosen to eradicate thought crime is nearly identical to how enemies of the state can now be dealt with. Replace unmanned drones with huge, high-tech airborne gun platforms and you have the same execution of US citizens without trial favored by the Obama Administration.

It’s pretty amazing these themes survived to the final cut. Chances are the script was written during the Bush II regime, when violations of civil liberties were double-plus ungood to the Hollywood Zeitgeist. And at one point you see that one of the millions of thought/hate criminals located is in the White House. Yeah, right. But still, it’s astounding that this plot element was retained with only a weak revision like that.

Take a knee, Cap, and prepare for debriefing.

However it happened, it appears the message of this film backfired on the Hollywood Elite in similar fashion to John Carpenter’s They Live.