Fiction Friday: STONY MAN DOCTRINE

My first cover-to-cover read of 2020 was this classic. I first read STONY MAN DOCTRINE back in either junior high or high school - I can't recall which - as my schools had a lot of donated fiction and someone must have had a collection of Gold Eagle titles. I remember back then thinking how amazingly badass the GE books were, with tons of technical detail and blistering action scenes.

For those of you totally in the dark here, SMD is the first book in Gold Eagle Books' Three-Series "Stony Man" world (I guess Sons of Barabas is also in this world but I don't really count it here) which encompasses the Mack Bolan Executioner series, the Able Team series, and the Phoenix Force series. Essentially the three men of Able Team and five men of Phoenix Force work for Bolan, and in this book they're all brought together for the first time to take on a multi-national terrorist organization called Hydra (no, not THAT Hydra), which is planning to carry out a series of WMD-style chemical weapon attacks against major US population centers unless the US government withdraws all military forces from foreign countries. The President decides that he cannot abandon America's allies, so he calls in Bolan and Co. to hunt down the terrorists and wipe them out.

Reading this again thirty years later, it is still entertaining action fare. The usual Gold Eagle titles are far slimmer than this book, but the author is able to stitch together what're basically two and a half novels' worth of action in order to deliver the first "Super-Bolan" book. Instead of action-interlude-travel-action-interlude-travel as you have in, say, an Able Team novel, this book can just go from team to team to team and keep the action coming.

One thing I did forget about this book was how early on in the lives of the Able Team and Phoenix Force series this took place. I believe it's right around the same time as Able Team #6, and Phoenix Force #5. It was definitely a cool idea someone had to bring all three series together for a big operation, but it is also evident of why it wouldn't work as a formula for every book - the end battle alone, where all nine combatants are fighting, just doesn't give enough "screen time" to each of the characters, and winds up jumping around a lot in order to show us what everyone's doing.

Overall, pretty darn entertaining, and I'm glad to have been able to re-read it after such a long period of time and not be crushed that it wasn't as awesome as I'd remembered.

Book Review: Phoenix Force #3 Atlantic Scramble

Truth be told, I think Atlantic Scramble would have made a far, far better first book than Argentine Deadline.  There is an excellent introductory chapter, where we see all five men in their "native habitats"; Gary in the Manning in the Canadian wilderness, McCarter gambling and womanizing in Vegas, Encizo in bed with a woman, Ohara meditating, and Katz admiring Starry Night in the MoMA with a female companion of his own (which amuses me, as I was recently at the MoMA and was introduced to that very same painting by a female friend of mine - but I don't wear a beret...).

This chapter is all the introduction we would ever need for the five men of Phoenix Force, and could have easily kicked off the series, with a few mentions of how the team had been recently formed but had yet to go into battle together, yadda yadda yadda.  It would have meant less wasted paper and would have given us more action, while still telling us everything we needed to know about our heroes for the first novel.  Instead, we were subjected to a rather boring "...you were picked by a computer from six thousand candidates..." speech, something which utterly killed any forward momentum Argentine Deadline might have had.  Instead, we see in this book each of the men raring and ready to go into battle, their "civilian" lives a boring cover story for their "real" lives as Mack Bolan's "Foreign Legion", which I think is the best description of Phoenix Force I've ever read.

Did I say action?  Oh yes, there is action - quite a lot of action, in fact.  There are four solid action sequences in the book, each of them has a pretty substantial body count, and each of them takes place with a different scenario.  In fact, there is probably twice as much combat in Atlantic Scramble as there is in the first two books combined, and it is handled quite well; lots of chattering Uzis and Ak-47s, M-16s and CAR-15s blazing away.  Grenades are thrown, demolition charges are set and blon up, and lots (I mean lots) of bad guys are killed, some in pretty nasty ways. 

In fact, if there is one criticism about this book, it is that it can be a tad bit too nasty.  Thomas Ramirez, although I feel he saved the series from a rather boring death, also seems to have taken a few too many pages out of the Joseph Rosenberger school of writing about your enemies.  The Libyan terrorists are spoken of in terms that border on racially derogatory and often come across as just uncomfortable to my bashfully sensitive 21st century sensibilities.  Their swarthy features are repeatedly pointed out ("...brown as a donkey's ass..." gets used at one point) as well as needlessly remarking on one Libyan's "Levantine nose".  Rafael and a couple other Hispanic characters in the book also banter around some "beaner" humor; maybe Ramirez, presumably of some kind of Hispanic descent himself, was going with the old "I can make fun of my own people if I want to" excuse when he wrote these jokes in, and as this book was written almost 30 years ago times have indeed changed, but I do find it a little awkward, especially since although the Gold Eagle titles are merciless on the various hero's enemies, they don't often lean towards racially-oriented slurs unless it is part of a character's dialogue.

That having been said, though, the book is overall much better written, in my mind, than the first two Phoenix Force titles, with some rather amusing turns of phrase thrown in here and there.  Manning's Ferrari takes off down a curving wilderness road "...like a fuck-starved jackrabbit", which I found hilarious, and a Libyan terrorist gets "...sent to Allah-bye Land" by one of the team.  If I didn't know better, I would almost think that "Thomas Ramirez" was a pen name for Joseph Rosenberger himself, as his Death Merchant books are filled with this sort of humor.  Indeed, the "super-weapon" stolen by the Libyans, the Dessler Laser Submachine Gun, is a weapon that shows up in only one other place than I can find; a Death Merchant novel (I have read it, but the number escapes me at the moment).  Whoever Ramirez is or was, I think there is no doubt he was a big fan of the Death Merchant series, which was about a decade old by the time Atlantic Scramble was published.

From Atlantic Scramble onward, the Phoenix Force titles become much more readable, and I hope to keep passing these reviews along for some time to come.

Book Review: Phoenix Force #2 Guerilla Games

This time around, Phoenix Force is sent back into South America again, this time to rescue more kidnapped Americans - but with a twist.  Apparently these Americans had been held hostage ninety-four days before their company had ransomed them...and then captured by another group of Paraguayan terrorists.  Talk about bum luck, eh?  I was never clear while reading the book if the kidnappers and the other set of terrorists were related; this premise, like in Argentine Deadline, is a little wobbly.  Kidnapped along with the American businessmen are the pilot and co-pilot of the plane flying them out, which was forced down by a military aircraft (never explained).

But wait - there's more.  One of the hostages is actually an American intelligence operative whose been working hidden in the corporation for a while now, monitoring its international activities.  Why more of an effort wasn't made to get this operative (who is Phoenix Force's primary mission goal) during the previous ninety-four days of captivity, we aren't exactly sure.  Regardless, in goes Phoenix Force, back to South America.

The good news with Guerilla Games is that the group, by and large, spends the whole book working in teams of some fashion, so there's plenty of inter-character interaction and development.  Manning and McCarter work together along with a French ex-pat arms dealer named Sweetie Pie Sazerac, probably the coolest secondary character name in a Gold Eagle title I've ever come across.  Meanwhile Keio, Katz, and Rafael work together to acquire transportation out of the jungle once the hostages are located.  The banter in this book is much, much smoother, and you really begin to see how the characters relate to one another; Manning thinks McCarter is a bit of a rabid dog, while Keio and Rafael work very hard to not embarass themselves in front of Katz, who the whole team holds in an almost worshipful regard.

The biggest problem with this book is that there is almost nothing action-oriented until the last few pages.  So much time is taken getting through the jungle, finding the hostages, arranging transportation, and interacting with secondary characters that the book as a whole becomes very anti-climactic.  There is a very brief firefight at the end but beyond that, Phoenix Force doesn't fire a single shot.  I can give the writer and Gold Eagle the benefit of the doubt and presume this was done intentionally, to show that Phoenix Force can solve problems without gunfire, but given the rather anemic action quota of the first book, having your second book come off as even more tame seems a weak strategy in my opinion.

Overall I consider this a better-written book than Argentine Deadline, but it is still a weak offering, especially compared to Able Team #2, The Hostaged Island.  Fortunately for Phoenix Force fans, book #3, Atlantic Scramble, makes up for the deficiencies of the first to books - in a BIG way.

Book Review: Phoenix Force #1 Argentine Deadline

I recently got in a bunch of old Phoenix Force and Able Team titles, and I've slowly been chewing through them.  These Gold Eagle books are extremely fast reads; you could probably get through a PF or AT title in a lazy weekend afternoon or a week's worth of lunch hours with little trouble at all.  If you have an interest in these older titles, you can often find them through Amazon via third-party vendors (see the link near the end of the review).

I was never as much a fan of Phoenix Force as I was of Able Team in my youth.  There wasn't any one thing in particular to put my finger on, but that's just the way it was.  I read more Able titles, and maybe the greater exposure helped.  Either way, I wanted to start from the beginning in each series and begin reading them to see how each progressed and developed.  So, I thought I'd start with Phoenix Force.  My review of Able Team #1: Tower of Terror will appear in the inaugural issue of Hatchet Force Journal later this month.

Unlike the members of Able Team, who all came into association with each other through Don Pendleton's Executioner stories, Phoenix Force meets for the very first time in chapter 4 of Argentine Deadline.  Following the usual pattern for Gold Eagle titles, both PF and AT, the crisis develops in the first couple of chapters, and then the main characters become involved.  Although that's usually okay when you know who they are going to be, doing this for the first PF title, when we've never met the characters before as we had with Able Team, seems a little weird to me.

This is coupled with the way the team is introduced.  There's about two dozen pages of "You're all the best, and we want you to do all this secret stuff.  If you don't want to, bye.  Oh, and even though you JUST met, there are people who need saving in just a couple of days or they are all dead, and it's entirely up to you.  No pressure or nothin'".

I know we need to get the story moving along, but having Phoenix Force go from never having met each other before to working together in the field twenty-four hours later just doesn't work for me.  No real-world anti-terrorist organization would throw together a team of five different men from five different countries, two of whom get into a brawl five minutes into their introductions, without weeks if not months of training and acclimation to each other's methods and abilities.

What further drags the book down is that, in order to give each individual some spotlight time, each member of the team immediately splits off once in-country, so we can dedicate a chapter or two to their abilities and point of view.  A noble effort, but it also wastes the entire middle third of the book, and most of the "action" is at most a paragraph or two.  Two of the characters also immediately get their asses kicked, which further complicates the plot, as one needs to be rescued and the other spends a whole chapter dealing with a bad blow to the head.  It's an enormous waste of paper in my opinion, and having them alone and not interacting with each other means less inter-character devlopment, which is so critical to these sorts of "kill team" type books.

To further frustrate matters, I found the plot of this book needlessly complicated, and just kind of boring.  Some Americans get kidnapped while on an "academic retreat" - who takes an academic retreat to Argentina?  Apparently their last retreat was in NYC; maybe they should have gone to Vegas instead.  It's also pointed out that none of them have any money or collatoral to be ransomed with, something the kidnappers screwed up on (they were mistaken for "wealthy American business people").  Apparently this bunch of academic paupers could still find the cash to fly down to another continent to have their meeting.

All in all, this book is a little weak for a "#1".  However, it's worth reading if you are a fan of the Gold Eagle titles, as it's the first in its series and helps lay the ground work and backstory for the other characters.  I still definitely think it could have been handled better.  I'm reading the first Able Team book now, and the quality is considerably higher - it helps tremendously that Pendleton had already fleshed out the characters and established their working dynamics before the series began.

You can probably pick up Argentine Deadline for a few bucks off of an Amazon retailer.  If you're interested in these titles, pass on the next iced mocha, and spend the cabbage on  a couple of these instead.  They make for great back-pocket summer reading.

Buy Argentine Deadline Phoenix Force #1 Through Amazon Here.