Mon 2 Mar 2015
NICK CARTER – The Parisian Affair. Ace/Charter paperback original; 1st printing, December 1981.
I was going through of box of paperbacks the other day, a box I’d had in the garage for quite a while. It was time, I thought, that they should not be in the garage any longer. Some I’d sell on Amazon, was the plan, the others I’d donate to the local library.
This was one of them, and since I’d recently read and reviewed a Matt Helm adventure (check it out here), I thought I’d delay the fate of this one and basically read it and compare. The two stories were not the same, of course, but what, I thought, might be the similarities, and the differences between the story-telling.
This Nick Carter tale, to get that out of the way first, has something to do with an assassin, quickly discovered to be female, who is targeting foreign diplomats in Paris, all from underdeveloped countries. Nick’s job: find her.
Well, this established a difference already. Helm’s job in The Interlopers was to infiltrate a gang of Communists and do spy stuff like exchange passwords and pass notes to each other. The scope of Nick Carter’s assigsnment expands to world disaster proportions, politically speaking, real super-spy stuff.
Nick has a boss named Hawk whom he says “sir” to, just like Helm does. He meets a girl — actually several of them — but he goes to bed with only two of them, as I recall, and believe it or not — and this surprised me, too — one of them survives long enough to walk off the stage with Nick when the play is over, or that is to say, when the book is done.
Whether or not this lady shows up in the next book, Chessmaster (January 1982), I do not know. It would be surprised if she does, but I on the other hand was taken aback by the fact that she even made it as far as to the end of this one.
I think that both Matt Helm and Nick Carter are both playing catch-up in each of their separate adventures, but Helm is much more active in pulling the trigger on the bad guys as he runs across them. The Nick Carter adventure is much closer to a detective story than Helm’s, with at least four women coming into play as the possible assassin, three of them beautiful models. The book does take place in Paris, after all, and it’s a large plus that the author seems to know his way around and describes the streets and cafes very well.
Which brings me around to naming the author, not that you’re very likely to have heard of him: H. Edward Hunsburger, who wrote only this one Nick Carter novel and one other under his own name, Death Signs (Walker, hardcover, 1987). It’s a detective story in which a deaf man is murdered, and Mattie Shayne, a teacher for the hearing impaired, helps the police with their investigation.
But I digress. My conclusions? I enjoyed both. The Matt Helm book was better written, I believe, and more realistic, but in some ways, I think the Nick Carter one was more fun to read. Overall, though, I think realism wins out. I’d give Matt Helm a solid “B” and by stretching it a little, Nick Carter gets a “C.”
March 2nd, 2015 at 8:36 pm
I liked the original Award Nick Carter’s better with writers like Michael Avallone and others. They weren’t always great, but they had fun in them. The later Charter books depended on who was penning them much more, especially after they turned to a first person narrator.
No where near Helm, but they could be fun, and even literary writer Craig Nova did one.
March 2nd, 2015 at 10:19 pm
The Nick Carter: Killmaster series lasted a very long time, 261 books, published between 1964 and 1990. They were uneven; as someone in the publisher’s office told me once “Some of them are very good, some of them are not so good.” I read a lot of them and put together a complete set. Some of mine are signed by their authors. When they reached the 100 volume mark the publishers asked me to select one of the original dime novels to be published in a massive volume that contained that story (I chose “A Preposterous Theft”, one of the short stories from the New York Weekly of the 1890s) along with Mike Avallone’s RUN, SPY RUN (the first one in the series) and DOCTOR DEATH (the 100th one). I also wrote a short history of the Nick Carter phenomenon for that volume.
March 2nd, 2015 at 10:26 pm
I should add that the final volume in the series, DRAGON SLAY, says “Collector’s Edition! Last Book of the Series!” at the top of the front cover.
March 2nd, 2015 at 10:29 pm
Randy.
I had that 100th book and agree with your choices. RUN SPY RUN was often named the best of the Award series.
March 3rd, 2015 at 8:42 am
The Nick Carter series should be noted for having Bill Crider’s first book, THE COYOTE CONNECTION (1981, I believe).
March 3rd, 2015 at 8:45 am
CHESSMASTER is a Bob Randisi book, isn’t it? I remember reading it. There’s a Lyle Kenyon Engel interview in PAPERBACK PARADE in which he claims to have invented everything about the Killmaster series, come up with all the plots, and rewrote many of the books. I don’t buy any of that. I think his contribution was probably saying, “Hey, that James Bond is popular. We should do a secret agent series.” But I wasn’t there, so I don’t really know. My feeling is that most of the character came from Mike Avallone.
March 3rd, 2015 at 1:34 pm
If you ever spoke to Mike Avallone he would agree with you! He only contributed to a few of the early titles and then left.
I once spoke with Lyle Kenyon Engel on the telephone. I had to call him or he called me and I was in the phone booth at a Woolworth’s (remember them?) in Manhattan. Actually, Engel made the arrangement with Conde Nast to use Nick Carter first and then he (or someone) decided to tap into the spy genre that was so popular in the sixties. It obviously worked or the series wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did. Engel dropped out of the arrangement sometime in the 1970s and the publishers took over. Engel also launched two other series based on major Street & Smith products from the past, The Shadow and Frank Merriwell. Conde Nast was firmly in charge of all three.
March 3rd, 2015 at 2:03 pm
Jeff
You’re right about Bill Crider having written THE COYOTE CONNECTION, or co-authored it with a fellow named Jack Davis. You’re also right about the date, 1981. I remember reading it back then, but my goodness, that was a long time ago, and I don’t remember the story line at all, much less any details.
March 3rd, 2015 at 2:09 pm
James
Yes, Bob Randisi wrote CHESSMASTER, the next book following this one. I brought it up because I was curious as to whether or not the girl Nick leaves this book with is mentioned at all in the next one. (I won’t mention her name as she was one of the suspects.)
I have a feeling she was not, given the schedule the Carter books were on, one a month. I’m sure Randisi would have been writing the next one and maybe had it finished before he knew anything about what happened in THE PARISIAN AFFAIR. A solid sense of continuity between books doesn’t seem at all likely.
I could be wrong, though!
March 3rd, 2015 at 2:14 pm
Randy
I’m sure I once talked to Mike Avallone about his role in creating the character and all of his various (named) weaponry and the other members of AXE, or I read an interview with him in which he talked about it.
Either way I’m also sure that Mike took all of the credit, and he probably did. I doubt that Lyle Kenyon Engel really did much in terms of details in defining the character.
I also doubt that Mike left the series willingly. He was a very outspoken kind of guy, to put it mildly, and publishers began to find ways to part company with him very easily.
March 3rd, 2015 at 2:21 pm
David, way back in Comment #1.
Yes, there really were a lot of authors who wrote books in the series, and in fact two of them were women, which didn’t happen often in the history of men’s adventure paperbacks, namely Valerie Moolman and Gayle Lynds, whose husband Dennis Lynds also wrote a few.
I haven’t read enough of the series to say for sure, but I tend to agree with you that the earlier ones were better, the ones that Award did before they went out of business.
But THE PARISIAN AFFAIR is a good one. For me it was by chance that it was the one I happened to read, but it really is a detective novel at heart, with a minimum of gunplay.
March 3rd, 2015 at 2:38 pm
Lyle Kenyon Engel’s role in the series was as a producer, or as he called it, “a book packager.” He had a number of projects and hired authors to write the books. In our telephone conversation he said one thing he would not tell me was who wrote the books. Of course, since then people like Will Murray have identified many of the writers. (There may be a couple in the later years about which there is some doubt.) I have a book from McFarland that contains descriptions and bibliographies of many of these series and it identifies most of the writers of the Killmasters.
I was at a Mystery Writers of America cocktail party in the1 1970s and mentioned I was working on a study of the Nick Carter phenomenon. Someone standing near me looked up and said “I wrote one of the Killmasters.” It was Bruce Cassiday and later I arranged to have him sign a copy of the book he had written. I also got in touch with some other writers who wrote books for the series and had them sign their works. One of them sent me some other books he had written and inscribed one “At last, a real live reader of my books!”
March 3rd, 2015 at 2:44 pm
CHESSMASTER was, indeed, mine and I had NO knowledge of what was happening in the previous book, even though Hunsburger was a close friend of mine. Ed was a good writer, but it took him a loooooong time to write a book.
I did 6 Carters and I did tend to make them more like mysteries. In fact, in one I had him go undercover as a P.I.
March 3rd, 2015 at 3:47 pm
Good to hear from you, Bob. I’m not surprised to learn that you wrote the Carters you did as mysteries. Even a lot of your westerns can be read as detective stories.
I thought I’d see if I could find the titles of the ones you did, and not surprisingly Al Hubin’s CRIME FICTION IV identifies all six:
Caribbean Coup, 1984.
Chessmaster, 1982.
The Decoy Hit, 1983.
The Greek Summit, 1983.
The Mendoza Manuscript, 1982.
Pleasure Island, 1981.
There’s an online obituary for Hunsburger that says some more about his writing career.
You can find it online at http://www.bacasfuneralchapelslascruces.com/memsol.cgi?user_id=534798
He died in 2011, apparently of a head injury. He was 64.
March 3rd, 2015 at 3:41 pm
David (back in #4), The only part of the contents of that 100th volume for which I was responsible was the short story. The publishers chose to re-issue RUN, SPY, RUN. In point of fact the official #100 was not the 100th volume at all. Someone had miscounted. The early books were not numbered at all. Somewhere along the line the publishers began to assign numbers to the books. Another innovation was to have the stories told in first person. I believe that reissues of some of the earlier novels were revised to be told in first person.
March 3rd, 2015 at 3:55 pm
No, Mike didn’t leave the series willingly. Lyle fired him after he had written part of SAIGON, which was supposed to be the third book in the series. I think it wound up being the seventh or eighth one published after Lyle had Valerie Moolman finish it. Wikipedia insists that the first two books are collaborations between Avallone and Moolman, but that’s wrong. She didn’t have anything to do with any of Avallone’s books except SAIGON. That said, the entries she wrote on her own are all good to excellent. The first one I ever read, HANOI, was one of hers, and it turned me into a fan right away. I read all of them I could get my hands on.
Seems like I read not long ago (maybe on Joe Kenny’s blog) that Manning Lee Stokes, who wrote a lot of the books, claimed to be the one who came up with the idea of writing them in first person. Some readers don’t like the first person books, but I always did. I found the ones by Jon Messman to be especially good, like OPERATION SNAKE.
March 3rd, 2015 at 4:00 pm
The early Eighties is a good stretch for the series with strong entries from Bob Randisi, Bob Vardeman, and George Warren. And of course THE COYOTE CONNECTION. Jack Davis, Bill’s co-author on that one, was the brother of noir novelist Jada Davis, who wrote ONE FOR HELL, reprinted a couple of years ago by Stark House.
I wrote chapters-and-outline for a Nick Carter book myself, but it didn’t sell.
March 3rd, 2015 at 4:12 pm
Of the Award series the Avallone, Moolman, and Stokes books were usually good, later with Charter I don’t recall any really bad though I didn’t read many the last couple of years, but certainly ones by Bill Crider, Bob Randisi, a Craig Nova, or even W.T. Ballard had something extra.
Did they finally manage to kill the long running rumor Harper Lee wrote one, or are there some still claiming that?
March 3rd, 2015 at 4:17 pm
I haven’t heard the Harper Lee rumor in a long time, so maybe it’s finally faded away.
March 3rd, 2015 at 5:03 pm
I have to admit that I tried to read all of them as they came out, but gave up. Reading them in order like that it was easy to tell they were the work of different writers. A young man in the publishers’ offices once took the guidelines and tried to write one and found it was not so easy as he had thought.
March 3rd, 2015 at 8:49 pm
There is a nice database website called Spy Guys and Gals that matches book and authors for Killmaster Nick.
http://www.spyguysandgals.com/sgShowChar.asp?ScanName=carter_nick
March 3rd, 2015 at 9:58 pm
What a wonderful website! I could have used something like this years ago. I see that a number of the covers are from later printings. My set is made up of first printings because I bought them as they came out (once they started numbering them it was easier to do), but often had to drive at least 30 miles to find a newsstand or a book store that carried them. One regret is that I had to replace my signed copy of RUN, SPY, RUN with an unsigned copy when I couldn’t find the one Mike had signed.
March 3rd, 2015 at 10:09 pm
What I wonder about that website — and thanks, Michael, for reminding us of it — is how the fellow who is charge of it finds the time to read all of the books he does, much less keep adding to it seemingly several times a week. I’ve known about the site for quite some time, but looking at the home page where he lists all of the new arrivals, I haven’t been there in about six weeks or so.
Maybe that’s a good thing. Every time I look at the new arrivals, my “need to have” list takes a couple of quantum jumps. Upward, of course.
March 4th, 2015 at 1:06 am
Steve
It’s a great website, but he doesn’t find the time to read all of them. Not yet anyway, he is dedicated and he is trying though. I’ve contributed several which he then researched, and I’m sure others have as well. He does read the ones he can, but that would be a chore to read more than a few in every series, and some are obscure.
My contributions were Drexel Drake by Sea Lion, Geoffrey Mildmay by Burke Wilkinson, and Maxim Gunn by Nicholas Boving and soon some guy who looks and writes a great deal like me — could not very well leave him off could I?
March 4th, 2015 at 10:24 am
See, Steve, you don’t have to do it all yourself! You can assign “catch up” to other people.
March 6th, 2015 at 9:55 am
I rarely find any NICK CARTER books in the various thrift stores I haunt. And many of the men’s action series books are rapidly disappearing. I donated all my NICK CARTERs to SUNY at Buffalo but its not a complete set.
March 6th, 2015 at 2:09 pm
The last book in the Nick Carter series was published in 1990, which is 25 years ago. I just realized this. It’s a long time ago. A quarter of a century. It’s no wonder none of them show up any more. While the men’s adventure book has lasted longer as a genre, it’s also about to come to an end.
From http://www.mackbolan.com/
“Gold Eagle will be closed down in December 2015. All of the series belonging to Gold Eagle have been cancelled. Whether Mack Bolan will find a new home with a different publisher remains to be seen.”
I notice that you mentioned thrift shops as places where you hunt for old books, George. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. There used to be a paperback swap in almost every small town in Connecticut, each with their own arcane way of taking trade-in’s but with a small fee involved in the transaction as well. As far as I know, they’ve all disappeared. When exactly did they die out? I wasn’t paying attention at the time, I know that.
March 6th, 2015 at 6:07 pm
Steve, we used to have TWO paperback swap stores in little North Tonawanda. One merged with the other paperback swap store about 10 years ago. The survivor struggled to stay alive, but finally closed its doors last year. We used to have over a dozen used bookstores in Western NY but now we’re just down a handful that are on life-support.
Ebooks, the bankruptcy of BORDERS, and the decline of reading (and the rise of video) are just a few of the causes. It’s all very sad.
March 6th, 2015 at 10:22 pm
Steve and George, I’ll add one more villain to the end of the used bookstore – eBay.
The fall of men adventures genre parallels the rise of mass audience interest in romantic suspense books as sales in books have changed. The men adventure books can now be found as video games and movies.
Pop culture view of the PC content of the men adventures books have reduced their appeal to us old guys who read them when we were young guys. To hear young men criticize how sexist those books is almost enough to make a guy cry…but it doesn’t…cause we’re guys…and as we remember, guys don’t cry…we hit something..preferably a commie.
May 27th, 2015 at 3:00 pm
A comprehensive account of the history of the Nick Carter: Killmaster series was written by Will Murray and published in THE ARMCHAIR DETECTIVE, vol. 15, no. 4 (1982) Will answers many of the questions asked here …. it has taken me a very long time to find this and add it to the collected comments.