THE KOREAN INTERCEPT by Stephen Mertz

The Korean Intercept is the fifth (by my count) novel Stephen Mertz has published under his own name in the past few years, and it is the first to hit mass-market paperback. It is an action thriller with more than a little attitude, and even a touch of originality.

The space shuttle Liberty is just minutes off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral when its crew is given the order to abort mission—they are to maintain radio silence, and let the navigation system take them down. It isn’t long before the crew realizes something is terribly wrong and as the shuttle makes its final approach the pilot takes the controls and overshoots the approaching runway in Hamgyong Province, North Korea. He also gets a short mayday transmission out before the shuttle’s power goes down.

In the United States the president wants answers. No one knows exactly where the Liberty went down and the crew’s emergency beacons are frighteningly quiet. The Koreans, while not openly hostile, are unreceptive to a U.S. led search party, and the Chinese are more interested in their own search than helping the United States. This is where the hero arrives—Trev Galt. He is the best operator the United States has and to make things even more interesting his wife is one of Liberty’s missing astronauts. It doesn’t take Galt long to take things to the next level and when he does, watch out.

The Korean Intercept is a modern thriller in every sense of the word. The writing is loose and stark. The plot is flamboyant, larger-than-life, and fast-paced. The characters are cardboard, but they fit the story and fulfill their roles perfectly as the plot steams toward the climax. The major difference between The Korean Intercept and most of its peers is the action. Stephen Mertz made a name in the men’s action novel market in the 1980s, and it shows here. The action is quick, sharp, and exhilarating.

If The Korean Intercept has a weakness, it is one shared by most works in the genre—it takes the story a little too long to develop as the major players are introduced, but Mr. Mertz infuses the introductory scenes with enough action to keep it interesting. Then it really begins to pop about a quarter of the way through and it doesn’t let up until the final climax when Trev Galt makes it his mission in life to rescue both the Liberty and its crew.

THREAT CASE by J.C. Pollock

I have been a voracious reader since I was a kid—I started with the Hardy Boys and moved on to Encyclopedia Brown and then somewhere between then and now found the espionage, thriller, and techno-thriller genres. And what a find it was. As a teenager my reading diet consisted of Tom Clancy, Jack Higgins, David Morrell, J.C. Pollock and a bevy of other thriller writers, which brings me to my point. I just finished J.C. Pollock’s Threat Case, and it was everything I remembered it to be. Cool, fast and engrossing entertainment.

Threat Case is Pollock’s second novel to feature former Green Beret and Delta Force Operator Jack Gannon. In it we find Gannon smack in the middle of a plot to assassinate the President of the United States. The drug war is having its affect on the cartels, and they want a little vengeance, so they hire a professional hitman to send Western leaders a message: no one is safe. Gannon is dragged into the mess when he learns of the murder of a friend who helped him through hard times, and it turns out her killer and the assassin are one and the same, and Gannon can’t believe it when he realizes he is hunting an old enemy who he thought had been dead for twenty years.

Threat Case was published in 1991, and its plot is reminiscent of the era—there are street gangs, cocaine, and Vietnam vets behind every tree. The protagonist—Jack Gannon—is tough as nails, and an all around great guy who not only has a sense of duty, but also has a very strict definition of justice and fair play. He is willing to kill, but the killing does not define him—corny sounding, but in its own literary sense very comfortable.

The plot is large: It begins in the Caribbean, but quickly moves to the Peruvian jungles and then on to Washington, D.C. and New York City with plenty of stops in between. The cast is large also, but the novel is at its best when Gannon is on stage struggling to stay in the game and stop the madness before it can change the world. He is a protagonist that, while not well developed, the reader can cheer for because he is representative of everything that is right with the world. He is bold, brave and honest as the day is long.

This is my second reading of Threat Case, and I enjoyed it as much, maybe even a bit more, than the first. It is the perfect length for a thriller, clocking in at 356 pages in mass market, and while it suffers the usual weaknesses of the genre—a little bloat, too much character description, and too much space to set-up the storyline—it makes up for it with heady you-are-there action, and a story that has just enough realism that it could maybe be happening right now. J.C. Pollock was one of the better thriller writers working in the Eighties and early-Nineties, and Threat Case is probably his best.

A little extra: J.C Pollock authored seven novels between 1982 and 1993. Then he disappeared from the world of fiction. His work disappeared at about the same time the genre imploded—one week there were dozens of new military-type thrillers, and the next they were gone. The short biography included with his books says, in part, that he: is a member of the Special Operations Association and the Special Forces Association and a contributing editor to the National Vietnam Veterans Review.

My question: what happened to this guy? He was an above average seller—most of my local bookstores carried everything he wrote up through the mid-1990s—and his work was a notch above most of the thrillers being written at the time. Is he still around? Does he write under a pseudonym—hell, was J.C. Pollock a nom de plume? If anyone out there knows anything about what happened to Pollock—and I know someone does—please send me an email. I would love to hear the story.

"The Techno-thriller" by William F. Ryan

I've been in a nostalgic mood recently, at least so far as my fiction reading is concerned, and that nostalgia has led me back to the novels of my youth. Technothrillers, mostly. I have read a few in the last couple weeks and even checked a Tom Clancy novel out from the library--I gave up on Clancy back in 1991 with his voluminous, over-technical, and down-right boring, The Sum of All Fears.

In my Internet perusing I found an interesting article about technothrillers in general, and Tom Clancy in particular. It was published by the venerable Virginia Quarterly Review in the Winter 1993 issue, and was written by William F. Ryan. Ryan asserts that Clancy is the father of the technothriller--an argument he doesn't quite prove--and that technothrillers are less literature (something I could agree with) and more propaganda than anything. Mr. Ryan captures the essence of the technothriller well:

The stories ring with patriotic fervor and a Manichean discernment of good versus evil. You always know your enemies. You quickly spot the good guys. You know from the outset which side will win because destiny commands it....The plots and crucial sequences always rely on advanced technology for waging war.

Mr. Ryan makes the obvious link between technothrillers and science fiction, but he also makes a more subtle connection between the technothriller and western. It is a disparaging connection--they are simple, the characters less than believable and very generic--but an accurate comparison. They are both uniquely American and very much rely on the upright morale code of the outsider to save and support society.

But what type of story doesn't rely on the alienation of the protagonist? And while it is true both genres can be insipid and stupid at times, I think it is an over simplification and a disservice to both readers and writers alike to label an entire genre, or genres in this case, as not worthy of an audience. Is The Hunt for October a classic? No, but it was original and really pretty damn good. While it may be difficult to cultivate a potential classic from the technothriller field, there are a number of westerns that have reached beyond their genre and become bona fide classics: Shane by Jack Scheaffer, The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie and many more.

Mr Ryan's views on the technothriller are interesting, but his analysis is skewed and biased; against genre fiction in general and military fiction in particular. In his final paragraph Ryan says:

What does all this say about the techno-thriller genre? Is it for fun and escape, or is it a bill of goods? Maybe it is both. Jules Verne couldn't be reached for comment. But I don't think he ever conceived a novel about science and propaganda.

I'm not sure propaganda can be removed from any art form, including literature. The authors biases, fears, hatreds and just about every other damn thing are bound to bleed into the storyline. It's who we are. A painter doesn't create a static, lifeless body, but they leave a portion of their humanity, their beliefs, on the canvas. Propaganda.

Why should a writer be any different? While we don't have to agree with the propaganda in any art form--and I certainly don't agree with the allegiance to authority, the inevitable wholesomeness of American culture and its war machine that most technothrillers espouse--it doesn't mean we shouldn't read it. Or enjoy it as a distraction. Instead it means we should understand what we are reading, what it means and its value as a vessel of perspective and morality. In other words, we should read critically.

Hell, I like technothrillers--at least the ones that can play out in less than 500 pages--and I don't support many of the ideas portrayed in them. I don't like violence. I don't think American firepower can solve much of anything. I have an aversion to authority, and I don't think the American military--or political system--is always right. But still, I like the books.

To read the article go Here

Combat #3 edited by Stephen Coonts

I've been in a sentimental mood recently. I read an Executioner novel, watched Crimson Tide and even pulled my boxed-up books out to take a look at them. And I loved what I saw. It felt like going to a favorite bookstore and browsing, only the books were all mine, and I didn't have to pay for one of them. Well, I paid for them once. Probably.

I've been in the mood for good old fashioned military fiction--the techno-thrillers of the mid to late-Eighties, and as I was going through my boxes and boxes of books I stumbled across Stephen Coonts' Combat #3--published in 2002. It is a collection of four novellas written by two old hands--at least they were writing technos when I was reading them--and two new writers. The collection is good, but not great.

The first two stories make the read worthwhile. Harold Coyle's Cyberknights is a cool take on the future of warfare--a team of elite computer hackers do all the fighting across the ether of cyberspace. The story is fast paced, exciting and, at places, thought-provoking. It reminded me just a little of the cyberpunk science fiction made popular by William Gibson and company fifteen or so years ago. A cool story with a unique angle on the thriller.

The best story in the collection is Ralph Peters' There is No War in Melnica. We follow Major Jeff Green--an observer in the Balkans--through a journey of genocide, deception and betrayal. This story gets at the heart of conflict--what it is, how it is, and maybe even touches on the why. It is one of the best military stories I have ever read. The characters are top-notch. They feel real, and their motivations are explored and examined if not completely explained. There is No War in Melnica is as close to pure literature as any war story I have read in the genre--it examines the human condition and shows us as wanting.

The final two stories left me wanting--Cav by James Cobb is a great example of why I quit reading technos ten-plus years ago. It is full of techno-mumble, very little story and even less characterization. The storyline was bland, at best, and I lost patience some forty pages into it. Flight of the Endeavor by R.J. Pineiro was better than Cav, but still on the far side of good. It is the longest of the stories at just over 100 pages, but it easily could have been cut down to seventy or eighty. It started slow, and built even slower. At times it felt like a 3,000 page monstrosity. I didn't like it, or finish it.

Read the first two, skip the last two, and you'll love Combat #3.