I don't think there has ever been a spy novel written that didn't make at least one mention of some female character's "proud breasts." It's a description that has, for whatever reason, always amused me. Not that I don't think breasts are great, because they are, and very few people seem to really dislike them in general. But the notion of proud breasts, not of being proud of your breasts but of possess breasts which are proud of themselves, seems deliciously absurd. I guess it's just a slicker sounding way to say either "firm" or "big 'n' bouncy."

When it comes to proud breasts, Sam Durell does not disappoint. He doesn't actually have proud breasts himself, and men with breasts are usually not very proud of them unless they paid good money for the things. No, like all men in spy novels, we get to obsess over the rock-hard line of his jaw. Not really fair. Women get breasts and men get to obsess about them. Men get jawlines, and that's not nearly as fun to look at or read about. Breasts get kissed, caressed, and on occasion tweaked, while jawlines mostly get punched at.

But Sam Durell, star of this long-running series of spy novels, has a wonderful stone-hewn jawline, the kind of jawline you generally only see in comic books. Men with strong jawlines generally hang out with women who have proud breasts, and Sam encounters several.

Durell is different from another of my favorite pulp novel spies, Nick Carter, in several respects (though they both have superb jawlines). Durell is older, wiser, a little more cautious though that rarely results in him getting captured less. He's not nearly as sleazy as Carter, though there's still a fair amount of sleaze in the stories. No one wants to read clean, wholesome spy novels, after all. No one ever got excited about a spy who is trying to track down a missing Burpee's flower seed shipment and is accompanied by a demure Christian woman in a calf-length skirt and thick sweater. The Sam Durell stories generally have less sex, more action and espionage, which give them a nice balance after reading a Nick Carter book, where the guy can hardly keep his pants on long enough to save the world.

In this story, which could have the greatest title ever in the history of any and all written accounts, Sam Durell, aka "The Cajun," is strongly encouraged to volunteer his services to one of the richest men in the world. The strong encouragement comes from Durell's boss, your standard issue "old guy in charge of the most elite secret agency in the United States." These guys are always named Hawke or Arch Angel or Mr. Falcon. I've noticed that good guys are always named after the whole bird, and evil guys are always named after parts of the bird, like Talon or Klaw or Wings Hauser.

Durell is not all that excited about the mission, probably because he was about to go on a much-deserved vacation. It's generally the case that every spy story in the world begins with the hero's "first vacation in eight trillion years" being cut short by some national crisis or other. Plus, this rich guy is a grade-A asshole. Unfortunately, Durell isn't given much choice in the matter, so off he goes to see what this rich guy wants.

It turns out he wants a painting. A run-of-the-mill nude by some loser hippie. In fact, not only does this rich guy desperately want this painting, so do three other of the world's richest men -- one from China, one from Turkey, and one from Germany, all of them with very checkered pasts. The Chinese guy has tons of triad ties. The German has ties to the old Nazi regime. The Turkish guy -- well, I can't really remember, but I bet he had something to do with opium. Why would these four guys want a cheap-ass nude painting you could probably get at some arts and crafts jamboree down at Haight-Ashbury? The answer is fairly obvious of course. Hidden on the canvas underneath the painting is an equation that could, if used properly, unleash untold amounts of power. Or so they think. No one is sure exactly what the equation will unlock. All they know is that it will be big, and they want to control it, whatever it may be.

The young scientist who derived the formula deemed it too powerful for any person to possess, so rather than just erase it, he had it put on the canvas then hidden under the painting. Since the scientist was working for the rich guy, by law he had to turn the formula over. It all became a moot point when the four daughters of the four rich guys banded together to stop their own fathers and stole the painting. Got it all so far? Good, because that's just the beginning.

Durell quickly tracks down, or is tracked down by, the four daughters, each of whom dress skimpily and have proud breasts, although the German daughter has not only proud breasts, but the proud breasts of a Valkyrie. She is, of course, the most fiery, the toughest, and probably the most attractive and interesting. Unfortunately, the American girl, Susan, who is a dippy spoiled rich hippie wannabe (like most people who adopt the hippie lifestyle) is the main character out of the daughters. The Turkish girl gets killed pretty quickly, and her father subsequently loses heart in the little scheme. The Turkish girl gets killed because besides the rich guys, some other shadow organization is trying to get a hold of the painting, and as the story progresses, Sam Durell discovers that it is his old ultra-super-duper arch-nemesis, Madame Fong.

Finding, losing, then trying to recover the painting takes Durell and his three newfound female sidekicks from the lush subtropics of Florida to a series of "pleasure islands" run by Madame Fong off the coast of Singapore. Along the way, one of the daughters will prove to be in cahoots with Madame Fong, but for every girl he loses, Durell will pick up a new one. He meets up with a beautiful Asian-American girl who is working as an escort on Fong's island, and then of course, in typical spy fashion, his attempts to save her result in her enduring more grisly abuse than anyone else in the book. Durell himself is captured, as is Susan. Of course, they strip Durell naked while they put Susan in one of those rays that makes you go-go dance until you die. What the hell? How many times am I going to run into this stupid weapon? This must be the third book or movie where someone uses a go-go ray. They never work. They're like those MASER cannons in all the old Toho monster movies. Just give up on the go-go ray already.

Durell, Susan, and the tortured girl eventually escape with the help of the scientist who came up with the troublesome formula in the first place. He has a terrible crush on Susan, but she always thought he was a real square. But now he gets all heroic, so they fall in love. Meanwhile, Durell must race to the jungles of Thailand where a cargo plane carrying the painting has crash landed. In order to help him beat Fong to the formula, he enlists the aide of some old Triad buddies, which makes the book even more interesting. It throws out some fairly accurate, fairly detailed history of the Triad societies, their origin as Ming revolutionary groups fighting against the invading Ch'ings who conquered China, and their eventual disintegration into organized crime gangs.

So it all boils down to gangsters versus commies in the jungle! You can't beat that for entertainment!

This was a pretty damn fun book. Tons of action and intrigue, some surprising twists and turns, and a decent amount of the arcane history and obscure facts that make these books such a joy to explore. I like the Sam Durell stories a lot. Like I said, they don't have nearly the amount of explicit sex that makes books like the Nick Carter series saucier reading, but they make up for it with more action. There's also plenty of grisly moments. The horrors visited upon the poor Asian-American girl are pretty intense, though unlike most characters who befriend and help out the super-spy, she manages to stay alive. All in all, a great little read that I would highly recommend to anyone looking for something a little more tasteful than the Nick Carter books but still jam-packed with violence and espionage.

Labels: Espionage