I read this Nick Carter book second, primarily because I noticed it had the exact same cover as Temple of Fear only mirrored. That alone was enough to amuse me into liking the book. 14 Seconds to Hell is a lot more explicit than the other Nick Carter books I'd read, though in looking ahead to some of the titles I haven't gotten to yet, I don't doubt that it will be topped. The sex is frequent and written about in a pretty saucy, no-coyness-needed style. Not one for the kiddies, I guess. And then there's the torture machine at the end, but we'll get to that.

This time around, Nick Carter is assigned to stop a Communist Chinese madman from launching a nuclear strike against America, or Russia, or both. You may notice, as these reviews go on, that the villains are often Communist Chinese and are rarely Russian. This seems a bit odd at first, given that almost all the Cold War era rhetoric and mud-slinging took place between the United States and Soviet Union. From the "We will bury you" speeches of Kruschev, to the "evil empire" speeches of Ronald Reagan, it was always about the Soviets and the Americans.

So why are the Russians so rarely the bad guys in Nick Carter books? Well, because that's so easy, for one, and because I don't think anyone but a few crackpot heads of state ever saw Russia as a serious threat to the US. Two massive bodybuilders flexing for each other are not going to start a fist fight. It's the little, hungry guys you have to watch out for. Besides, everyone in power knew that Russia was, for most of the Cold War, bluffing. It's become common knowledge these days, and even the Kremlin has released documents attesting to it, but at the time, the general population of the US had no idea that Russia was, well, broke, and didn't have most of the capabilities it claimed to have. The Cold War ended not because Gorbachev led the people to a new way of thinking; the Cold War ended because Russia could no longer financially afford to maintain its bluff.

In the end, however, I think most of these espionage involve Arabs and Chinese and other people like that because they are more "exotic," or so they were in the 1960s. I mean, we knew pretty much everything there was to know about Russians, but no one really understood Arabs or Chinese. Arabs especially were at the forefront of current events, with the oil embargo, the Arab-Israeli war, and terrorism kicking into high gear. America's involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia was also making people more curious about Asia, so Chinese communists became much more interesting characters. Not only could we blame them for everything in Vietnam, they had all this cool culture behind them no one in America really knew much about.

Compared to them, the Russians were really nothing more than boisterous next-door neighbors. We made speeches denouncing them, but for the most part, America and the Soviet Union got along a lot more than they disagreed. Both of them wanted to insure their continued place as one of the two super-powers, and that meant keeping down upstart regimes like Communist China and the Arab nations. Thus the propaganda of espionage books often focused on "threats" that were not Russian in origin, because we already knew about the Russians. You could also argue that Russians were a far less terrifying enemy because, communist though they may have been, at least they were still white. You could argue that, and you'd probably be right, but I can only analyze the politics of a cheap pulp spy novel for so long before I start feeling silly about it.

Anyway, I bring this whole thing up because 14 Seconds to Hell features Nick Carter working alongside two Russian agents (female, of course, and twins -- and both are very, very horny) to stop the even more evil Chinese communists. Of course, Nick and the Russian spy twins spend a lot of time heating up the Cold War in their own special way, and as I said earlier, the sex in this book is pretty explicit. Not Hustler explicit, but you wouldn't want to read it to your mom.

The adventure starts in Hong Kong, where Nick meets his two beautiful, voracious sidekicks. It is in this part of the book that one of the true values of espionage pulp surfaces. Despite all the Cold War politics, sexism, and racism (which come more out of nationalism than actual biological discrimination), not to mention shoddy spy work, there are actual facts worth noting, little pieces of underground history and ignored things that are fascinating and surprisingly accurate. For instance, 14 Seconds to Hell has action taking place among the floating junks of the Tanka Boat People in Hong Kong.

The Tanka live in what amounts to a floating ghetto, a series of junks and sampans and rafts lashed together in the harbor. They were not allowed on the land, and no one really ventured out into their floating shanty town. It's a pretty unique and interesting piece of Hong Kong history that you don't hear about very often (you might remember a brief appearance by them in Enter the Dragon, in which Jim Kelly's character surveys the Tanka ghetto and compares it to the inner cities of America). What makes it even more surreal than the fact that, yes indeed the Tanka are quite real, is that these days, Hong Kong tourism companies try to pass them off as quaint attractions to be ogled by foreigners. Come see the happy floating Tanka people in their natural environment! That's tantamount to an American company taking out ads that say something like "Come see the quaint American Negro in his natural Cabrini Green habitat!"

Anyway, if you dig through all the goofy nonsense and adventure book stuff, there is quite a lot to take away from these books, and you get even more out of it if you take a thread and run with it. Another interesting thing in 14 Seconds to Hell is the action (of a different, more horizontal variety) that takes place in a rooftop shanty town. This, too, existed and probably still does -- an entire shanty town built out of plywood, tin, crates, and boxes spanning the rooftops of Kowloon City and occupied by thieves, the impoverished, and students. Reading the description of it here, and then reading its actual history in other books, it reminded me of the bridge dwellers in William Gibson's Dark Light and All Tomorrow's Parties. It seems almost identical to that idea, so much so that I have to think Gibson had heard of the rooftop city and used it as his model for the Bridge (especially since that book uses Kowloon as a motif for a secret cyber community).

Getting back to the book itself, their mission is a hopeless one: locate the missile base of the insane mad doctor, and blow it up before he is able to blow up Moscow and New York. You know, one thing the Russians had in their favor during the Cold War was that they had hundreds of targets to chose from. They could blow up New York, DC, San Francisco, Chicago -- plenty of places. If you're attacking Russia, you are pretty much stuck with Moscow. Nuking the Siberian wasteland is not going to win you many battles.

Of course, after much fucking and bloodshed, the trio of spies reach their destination and are, in accordance with superspy protocol, promptly captured. The insane doctor then introduces what has to be one of the most tasteless spy novel contraptions ever, the rape machine, which is a giant automated dildo that forces women to have orgasm after orgasm, non-stop, until they go insane. He likens it to a slightly more offensive version of the old tickling torture. You have to wonder about the authors who come up with shit like this. I mean, on the one hand, you can see where it works. If you've ever been tickled mercilessly by some thug, you know that it goes from funny and even somewhat pleasurable to excruciatingly painful, and probably does indeed totally break you down after a while. Same concept here, but in a machine that is lot more likely to cause readers in the year 2000 to throw the book down in disgust. Again, all I can say is you really shouldn't get all worked up over a thirty year old pulp novel no one even remembers.

Anyway, it all reminds me of a funny bit I read in a Remo Williams pulp novel, in which Remo amuses himself thinking about all the crazy-ass perverted torture machines in books and movies. Goofy creations of twisted nerds, he figures, since the greatest torturers in history, from the Huns down to the Nazis, only used one method: they hit you. A lot. And really hard. Or they kicked you. All that electrified dildo up the ass, skin-peeling midget henchmen, Ilsa-commanded sex torture camps, and other nonsense was just that. Professional torturers and interrogators just hit you.

But of course, the crazy torture methods and dungeons make for good stories, where as just watching someone kick a guy for an hour isn't all that interesting.

Once again, blind luck and coincidence combine to help Nick and his two female associates escape and carry out their plan in the nick (so to speak) of time. Of course, then they have to get out of China, which is made difficult by a general who is called in to track Nick down. The general is actually a pretty cool character, though in a movie he would definitely be the one to give the "this guy's good" speech. You know, when some lackey makes a comment about how easy it will be for them to kill Nick Carter, so the general guy has to give the big speech about how Nick Carter's whole body is a weapon and he can kill a man from halfway across the world and blah blah blah -- you know, I always figured the actor themselves wrote that part of the dialogue. Anyway, I talked about that elsewhere on the site. If you need a good example of the speech, you can pick up Rambo and note just about every one of Richard Crenna's lines.

The general represents the old school military man, a guy who is disillusioned with politics and Communism, and sees it all as nothing but a system set up to exploit the people and make a few fat cats rich. Democracy, Communism, all the same thing. All he wants is to catch a guy as good as Nick Carter (and we are assured that Nick is just that good, even though he always gets captured). Unfortunately, the book introduces this guy in like the next to last chapter, and he and Carter never actually meet. I think that was a major missed opportunity, but what can you do? Nick had already killed a hundred people and had sex about a hundred times with the Russian twins.

14 Seconds to Hell is not a good book for the easily offended, as it is far more extreme in many ways than many other titles. Of course, I reckon none of the Nick Carter books are good for the easily (or even mildly likely to be) offended. Those folks should just stick to, I don't know, whatever secret agent goes around talking about his feelings, empowering women, and how the Cold War could have been ended with hugs and cookies. However, if you aren't the type to be offended by pulp, and lord knows nothing make-believe offends me, because I am able to tell the difference between reality and fiction. Once you get over that, 14 Seconds to Hell is among the more violent, explicit, and interesting Nick Carter books so far, in part because of it's look into the underworld and underbelly of Hong Kong. And yeah, all the sex and killing doesn't hurt, either.

Labels: Espionage, Series: Nick Carter