So what's Nick Carter up to this week? Well, it turns out he's heading to Syria and Israel in order to stop a mad Nazi general from tricking Jordan into declaring war on Israel by raiding a Jordan village with Syrian troops disguised as Israelis and committing a variety of horrific atrocities just like he used back in the good ol' days with the Reich. Standing between Gunther and the spark that could ignite World War III: one Nick Carter, Killmaster for the super-secret US organization AXE.

Assignment Israel is one of the least sleazy of all the Nick Carter paperbacks I've read. Heck, he doesn't even get laid until page twenty-five or so. Granted, Nick doesn't even appear until page twenty-five, but you take what you can get. After that introductory interlude, which really now is the trademark of every Bond and Bond wannabe story worth its weight in stolen weapons-grade plutonium, Nick only gets laid one more time, and neither experience is recounted in as lascivious detail as appears in other Nick Carter adventures, where there are things like evil sex rays and a Chinese warlord with a deadly double dildo orgasm machine that pleasures female agents to death.

What you get instead of the usual trashy sleaze is more trashy violence, a little filler (Nick's entire fight on a Swiss skiing slope goes on for quite some time and ultimately has nothing at all to do with the story), and dare I say, a little character development, as least in so far as these types of books develop characters. Specifically, I'm speaking about this story's tendency to allude to Nick getting a little older and slower instead of just always reminding us how hot and powerful and perfect he is (though there's plenty of that). Several times we get to hear Nick criticize another agent (a female Israeli, who luckily, is beautiful) only to make the exact same mistakes (emotion, etc) mere pages before or after. In a way, it almost humanizes Carter. I mean, we're not talking Matt Helm style internal monologues, but it's more self-examination that we usually get from Carter.

That said, the story itself flounders here and there while still managing to be a decent read. As I said, there's this whole long part involving Nick, a mistress, and a couple East German agents that takes up a big chunk of book and has nothing whatsoever to do with anything else. Likewise the constant mention of having to beat the Russians (no fans of Nazis, if you recall) to finding Gunther the mad German butcher. When the Russians finally emerge, they do so only for a couple pages and in a near slapstick fashion. They should have reversed the two situations, devoting a couple pages to the pointless thing in Switzerland and maybe making the Russians a little more involved in a plot that mentions them so often.

Gunther is, of course, a cartoon villain, as all evil ex-Nazi butchers are. Nothing wrong with that. What did surprise me though is that the book was rather even-handed in dealing with the Arabs. I'm not sure if that will hold true when I get to titles like The Arab Plague, but for this one, most of the Arabs are good guys, or at least willing to be paid off by the good guys, and even the Syrians seem to loathe Gunther and what the government boys in Damascus are ordering them to do.

This also strikes me as one of Carter's easiest missions. It was a snap to locate Gunther's secret desert lair and lead a bunch of sword-waving Bedouin warriors into combat. Nick even manages not to get captured and tortured at the very end. He gets captured by the Russians, but that only lasts a page and is pretty easy to escape from. And the female agent -- in what must be a first for these books, she not only avoid being raped, but is never once even captured. Her position as "Israel's best agent" is a little tough to swallow. Okay, it's completely ludicrous given her performance in the field, and before too long she's reduced to "stand here and radio for help while us men go fight." This is Israel's top agent? Man, give me Vadya the Russian agent from the Matt Helm books any day.

All in all, an average Nick Carter book that wins points for trying a couple things differently but loses points for having too much filler and a lack of logic in using the characters properly. Where as Mission to Venice was about as streamlined as a book can be without becoming an outline, Assignment Israel gets lost too often during the first half of the book and lacks any engagingly outlandish supporting characters. Not a bad read, but definitely not the best Nick Carter adventure waiting for you.

Labels: Espionage, Series: Nick Carter