Mission to Venice is one of the simplest, A-to-B Carter stories I've read. Nick gets an assignment -- go to Venice, find a missing atomic bomb, and kill the foreign agent before that agent finds it. There are no subplots to get in the way, none of the weird digressions into bits of obscure history that often pepper the stories. For this type of book, there's really noting at all wrong with this streamlined simplicity. I generally measure the length of a pocket paperback in terms of the number of train rides it takes me to finish reading. In the case of Mission to Venice, it was four rides -- two into the city, two back home, each lasting about twenty or twenty-five minutes. In other words, you can actually read this book in its entirety in less time than it would take you to watch a movie adaptation of the same book. This makes it -- and just about all Nick Carter and other 60s/70s espionage potboilers -- absolutely perfect for a mass transit commute.
This one is less perverse in its sexual content than many of the other Nick Carter adventures, but when you take into account the fact that some of the plots include an evil Communist Chinese sex ray (The Red Rays) and an insidious plan to flood the entire western world with degenerate pornography (The Devil's Cockpit), then being less twisted than most Nick Carter novels still leaves plenty of wiggle room for explicit sexcapades, which here begin on page one and continues with an adventure that allies Nick with an international prostitute who his helping him get close to a Yugoslav agent with a voracious sexual addiction. The entire finale of the book, including shoot outs, fist fights, Tommy guns, and a chase scene through a water-logged cemetery island, finds Nick Carter entirely naked for the duration.
Mission to Venice delivers exactly what it should: cheap, briskly paced, trashy action with some sex, plenty of violence, and a no-nonsense plot that, while completely free of any sort of complexity, keeps you interested, though considering that you can read the book in just under an hour, I guess sustaining your interest isn't really that big an accomplishment.
Labels: Espionage, Series: Nick Carter
