I haven’t been
around the blogs much for a couple of days. Lana had surgery Wednesday to
repair a hernia. She was supposed to go in around 11:00 but it was 12:00 or so
before they took her to the operating room. She got out of there in 45 minutes
but remained in recovery for a couple more hours, partially because of the
hospital being overcrowded. Anyway, the important thing is she came through the
surgery well and is feeling much better already. She was feeling pretty sick and
nauseated from the hernia. Very glad to see her feeling better. It is hard to
watch her feel constantly ill.
Over the years,
I’ve gotten a lot of reading done in hospital waiting rooms. Yesterday I read
well over 100 pages in the book Footfall, by Niven and Pournelle. This is an
alien invasion tale and I’m enjoying it very much. I also finished a book that
I did not much enjoy. It was the first in a men’s adventure series called Hawk,
by a writer named Dan Streib, who died back in 1996 of a heart attack. This
particular volume was entitled “The Deadly Crusader.”
According to SpyGuys and Gals, Streib wrote all fourteen books in this series over a two year
period, 1980 and 1981. This is what I call a Men’s Adventure novel and it has
the trappings of its era. I often enjoy this type of book, but have to judge
this particular incarnation as sub-par in most respects. I thought the work had
a relatively promising premise and a decent start, but it lost me pretty early
and I ended up just scanning the last two-thirds of the book. I can’t recommend
it at all and won’t be reading any more of the series myself. In addition, I’ll
have second thoughts about picking up other books with Streib’s name or
pseudonyms on them. According to Amazon, Streib
also wrote romance novels as Lee Davis Willoughby, and other adventure
tales under the names J. Faragut Jones and Jonathan Schofield.
The plot of the
story has some interesting elements. Michael Hawk, who is an investigative
reporter, has just been released from a Soviet prison and is relaxing aboard a
cruise ship to Greece when he discovers a mysterious yacht anchored at one of
the islands. He decides to find out the story behind it. Predictably, all hell
breaks loose. However, the character of Hawk is not particularly well drawn. He
seems to alternate between periods of mastery and incompetence.
Finally, and
critically for me, the writing is just godawful in many places. There’s no
other way to say it. I imagine a lot of this came from pumping out 14 Hawk
books in two years, plus whatever else he was writing. There are plenty of
decent lines so I’m sure it’s a matter of rushing and not anything to do
specifically with his writing skills. Anyway, here’s a little sample, from page
109, of “The Deadly Crusader.” I've taken out the paragraph breaks but the
words are quoted exactly.
"A rifle
slug clanged metallically into the boat's exposed gas tank, leaving a hole to
squirt out the explosive fluid and send it running directly toward the hot,
protesting engine. Hawk stared at it, then compressed the coiled muscles in his
legs for the jump. The gas tank exploded with a roar that splintered the
already battered craft. A flying hunk of wood cracked Hawk on the base of the
skull and he felt unconsciousness trying to relieve the pain. He wanted to
scream at his own brain."
