Post by PMP Webmaster on Apr 20, 2005 12:47:37 GMT -5
I picked this book up for $1.50 a couple of weeks ago in a used book store. I'd seen the series before several times, but it just looked unappealing. The photo of the poor unfortunate who's being depicted as "Joe Gall" looks like someone crammed his head into running KitchenAid mixer for a few minutes. To top it off, the blurb on the back of the book is pretty bland.
Nevertheless, I gave it a try, and I was pleasantly suprised. It read like one of the older James Bond novels, but it was a lot grittier and much more...dare I say it? Realistic. This guy was just an "operator", not an invincible superspy. And while there's some action, it's not pile-of-corpses-crazy like some pulps.
I need to read a few more of these to form a better opinion, but I'd defnitely say that this is "good" pulp, and I've found a lot of the older stuff from the 60's and early 70's tends to be a lot more interesting and less gratuitous than the later material out there.
