Overkill is the first adventure of Super-secret-agent John Keith. I'm sure the super means that the agency he works for (the American Policy Executive, or A.P.E.) is super secret and that John Keith is a super agent. In fact, A.P.E. is so secret that Keith doesn't even have anyone to report to. Agents can pretty much do as they please, though apparently some of them are assigned to be sleepers.
In this adventure, Keith is trying to prevent the Chinese from arming an Albanian missile with an atomic warhead and shooting it at . . . well, who knows? It doesn't matter. What matters is that they must be stopped. Keith is working with the KGB, though he hates them, and of course he falls in love with a beautiful Chinese woman, who might as well have "I Am Going to Die" tattooed on her forehead. The ending, with its attitude toward the dangers of an atomic explosion in the atmosphere is ludicrous by today's standards. Daniels moves things right along, though, and the local color is well done in both Russia (where the story opens) and Albania.
Daniels was a prolific writer, beginning in the pulp era. He could, and did, write just about anything. His wife was Dorothy, and Norman is suspected of having written many gothics as Dorothy Daniels. There's not much information on Daniels on the 'Net, so it's hard to sort out just what he did and didn't write. At any rate, his work is usually solidly professional and often even better than that.
John Keith went on to star in five or six more novels, all of them after the second having the word Operation in the title. I read some of them long ago, so I must have liked them at least a little.
6 comments:
I remember reading some of those Norman Daniels' spy novels back in the 1970s (I was little behind). They are nowhere to be found now.
Daniels moved effortlessly into the paperbacks after leaving the pulps. I enjoyed his Man From A.P.E. novels, along with his two novels featuring the Baron of Hong Kong, just a remake of his Man From A.P.E. His main claim to fame were such pulp titles as The Phantom Detective and The Black Bat, but he wrote damn near everything back then. You can read his pulp bibliography in my studies of The Phantom Detective Companion and The Black Bat Companion, published by Altus Press. Learn about the missing Black Bat story that became a paperback original, with the Black Bat dropped. Oh, I have a few copies of The Man From A.P.E. for trade.
Did write a few G-8 stories, too? There really needs to be more written about him.
No, Robert Hogan wrote all the G-8s. Daniels wrote aviation, science fiction, mystery, western, and the heroes. He told me that Dorothy would edit and clean up all his stories, and they may have even collaborated on some romance and other stuff, but we're not sure. One of those Man From A.P.E. stories read a little strange for Norman, and may have actually been written by Dorothy. But, again, we don't have any records of their collaborations.
That's really too bad. I'd love to know if he and Dorothy wrote all those gothics together or if she did them all herself.
I am glad to see that Norman Daniels is getting a little attention. I just finished scanning a story for Pulpgen.com of his by the title of "Racket Buster" from 1941. One of man many actioned packed stories he wrote for the pulps. Thanks for the review of Daniels' novel. I haven't read any of that series yet, but I might look for the books.
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