Nick Carter, Killmaster, hunts his old enemy Mr. Judas (actually escaped Nazi Martin Bormann) as Judas teams up with the Chinese to launch a deadly drug called Agent Z, in Peking, part of the long-running spy series.
As a teen, I read Nick Carter books avidly, and have decided to tentatively dip my toes back in to see how they hold up.
In this entry, Carter forgoes his usual array of nicknamed weapons and instead using an Astra Firecat .25 pistol and an incredibly handy pen that actually injects a serum that makes the recipient seem dead (and is used multiple ways at convenient times throughout).
This one was penned by Arnold Marmor, an old-school pulp fiction jockey, who writes in a terse, overheated style with a Nick Carter prone to anger and violence.
So terse, in fact, that the story goes that the book was too short, so instead of padding it out Marmor wrote a little short story to stick in the back. To my knowledge, this is the only time this was ever allowed to happen, and might have contributed to the fact that Marmor only wrote one Killmaster book.
The short story, The Tulip Affair, is a pretty poker-faced and straightforward account of a double agent called Tulip who Carter sets out to kill and chases around Asia a bit before finishing the job.
This is a second-tier spy novel I picked up in a big stash of Nick Carters somewhere, and read quickly.
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