When I was a kid, I greatly enjoyed a series of spy novels I found up in the attic- Nick Carter, Agent of Axe. Nick Carter was so badass, his codename was Killmaster! (I always wondered if he started out as Kill-Apprentice and worked his way up).
The books, which were written in the '60s and '70s, had titles like
The Mind Poisoners,
Codename: Werewolf,
14 Seconds to Hell,
A Bullet for Fidel and
Operation Che Guevera (lousy Cubans!),
The Casbah Killers and
The Arab Plague (lousy Middle-Easterners!), and
Vatican Vendetta and
The Ebony Cross (lousy Catholics!). Every book was packed with gruesome murder, exotic locales, beautiful women, and high-tech gadgetry (Nick Carter had a poison gas bomb disguised as a testicle, for example).
There were literally hundreds of these things, and I thought they were terribly sophisticated, with all of the graphic violence and explicit sex you'd expect from a good James Bond knockoff. Engrossing stuff when you're ten years old.
Just recently, I wandered into a used bookstore in upstate New York, and was thrilled to see shelves of Nick Carter books. I scooped up a bagful and took them home.
They're... awful. Absolutely, irredeemably, unreadably bad. Say what you will about Brown, Meyer, and Paolini. They're Dickens, Austen, and Hemingway compared to the anonymous authers of
Assassin Convention,
Zero-Hour Strike Force, and
Operation Sharkbite.
And yet... the ten year old who lives in my heart loves them still.
