Danny Black 5: Warlord by Chris Ryan

[ripper]

Danny Black 5: Warlord by Chris Ryan (Coronet, 2017)

Blurb:

On the border of the United States and Mexico, a war is raging that can never be won by conventional means.

The drug cartels are rampant. Their victims number in the tens of thousands. Men, women and children are butchered in the most obscene ways imaginable. Of all the cartels, the most violent is Los Zetas. Originally made up of former Mexican special forces turned bad, they are perhaps the most ruthless and highly trained criminals in the world.

Which is why only the most ruthless and highly trained operatives can ever hope to be a match for them.

Enter the Regiment.

When the CIA reaches out to the British military for help, SAS legend Danny Black and his team are despatched to give the Zetas a taste of their own medicine. Working deniably and under the radar, their mission is to sow death and mayhem among the cartel, and to coax out from hiding their elusive leader, the iconic Z1.

But as Danny is about to find out, the arm of the cartel is long, their sickening strategies underhand and brutal. And in the dog eat dog world of this clandestine, bloodthirsty war, nothing is ever quite as it seems.

It will take all the SAS team's skill to break through to the heart of the cartel. And even that might not be enough...


Number 5 in Chris Ryan's Danny Black series. Ryan, like his perhaps more famous colleague, Andy McNab, was a member of 22 SAS and had a long and distinguished career. Also like McNab, he turned to writing thrillers after his military service ended. Danny Black is the latest of his protagonists. Black is a serving member of 22 SAS. He has a disfunctional family: he rarely sees his daughter, his brother is a drug addict and small-time criminal, and his ex-Para father is frail and disabled. Unlike McNab's Nick Stone series and Ryan's earlier Geordie Sharpe books, which were written in first person, the Danny Black series is written in third person.

As the blurb describes aptly, in this volume Black and his team are operating clandestinely in one of the most dangerous areas of the world, against a foe that is well-trained and utterly ruthless. As usual with this kind of thing, the pace is fast, the action brutal, and characterisation takes a back seat. The Zetas are truly evil, and it is satisfying to see them get their just desserts, though the ending rather shocked me. Ryan doesn't shy away from killing off seemingly well-established characters, nor the murder of innocents.

There is inevitable comparison between Ryan and McNab. I would say that McNab has the edge in characterisation; there's a definite advantage in McNab's Nick Stone being written in first person, though Ryan can jump between character viewpoints. Stone is also slightly more believable than Danny Black. McNab also shows more detail in the way of the tradecraft of an SF soldier than does Ryan, but, again, first person is an advantage as Stone can more easily relate his thought processes on how and why he is doing something.

Chris Ryan made a documentary series some years ago in which he trained with various police forces around the world, and joined them on patrols and operations. One force was the elite Mexican force tasked in opposing the drug cartels, so perhaps that was an inspiration for this particular Danny Black adventure. Another was when Ryan trained with a similar unit in Brazil, and that background also featured in a Ryan book, though not a Danny Black.

I enjoyed Warlord for what it was. It's not high-literature, but it isn't meant to be. Instead, it's a fast paced adrenaline rush with lots of action, most of it brutal. Warlord is the third or fourth Danny Black adventure I have read, with this one being perhaps my favourite.

[andydecker]

Thanks for the tip. Ages ago I picked an early McNab up second hand, but it couldn't grab me. I hasten to add that this is more my problem than the writing. The over-familiarity with the genre - I used to read everything from The Executioner to Jon Land - has a bit killed my interest for action-adventure.

But I always wondered about the difference in McNab and Ryan.

[ripper]

Jul 1, 2022 19:45:43 GMT andydecker said:

Thanks for the tip. Ages ago I picked an early McNab up second hand, but it couldn't grab me. I hasten to add that this is more my problem than the writing. The over-familiarity with the genre - I used to read everything from The Executioner to Jon Land - has a bit killed my interest for action-adventure.

But I always wondered about the difference in McNab and Ryan.

I used to prefer McNab's books to that of Ryan, though lately I tend to read more Ryans. I haven't read the last few Nick Stone adventures--not really sure if that series has now come to an end--the character must be pushing 60.

Have you tried any of the 'Soldier SAS' or 'Marine SBS' series? They were published in the mid to late 1990s by 22 Books with various authors contributing. The 'Soldier SAS' series often chose a real-life campaign in which the SAS had been involved, such as Falklands, Gulf War, Iranian embassy siege, Malayan Emergency etc, and wove a fictional story around it. The 'Marine SBS' series was more fictional, and there were fewer entries.

SAS fiction is quite popular here in the UK, as is that for Navy Seals in the USA. Is there a similar popularity for stories about GSG9 in Germany, Andy?

[andydecker]

Jul 2, 2022 10:51:57 GMT ripper said:

SAS fiction is quite popular here in the UK, as is that for Navy Seals in the USA. Is there a similar popularity for stories about GSG9 in Germany, Andy?

No. Absolutley not. Too violent fiction became a hot debated topic in the 70s, deemed harmful to minors which of course had unhindered access to books and pulps. Publishers who tried action-adventure got problems. The Executioner got 11 or so novels translated by a big publisher but after a few of them had to be pulled after complaints about the glorification of vigilantism and so on and the usual hearings which followed the sale to minors was prohibited by law. Which made distribution and advertising impossible. A few others got edited to death and self-censored. I think I wrote somewhere how the first Edge was basically re-written in large parts by the German editor, the same is true for the first Breed novels.

But war-fiction as such was always deemed beyond the pale in Germany for obvious reasons. Non-fiction was okay but could often not shake the taint of Nazism. But unlike crime or western - which at a time was translations only on the book market - there never were translations of Kessler and co back then. Or war comics. Nobody touched such things.

So there never was a project fictionalising the exploits of the GSG9. I remember the movie Who Dares Wins with Lewis Collins where there was a German character from the unit featured, but nothing like that was ever produced in Germany at the time. The proximity to war-fiction made such projects impossible, also there was no tradition of fiction like that, and it is dubious if it would have sold.

In the 90s the pulps died and crime and thrillers were phased from their own imprints into the mainstream. Of course one could find thrillers with the background of WWII always on the shelves and they sold, writers like Ludlum or Maclean, and there often was a bit of nip and tuck in the translations. But nobody would have marketed this as war-fiction.

As the old discussions became no longer valid over the decades and video nasties became more of a target, the content of the mainstream got stronger. In the 90s writers like MacNab were of course done, like everything else that sold on foreign markets. There even was a short-lived unsuccessful German tv-actioner called GSG 9 in 2008, but this didn't translate in print. I surely have seen an ep, but have zero recollection of it.

I took a look on what is currently avaiable, and to my surprise MacNab's Nick Stone series has been discontinued in translation since 2007. Chris Ryan is basically the same story. His series Extreme is done by a speciality publisher, his YA Agent 21 is still avaiable by one of the Random House publishers. The rest is either OoP or never was translated. I guess it doesn't sell well enough to merit the production costs.

But this a problem across the board and doesn't say anything about this particular kind of fiction.  For instance John Connolly is also no longer published in Germany for about 10 years. Anne Perry with her Victorian mysteries has a big enough fanbase so her new books are still published in translation, but the impressive Charles Todd novels never sold well enough and stopped after a few books. This list is endless.

[Dr Strange]

Jul 2, 2022 17:29:55 GMT andydecker said:

Jul 2, 2022 10:51:57 GMT ripper said:

SAS fiction is quite popular here in the UK, as is that for Navy Seals in the USA. Is there a similar popularity for stories about GSG9 in Germany, Andy?

No. Absolutley not.

The SAS have had a lot of peculiarly positive press in the UK when you think about it, which maybe is a bit untypical in the context of European special forces (America is a wholly different kettle of fish). I vividly remember the televised live World Snooker Final being interrupted to show the SAS storming the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980. Prior to that (when I would have still been at school), I remember a TV news story about a lone SAS operative in Northern Ireland being forced off the road by a car carrying 3 or 4 IRA members armed with assault rifles and submachine guns - and him then proceeding to kill them all with his service pistol. Maybe this just reminds us how good our press and TV news outlets were at keeping us all "on-side".

[andydecker]

Jul 2, 2022 18:28:05 GMT Dr Strange said:

I vividly remember the televised live World Snooker Final being interrupted to show the SAS storming the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980. Prior to that (when I would have still been at school), I remember a TV news story about a lone SAS operative in Northern Ireland being forced off the road by a car carrying 3 or 4 IRA members armed with assault rifles and submachine guns - and him then proceeding to kill them all with his service pistol. Maybe this just reminds us how good our press and TV news outlets were at keeping us all "on-side".

Funny you mention this, but I remember an episode of The Professionals which had a similiar plot. A wounded Bodie stumbles upon a German terrorist group in the country. I wonder of it was inspired by this. I only got to see this episode decades later as it was omitted in the first German run on tv. In 1978 this touched a too raw nerve.

Of course the perception changed so much over the time. A tv series like JAG would have been villified by the culture pages in the 70s or maybe even the 80s, at the end of the 90s nobody gave a damn any longer. I think I read that The Professionals also drew heat for its violence back in the day in the UK. Compared to a random episode of NCIS:LA it was rather tame and lame. (Except the Ford Capri leaving rubber on the street. Nobody did that ever so well again )

Sometimes I wonder about synchronicity. Just last week I watched a short documentary about the founding of the SAS in the WWII in Real Time series from Timeghost TV.

[ripper]

Jul 2, 2022 19:38:13 GMT andydecker said:

Jul 2, 2022 18:28:05 GMT Dr Strange said:

I vividly remember the televised live World Snooker Final being interrupted to show the SAS storming the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980. Prior to that (when I would have still been at school), I remember a TV news story about a lone SAS operative in Northern Ireland being forced off the road by a car carrying 3 or 4 IRA members armed with assault rifles and submachine guns - and him then proceeding to kill them all with his service pistol. Maybe this just reminds us how good our press and TV news outlets were at keeping us all "on-side".

Funny you mention this, but I remember an episode of The Professionals which had a similiar plot. A wounded Bodie stumbles upon a German terrorist group in the country. I wonder of it was inspired by this. I only got to see this episode decades later as it was omitted in the first German run on tv. In 1978 this touched a too raw nerve.

Of course the perception changed so much over the time. A tv series like JAG would have been villified by the culture pages in the 70s or maybe even the 80s, at the end of the 90s nobody gave a damn any longer. I think I read that The Professionals also drew heat for its violence back in the day in the UK. Compared to a random episode of NCIS:LA it was rather tame and lame. (Except the Ford Capri leaving rubber on the street. Nobody did that ever so well again )

Sometimes I wonder about synchronicity. Just last week I watched a short documentary about the founding of the SAS in the WWII in Real Time series from Timeghost TV.

Thanks, Andy, that's very interesting. I can understand why WW2 fiction is such a difficult subject in Germany, but the absence of fiction about the adventures of German units fighting terrorism in modern times really surprises me. Having gotten used to reading UK and US authors writing about Iraq, Afghanistan, foiling terror plots etc, I had assumed that there would have been something similar in Germany.

Sounds like Germany suffered the same phenomena of blaming mass media for violence in society as we experienced here in the UK: penny dreadfuls in the 19th century, crime and horror comics in the 1950s, video nasties in the 80s, video games in the 90s/2000s, rap songs, the blame game just goes on.

Yes, I remember the German GSG9 guy in Who Dares Wins. He and a US Ranger get mistreated by Lewis Collin's character during a training exercise as a ruse for Collins to get kicked out of the SAS and infiltrate the terrorist organisation.

I know the episode of The Professionals you mean, I think it may be from series 1.

[ripper]

That episode of The Professionals was Close Quarters from series 1. I recall the debate about TV violence around the time that The Professionals was first shown. Yes, nowadays the programme does appear fairly tame. Target got quite a bit of stick at the same time. It was a BBC series, really a clone of ITV's The Sweeney, with Patrick Mower playing the Regan character. Series 2 was toned down due to the criticism that series 1 received.

According to Wikipedia, The Professionals was shown in West Germany in 1981, with 14 episodes being deemed unsuitable for transmission, and those episodes were subsequently released on VHS.

[andydecker]

Jul 3, 2022 10:31:18 GMT ripper said:

Sounds like Germany suffered the same phenomena of blaming mass media for violence in society as we experienced here in the UK: penny dreadfuls in the 19th century, crime and horror comics in the 1950s, video nasties in the 80s, video games in the 90s/2000s, rap songs, the blame game just goes on.

Yes and no. After the war one of the cornerstones of the new constitution was (and is) the no censorship rule. On the other hand the view what was deemed suitable for kids was always fluid. There were and are regulations how to handle material deemed harmful to minors. It is a complicated process and rather unique in Europe, if anyone is interested in the nuts and bolts see here on Wiki. One must keep in mind that theses restrictions are only possible after the fact and depend on a lot of ifs. If there is a complaint by one of the youth welfare offices or affiliated organisations, if the board shares their opinion and so on. In endeffect in book publishing - especially the lower tiers - it led to a lot of self-censorship and even more second guessing. Always better to err on the side of caution.

Of course things have changed a lot over the decades. In the 50s Mickey Spillane got on the index list, so the publishers edited the novels, softened the texts, rewrote a few bits. At the time nobody was really aware of this, so nobody complained. Later in the 90s you got new translations of those novels without a word changed. Today I guess the question would be Mickey Who?

In the 70s the target became horror pulps - the crime and western pulps knew how to handle this before publication and had rules for their writers, but horror was new - then came video, like you described, the games, etc. Of course cultural ideas are terrible different. I remember reading that while in Germany Schwarzenegger's Terminator had a 18+ rating, the uncut version was shown in France or Spain on daytime tv. The casual OTT violence of British westerns or the American vigilante genre was an absolute no go here. Different strokes, I guess.

But nobody complained much about sex for a time, if it was sold up market, and sometimes it was left alone and sometimes not. Accidently I discovered to my surprise that in some of Marc Olden's ninja thrillers of the 90s which at the time sold really well some explicit sex scenes were edited. If you don't know the original you don't notice this. At the time the publisher had a lot of problems with an established erotica line, mostly terrible dry classic "literate" stuff. Thanks to the switch to a conservative government back then suddenly stuff like that came under new scrutiny, and dozens of titles were suddenly brought before the board. Which was especially absurd as a lot of those books were already 15 years on the market and had up to 20 printings. Now they had to be pulled. So I guess in editorial the order was to edit too explicit things in mainstram also out to be on the safe side.

Said mass market erotica imprint by the at the time no 1 paperback publisher ran up to 469 publications. But real porn novels were only distributed in sex shops and those novels cost an arm and an leg. In France there also used to be a lot of original freely avaiable mass market erotic fiction, sometimes not so far removed from Americas Beeline porn novels in content. (Ironically the Beeline novels were freely avaiable on a lot of International Press Stands at train stations in Germany at the end of the 70s, right aside Nick Carter and DAW SF. No system is foolproof). I can't remember any British equivalent of smut before the advent of the "tasteful" erotica from Virgin books in the 90s. But like so much else such books have vanished along with most of the sex shops.

Everything changes. Even Mary Whitehouse is kind of appreciated again as I accidently saw in a British article on BBC com. The mind boggles.

 

[andydecker]

Jul 3, 2022 11:39:34 GMT ripper said:

That episode of The Professionals was Close Quarters from series 1. I recall the debate about TV violence around the time that The Professionals was first shown. Yes, nowadays the programme does appear fairly tame. Target got quite a bit of stick at the same time. It was a BBC series, really a clone of ITV's The Sweeney, with Patrick Mower playing the Regan character. Series 2 was toned down due to the criticism that series 1 received.

According to Wikipedia, The Professionals was shown in West Germany in 1981, with 14 episodes being deemed unsuitable for transmission, and those episodes were subsequently released on VHS.

Thanks for looking it up. Cowley and his boys were a big hit on German TV in 81, especially Martin Shaw became a darling of the youth magazines. Lots of posters. But at the time there were only the two official BBC like networks, and they had strict ideas what was suitable and what not. Can remember that when those episodes came on video years later there was a long waiting list. And a lot of viewers were pissed that they couldn't get the same voice actors for dubbing.