Chet Cunningham (1928–2017)

Fourth in the Penetrator men's adventure series.

This one concerns an almost uniquely '70s plot: a violent group of black separatists blows up a New York City subway station, then extorts millions out of the city government, threatening to blow up as many additional stations as it takes to secure the money they demand. They seem to operate with military precision and meticulous planning, making fools out of the police and city officials. Amusingly, they even demand that one of their ransoms show more be delivered by a midget. (It's never made clear where the NYPD found the midget to deliver the second ransom, especially since the first ransom's driver was a female undercover cop who was gang-raped and murdered.) As it turns out, the Chinese have been supplying weapons and training to the blacks, and have provided them with an extremely lethal biological agent that has the potential to kill millions. The Penetrator saves the day, never fear. He seems to ignore several critical leads early on in his investigation, only visiting them at the last second -- this seems to delay the inevitable resolution and is a bit sloppy on the author's part. The Penetrator is aided by a female government agent (possibly CIA, though she consistently denies this); she provides him with some critical information, but she also has to be rescued a couple times, so she's a mixed bag.

I've read about a half dozen Penetrators thus far and this one was slightly better than average, with an interesting premise, well-realized villains, and a fast paced lot. The Penetrator's shoddy investigation mars what could have been a quickly wrapped up case though.

Review copyright 2008 J. Andrew Byers show less

Y'know, everything on the fantastic cover (by the rockin' George Wilson) happens in the book. You cannot complain about that, because it involves a shark exploding. And I have read a good bit of pulp, so I have a high tolerance, but Derrick actually can write. He maybe drops name-brands sometimes and it is weird, but the death scenes are killer, he describes ladies with a fantastic, appraising eye, Mark Hardin (the Penetrator himself) has a pretty solid code of conduct and the toys—I am an show more unrelenting fan of 'splosions, and they are delivered in well-paced mayhem here. No complaints and passages worth reading aloud for their legitimate worth (as opposed to accidental funny). show less

This is the story of Johnny Utah, a Detroit gangster, and Mark Hardin, popularly know as "The Penetrator," who aims to make up for the law's inability to bring Utah to justice.

Utah's hobby is hunting, especially for big game. His greatest kick is to hunt down people -- kidnapped unfortunate innocents, as well as enemies -- at his lodge in the Canadian wilderness. The lodge is inaccessible, except by air. The victims are kept naked in crude cages at the lodge until released to be hunted down show more and killed by Utah and his cronies.

Hardin is a vigilante, pure and simple. He works outside the law, and although some in the law enforcement community are sympathetic with his goals, nevertheless he is wanted too, for murder.

Chet Cunningham is a talented writer. The plot is skillfully constructed, character development is good, and the technical quality of the writing is top notch.

Cunningham's plot, however, is something else. If you like blood and gore; murder, torture, and rape, then this is your book. Me, not so much.

IMHO, the author's technical skills rate 4 four stars, the book's plot 0 stars, for an overall average of 2 stars (out of 5). If this were a movie it would be rated R for sexual situations and violence.

I received a free copy of this eBook in exchange for an honest review. show less

Overshadowed by the attack on Pearl Harbor, and sometimes forgotten amidst the more famous campaigns of the Pacific, tiny Wake Island suffered its own sudden attack just five hours after Pearl Harbor on that "Day of Infamy." Under-defended due to strategic confusion and without reinforcements due to upper-command incompetence, the small garrison of navy personnel, marines, and construction-contract civilians endured constant bombing over much of the short conflict. With only a handful of show more aircraft and AAA, and a few dozen light machine-guns, the force managed to repulse one attempted landing and sink several ships in the Japanese fleet. Severely out manned and with dwindling supplies and no hope of reinforcement, the island was eventually surrendered on Dec. 23. What followed was almost 4 years of misery and hardship as those captured were scattered throughout POW camps in Japan, China, & Korea and subjected to untold starvation, abuse, and hard labor.

Cunningham's book is a fairly straightforward oral history, comprised of the stories of around 70 participants across the spectrum of rank and service. Originally started as a project to track down information on the author's brother -- a Wake veteran -- the book focuses exclusively on the military participants. Given the presence of so many civilians on the island, from contractors to the employees of the PanAm seaplane port, the book would have benefited from the inclusion of a variety of voices. Many of the civilian contractors, after all, participated heavily in the fighting, manning artillery positions and serving in the infantry and suffering the same POW experiences as their military counterparts. Still, the action on the island, and the horror of the POW experience, is ably and thoroughly recounted, and the book is capably organized.

At times, though, Cunningham's work suffers from some of the problems that plague so many oral history books - poor editorial control and narrative redundancy. Given the personal nature of the project's origin, it's understandable that Cunningham is loath to amend or rearrange much of the material provided to him. But that doesn't make the reading any easier. The stories Cunningham presents sometimes effect the overall narrative stream. While he should be commend him for feeling the need to include each and every Wake veteran's story, some of these submissions consist of nothing more than a few sentences, and often the material seems taken from a short, aimless telephone conversation or postcard-sized written response. To include late in the middle of the chapters dealing with the island's defense, for instance, a vet's 5 sentence summary of his enlistment, service, imprisonment, and return to civilian life, is to necessarily diminish the impact of the stories surrounding it. Including these featureless and non-descriptive summaries (provided by vets clearly uninterested or unwilling to offer a more descriptive or contemplative recounting) can make the story feel tiny and lost.

Thankfully these moments are few and far between, and generally appear in the first half of the book. Other aspects of the battle and its aftermath are vividly described in many of the transcripts: the shock and surprise of the war, the tiny, nowhere feeling of the island's defenders, the sometimes lingering recriminations of the veterans towards their captors. Certainly, the stories of the veterans' POW experiences contains the strongest and most effecting material (understandable given the brevity of the conflict itself (less than 3 weeks) compared to their term of imprisonment (44 months)). From the brutality of their captors to the back-breaking labor, this section of the book paints a bleak picture of the POW experience at the hands of the Japanese. Torture, abuse, the officer corps' abdication of leadership (officer POWs did little to no work and received dramatically more rations), and the daily struggle for survival all are depicted in great detail in powerful personal stories and vignettes.

Given the dearth of memoirs about Wake Island and the battle's brief and early occurrence in the timeline of the Pacific theater in WWII, Hell Wouldn't Stop is a worthwhile addition to both the library of military studies and to the canon of oral histories. show less