PUBLISHED: 1972.
WRITTEN BY: Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy.
THE PLOT: Someone has devised a machine capable of stopping earthquakes — or starting them. They’re using it to blackmail a California town, and if their scheme succeeds, the whole state is next to go.
BODYCOUNT: 21. Most at the hands of the villains, by a small majority. Best death: Remo runs a mafioso through an automatic car wash.
THE VILLAINS: Dr. Silas Forben, a.k.a. “Dr. Quake”, a renegade geologist (although it’s a bit murky as to whether he was truly behind the scheme); his two Mansonesque daughters, Jacki and Jill Forben, who spearhead the blackmail scheme; and the Beverly Hills mafiosi Don Fiavorante Pubescio and his henchmen, Gummo “The Pipe” Barussio and Manny “The Pick” Musso, who try to take over the earthquake protection racket. Interestingly, Remo misreads who’s behind the whole scheme from the very beginning, and holds more wrath for the mafiosi, who took out the man he’d originally pegged as the bad guy, than for the Forben Family.
EMBARRASSING SEX SCENES: One. Although this was far enough into the series that the always-fun Remo/Chiun relationship was getting really fleshed out, it wasn’t far enough that the writers had gotten bored with pandering stroke material, and we get a doozy here between Remo and the Forben twins. There is a funny bit where the girls invite Chiun to join them for a romp, and he refuses, saying “The last woman I had I was twelve years getting rid of.”
SATIRICAL TARGETS: Most of it’s pretty mild here, with a few cheap shots at the liberated Manson-feminist Forben twins on the one side and the homophobic, anti-Semitic southern sheriff on the other. However, since most of the action takes place in California, there’s some fun gags at the Golden State’s expense: Remo refers to the state as “the place where all the misfits of the world congregate, under the assumption that since they were going to be miserable anyway, they might as well be warm”, and Dr. Smith has a conversation with the President (then Nixon), who says he’s willing to pay the ransom to save California, and implying that it would be a different story if it were, say, Texas.
THE WRITING: Surprisingly good at the start; the introductory chapter contains this nice little piece of prose about earthquake country:
Every man owes God a life. California owes Him a disaster, payable about twice a century.
For those people not hurled hundreds of feet in shifting earth; for those not buried alive in their homes along with the fear-triggered refuse of their bodies; for those not deposited deeper than any gravedigger’s plan, these disasters are considered a simple geological adjustment.
There’s also some nice little psychological bits about Remo choking on his own disconnected hate; Don Pubescio is left open as an effective future villain; and there’s a good line about the ideal way of getting rid of the Mafia: stopping the manufacturing of Cadillacs.
CHIUN STUFF: Chiun (still referred to as a ninja here; this is before they really pushed the idea that all martial arts sprang from Sinanju) still isn’t a major character yet, but he’s got some fun scenes: this book has some of the first scenes of him chiding Remo for his meat-eating and “bubbling drinks laden with sugar” habit, for one thing. He also destroys the earthquake machine and notes that “nothing works in America except me”, and has a great bit where he throws out a AAA road map of California because it doesn’t have Korea on it.
THE VERDICT: The plot gets pretty lost towards the end, and while it’s nice to see Remo portrayed as essentially too dumb to figure stuff out (he gets some basic training in geology early on in the book and forgets it all by the fifth chapter), he does spend a good hunk of time wandering around aimlessly not picking up on obvious clues. So, plotwise, it’s a bit of a wash, but it doesn’t have too much exposition, there’s nothing extremely embarrassing outside the sex scene, and there’s a lot of funny bits. Let’s call this one a 7.0 on the Sinanju Scale of 1-10.
