PUBLISHED: 1973.

WRITTEN BY: Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy.

THE PLOT: Previously unorganized, incompetent terrorist gangs are showing unexpected levels of competence — and malice. Remo must stop them before they disrupt a major anti-terrorism summit; and Chiun suspects that there’s more to them than simple mayhem.

BODYCOUNT: approximately 22. Most of these — around a dozen, all terrorists posing as Army officers — are wiped out by Chiun; of the remaining ten, seven are killed by Remo. Astonishingly, the terrorists only kill one person in the whole book, and it’s a baby.

THE VILLAINS: Putatively, it’s a gaggle of terrorist outfits, from a Palestinian splinter group to a Black Muslim outfit to a Chicano Liberation movement patterned after the Black Panthers. Really, though, they’re being manipulated behind the scenes by Joan Hacker, a wealthy college student and wannabe radical, and she herself is a pawn of Niuhc, the evil nephew of Chiun , himself a master of Sinanju and a sworn enemy of Remo’s.

EMBARRASSING SEX SCENES: Call it one-half. Sapir and Murphy were clearly getting pretty tired of the grind, so to speak, and truncate Remo’s seduction of Joan Hacker to a couple of paragraphs. Another sex scene, later in the book, is played entirely for laughs.

SATIRICAL TARGETS: This one’s awfully right-wing in its choice of targets. Arabs are portrayed almost exclusively as dupes and abettors of baby-killing, Vietnam is no big deal, American radicals don’t know how good they’ve got it, and Remo slips from his life-hating cynic mode to drop cornball assessments about how we oughtta just lock up all of these stooges. Still, there’s some funny jibes at garden-party radicals, and you can see the warring voices with the two writers: one black radical turns out to be unexpectedly erudite, one Muslim hijacker advocates reason and moderation, and so on. It’s the we-hate-everybody feel of the comedy that salvages the more racist/xenophobic moments, and likewise, it’s the humanizing of some of the villains that keeps the Destroyer series’ more intensely reactionary bits from sticking too far in the craw.

THE WRITING: For much of the book, Terror Squad is plodding and obvious. The terrorist attacks read, more or less, like all the other yawn-inducing slaughterfests of other men’s adventure series. There are some fun bits (like Remo’s casual, chummy conversation with a skyjacker), but really, it doesn’t kick into gear until the first hints that Niuhc is behind the whole thing. It doesn’t exactly improve all that much then, but there is a lot of ominous pseudo-mysticism (almost like the “ritual reluctance” to name the Trystero in Crying of Lot 49) that creeps in and keeps it entertaining.

Remo’s characterization is all over the map in this one, too — in particular, the way he treats Joan Hacker is far more sympathetic than you’d expect given how casually he murders other abettors of terror who are a lot more sincere — but it does establish nicely something that I think is important to appreciating the series, which is that he’s really an unlikable bastard who no one in their right mind would like. Pretty much anyone he gets involved with has reason to regret it, even if he doesn’t kill them.
CHIUN STUFF: Chiun’s got a major role in this, and not just in support — he’s much better characterized than Remo, and spends much of the book trying to tip Remo to Niuhc’s plans without telling him outright and risking his going off half-cocked. He’s also shown as both deadly and fallible, as he doesn’t catch on to Niuhc’s master plan until the last minute, but he never lets his doubt interfere with his being a jackass. He also has some funny moments, especially his book-long quest to visit Brooklyn and see the shrine honoring the birthplace of America’s greatest cultural figure, Barbra Streisand.

THE VERDICT: The wandering plot (early on, there’s once again far too many scenes of the hapless Remo meandering from one place to another, never quite able to figure out how anything fits together), a strange subplot about Dr. Smith undergoing a midlife crisis, and the obvious and partisan politics slow this thing wy down, as does the lack of any particularly fine prose — until Nuihc shows up. The presence of a major villain, though, with a sense of continuity, a bunch of creepy mystical trappings, and a lot of great dialogue, redeems it somewhat. Let’s call this one a 6.0 on the Sinanju Scale of 1-10.