The Red Menace Series

WHO IS THE RED MENACE? Throughout the 1950s this was the number one question from Moscow to Beijing and in every communist palace and malaria-ridden backwater in between. The mysterious masked figure was a shadow and a whisper. For the Kremlin and its fellow travelers he was a damnable monkey wrench tossed into the gears of the not-so-glorious worldwide revolution. Wherever Reds schemed, the Menace was there to set things right. And then, just like that, 1960 came and the whisper grew silent. Twelve years later, Podge Becket, computer tycoon and security expert, thinks he's hung up his mask and cape for good. He escaped the spy game while still a young man, and none but a select few know about his long-dead secret identity. But into his restless retirement steps a ghost from his past, a bitter Russian colonel with nothing to lose and the means to wreak worldwide destruction. Aided by his partner, brilliant inventor and physician Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright, the Red Menace is dragged back into the hero game. But it's a whole new world out there, and if the Menace doesn't watch his step the swinging Seventies might just find him RED AND BURIED!

RECIPE FOR DISASTER! Take one psycho beauty hell-bent on revolution. Add millions in illicit cash. Stir in one counterculture army. Simmer in a political pressure cooker until it explodes into America's streets. A devastating attack in the heartland leaves a stunned nation reeling. Claiming credit for the unprovoked strike is a new radical group called the People's Brigade. Even as bodies are being pulled from the rubble, this heretofore unknown group loses no time launching assault after assault in cities across the country. America's intelligence agencies are flying blind and can only stand helpless as the violence escalates...until a desperate MIC tosses Patrick "Podge" Becket and Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright into the fray. The two men quickly uncover a scheme that links the People's Brigade to underground radical groups in every state in the union, all answerable to a lovely young sociopath called Daisy. The gal's got looks, brains, money and an army of men willing to die for a cause. Our side has the Red Menace and Dr. Wainwright. The bad guys haven't got a chance.

RED IS THE NEW GOLD There's more than meets the eye when inmates riot in a West Coast maximum security prison. What could transform men into wild beasts? Turns out the dead prisoners are guinea pigs in a larger scheme, and Washington sends in the only two men who can deal with the sinister plot. Patrick "Podge" Becket and Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright trace a trail of bodies to a crazy California cult whose demented leader welcomes all who seek truth. But enlightenment costs, mainly in the form of cold, hard cash into the bank account of failed writer and self-proclaimed High Star Admiral R. Gunn Hallifax. Hallifax's tall tales of out-of-this-world enemies have the gullible lining up in droves to join his church, and his disciples become an earthly army for their leader's terrestrial aims. There's nothing otherworldly about murder and mayhem. It's up to the Red Menace and Dr. Wainwright to discover just what the cult has to do with the head honcho of a down-on-its-luck perfume company, a Russian hit squad, a sexy Hollywood superstar, and a threat to all America. No matter what the stars have to say about it, here on Earth all the players quickly learn that even in the Golden State blood runs Red. Just like everywhere else.

A SAFE BET? Official Washington is in an uproar when late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's top secret safe is found and then promptly goes missing. Rumor has it that Hoover was infamous for collecting files on all the nation's powerful movers and shakers, so there's no telling what damning information exists within the high-tech vault. There's usually only one man MIC calls for dire situations like this, but this time it's not the Red Menace. It seems Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright designed the safe years before so that only Hoover could open it. Flash-forward to a post-Hoover world where the billion dollar blackmail question becomes: can whoever stole the safe spring the lock? When Wainwright says it's a very definite maybe the whole world turns upside-down. The race is on for the big black box that holds America's future, and the Red Menace and Dr. Wainwright must outrun, outfight and outfox the Mob, a doomsaying environmentalist, every nation on earth desperate to watch the U.S. bleed, as well as an ancient enemy determined to bust the safe and a certain brilliant doctor's world wide open. There's no doubt that whoever crosses the finish line first is sure to have A RED LETTER DAY.

HOLD THE PICKLE, HOLD THE HOMICIDE! Something fishy is going on at famous Franklin Morrow's Restaurants. Why is the most successful chain of eateries in the U.S. suddenly catering to the murder and mayhem crowd, and who exactly is the mysterious man in the ten gallon hat with an all-you-can eat appetite for death and destruction? All signs point to something big and bad being served up soon, but the CIA, FBI and Pentagon are all out to lunch, leaving only one of America's intelligence agencies to chew around the edges of a vast and horrifying terror plot. When one body too many surfaces, MIC Director Simon Kirk has finally had a bellyful of bad bistro news and decides that someone is in need of some just desserts. And, of course, who else but Podge Becket and the brilliant Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright would be dispatched to act as the ultimate antacid? As always, how does America spell relief? R-E-D M-E-N-A-C-E!

SPEAK OF THE DEVIL When the nation's number one oil company becomes a target of terrorists, everyone naturally blames the usual rabid environmentalists. After all, when you're as big as Dallaco Oil and its larger-than-life CEO Jim Bob Slickens, you get a pretty good sense of who's painted that bull's-eye on the back of your ten-gallon Stetson. Except this time Dallaco's Mideast well fires and ocean oil spills seem to have attracted an enemy a few millennia older than the Sierra Club. Just who is the mysterious red fiend with the crooked horns who seems hellbent on disrupting the world's petroleum supply? America runs on oil, and Director Simon Kirk of MIC vows to keep the motor running come hell or high water. Kirk calls in his two top men to make a deal with the devil: the permanent kind. Podge Becket and Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright are determined to get to the bottom of things, but soon discover that giving the devil his due is harder than even they imagined. It turns out the road to hell is paved not with good intentions, but with the bodies of innocents. The Red Menace vows to raise hell and put a stop to the evil figure with the fiery eyes, but this time, for the first time, the masked man might not have a snowball's chance...

HISTORY REPEATS? Governments around the world are shocked when the sleepy South American nation of Manu unexpectedly launches a rocket from a secret jungle base. How could a backwards country, dismissed by every superpower as irrelevant, join the Space Age seemingly overnight and in such spectacular fashion? As every intelligence agency on earth scrambles to send men to Manu, MIC director Simon Kirk enlists the only two agents who can be counted on in a crisis: Patrick "Podge" Becket and the brilliant Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright. The MIC boys uncover something far worse than one little ICBM hiding out in the deep, dark jungle. A group of German expatriates, still seething over the collapse of their vaunted Third Reich, have hatched a twisted plot of revenge that soon spreads from Manu across the entire globe. The world hangs in the balance, and only Podge Becket and Thaddeus Wainwright can stop civilization from tumbling off the cliff and into a thousand-year nightmare!

SPLAT IS WHERE IT'S AT! A trendy new drug nicknamed "Splat" has come out of nowhere and is suddenly sweeping the nation. The designer narcotic boasts that it will get kids higher than they've ever been before. But coming back down is murder. With a body count rocketing up from coast to coast, MIC Director Simon Kirk decides to send in the cure for what ails America's youth. Enter Podge Becket and Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright, the most lethal therapeutic MIC can prescribe. Their mission: find out who's behind this synthetic drug and give them a dose of their own medicine. The permanent kind. Except, as usual, nothing is exactly as it seems. Splat is just the opening gambit in a much larger game. Unknown to Podge and Dr. Wainwright, all the pieces are in place for a fatal final match involving the underground drug scene, the Soviets, and a couple of old enemies of the Red Menace eager to prove themselves. What goes up must come down, but the bad guys soon find out the masked man with the target on his back won't crash so easily. Before this trip is over the psychedelic seventies drug scene will find out the hard way what it's like to O.D...on Red!