Clockwork's Pirates / Ghost Breaker

by Ron Goulart

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0006W62L8
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Ace Books
• Length: 253 Pages
• Weight: 0.33 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Mechanical Buccaneers and Oddball Ghostbusters

Ron Goulart's _Clockwork's Pirates_ and _Ghost Breaker_ (both 1971) are a pair of Ace Double books. The first is one of Goulart's madcap adventure spy novels set in the Barnum system. The second is a collection of nine stories about Max Kearny, psychic investigator, that are set in California during the 1960s. Both are passable pieces of entertainment. The hero of _Clockwork's Pirates_ is a free-lance mercenary named John Wesley Sand. (Did Goulart have the outlaw John Wesley Hardin in mind when he named his hero?) He is hired to recover the governor's daughter, who has been kidnapped by mechanical pirates headed by the mysterious Master Clockwork on the planet Esmerelda. A ransom has been paid, but the daughter has not been returned. Sand sets out to stir things up. The trouble is, on a planet where illegality is the norm, he is a bit _too_ successful. There follow adventures with zombies ("Sand knew they were dead even fifty yards away from them," p.15), an amiable hack writer with a secret passage to his squatter's hut, a hired barbarian, a gourmet chef innkeeper and his poisoner wife, a talking gorilla grape stomper, a powerful sorcerer, his beautiful daughter, and--of course-- the scurvy pirates. It's not Goulart at his best, but it is still good fun. I have reviewed _Ghost Breaker_ in more detail on another site, so I will attempt only a briefer review here. The nine stories of Max Kearny, psychic investigator (mostly from _Fantasy and Science Fiction_ in the 1960s) are a bit more oddball and lighthearted than, let us say, the Jules de Grandin psychic detective tales by Seabury Quinn in the 1930s. The plots are a bit more imaginative and complex. The reader would have to be as dumb as M. de Grandin's companion, Dr. Trowbridge, not to figure out what was afoot in a Seabury Quinn tale. But Goulart is likely to keep you guessing a bit with his Max Kearny yarns. My favorites are the one about the young man who turns into an elephant on national holidays ("Please Stand By"), the one about the ghostly father-in-law who tries to drive his son-in-law away, complete with his jazz band ("The Strawhouse Pavilion"), the one about the secretary who turns invisible when she goes for a job interview ("Kearny's Last Case"), and the one about the house gnome who makes things really nasty for the couple who move into the house ("Breakaway House"). I give three stars to both books, for a global score of three stars. Both covers are good ones by Karel Thole. For once, Ace gave proper credit to the artist in the books.