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The Girl in the Telltale Bikini
Champion surfer / millionare / CIA agent Bill Cartwright travels to Australia to find the man impersonating him, only to become tangled up in a drug cult and the theft of secret Navy documents.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 19, 2020
This was the sixth book (out of ten) in the Operation Hang Ten series about surfer/secret agent Bill Cartwright. He's kind of a mash-up of James Bond and Travis McGee. Drives a Woody, lives in a trailer by the beach, surfs, chases women. His cover is that he's a private investigator, but he's a secret agent. Plenty of action: fights, gun battles, car chases, sex. But what makes this series unique is the surfing scenes, and in this book we get a surfing duel with the surfboards as weapons. I first read this whole series back in junior high and this was one of my favorites because of the clever plot driver of someone impersonating Cartwright. Plenty more in this one though as you have missing women (auctioned to arabs for harems) and a sunken spy ship (creates great new waves for surfing ) and a weird cult (trafficking the women and the spy documents) and the Cartwright double is in the middle of it all. The real Bill unravels the mystery and kills all the baddies, but the one thing never explained was why they chose to impersonate him (not that it matters!)
January 19, 2009
This is belongs to a series that weds the James Bond prototype with Beach Blanket Bingo and comes up with a weird chimera that works as long as you're willing to deactivate your brain.
Morgan attempts to portray Cartwright as a carefree playboy sort--love 'em and leave 'em, no strings no bad feelings--but it comes off as a cold and self-serving user of women. This puts me off: I greatly prefer a protagonist I can root for, rather than one that disgusts me. I shudder to think of the reader who'd identify with this character.
It's definitely trash, with explicit sex scenes just for the purpose of titillation. More responsible stories tastefully close the curtain, if for no other reason to keep momentum and not waste words on events that bear no relevance to the plot and which the reader is fully capable of filling in without assistance. This, here, was wasteful. Worse, all the terms were couched in metaphorical or abstract terms, leading to some laughable language.
But if you really want to talk about sections that really grind the action to a halt, you'd have to mention the occasional exposition shoehorned into place by the author, not dialog or anything, just random diatribes about youth culture, authoritarianism, or women knowing their place. I don't know what its purpose was in 1971--to attract those with similar viewpoints, perhaps--but it's just dated, misogynistic, and forced-sounding, now.
Plot problems? Sure, those too. The secret documents are being sold in the black market. They're invisibly printed onto the fanny of various bikinis (the "telltale bikini" of the title, which may or may not have appeared before the writing of the actual story), and are worn by women sold as white slaves to Arab countries that is fronted by a free-love cult of beach bums. I can't believe I just wrote that sentence.
Bill Cartwright's doppelganger was bizarrely handled. The person served as a hook to get Cartwright to Australia (beyond being ORDERED TO GO THERE by his agency superiors), but there's no justification. The doppelganger is nearly a complete double, BUT SERVES NO PURPOSE WHATSOEVER. These people copied the Bill Cartwright identity, but WHY? Is the implication that Cartwright is such a big-shot surfer dude that he'd be known within the culture? Would that fly? Why isn't this said outright? Even that doesn't hang together, because in 1970 you could compare photographs. Nothing works: the double is just this unexplained plot device, an inexplicable appendix to the actual story, other than that the cover copy may have been written before the rest of it. That actually explains a few things.
Oh yeah: Surfboard. Duel. There are no words to explain this.
Morgan attempts to portray Cartwright as a carefree playboy sort--love 'em and leave 'em, no strings no bad feelings--but it comes off as a cold and self-serving user of women. This puts me off: I greatly prefer a protagonist I can root for, rather than one that disgusts me. I shudder to think of the reader who'd identify with this character.
It's definitely trash, with explicit sex scenes just for the purpose of titillation. More responsible stories tastefully close the curtain, if for no other reason to keep momentum and not waste words on events that bear no relevance to the plot and which the reader is fully capable of filling in without assistance. This, here, was wasteful. Worse, all the terms were couched in metaphorical or abstract terms, leading to some laughable language.
But if you really want to talk about sections that really grind the action to a halt, you'd have to mention the occasional exposition shoehorned into place by the author, not dialog or anything, just random diatribes about youth culture, authoritarianism, or women knowing their place. I don't know what its purpose was in 1971--to attract those with similar viewpoints, perhaps--but it's just dated, misogynistic, and forced-sounding, now.
Plot problems? Sure, those too. The secret documents are being sold in the black market. They're invisibly printed onto the fanny of various bikinis (the "telltale bikini" of the title, which may or may not have appeared before the writing of the actual story), and are worn by women sold as white slaves to Arab countries that is fronted by a free-love cult of beach bums. I can't believe I just wrote that sentence.
Bill Cartwright's doppelganger was bizarrely handled. The person served as a hook to get Cartwright to Australia (beyond being ORDERED TO GO THERE by his agency superiors), but there's no justification. The doppelganger is nearly a complete double, BUT SERVES NO PURPOSE WHATSOEVER. These people copied the Bill Cartwright identity, but WHY? Is the implication that Cartwright is such a big-shot surfer dude that he'd be known within the culture? Would that fly? Why isn't this said outright? Even that doesn't hang together, because in 1970 you could compare photographs. Nothing works: the double is just this unexplained plot device, an inexplicable appendix to the actual story, other than that the cover copy may have been written before the rest of it. That actually explains a few things.
Oh yeah: Surfboard. Duel. There are no words to explain this.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 2, 2012
70's era beach life
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews