It was inevitable that the Killmaster series would get to Macao. The Nick Carter-Killmaster series was a veritable tsunami of spy adventure novels published between 1964 and 1990 – 25 years, 261 novels! That meant roughly a dozen paperbacks a year written by a team ofauthors (usually writing pseudonymously) to be consumed by (mainly) male readers on commutes, beaches, airports, and lazy Sunday afternoons. They’re short and punchy in style; tough, full of gun and weapons tech, all
action with plenty of that taking place in the bedroom. Certainly more James Bond than George Smiley.
And they all feature a US secret service guy, who works for a shadowy semi-US government agency called AXE, running and gunning round the world, taking out the bad guys, while wooing beautiful women along the way. Think the thrills of a Fleming novel, but more hardboiled American in style than suave, sophisticated European. Nick Carter, code-named N-3, has the rank of “Killmaster” – meaning he can assassinate at will and as he chooses.
But almost nobody reads Nick Carter-Killmaster books today, which is a shame as some of them are
pretty good, including the 31st in the series, Killmaster: Macao (1968). It was written by Manning Lee Stokes, a prolific writer of pulp fiction who published under his own name and at least nine different pseudonyms.
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It’s London in the Swinging Sixties and the Portuguese Princess Morgan da Gama is being blackmailed by a sleezy cockney gangster. He drugged her and filmed her naked in rather compromising positions. Big problem is she’s the daughter of a senior Lisbon politician. Everyone wants the film to bribe her father –Angolans fighting for independence, the Chinese supporting
them, and Portuguese Intelligence who just want to get it all swept under the carpet. Then the gangster ends up dead, followed by the Portuguese spy, the film goes missing while the princess falls into the arms of Nick Carter. AXE wants to bust everyone involved and sets up an auction for the film on neutral territory –Macao. And so independence fighters, Chinese spies, Portuguese mobsters all gather in ‘this tiny green piece of Portugal, clinging to the past on borrowed time…’ Carter checks in to The Sign of the Golden Tiger Inn on Rua das Lorchas. Macao is about to explode!
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Manning Lee Stokes’s Macao is a slightly different Macao to the one in most pre-World War Two pulp fiction. The sensationalist sin city vibe is still there of course, the Mediterranean-style lassitude, but also an overarching notion that Macao is on borrowed time, borrowed from Beijing who have ‘taken over the city in everything but name’. It’s the familiar louche territory of the pre-war pulp fictions set in Macao, but now with a veneer of Cold War hysteria thrown in. It’s also the 1960s – the Princess was tricked into taking LSD in London and, on a certain level, the entire novel is one big psychedelic
trip to Macao.
In Macao mingle “Red” Chinese pies, Portuguese counter-intelligence, curious British secret agents form Hong Kong and Macanese “tangars”, local fishermen that poached in Red Chinese waters and were useful security for hire if you happen to be a lone Killmaster in Macao without backup. And everyone wants the princess and Nick Carter. They chase the couple through the floating casinos, up and down cobbled lanes of the old town, and eventually into the smart Pousada (or Villa) Tai Yip Hotel (which did once exist on the Avenida do Dr Rodrigo Rodrigues behind the Grand Lisboa and
Club Militaire and boasted a very popular swimming pool). It is in the Tai Yip that the auction will occur. Of course, all hell breaks lose and… but that would be a plot spoiler – suffice to say Nick Carter survives and returns in another 223 books!
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It’s not clear how much, if any, time, Stokes spent in Macao in the 1960s. But Killmaster: Macao does capture vital elements of the colony at an interesting point. The low-level town is starting to be replaced by a city of multi-level apartment buildings, a few towers, and much bigger, more modern casinos, shopping malls etc. 1960s Macao is a building site, old housing being demolished and cleared, concrete being poured on new structures. At one point Carter finds himself on a construction site near the Tai Yip Hotel among the ad-hoc sodium lamps and carbide flares of the tin hovels of the construction crew and their families (recent migrants from Guangdong mostly) – radios play screechy Cantonese opera, babies weep, ‘there was a stench of urine and ordure, of sweat
and unwashed bodies, of too many people living in too small a space; all this lay like a palpable layer atop the humidity and rising storm smell.’
That Macao of the 1960s – run down buildings losing their battle against mould and crumbling concrete, of new foundations being sunk for hi-rises, of wastelands waiting for developers, is hard to imagine now. It was rarely recorded in the glossy tourism or government investment brochures of the time, but there is a flavour of it in Stokes’ writing in Killmaster: Macao, which alone
makes it an interesting curiosity of the time and worth a read.
(old copies of Killmaster: Macao can be found online, or it can be downloaded as a pdf from Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/nick-carter-killmaster-series
