BUTLER

Butler is an agent for the private Bancroft Institute.

For many years, Butler, who has a first name but hates it and therefore doesn't use it ever so the reader never finds out what it is, worked as an agent for the CIA. On the one hand he was considered, certainly by himself, to be one of the top men the agency had. On the other, he was extremely opinionated and vocal about his dislike of the agency's policies. This led to his having every supervisor he was given.

At the start of the series, the vociferousness of his objections has led the agency to finally fire him. Suddenly without a job and feeling understandably sorry for himself, he is open to a meeting with people from the Bancroft Institute, especially when it appears that the Institute has set him up to be arrested for murder unless he helps them.

The Bancroft Institute is comprised of dedicated men and women determined to thwart the evil machinations of the vast military-industrial complex of the western world. Dubbed Hydra by the Institute, this loose federation was itself dedicated to the subjugation of the free world. Only through the Institute could their actions be countered. They disguise their real work by posing as an international think tank and research organization.

Butler is two things in this series. He is a tireless agent on behalf of everything that is decent and good. He is also one of the world's greatest lechers who has the attitude that if there is a free moment, it should be spent having sex. Of the two, the books seem to spend more time on the latter than the former but that may only seem so because it drags so badly.

The one redeeming point to the series, if it can be called that, is that the agents of Hydra are even nastier and more unpleasant to be around than Butler, definitely a case of the lesser of two evils. While Hydra will replace its leadership if that head is cut off, at one point its ultimate leader was known as the Swami.

It is often hard to select the best or the worst of anything. Philip Kirk's unbelievably bad series about Butler helps, though, in finding the very worst. I was totally stunned at just how bad the writing, the dialogue, the action, and the sex were done and I found it impossible to relate strongly enough how bad these books are.

I have written - and deleted - many different attempts at describing just how poorly done everything is and each attempt just falls flat and lame. Therefore, I decided to include a couple of passages to let the books speak for themselves.

Passage 1: From Killer Satellites, as a hunter satellite neared a killer satellite to eliminate a threat to aircraft and managed to destroy it:

'The Joint Chief of Staff threw their hats into the air and shouted 'hooray!''

Passage 2: From Slayboys, a bit of dialogue between a woman sitting beside a pool at a resort and Butler, who had never met her before, seeing if he might sit next to her:

'Mind if I sit down?'

...'The chairs here are for all the guests. If you want to sit down, sit down.'

'Thanks for the invitation,' Butler replied.

'Invitation?' she asked. 'It was no invitation.'

'Oh, I thought it was. Should I go away?'

'I don't give a damn where you go.'

'What if I got on top of you right now?'

'What was that?...Are you crazy or something?'

'No, I'm only trying to establish that you do give a damn where I go.'

There are an almost unlimited number of other examples, many quite pornographic but all incredibly inane. How these books got accepted and actually published is stunning. And more fascinating is that some of these books were very hard to find online and bring a considerable price online. It is a crazy world.