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The Sergeant #1
Death Train
The brainchild of Amazon Kindle bestselling western writers Mike Stotter and Ben Bridges, PICCADILLY PUBLISHING is dedicated to issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!
DEATH TRAIN
“If the Sergeant doesn’t stop those trains, D-Day goes down the drain!”
The speaker was Colonel Fairbairn, special OSS advisor to General Omar Bradley, at a tense meeting of SHAEF only days before the planned Normandy invasion. Thus began yet another do-or-die mission of the man called The Sergeant – C. J. Mahoney (Code Name: Parrot), a big, brawling career G.I. Mahoney was an almost perfect killing machine with an incredible knack for languages … and the Army’s heavyweight champion foul-up.
His assignment was to stop the personnel and supply trains crafty General Erwin Rommel had lined up to checkmate the assault he knew would come on Omaha Beach. His first try failed when a key bridge wouldn’t blow. Now, with Gestapo Colonel Richter on his trail, it’s last-chance time as Mahoney and a handful of maquis steal an explosives-laden train and head for a fateful rendezvous in a tunnel of death!
LEN LEVINSON, ALIAS GORDON DAVIS
Hailed as a ‘trash genius’, Len Levinson was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, served on active duty in the U.S. Army from 1954-1957, and graduated from Michigan State University with a BA in Social Science. He relocated to NYC that year and worked as an advertising copywriter and public relations executive before becoming a full-time novelist. Len created and wrote a number of series, including The Apache Wars Saga, The Pecos Kid and The Rat Bastards. He has had over eighty titles published, and PP is delighted to have the opportunity to issue his exceptional WWII series, The Sergeant in digital form. After many years in NYC, Len moved to a small town (pop. 3100) in rural Illinois, where he is now surrounded by corn and soybean fields ... a peaceful, ideal location for a writer.
DEATH TRAIN
“If the Sergeant doesn’t stop those trains, D-Day goes down the drain!”
The speaker was Colonel Fairbairn, special OSS advisor to General Omar Bradley, at a tense meeting of SHAEF only days before the planned Normandy invasion. Thus began yet another do-or-die mission of the man called The Sergeant – C. J. Mahoney (Code Name: Parrot), a big, brawling career G.I. Mahoney was an almost perfect killing machine with an incredible knack for languages … and the Army’s heavyweight champion foul-up.
His assignment was to stop the personnel and supply trains crafty General Erwin Rommel had lined up to checkmate the assault he knew would come on Omaha Beach. His first try failed when a key bridge wouldn’t blow. Now, with Gestapo Colonel Richter on his trail, it’s last-chance time as Mahoney and a handful of maquis steal an explosives-laden train and head for a fateful rendezvous in a tunnel of death!
LEN LEVINSON, ALIAS GORDON DAVIS
Hailed as a ‘trash genius’, Len Levinson was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, served on active duty in the U.S. Army from 1954-1957, and graduated from Michigan State University with a BA in Social Science. He relocated to NYC that year and worked as an advertising copywriter and public relations executive before becoming a full-time novelist. Len created and wrote a number of series, including The Apache Wars Saga, The Pecos Kid and The Rat Bastards. He has had over eighty titles published, and PP is delighted to have the opportunity to issue his exceptional WWII series, The Sergeant in digital form. After many years in NYC, Len moved to a small town (pop. 3100) in rural Illinois, where he is now surrounded by corn and soybean fields ... a peaceful, ideal location for a writer.
272 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1980
23 people are currently reading
44 people want to read
About the author
Gordon Davis
47 books5 followersPseudonym of Len Levinson; Aka = J. Farragut Jones, John Mackie; ** Has Ghost Written as Clay Dawson.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 1, 2020
Top-notch military fiction taking place in France during the Nazi occupation and telling the story of Sergeant Mahoney, his soldiers, and a band of French resistance fighters attempting to blow up a bridge to cut off the Nazi supply lines to the beaches at Normandy on the eve of the Allied invasion. Of course nothing goes as planned and the heroes have to dig themselves out of several unexpected situations. Mahoney is a fascinating character, an outstanding soldier, and also a complete asshole. Major Richter of the Gestapo is a vile and terrifying villain. Several other memorable characters. Nice blend of actual historical events and people are smoothly integrated into the main narrative. A very entertaining page turner from the great Len Levinson writing as Gordon Davis.
October 13, 2019
Dude is a complete dick, but damn he's the one you want on your side.
March 23, 2018
I remember seeing these novels on the shelves of my local bookshop (Tonypandy's Wishing Well) alongside the westerns that I so loved - that was back in the day when paperback original men's adventure novels were a thing. Though I'd never read this particular series until now - I was always more drawn towards the westerns of George G. Gilman during that period, so it's great that digital publishers like Piccadilly are bringing these books back for a modern digital audience.
Online I've seen people calling this series a pulpy war series - but the word pulp when applied to fiction is often derogatory, at least in a modern sense. The true definition of pulp literature comes from the low quality paper used in the production of the cheap mass market magazines and books produced from the late 1800's up to the mid to late 1950's. By contrast the more expensively produced magazines were known as slicks. Though the term pulp literature is now bandied about to often mean low grade or poor quality. To be pedantic though the term pulp literature can not be applied to digital books, that is without altering the true definition of the term. Still, I am being overly pedantic here and the way the word Pulp is used in the modern world does, I suppose, apply to this series. Think of Pulp to mean cool rather than disposable and we'll get along just fine.
Saying that it is hard to read this book without laughing- the sex scenes (and there are many) are absurd and come across as silly rather than anything else -
She moved closer to him. 'You want me to show you?'
'Yeah.'
She reached over and grabbed his joint, caressing it through the material of his pants.
He pulled back, but she held onto him.
'You act as if nobody ever played with your little doodle before.'
Doodle? WTF! These scenes come across as absurd given the hard hitting style of the rest of the brutal well paced narrative - the title character is Sergeant Clarance J. Mahoney, a hard drinking, chain smoking, whoring, Nazi killing machine of a man, who is working with the resistance in France in the lead up to the Normandy landings that would eventually turn the tide of the war against the Axis powers.
The plot of this first book in the series sees Mahoney and his team targeting a bridge that will allow the Germans to get troops to the beach-heads quickly when the invasion starts. And it really is a great yarn once you get used to the bastard that is the central character.
'Mahoney knew that you shouldn't get too close to people at wartime, because you never knew when they were going to bite the dust. But he hadn't thought he'd been that close to Celestine. He just thought she was the best available female to screw. But now his heart ached whenever he pictured her sprawled on the road with her eyes closed and blood pouring out of her side.'
The Sergeant does, after all, it seems have a heart and he moans the death of a female comrade early in the book, but he soon seems to be getting over it when another woman meets his eye.
'Mahoney felt Odette's body next to his and he started to get an erection. He wondered if he had time to knock off off a quick piece before going to the bridge, and then cursed himself for having these thoughts when Clestine hadn't even been dead for a full twenty-four hours yet.'
Maybe back in the 1980's, when this book first saw print passages like those above wouldn't have seemed so ridiculous, but they certainly stand out to the modern reader. That's not a criticism though, after all the story is still excellently told, but these sections do stand out. As does Mahoney's entire attitude towards women. He has fought, we are told and shown, alongside several incredibly brave women and yet that doesn't stop him thinking along these lines:
'Mahoney didn't like going on operations with women because he tended to worry about them. It was true that any women, if pushed too far might slug her husband with a frying pan, but guns and grenades. What did women know about guns and grenades.'
Turns out quite a lot, and some of the female characters who populate this story are indeed strong and resourceful, and not just somewhere to dip your doodle. In this book the men are hard, the woman are all sexy, the Nazis are murderous scum and the action comes thick and fast. And I'll certainly be checking out more books in the series - there are nine in all, and I'm told that the series improves as it goes along. Though in fairness this is not a bad book - yes, it's ridiculous, but as a piece of all action storytelling it succeeds just fine, though a little more depth would have been nice.
Think the Dirty Dozen, Inglorious Bastards (the original Italian version) and you pretty much have the feel of this novel. It's trashy in places, with attitudes very much of the time it was written, and great fun for a quick no nonsense read.
Still, I can't believe anyone ever called it a doodle!
Online I've seen people calling this series a pulpy war series - but the word pulp when applied to fiction is often derogatory, at least in a modern sense. The true definition of pulp literature comes from the low quality paper used in the production of the cheap mass market magazines and books produced from the late 1800's up to the mid to late 1950's. By contrast the more expensively produced magazines were known as slicks. Though the term pulp literature is now bandied about to often mean low grade or poor quality. To be pedantic though the term pulp literature can not be applied to digital books, that is without altering the true definition of the term. Still, I am being overly pedantic here and the way the word Pulp is used in the modern world does, I suppose, apply to this series. Think of Pulp to mean cool rather than disposable and we'll get along just fine.
Saying that it is hard to read this book without laughing- the sex scenes (and there are many) are absurd and come across as silly rather than anything else -
She moved closer to him. 'You want me to show you?'
'Yeah.'
She reached over and grabbed his joint, caressing it through the material of his pants.
He pulled back, but she held onto him.
'You act as if nobody ever played with your little doodle before.'
Doodle? WTF! These scenes come across as absurd given the hard hitting style of the rest of the brutal well paced narrative - the title character is Sergeant Clarance J. Mahoney, a hard drinking, chain smoking, whoring, Nazi killing machine of a man, who is working with the resistance in France in the lead up to the Normandy landings that would eventually turn the tide of the war against the Axis powers.
The plot of this first book in the series sees Mahoney and his team targeting a bridge that will allow the Germans to get troops to the beach-heads quickly when the invasion starts. And it really is a great yarn once you get used to the bastard that is the central character.
'Mahoney knew that you shouldn't get too close to people at wartime, because you never knew when they were going to bite the dust. But he hadn't thought he'd been that close to Celestine. He just thought she was the best available female to screw. But now his heart ached whenever he pictured her sprawled on the road with her eyes closed and blood pouring out of her side.'
The Sergeant does, after all, it seems have a heart and he moans the death of a female comrade early in the book, but he soon seems to be getting over it when another woman meets his eye.
'Mahoney felt Odette's body next to his and he started to get an erection. He wondered if he had time to knock off off a quick piece before going to the bridge, and then cursed himself for having these thoughts when Clestine hadn't even been dead for a full twenty-four hours yet.'
Maybe back in the 1980's, when this book first saw print passages like those above wouldn't have seemed so ridiculous, but they certainly stand out to the modern reader. That's not a criticism though, after all the story is still excellently told, but these sections do stand out. As does Mahoney's entire attitude towards women. He has fought, we are told and shown, alongside several incredibly brave women and yet that doesn't stop him thinking along these lines:
'Mahoney didn't like going on operations with women because he tended to worry about them. It was true that any women, if pushed too far might slug her husband with a frying pan, but guns and grenades. What did women know about guns and grenades.'
Turns out quite a lot, and some of the female characters who populate this story are indeed strong and resourceful, and not just somewhere to dip your doodle. In this book the men are hard, the woman are all sexy, the Nazis are murderous scum and the action comes thick and fast. And I'll certainly be checking out more books in the series - there are nine in all, and I'm told that the series improves as it goes along. Though in fairness this is not a bad book - yes, it's ridiculous, but as a piece of all action storytelling it succeeds just fine, though a little more depth would have been nice.
Think the Dirty Dozen, Inglorious Bastards (the original Italian version) and you pretty much have the feel of this novel. It's trashy in places, with attitudes very much of the time it was written, and great fun for a quick no nonsense read.
Still, I can't believe anyone ever called it a doodle!
March 22, 2021
I've enjoyed my forays into WW II with the no nonsense writing of Gordon Davis (Len Levinson). Mahoney is a son of a b***h through and through but he's a funny and likeable son of a b***h all the same. Coming from the wrong side of the tracks, the war raging in Europe is a blessing for him and he thrives on the carnage and carnality it offers. This one reads like a furious freight train, steaming ahead at a furious clip. The Nazis are real bad guys and there are some harrowing scenes. The finale involves a great series of battle sequences although I felt a little cheated at the climax. That aside, this is solid men's adventure fare. The '70s were a good time for these types of books. If you like your thrills mean, down and dirty like the Neil Langholm THE VIKINGS series or George G. Gilman's EDGE books, you'll get a lot out of Sergeant Mahoney.
October 5, 2018
in about 1984 I belong a long commute to a job I hated! The Sergeant series by Len levinson
made that journey slightly better.
Bullets & Gore by the bucketful the action never gives up!
The brainchild of Amazon Kindle bestselling western writers Mike Stotter and Ben Bridges, PICCADILLY PUBLISHING is dedicated to issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!
DEATH TRAIN
"If the Sergeant doesn't stop those trains, D-Day goes down the drain!"
The speaker was Colonel Fairbairn, special OSS advisor to General Omar Bradley, at a tense meeting of SHAEF only days before the planned Normandy invasion. Thus began yet another do-or-die mission of the man called The Sergeant - C. J. Mahoney (Code Name: Parrot), a big, brawling career G.I. Mahoney was an almost perfect killing machine with an incredible knack for languages ... and the Army's heavyweight champion foul-up.
His assignment was to stop the personnel and supply trains crafty General Erwin Rommel had lined up to checkmate the assault he knew would come on Omaha Beach. His first try failed when a key bridge wouldn't blow. Now, with Gestapo Colonel Richter on his trail, it's last-chance time as Mahoney and a handful of maquis steal an explosives-laden train and head for a fateful rendezvous in a tunnel of death!
Death Train is substantially different from the later books in the series. Mahoney and his sidekick, Corporal Cranepool, are a pair of Army Rangers who've been assigned the job of working with the French Resistance behind enemy lines in preparation for the D-Day invasion. We start the novel as Mahoney, Cranepool, and several partisans blow up a radio tower, then flee the Germans while being shot at and attacked by war dogs. This is actually the only time in the book that we have any bayonet combat, with Mahoney and Cranepool sticking a couple of mutts. Later on, incredibly vicious bayonet and close combat become a staple of the series and the source of much delightful carnage.
Not everyone's cup of tea. But I Enjoyed reading this second time around as much as the First all those years ago!
made that journey slightly better.
Bullets & Gore by the bucketful the action never gives up!
The brainchild of Amazon Kindle bestselling western writers Mike Stotter and Ben Bridges, PICCADILLY PUBLISHING is dedicated to issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!
DEATH TRAIN
"If the Sergeant doesn't stop those trains, D-Day goes down the drain!"
The speaker was Colonel Fairbairn, special OSS advisor to General Omar Bradley, at a tense meeting of SHAEF only days before the planned Normandy invasion. Thus began yet another do-or-die mission of the man called The Sergeant - C. J. Mahoney (Code Name: Parrot), a big, brawling career G.I. Mahoney was an almost perfect killing machine with an incredible knack for languages ... and the Army's heavyweight champion foul-up.
His assignment was to stop the personnel and supply trains crafty General Erwin Rommel had lined up to checkmate the assault he knew would come on Omaha Beach. His first try failed when a key bridge wouldn't blow. Now, with Gestapo Colonel Richter on his trail, it's last-chance time as Mahoney and a handful of maquis steal an explosives-laden train and head for a fateful rendezvous in a tunnel of death!
Death Train is substantially different from the later books in the series. Mahoney and his sidekick, Corporal Cranepool, are a pair of Army Rangers who've been assigned the job of working with the French Resistance behind enemy lines in preparation for the D-Day invasion. We start the novel as Mahoney, Cranepool, and several partisans blow up a radio tower, then flee the Germans while being shot at and attacked by war dogs. This is actually the only time in the book that we have any bayonet combat, with Mahoney and Cranepool sticking a couple of mutts. Later on, incredibly vicious bayonet and close combat become a staple of the series and the source of much delightful carnage.
Not everyone's cup of tea. But I Enjoyed reading this second time around as much as the First all those years ago!
March 8, 2018
Really good book.
I thought this was a really good book. Sgt. Mahoney is a cigar chewing, womanizing, snarky badass. SS Major Richter is truly evil and you really want him to get what he deserves. There was a ton of exciting action and I thought it was a really fun, quick read. I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series!
I thought this was a really good book. Sgt. Mahoney is a cigar chewing, womanizing, snarky badass. SS Major Richter is truly evil and you really want him to get what he deserves. There was a ton of exciting action and I thought it was a really fun, quick read. I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series!
November 30, 2020
This one really failed to meet expectations - stereotypical cardboard cut-out characters and predictable plotting.
The American Sergeant of the title is all man, all two-fisted hero who can take out any dozen Waffen SS troops with his magical superweapons: a sub-machine gun, a bazooka and an endless supply of grenades. In the midst of the grand finale battle, our hero mounts a nun in the French Resistance who is uncontrollably aroused by his all-American martial manliness. However, he desists because he is Irish-American and thus, a good Catholic even though lapsed. He refuses the nun and leads her instead in the Lord's Prayer.
And, of course, the German soldiers are like Katzenjammer cops, bumbling and incompetent. The German officers are incompetent or both incompetent and maniacally psychopathic.
Action to the very last page when they are saved by the D-Day invasion - but that should come as no surprise.
The American Sergeant of the title is all man, all two-fisted hero who can take out any dozen Waffen SS troops with his magical superweapons: a sub-machine gun, a bazooka and an endless supply of grenades. In the midst of the grand finale battle, our hero mounts a nun in the French Resistance who is uncontrollably aroused by his all-American martial manliness. However, he desists because he is Irish-American and thus, a good Catholic even though lapsed. He refuses the nun and leads her instead in the Lord's Prayer.
And, of course, the German soldiers are like Katzenjammer cops, bumbling and incompetent. The German officers are incompetent or both incompetent and maniacally psychopathic.
Action to the very last page when they are saved by the D-Day invasion - but that should come as no surprise.
March 14, 2020
Action filled WWII exploits of the Sergeant, codename: Parrot, an Army Ranger operating behind enemy lines to stop nazi supply trains and protect the Allies’ D-Day plans.
August 15, 2021
If you are looking for a clean cut war hero or Sgt. Rock ? This ain't your man. He really has little character to speak of.
August 13, 2023
Score 4.2
January 8, 2010
Read this on a plane from Helsinki to Manchester. Point in that being: Very fast book to read.
June 18, 2014
All action pulp fiction from the 80's. Limited character development.
January 6, 2017
Entertaining and fast paced. It won't cure cancer, but it was fun to read.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews