Gutbrain Records

This is the February 1968 issue of Mr. magazine.

I picked it up because of the Robert Mitchum piece mentioned on the cover but that turned out to be pretty dull, just a standard brief biographical sketch.

Inside, though, was a surfing short story.

It's very short and is about a middle-aged married man with children, bored and unfulfilled in his typical, middle-class life, on a solo three-week vacation.

The story starts on his last day before going back home. He's on a Polynesian island and has been surfing every day and wishing he had made some different decisions when he was younger.

On his last night he takes a walk along the beach by himself and comes upon a beautiful surf board on the beach with no one around.

He decides to take a ride on it, just one last one. And what happens next is the story.

It's pretty melancholy. Imagine a much quieter and scaled down version of "The Swimmer" or something like that.

2026 September 02 • Wednesday

Once the surf craze of the 1960s got going and got profitable, there were lots of efforts to keep it alive. You know about the music and the movies and the TV shows. But what about the books?

Well, here comes Patrick Morgan (apparently a pen name for George Snyder) with the "Operation Hang Ten" series, combining surf action with secret-agent clichés. The first book in the series is called Hang Dead Hawaiian Style and has a copyright date of 1969.

Meet Bill Cartwright, twenty-three-year-old expert surfer, private detective, irresistible to women and secretly employed by the unorthodox Operation Hang Ten, a Federal agency that gets surfers to infiltrate surf scenes around the globe on those incredibly frequent occasions when national security is being threatened on the beach, where the CIA and FBI are totally hapless.

Cartwright drives a woody with a souped-up Dodge engine and hauls a trailer with it that’s like a high-tech Playboy mini mansion. It has a computer that makes drinks, a vibrating bed with ceiling mirror (of course) and also some practical security features such as cameras for surveilling what's outside.

All of these come in handy.

Cartwright lives in California but maybe can’t function without all this stuff, so when he has to go to Hawaii to locate a missing microdot containing plans for a new Chinese laser system, which has already cost the lives of a US agent and a Soviet one, as well as being mixed up maybe somehow with an opium racket, he has to make a bunch of phone calls to find a cargo plane service that’s willing and able to schlep it all on incredibly short notice, like hours, not days.

He gets to Hawaii, immediately gets into conflict with a square, Establishment local cop, but also immediately bonds with the Hawaiian ex-surfer Chief of Police. Like so many white action heroes he reconnects with his black best friend, another convenient testifier to our hero’s greatness, and then it’s sex scene, fight scene, surf scene, sex scene, fight scene, surf scene, etc.

Which is the promise of a book like this anyway.

All of these scenes are handled pretty well, despite Cartwright’s being a ridiculous and thoroughly unbelievable male fantasy character. The surf writing in particular seems to indicate real knowledge (though I’m no expert) and there are sharks!

The most serious misstep is a chapter in about the middle of the book, the only time we leave Cartwright’s point of view for a scene from someone else’s point of view. Not only is it a jarring and clumsy exposition dump, it just seems totally unnecessary.

I take books like these on their own terms, or whatever I imagine their terms to be, and my feeling was that it succeeded to deliver on the promise of its concept, title and superb cover art.

Pronouncing a book like this to be “good” or “bad” is a waste of time and a move in the wrong direction. It’s possible and, for me, preferable to go beyond or at least to sidestep such picayune distinctions. Operation Hang Ten: Hang Dead Hawaiian Style is psychotronic enough for me and I’ll be looking at other books in the series soon enough.

The first line is “Jim Dana, head of West Coast Headquarters of Operation Hang Ten, leaned back in his battered desk chair, swung his feet up to the window sill, and peeled the second of his two breakfast oranges”.