2026 May 06 • Wednesday

The movie Jaguar Lives! is based on a book of the same name by Yabo Yablonsky, who also wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation.

It’s not good.

A lot of popular culture, at least Western popular culture but perhaps global popular culture, has been what ended up just calling itself Men’s Adventure fiction. Men of action who can be heroes and villains but are male fantasies of competence, particularly of sex and violence competence.

This is Homer, this is mythology, this is Arthurian knights and the Scarlet Pimpernel and Diabolik and James Bond and Jack Reacher and any number of fictional characters across numerous media and genres.

There are hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, too many, really, for one person to offer a coherent, critical survey of whatever they are: a niche genre, a sub genre, a splinter group, an attitude, a dream or some combination of some of those?

Certainly the best of them make it look easy, just as their heroes’ competence and capability will always be more than equal to the task.

And then there’s a book like Yabo Yablonsky’s Jaguar Lives! that’s enlightening for how it misses all the marks.

Jonathan Cross was Jaguar, a super-duper action hero agent who was a member of an elite group of such agents, code-named the Big Cats. In addition to Jaguar there were the Bengal, the Leopard, the Black Lion and the Panther. Cross has had plastic surgery and has been peacing out in New Mexico with his Apache martial arts mentor, though they have to beat up some racist rednecks in the beginning of the book.

Of course Cross ends up leaving when his old boss tracks him down because of some really big thing that’s going down somewhere and all of the other Big Cats are dead. OR ARE THEY?

Everything that follows is arbitrary and/or predictable, rendered in prose that’s either tediously effortful or just boring. Action scenes and sex scenes alternate with dull, dialogue-driven expository sections. One thing happens after another for no reason and the story has no shape or coherence. Cross will be superhuman and untouchable until the plot needs him to be captured and then he’s brought down by, literally, a small child.

By the time the big deal scheme is revealed, you probably wouldn’t have cared no matter what it was, but it’s a mundane, unimaginative anticlimax anyway.

The evolution of men’s adventure fiction and its takeover of English-language popular culture, much in the manner of an invasive species, is an interesting and under-studied phenomenon. Much of it is very entertaining and at least diverting and I would argue that a lot of it very good. If you like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Marvel movies, Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and so on, then you like those examples of men’s adventure fiction.

Jaguar Lives! belongs to the same genre but has really nothing to recommend it. The author apparently expected Pavlovian or fetishistic responses from the readers just by waving generic conventions at them. But one way or another, when it works, it works because we’ve been moved to invest care in the characters and situations and this is something they earn from us, not something we give away for free.

The first line is “A large hawk cut circles in the purple of the New Mexico sky”.
2026 May 04 • Monday

The 907th Soundtrack of the Week is the score for Jaguar Lives! by Robert O. Ragland.

The main title is very post-Bond "spy music", with swinging horns and strings and a majestic adventure feel to it. The melody is somewhere in between "Thunderball" and "Green Dolphin Street".

The filmmakers were working a Bond connection with the cast, too: Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasance, Barbara Bach, Joseph Wiseman and John Huston were all in Bond movies. Capucine from The Pink Panther is also in there.

"Sunset in Istanbul" is a short and low-key variation on the main theme while "Never Die Jaguar" starts with an reiteration of the theme before moving into action music, accompanied here by the FX and speech tracks from the movie.

Solo acoustic guitar and someone either stamping their foot or using their hand percussively on the guitar bring us to "Spanish Town", a nice, typically Spanish guitar-sounding piece.

Another short adventure/suspense cue, "Secret Galley", comes next, followed by "Jonathan Cross", the name of the main character, whose music starts out angular and staccato before swinging into the main theme again.

Of course there has to be a love theme and "Wiles of Love" is a very pretty solo piano piece.

Ominous low tones from the horn section combine with acoustic guitar and flutes to give us "Murder Trap" and then we get the main theme again, slower and with wah-wah guitar, in "Beyond the Border".

"Terry" is another tender, pretty, wistful tune, this time for the full orchestra.

Then it's time for two minutes of military drums for "General Villanova" and then another tense action/suspense cue for "Getting Away".

This continues in "Battle at the Castle", the longest track here, a mini-suite of mostly action music but with sweeter more melodic bits thrown in.

The end credits reprise the main theme again. Not having a vocal version is one way they avoided imitating Bond movies, I guess, though this particular piece doesn't seem like it would lend itself well to lyrics.

2026 May 01 • Friday

It turns out that Michael Crichton wrote some novels under the name John Lange when he was still in medical school. I came across one called Odds On, saw that it was about a heist and predictably failed to resist it.

Steven Jencks is a high school dropout and Korean War vet who came up with a system to beat the house at casinos and did so, amassing a fair amount of money. His interest in odds led him to an interest in statistics and then he puts together a really tight plan to rob a luxury hotel of all the guests' money and jewelry. To account for as many possible scenarios, random events and deviations from the plan as he can he does a lot of crunching with a computer.

Crichton takes his time bringing his cast of characters to the hotel, which is in Spain. Jencks's small team is a good one, each member having his act together and bringing specialized skills to the situation.

The plan is ambitious but solid.

Also at the hotel are a young college couple who are engaged but unhappy, a sex-crazed former exotic dancer and an older woman with a chauffeur and a secret.

Odds On is like a Men's Adventure Magazine story expanded to the length of a novel. In between the explaining of the plan and preparation for the robbery, we bounce between the characters and their various backstories and current developments, as well as numerous sex scenes, some involving marijuana, treated here as an insanely powerful drug.

The sex scenes are about as explicit as a mainstream book could be at the time, 1966, and presumably would have appealed to the prurient interests of many readers.

Naturally you expect the unexpected to derail the plans—Jencks himself used the computer to come up with as many responses to such things as possible—but what ends up happening is a genuine surprise and revealed only after a lot of suspense is generated.

The characters are all distinct and fleshed out beyond the requirements of the genre and it was pleasant to read. You already know if you like this sort of thing and if you do you'll like this one okay.

The first line is "The dynamite, neatly bundled in 'Happy Birthday' wrapping paper, lay casually on the back seat".