Men’s Adventure Quarterly #4

Men’s Adventure Quarterly #4, edited by Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham

January, 2022  Subtropic Productions

This fourth volume of Men’s Adventure Quarterly is different from the previous three, not only due to its focus on female characters, but also because it features a few stories that were actually written by a female author. As Bob Deis notes in his intro, Jane Dolinger was definitely unique in the world of men’s magazines: a female writer who turned out escapist adventure yarns and who also happened to be a stacked beauty who posed nude for the very magazines she wrote for! The whole thing just comes off as so incredibly wrong in our modern era, which is to say incredibly right. There are similar female authors who come to mind, like for example Xaviera “The Happy Hooker” Hollander, who often posed nude in the men’s mags she wrote for in the mid-1970s. But Xaviera Hollander was no Jane Dolinger, that’s for sure. And also, Dolinger’s stories stood on their own as fast-moving yarns; the nudie stuff was just the icing on the cake. 

This issue also features one of the best intros yet, an interview between Bob Deis and Lawrence Abbott, who wrote a book about Dolinger, Jane Dolinger: The Adventurous Life Of An American Travel Writer.* And her life certainly sounds fascinating: basically, she answered an ad in the paper to be the “girl Friday” of a globe-trotting adventure writer (and ended up marrying the lucky s.o.b.) and thus went around the world, venturing into uncharted realms and writing about the experiences for various books, magazines, and tabloids. She also took it a step further by actually posing nude for some of the men’s mags; we learn via the insightful intro that this was just another avenue to make an extra buck or two, given that there were different rights involved. Suprisingly, most of her books were not even published here in the US, but perhaps this edition of Men’s Adventure Quarterly will drum up enough interest in Jane Dolinger’s “body of work” (sorry, couldn’t resist) to change that. 

The stories here are all assembled around a “White goddess” or “jungle girl” theme, with the “yank” protagonists typical of men’s mags venturing deep into the jungle and finding beautiful women who are just waiting there for them. The other year I reviewed a similar vintage publication, Adventure In Paradise, but that one didn’t feature stories as fantastical as the ones here. Honestly it’s a shame the men’s mag and/or publishers of the day didn’t have more vision, as they could’ve done a plethora of themed paperback anthologies. But luckily Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham are doing it today, and thus we have another highly-recommended issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly. 

This issue deviates from past ones in that there’s no editorial intro from Bob for each of the Jane Dolinger stories that follow; instead we get a sort of section overview that tells us which story came from which men’s mag. As ever the original full-color covers are reprinted, and visually as always the issue looks great, thanks to Bill Cunningham’s art direction. First up is one of the more ghoulish stories in the issue: “I Helped Shrink A Human Head,” from the September, 1959 issue of Champion For Men. In this one Jane Dolinger finds herself in Ecuador, among the Jivaro Indians – “I was a White girl in the land of the savages.” Here she witnesses the “thoroughly nauseating” ceremony of head-shrinking, “the most gruesome and yet strangely fascinating sight I had ever witnessed.” The Jivaros bring in the severed head of a fifteen year-old girl, presumably from an enemy tribe, and the witch doctor takes a couple days to shrink it down, with all the ghoulish details on sewing the lips shut and whatnot. Crazy for sure, and meanwhile I kept wondering who this poor unfortunate teen girl was, though no one – not even Dolinger – seemed to much care. Not that she would’ve asked, for as our author puts it, “religion is a man’s business.” 

Next up is what appears to be a straight-up piece of jungle pulp, “I Found The Jaguar Princess,” from the April, 1965 issue of Adventure. Per the intro, this piece was adapted from one of Dolinger’s books, one which was never published in the US. This one’s more pulpy than the previous yarn and very much in line with the jungle tales typical of men’s adventure mags, in that the titular Jaguar Princess is a veritable White Goddess. Her name is Pamela Hawkins and she’s a 24 year-old “alluring jungle woman” who has carved out an “empire on the outer edges of Ecuador,” 1,500 Indians under her rule. The tale also veers from the previous one in that Jane Dolinger provides the intro, telling how she tracked down Pamela, and then the rest of the tale is told by Pamela Hawkins herself. So we go from first-person to first-person, but likely all of it is fiction. 

This one as mentioned was taken from a longer book devoted to the subject; here is a 2017 article on Pamela Hawkins and Jane Dolinger, Google-translated into English. No idea whether there really was a Pamela Hawkins or if the whole story, including the book, comes from Dolinger’s imagination. Certainly Abbott’s bio of Dolinger gets more into the story. Anyway “Pamela” tells us how she came to this life, raised here in the jungle by her anthropologist father, who reared his daughter in the manner of two worlds – hunting with the Indians and reading novels in the original French. She now straddles both worlds, with a closet of “French fashions” and a jungle pad complete with a private swimming pool. There seems to be a lot more to the tale than we are told, though, so it makes sense this was taken from a book. But Dolinger truly knew her audience, as the book ends with “Pamela” saying she’s lonely and wants a man – the type of man who might be reading a men’s mag, in fact! She’s not concerned about looks, or wealth, or anything like that (basically just so long as he isn’t an Indian, it’s implied), and she’s just waiting for him to walk down that jungle trail to her place! One can only imagine the horny readers of Adventure booking immediate passage to the Amazon. 

Our last Jane Dolinger story is “The Jungle Killers Who Fight For Women,” from the May, 1963 issue of All Man. Once again Dolinger finds herself the only “white woman” in a tribe of “savages,” these ones warring over the theft of women. As Bob notes in his intro, an interesting thing about Dolinger’s stories is that she never mentions she’s with her husband. In fact he’s never mentioned; the impression is that “Jungle Jane” Dolinger has travelled all by her lonesome into these green hells. And it surely is hellish, another lurid tale in which an enemy of the Chama Indians Dolinger is staying with is captured and put through various tortures, all for stealing a Chama woman. Even when she escapes the orgy that ensues at the end, Dolinger does not mention her husband. 

This issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly does come off like a vintage men’s mag publication (only a lot slicker and without that weird smell), as there follows an actual pin-up section, one devoted to Jane Dolinger. I can only say one thing about this section: Good friggin’ grief! This lady was actually prettier (and, uh, more endowed) than most of the professional pin-up models who appeared in these magazines. Plus she could write! Also we get the note that her husband, Ken Krippene (the aforementioned travel writer), took all of the nude photos of her…I mean this dude must’ve gone to his grave feeling like the luckiest jerk ever. He puts an ad in the paper looking for a travel-writing assistant and this is what he gets: 

Note to self: Start putting ads in the paper. 

After this section the issue gets back to the format of the previous three, with Bob providing intros before each story. First up is “The She-Wolf Of Halmahera,” by Leonard Kelcey and from the September, 1959 Spur. Bob is correct that this one is a cool piece of jungle-pulp. The narrator, a brawny butterfly hunter(!), tells us of how he made his way to Halmahera island in Indonesia to track down a mythical she-wolf. Instead, per men’s mag tradition, he meets a super-hot and built brunette who is bathing nude when he comes upon her. She takes him back to her tribe, where he is of course tied up. She comes to him that night, drinks his blood, and then has her way with him (off-page, of course). Apparently the lady didn’t get the memo that she’s supposed to be a she-wolf, not a vampire, or maybe the Spur editor just stuck the wrong title on here. The hotstuff vampire-chick has her way with our hero a few nights a week for a month, but he gets sick of it and looks for his chance to escape – leading to one of the most violent finales I’ve read in a men’s magazine, as he literally tears the chick apart. And keeps her fanged teeth as a memento! 

Next up is the first third-person piece in the issue: “Yank Explorer Who Ruled Guatemala’s Taboo Tribe,” by Donald Honig and from the August, 1959 For Men Only. This one concerns the titular female tribe, “powerful, muscular women of surpassing beauty.” True to the template it opens on a memorable scene, with two of these hotstuff jungle babes fighting for a man – a “rugged ex-GI from Chicago” named Nick O’Hanlon. Honig has had a story in each issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, and once again he doles out a fast-moving piece of pulp which turned out to be my favorite story here. O’Hanlon’s been hired by a wealthy lady with “spungold hair” to venture into Guatemala to find her missing husband; I love it that part of O’Hanlon’s payment is that he demands the lady spend the night with him! And though she protests, we learn that she’s in tears when he leaves two days later, having basically fallen in love with him. 

As these things go, O’Hanlon comes upon Ixla, a sort of holdover from the Malayan empire, one run by hot Amazon women. Here O’Hanlon is kept as a “stud” by the beautiful women of the tribe; while the other male captives work as slaves, O’Hanlon just sits around all day and then a different woman comes to him each night. Somehow after only four months he grows tired of this, and manages to escape – but it’s one of the least suspenseful escapes I’ve ever read. O’Hanlon basically just knocks out one girl and walks away into the jungle. I thought the finale was a little goofy, though, as O’Hanlon’s desperate to escape, finally does so…and we learn in a postscript that he might’ve changed his mind and decided to go back to Ixla. 

“Borneo’s Topless Army” by the wonderfully-named J. Archibald Collinson comes next, from the October, 1966 True Adventures. Another memorable opening, in which the narrator is firing his rifle at attacking jungle women, “trying not to be distracted by the sea of bobbing breasts.” We do get the buzzkilling note, though, that “their figures [aren’t] among the world’s most beautiful.” Never to fear, as during his escape our hero knocks out an Indian babe who is lurking behind the others, this one with “high, erect breasts” and who is “much too beautiful and clear-featured to belong to this Asiatic race.” Sure enough she turns out to be the daughter of a white explorer, her name Ruth, and there follows a strange story of jungle love (cue the song) between the two. A very interesting aspect of this yarn is that the narrator ends up leaving the jungle with Ruth and marrying her. This is such a rarity in the world of men’s mag stories; generally the Yank protagonists have no problem banging these exotic foreign gals, but then go back home to marry a white girl…something I mentioned way back in my Women With Guns review. But, perhaps this story isn’t so unique, given that Ruth is actually white…it’s clear that these mags come from an era in which miscegenation was still a thing. 

We’re back to the longer (and generally higher-quality) “Diamond Line” of men’s mag stories with “Forbidden Amazon Female Compound,” by A.V. Loring and from the April 1968 Stag. We’re also back to third-person narrative, for another fun adventure story that’s slightly undone by a little too much anthropological detail. Jerry Knox is our hero, a ‘Nam vet who is in the Amazon to scope out a fabled Shangri-La with a colleague. But when the colleague goes missing Knox hunts the Amazon for him, only to be captured by – you guessed it – a tribe of hotstuff jungle women. But these are of a more violent sort than the ones in previous stories this issue; while they immediately take Knox captive, they’re much less receptive to a group of Indian males who trespass on the women’s territory, massacring them with relish. 

The story follows the same gist as “The She-Wolf Of Halmahera;” Knox like the protagonist of the earlier yarn is captured, but it’s by an entire tribe of bloodthirsty babes. They kill whoever ventures into their territory, save for one month a year in which the borders are open and they turn into rapacious jungle sluts, taking as many male lovers as they want. So of course hunk Knox with his unusual blonde hair is a hot item worth fighting over. Given the publication date, though, the sleazy details are few; Knox only gets it on with one jungle babe (the one who wins the fight for him), and she also starts to fall in love with him over the month he stays there. (Knox also spends a suspicious amount of time turning down other jungle beauties who try to have their way with him.) The ending’s weird, though, as she tells Knox he must leave once the month is over; even though she cares for him, she’ll still kill him if he’s “trespassing” on her territory when the holy month of whoredom comes to an end. 

The issue wraps up with another pictorial, this one devoted to “Liane the Jungle Girl,” whose real name was Marion Michael and who appeared in films and men’s mags of the time, with another intro on her as well as period pieces that were published about her in the men’s mags. There’s no letters page this time, but we do get an advertisement for the next issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, which looks right up my alley: devoted to “Dirty Missions,” those crazy “gonzo war” yarns (as Bob Deis memorably described them to me in a recent email) that appeared so often in men’s adventure magazines. The splash art is from “The Wild Raid Of Gibbon’s Lace Panty Commandos,” a fun Jim McDonald story from 1963 that I reviewed several years ago in my Girls With Guns men’s mag post. I’ll definitely be looking forward to it, but in the meantime I heartily recommend Men’s Adventure Quarterly #4.

*Several years ago Abbott maintained a site devoted to Jane Dolinger, but it appears to have gone offline around 2011.  But thanks to the magic of The Wayback Machine it can still be accessed; there you will find a lot more information about Dolinger.  Also this section on the Jaguar Princess indicates that the story was both truth and fiction; Pamela Hawkins, the so-called Jaguar Princess, did exist, but she was “an older woman and not very photogenic,” so Jane and her husband hired a young model to act the part for their photos!  Also the biography states that Ken Krippene was 55 and Jane Dolinger was only 21 when they got married...I mean I’ve really gotta start looking into posting some newspaper ads.  Blog-writing assistant needed!