Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers (Shaft #6)

Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, by Ernest Tidyman

September, 1974  Bantam Books

To this day I still have not read Ernest Tidyman’s novel Shaft, and I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve seen the more-famous film adaptation. Of course, I have Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack on vinyl, as to me Shaft has always been more of a music thing than a movie or novel thing. (Not sure if that sentence even made sense.) Many years ago there was a cool overview of the Shaft novels on Teleport City, and of them all it was this installment, the paperback original Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, that caught my attention. Only now, like 20 years after reading that Teleport City article, have I got around to reading the book. 

First of all, a big thanks to Steve Aldous’ World Of Shaft site, which provides a lot of great background info. Basically, Ernest Tidyman wrote a handful of Shaft novels in the early ‘70s, then farmed the series out to ghostwriters for a few paperback originals.  Carnival Of Killers, then, was actually written by pulp veteran Robert Turner, working off an unproduced non-Shaft script Tidyman had written years before about a private eye in Jamaica. But, according to Steve Aldous, Turner not only took a long time to turn in his manuscript, but Tidyman also deemed it subpar when Turner completed it, and Tidyman ended up rewriting the majority of it. 

Now, finally having made my way through this deceptively slim, 136-page book, I can only say that Robert Turner’s manuscript must have been really bad. Indeed, it gave me flashbacks to a novel Turner published the following year: Scorpio. Like that book, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers was a chore to read, with Turner taking what should have been a sure shot of a concept and turning it into a middling, overly-digressive banality in which super-cool John Shaft is reduced to a bumbling fool, always ten steps behind his opponents. Indeed, Shaft – and the reader – spends the entire narrative just trying to figure out what’s going on. My assumption is Robert Turner was a Mystery writer at heart, as that is all Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers really is: a tepid mystery, with hardly anything in the sex or violence categories. It’s so lame that Shaft even bungles the chance for a three-way with a pair of sexy white chicks, instead getting drunk and passing out. 

In this one, John Shaft is taken out of his element; when we meet him he’s lazing on the beach in Jamaica, taking a rare vacation. Not much effort is placed on establishing the character or referring to previous adventures, so I didn’t feel as if I was missing anything by reading this sixth volume before the others. Turner’s style is clearly apparent – but then, so is Tidyman’s. Above I mentioned I’ve never read Shaft, but I did start to read it once upon a time, and was surprised at the hardboiled narrative tone Tidyman employed. The fact that Shaft was black only came up in the occasional descriptions of him, but otherwise there was nothing that really differentiated Shaft from umpteen other tough guys of the time. But I guess the same could be said of the film, as Shaft the movie isn’t really “Blaxploitation” per se; it’s just like any other early ‘70s crime movie, only with a black protagonist. But the same could be said about every Blaxploitation movie; they aren’t so much “exploitation” as they are urban action movies with black characters. 

The same is doubly true of Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, as Shaft could be replaced with pretty much any other standard tough-guy P.I. in the book. Even the fact that he’s black doesn’t make much difference, which is odd, given that Jamaica is a country with a black population. Periodically Shaft will ruminate on the plight of the black man, but otherwise there is no focus on any sort of black unity or anything. In fact, Shaft constantly butts heads with the natives, and soon learns to hate Jamaica. 

Turner throws us into the action (or what passes for it) posthaste; Shaft’s beach picnic is ruined when a pretty young girl (“taffy-skinned, long-waisted, high-hipped, and very roundly bottomed with conical leaping breasts”) is accosted nearby by a pair of goons. Shaft only intervenes when the goons kick sand in his face, chasing after the girl, and knock over Shaft’s picnic setup. Our hero beats up the guys, but the girl runs away, and Shaft is taken to the local police precinct…where he learns that the two goons were undercover police officers. 

Here begins the incessant stalling and repetition that will make up the brunt of the novel’s narrative. Shaft meets Chief of Detectives Alex Ashton, an eyepatch-sporting native who speaks in a clipped British accent and who will spend the rest of the novel baiting and bantering with Shaft. The story goes that the “taffy-skinned” girl, Marita Dawes, was serving as the private secretary of the Prime Minister, Sir Charles Lightwood, and the cops were trying to round her up on suspicions of her involvement with a planned assassination attempt on the PM. Ashwood tries to lean on Shaft – as he will continue to do through the novel – but Shaft don’t take no guff and has Ashton call up his cop pal in New York, recurring series character Captain Anderozzi, who puts in a word for Shaft. 

And really, that’s all Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers proves to be: a continuous cycle of characters playing head-games with Shaft, using him as help or as bait as they try to figure out who is planning to kill the Prime Minister. The idea is that Shaft, a private eye, will help Ashton figure out who wants to kill Lightwood, in exchange for Shaft himself not being sent to prison. The only problem is, Shaft suspects that Ashton himself might be behind the assassination plot, as do many other characters – including Marita Dawes, the girl from the beach. In one of those “pulp novel” moments, Shaft comes back to his hotel room that night to find the scantily-clad beauty smoking dope in his room, practically begging Shaft to join the cause. She claims to be a fervernt supporter of the P.M., and indeed thinks Ashton is the one who wants to kill him. But our surly hero kicks her out. 

This will be the start of a disturbing trend in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, as Robert Turner – and presumably Ernest Tidyman – seems intent on keeping John Shaft from getting laid. Our studly hero goes without for the entire novel. There’s sexy Marita, who makes herself available but is spurned. Later, there’s the PM’s hotstuff but ice-cold wife, a black beauty who scorns Shaft, and who in a better pulp novel would probably engage him in some hate-sex. Then, as mentioned, there are the two white gals from America, teachers here in Jamaica on vacation; Shaft, pretending to be a prince from Trinidad who does not speak English (in one of the novel’s more bizarre subplots), takes them up to his room and gets them drunk…then watches as they strip…then ponders over the etiquette of a three-way (ie, wondering which to take first)…and then Shaft ends up passing out, along with the girls, thus squandering our third and final opportunity for any seventies-mandatory sleaze. 

Action is slightly more pronounced, but not much. Shaft gets in a few scuffles here and there, generally taking his opponents down without much fuss. Robert Turner has a tendency to make his action scenes hard to follow, as seen in Scorpio, and that is apparent here; I still find it humorous that Turner, who edited The Spider toward the end of its run, had dissmissive things to say in Robert Sampson’s 1989 study The Spider about main Spider writer Norvell Page, sneering at the frequency of action in Page’s manuscripts. Maybe Turner was just jealous, aware on some subconscious level that Norvell Page was a better writer than he was.  (I provided Turner’s quote about Page in the comments section of my Scorpio review, for anyone who is interested.) 

There’s also a little in the way of gunplay. Toward the end of the book Shaft gets hold of a Colt Python Magnum, and in the climactic action shoots down a thug, “[giving] him a new navel about the size of an ostritch egg.” Otherwise this is not a gory novel by any means, nothing like contemporary Blaxploitation pulp paperback series The Iceman, and as mentioned it’s more of a standard mystery than a pulp-action thriller. Robert Turner even squanders what few pulpy conceits exist in the novel; one of the thugs in the book is a friggin’ hunchback who uses a blowgun that fires poison darts, but the character is treated so conservatively that there’s nothing novel nor memorable about him. 

In fact, Turner is guilty of that hoary copout: having his protagonist knocked out by the bad guys but conveniently not killed by them when he’s out cold. This happens a few times in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, one instance in particular involving Shaft getting hit by one of those poison darts. Later on there’s a part where he crashes his car while chasing some bad guys. In each instance Shaft comes to later on, swearing revenge, apparently not realizing that his enemies could very easily have just killed him while he was lying there unconscious. But then, maybe Turner just doesn’t want his readers to realize that. 

The novel is mostly comprised of Shaft chasing one red herring after another, and getting nothing but conflicting signals from the locals he meets with. This is one of those novels where the hero is constantly befuddled and uncertain, making for a very trying read…again, so similar to the following year’s Scorpio. One can tell where Tidyman might have tightened things up at times; there are parts where Shaft will abruptly seem more like the John Shaft one expects. I also suspect Tidyman was behind the occasional veiled references in the book; we’re told, apropos of nothing, that Shaft doesn’t like moustaches, implying of course that he himself doesn’t have one – which, of course, is pretty surprising, given that Richard Roundtree sported one in his iconic portrayal of Shaft. There’s also a part where Shaft, watching those goons struggle with Marita Dawes on the beach, decides that it’s all “a lot better than that shit on television,” and I wonder if this was a veiled dig at the much-disliked Shaft TV series. 

Curiously, there is a focused attempt at knocking John Shaft down a few pegs throughout the novel, with the author(s) making him altogether disagreeable and surly…and stupid. There’s also a strange quirk in the final pages to imply Shaft is fat; for muddled reasons, the climax takes place during a costume ball, and Shaft appropriates the guise of a toreador. But the costume doesn’t fit him and everyone keeps telling him he’s “too fat” to pose as a toreador. Shaft consoles himself that there isn’t “an extra ounce of fat” on him, but otherwise he picks over his food in the climax…and yes, that’s how lame Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers is: the “thrilling” climax features Shaft picking at his meal during the costume ball and still trying to figure everything out. 

Even the very end of the novel continues with the novel’s confusing vibe: Shaft happily gets on a plane back to New York, and drifts off to sleep…only to be woken by a woman screaming that she has a bomb. It’s none other than Marita Dawes, that “taffy-skinned” beauty who started the whole caper, and I guess we are to take it that she’s one of those hippie terrorists who were so fashionable at the time. But Turner (and Tidyman, I guess) is determined to maintain the goofy vibe of the book, thus Shaft closes his eyes and forces himself to feign sleep! Whether he’s dreaming all this or not is unstated, but given the madcap tone of the book, one must imagine he is not. 

As it turned out, this was it for the adventures of John Shaft – in the United States, at least. Presumably Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers sold so poorly that Ernest Tidyman was unable to secure a publisher for the following – and final – installment of the series, The Last Shaft. That one was only published in the UK, in hardcover and paperback, and is now exceedingly scarce; a scan of it was, however, up on archive.org, but who knows when it will be back online now that the Internet Archive has been hacked. 

About the only thing that would make The Last Shaft worth reading is that it wasn’t written by Robert Turner; it was written by Philip Rock, who also wrote the incredible Hickey & Boggs novelization. It also sounds like the closest the Shaft series ever got to men’s adventure, with a well-armed Shaft taking on various criminals in New York. And it apparently lives up to its title, with Ernest Tidyman having grown so sick of his famous character that he wanted to do away with him. Judging from the harsh, rude, surly, and just plain grumpy character featured in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, I can’t say the literary world suffered much of a loss.

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast, by Warren Murphy

October, 1979  Pinnacle Books

I’ve never been the biggest fan of The Destroyer, but I’ve been aware of this particular installment for years, as it features Remo and Chiun taking on spoofy parodies of the protagonists of other Pinnacle series: namely, The Executioner, The Butcher, and Death Merchant. But as ever Warren Murphy (writing solo this time, without early series co-writer Richard Sapir) is more focused on the “spoofy” nature, with hardly any focus on action. Despite the trappings, The Destroyer is a comedy series, and one must admit that Bay City Blast is occasionally very funny, even if it isn’t the “Pinnacle All-Stars” novel one might have preferred. (It still surprises me that Pinnacle editor Andy Ettinger never conceived of a one-shot that would’ve united all of the series protagonists in a big story, like a prefigure of Gold Eagle’s later Stony Man books.) 

First of all, I want to note that the long-limbed black beauty in a bikini with the submachine gun on Hector Garrido’s cover art does not exist in the actual novel. This of course is a bummer. But then, girls don’t much exist in The Destroyer. They are for the most part cipher-like, and never exploited as they would be in the typical men’s adventure novel, due to the sad fact that hero Remo Williams has zero in the way of a sex drive. As I’ve complained before, Remo’s more robot than man; Bay City Blast even features a “pretty” secretary (“pretty” being the extent of what Warren Murphy gives you in the exploitative goods) who constantly throws herself at Remo, and he remains disinterested – and also Remo goes without a woman for the entire book. Some men’s adventure progatonist! 

My assumption is the gal with the gun on the cover might be Garrido’s interpretation of Ruby Gonzales, who appears briefly in Bay City Blast and reports to Smitty, the boss of CURE. But she is fully clothed throughout and for the most part breaks into a building to check its security level; I get the impression Ruby has been in other volumes, but I’m by no means an expert on The Destroyer. So I could be wrong, but it just seemed to me that Ruby was an already-established character, and all told she’s only in the book for a few pages. 

I always rant and rave about The Destroyer and what I wish it was, but truth be told Warren Murphy is a good writer, and clearly has a good sense of humor – one that he’s able to convey via the narrative. We already know Bay City Blast will be funny from the start, when a mobbed-up “businessman” named Rocco Nobile moves into slummy Bay City, New Jersey, and promptly takes it over by blackmailing various dirty politicians. The humor comes in the recurring image of Rocco’s bodyguard constantly putting his hand in his pocket, and the dialog throughout is, as ever, pretty humorous. 

The biggest humor comes via The Eraser and The Rubout Squad, a subplot that comes out of nowhere but ultimately overtakes the narrative: this is the name of Murphy’s pseudo-Pinnacle squad. First there’s Sam Gregory, a gun manufacturer with dreams of taking on the Mafia and wiping it out with his own squad. To this end he recruits three men: Mark Tolan, a psychopath who was court martialed in ‘Nam for gunning down a village of women and children (the Mack Bolan parody); Al Baker, a guy with delusions of being a torpedo who has decided to go against the Syndicate, but in reality is just some loser who’s seen The Godfather too many times (the Butcher parody); and finally Nicholas Lizzard, a six-foot-five failed actor who is now a full-time drunk and whose biggest talent is dressing up in drag so that he can make himself look like “a six-foot-four woman” (the Richard Camellion parody, and the one Murphy seems to have the most fun with). 

Meanwhile Sam Gregory dubs himself “The Eraser,” and it is he who has the trademark bit of dropping broken pencils at scenes, a la Bolan’s marksman medals or The Penetrator’s arrow heads. My assumption is Gregory is intended as Murphy’s spoof of The Penetrator Mark Hardin, but other than the name and the broken pencils bit…the character seems to more be a parody of Don Pendleton. This is mostly because he is the one who plans the hits and also comes up with alliterative titles for them: first is “Bay City Blast,” and later the Eraser plans on others with similar, Pendleton-esque titles, like “Salinas Slaughter.” 

Murphy also has a lot of fun spoofing Mack Bolan via his psycho duplicate Mark Tolan; in Tolan’s scenes, Murphy recreates Don Pendleton’s style, down to the recurring “Yeahs” that punctuate the narrative. He even gets double bang for his spoofing buck with Tolan often vowing to “Live Huge,” parodying Bolan’s “Live Large.” I seem to recall Warren Murphy saying years ago in a Paperback Fanatic interview that he felt Pendleton’s ego was getting a little too large at the time, hence he had some fun mocking him in Bay City Blast. One can well imagine Don Pendleton being unsettled at how psychopathic his character is made to seem: Tolan, who names himself “The Exeterminator,” is a nutjob who is ready to explode at any moment, and indeed gleefully guns down children in Bay City Blast. 

But as mentioned it’s Nicholas Lizzard, the Richard Camellion spoof, who draws the most laughs. Curiously, Lizzard is presented as a roaring drunk who lives off vodka, making one wonder if Murphy was making any insinuations about Camellion’s creator, Joseph Rosenberger. Speaking of whom, Murphy does not mimic Rosenberger’s style in the Lizzard sections (but then, not many could), but he certainly makes Lizzard just as psycho as Tolan. The recurring humor here is very un-PC in today’s era, as Lizzard often dresses like a woman, but isn’t fooling anyone. This though is the extent of Lizzard’s schtick, other than the heavy drinking, so he isn’t a “cosmic lord of death” or whatever Richard Camellion was. 

As for The Baker, he’s nothing at all like the character he’s spoofing. Whereas Bucher the Butcher is a terse, cipher-like death machine, Al Baker is at heart a good-natured sort who is only in it for the money, and in fact harbors a lot of concern about the increasingly-violent nature of the Rubout Squad. Not that this subplot goes anywhere. Baker still takes part in the Squads raids on Bay City’s “underworld,” ie gunning down innocent men, women, and children. The latter I think is where Murphy goes a little too far in his black humor; the Rubout Squad shooting down prepubescent Chinese children in a “heroin factor” (really a fortune cookie bakery) doesn’t really elicit many chuckles. 

Remo and Chiun are often lost in the shuffle, but on the positive side Remo is treated with less scorn in this one. His opening sequence is pretty cool, and another indication of the comedy nature of the series, as he takes out a house filled with recently-freed criminals, killers and rapists who’d been put away but released by shady lawyers; humorously, all of them have hyphenated, Joe-Bob type names. But unlike The Executioner or any other Pinnacle series, it’s all played for laughs, with Remo easily and casually killing each of them off one by one, and becoming more concerned with where to put their cars after killing them. 

And that again brings me to my central issue with The Destroyer. Everything is so easy for Remo and Chiun that there’s no tension or drama or anything. Killing is simple for Remo. Along with the lack of sex drive, this makes Remo Williams an altogether poor men’s adventure protagonist, because you can’t really feel anything for him. Perhaps this is why Murphy and Sapir grafted on the “treat Remo like a fool” subtext, to try to make Remo more relatable. And also again the action scenes are not presented the way I prefer; as ever they are relayed via the impressions of the person about to be killed by Remo, with the reader never getting a good idea of what Remo is actually doing. 

So it’s the comedy that carries the story, with every sequence always devolving into satire or parody. Like when Remo and Chiun go fishing for vacation, and a great white shark chases them – Remo even referring to Jaws while it happens – and Chiun merely “calls” the shark with his fingers in the water and then kills it with a single blow. The climactic faceoff with the Rubout Squad is also fairly anticlimactic, with Murphy again returning to his standard trick of killing villains off-page, which is a big letdown. And even here Remo dispatches his enemies with such ease that the reader who actually wanted to see a pseudo “Pinnacle All-Stars” square-off will be mightily underwhelmed. Only Tolan really goes face-to-face with Remo, Murphy apparently wise enough to know his readers would expect a little more from him for his Bolan parody, at least. But even here it’s more for laughs, with Remo almost like a god up against Tolan. 

As for the plot, it moves quickly, and Murphy spends more time with the Rubout Squad bickering and bantering with each other before gunning down innocents in their war to “cleanse” Bay City. Meanwhile Remo and Chiun are called into act as bodyguards for Mayor Rocco Nobile, the mobbed-up bigwig who showed up in the opening pages; this subplot I thought was pretty cool, ie Nobile’s real intent in Bay City, but again Murphy sort of loses site of it as the book progresses. Even here it’s comedy, with Remo and Chiun just happening to get a hotel room right next door to the Rubout Squad, but neither party realizing it. There’s also comedy in the Eraser’s growing anger that the newspapers, for some mysterious reason, never report on the Rubout Squad’s hits. 

The ”climax” is on us before we realize it, and while it might not be the action spectacular you’d get in a more “straight” men’s adventure novel, it does feature the Eraser in a tank going down Main Street in Bay City. But the confrontation with the Rubout Squad is quick, anticlimactic, and mostly off-page, so I wouldn’t use Bay City Blast as an indication of how Remo Williams would fare against the Death Merchant, the Butcher, or the Executioner. But then, Warren Murphy presents Remo as so omnipotent that he’d probably handle the real deals just as easily as he does the spoofs. 

Murphy does score huge points for somehow seeing through the mists of time and describing what passes for a “journalist” in our miserable modern era. Murphy’s intent apparently is to spoof the hiring standards of The New York Post (this is during the section in which the Rubout Squad is incensed that their hits aren’t making it into the news), but little does Murphy realize that he’s describing what will be the required background for a “journalist” in a few decades: 

Overall though, Bay City Blast is fast-moving and fun, but again The Destroyer just isn’t my kind of men’s adventure series.

The Peking Dossier (Nick Carter: Killmaster #84)

The Peking Dossier, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1973  Award Books

The first of two Nick Carter: Killmaster by an author named Linda Stewart, The Peking Dossier is from the unfortunate era in which series packager Lyle Kenyon Engel had let go of the reins and Award Books was fully in control, turning the series over to an army of ghostwriters with none of the unity or continuity that Engel had maintained for the series. Even worse, the series is now in first-person, with “Nick himself” relaying his adventures to us. 

This is problematic enough for me; I mean Nick Carter is this super-agent who is always “on the job,” so how the hell does he have time to write books? And indeed, The Peking Dossier is a slow-as-molasses read, another of those deceptively-slim ‘70s paperbacks. This sucker has some seriously small print and, despite “only” being 188 pages, it took me forever to finish the book. This is because Linda Stewart has a tendency to draw things out a little too much at times…and also, she makes the even worse mistake of putting her tongue a little too far into her cheek. 

It's the sort of thing Engel never would have allowed: Nick will often refer to himself as a “hero” when telling us his story in The Peking Dossier, usually in a “taking the piss” sort of vibe. Like a part where he scales a wall, and Stewart has an exhausted Nick tell us, “Sorry, I know heroes aren’t supposed to get tired.” There’s other stuff, like later on where Nick knows someone’s broken into his hotel room, and Nick informs us he has his own special way of monitoring this – and it isn’t the “hair on the doorway” trick Ian Fleming wrote about in James Bond. Nick further complains that Fleming gave too much away, and Nick himself isn’t going to give away his secrets “for ninety-five cents.” Ie, the cost of a Nick Carter: Killmaster paperback in 1973. 

This breaking of the fourth wall (or whatever the literary term for it is) might be fine in something like The Destroyer, but Killmaster is supposed to be more of a “straight, no chaser” affair…or at least it was when Lyle Kenyon Engel ran it. As Engel himself noted, he did not like the first-person narrative for the series, but it was insisted on by Award Books. One can see Engel’s point, as ultimately first-person narrative will lead to this…a writer thinking himself (or herself) too clever for the material, and poking fun at it in the narrative. Also the entire “Nick Carter is also the author” conceit is ridiculous, as one must imagine super-hero Nick Carter traveling the globe as he stops villains and beds exotic babes…and yet somehow finding the time to write a 188 page book of teeny-tiny print. A book that is then published under his own name! 

Another issue is the first-person narrative makes Nick seem altogether too gabby, as Manning Lee Stokes frequently demonstrated in his own first-person offerings for the series, a la The Red Rays. Since Nick narrates the entire story for us, he comes off like a neurotic fusspot, and it’s hard to square with the image of a virile man of action. But then, it all depends on the narrative voice, and again given the army of solo ghostwriters working on the series at this point, “Nick” comes off as a different narrator every time. In the hands of Linda Stewart he suddenly sounds more like a private eye in a bad ‘50s film noir, as Nick’s “voice” is decidely hardboiled in The Peking Dossier. 

That said, Linda Stewart wins the Leigh Brackett award for “female author who can write almost exactly like a male author.” Folks, if I hadn’t known going in that a woman wrote this one, I never would’ve guessed it. Speaking of Stokes, Stewart makes her version of Nick just as aggressively macho, and there’s none of the pussyfooting around certain subjects that one gets from other female authors invading the world of men’s adventure, like for example Blood or The Peacemaker. Unlike the few other female authors in the men’s adventure genre I’ve read, Linda Stewart knows to keep things moving, with a focus on action – of the violent and sexual variety. Even more so than the previous female author on the series, Valerie Moolman. 

That said (again), Nick does fall in love in The Peking Dossier, and indeed only has sex with one girl in the book (the one he falls in love with, naturally), so there is that giveaway that our author is a woman. Otherwise, Stewart knows enough to not emasculate her Nick Carter too much; we still get the topical description of women and there’s a fair bit of action…though, again, the sex is for the most part off-page or relayed in metaphors, and the violence is not gory it all. This is one of those books where Nick tells us he “shot” someone and leaves it at that. Or even, “In ten seconds they were all dead.” 

Again like Stokes, Linda Stewart has a little fun with some in-jokery; just as Stokes would often refer to himself, his pseudonyms, or etc in his own work for the series, so too does Linda Stewart. Indeed, she does Stokes one better, introducing herself into the book. The Peking Dossier ultimately concerns Nick Carter facing off against a master assassin with a clone army who is looking to kill every US senator and ultimately the President, and early in the book Nick is told to meet with the AXE agent who will be working the assignment with him…a lovely redhead with an incredible body who gives her name as Linda Stewart. 

Nick will soon learn it’s a lie: the redhead’s name is really Tara Bennett, and she’s a scientist for AXE. But it’s interesting that Linda Stewart slipped her real name into the book…doubtless unaware that fifty years later some random reviewer would be writing about it on his blog. It’s also interesting that she made herself Nick’s dream girl, in a way; later Nick will tell us that Linda/Tara not only has the best body he’s ever seen, but she’s the best lay he’s ever had – and, as Nick himself reminds us, he’s been with more than a few women. But Stewart doesn’t dwell much on the juicy goods. In fact, the most we get is stuff like, “Tara was something else.” The reluctance to dwell on all the juicy material also comes off as humorous, given how gabby our narrator is about vitually every other subject. 

Another interesting thing, given that The Peking Dossier was written by a woman, is Nick’s insistence on asserting his dominance over Tara. Moments after meeting her, and learning that she’s an AXE scientist who will be working with him, Nick ensures that Tara is under no question of who is in charge. Again, Stewart’s Nick Carter has the same aggressive macho tendencies as Manning Lee Stokes’s, but then it could because Stewart’s goal is to show how Nick goes from being a macho boss to a guy who falls in love with Tara. 

And for an author who is brand new to the series, Linda Stewart really goes to bat to have Nick Carter explain himself and his philosophy to us. We are also told without condition that he’s not wealthy: “If you were out of work for six months last year, you probably earned more than I did.” Frequently Nick will confide such thoughts in us readers, and I have to admit I kind of appreciated Stewart’s self-confidence in such things…I mean here she was, the first female author on the series since Valerie Moolman, ten years before, and she dove right into it without any hesitancies. One could easily believe “Nick himself” really is telling the tale of The Peking Dossier, Linda Stewart’s narratorial voice is so confident. 

The only problem is, the novel is incredibly sluggish. It just seemed to take forever for me to finish it, and my assumption is Stewart’s word count came in higher than expected and Award just shrank the print instead of cutting the fat. The helluva it is, the main idea is kind of cool: there’s this group of assassins from Red China that calls itself “KAN,” and Nick tells us that no one’s ever figured out what the name means, so AXE just refers to it as “Kill Americans Now,” which is what the assassin group specializes in. As if a cabal of “A1” assassins wasn’t enough, Stewart also throws in a cloning subplot; one of the chief KAN agents has apparently cloned himself, and is sending out his duplicates to kill United States senators. 

This is how Tara Bennett comes into the picture; Hawk sends her to meet up with Nick, and it turns out she is a scientist who has guessed clones are behind the plot…given that the killers have all been Chinese men who look identical, even to the same mole in the center of their forehead. Stewart’s footing is a little off with her presentation of Hawk; she has the AXE boss withholding info from Nick, for reasons that make little sense other than plot convenience. For example, why exactly Tara goes through with the “Linda Stewart” charade is not properly explained, nor is how she is under orders – from Hawk – to not tell Nick certain things about the assignment. Regardless, Tara as mentioned will be Nick’s sole bedmate and ally throughout The Peking Dossier, first going with him to Nassau to get a lead on the KAN plot, and then later to England, and then finally to Hanoi. 

One thing Linda Stewart shares with other female authors in the men’s adventure genre is her reliance on knocking Nick out for the convenience of the plot; Nick Carter is knocked out or drugged into unconsciousness at least five times over the course of The Peking Dossier. It gets to be comical after a while, and it’s clear it’s because Stewart has painted her hero into a corner and has to resort to the easy way out and knocking Nick senseless. The funny thing is, Nick’s opponents just conveniently don’t kill him when he’s out cold! But anyway, poor Nick certainly picks up at least a few concussions in this one. 

At any rate, Stewart does pack in a bit of action throughout, but as mentioned it is spectacularly bloodless. Nick uses his three mainstay weapons – the Luger, the stiletto, the gas bomb – and even here Stewart, again brand-new to the series, has Nick explain to us the usefulness of Pierre, the gas bomb. You know, the one he hides by his balls. Stewart, with her tongue again in her cheek, has Nick tell us how men never search there, adding to the benefit of the bomb, yet at the same time he humorously tells us how hiding something behind your balls can be a little embarrassing if the wrong person sees it. Otherwise Nick doles out quick, clean kills in The Peking Dossier, but he does gas-bomb a group of KAN killers at one point. 

The plotting is pretty busy, and overly so, to the extent that fun stuff is unexplored. Like there’s a part where Nick is cornered by some KAN killers, and they end up fighting with each other over who gets to kill the infamous Killmaster, as apparently there’s a points reward system in the KAN organization. Nick wonders how many points he’d be worth, but Stewart doesn’t do much with the setup. Same goes with the clone stuff, which isn’t really dwelt on until the final pages. Essentially, a top KAN killer hopes to create a clone army to topple the west, and he also plans to clone Nick and Tara! Nick because he could have an army of Killmasters (we are told clones inherit the exact abilities of the source), and Tara because he would have a super-smart genetic scientist at his disposal. 

The finale plays out in a temple in which the KAN villain manufactures heroin (another subplot), using a group of naïve monks to do the work. We have some B-movie sci-fi stuff, like Nick and Tara seeing little jars with growing embryos in them, knowing that they are looking at clones of themselves. But a lot of it is ruined by Nick constantly getting knocked out, or dosed by drugs into oblivion. Oh, and also falling in love with Tara. After a lot of off-page lovin,’ Tara admits to Nick that she’s fallen in love with him…and Nick, after telling us that under normal circumstances he’d come up with something to tell a girl who’d fallen in love with him – basically, to get lost – tells us that instead he tells Tara he feels the same. Now, one would expect this will mean that only one thing could possibly happen to Tara, but Linda Stewart goes in an unexpected direction. 

SPOILER ALERT: Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know. But for posterity, here’s what happens with Tara. Stewart as metioned puts a lot of subplots and extranneous background detail into the book, with Nick often referring to people he knew in the past (who of course have never before been mentioned in the series). Well anyway, one such reference, which Tara randomly throws out, is to an elite AXE agent who was killed in action or lost or something (I forget). Well, despite telling Nick she’s in love with him and even that she wants to have his child…in a hasty final chapter Nick informs us that Tara, who does survive the events of the novel, is already married – indeed, to that very elite AXE agent! Turns out he's been crippled or somesuch, and Hawk at AXE is paying for his care, and Tara used the opportunity to go out in the field and briefly fall in love with Nick and let herself imagine what it would be like to be with him. But she’s staying with her crippled husband. Or something. Nick for his part doesn’t seem much fazed, telling us a married life isn’t one he thinks he’d even want. 

Overall The Peking Dossier is entertaining, though a bit ponderous at times and certainly bloated. That said, Linda Stewart proves herself a better series writer than many who worked on Nick Carter: Killmaster, and perhaps one of these days I’ll seek out her other installment, 1975’s The Jerusalem File.

Orgasm

Orgasm, by Brian Richard Boylan

July, 1973  Dell Books

Now here’s a book on a topic I think we all might find some interest in. Subtitled “The Ultimate Experience,” Orgasm is part of the glut of sex paperbacks turned out in the early ‘70s; author Brian Boylan gives no bio for himself, but in the book he does reveal that in 1972 he published another sex-themed Dell PBO, Infidelity, which was taken from his interviews with a few hundred married couples who had cheated in some capacity. 

In his intro to this book, Boylan states that he personally has noticed that the orgasm itself is rarely focused on in these sex books; it is the end goal people work toward, and writers and researchers leave it at that. Or, “The last taboo,” as Boylan puts it. But what does an orgasm feel like? And how would women or men describe it? This apparently is the germ idea for Orgasm, but Boylan loses the plot, and for the most part the book comes off like any other early ‘70s sex book. 

This is humorous, given that Boylan spends the intro chapter of Orgasm ranting about the glut of sex books in the marketplace and how they are all essentially retreads of one another. That said, this is a good idea of how the market was responding to the sex glut of the early ‘70s; even the researchers were getting burned out. That is, if Boylan was indeed a researcher. His occasional self-references give the impression that he was, but there was no biographical detail about him I could find in the book. He’s certainly done his homework on the sex research front, though, but humorously he never refers to himself, maintaining an objective view and just telling us what the people he spoke to said. 

So then, Orgasm is not like How To Be A Tiger In Bed, but more like The Groupsex Scene, in that the majority of it is comprised of ribald dialog from early ‘70s men and women on how they like to get down. Boylan notes in his intro that he did not take notes nor record anything when talking to his subjects – saying that this often kept them from being totally open with him – and he admits that the dialog is filtered through his own writing style, which explains why all the characters “sound” the same. In other words, Boylan didn’t invade the privacy of his subjects like Robin Moore did in The Making Of The Happy Hooker. 

Occasionally Boylan does move away from the dry, factual tone, especially when complaining about all the misleading sex books of the day, or imagining how the average guy would describe an orgasm. There’s also a lot of complaining about sleaze novels, which Boylan asserts is the level to which most “sex books” stoop to. And yet, Orgasm also stoops to those levels, if only due to the sometimes-crazy comments Boylan’s subjects tell him. Oh, and given the lack of the male imagination in describing a climax, the majority of the commentary in Orgasm is from women. 

As with most of these books, Orgasm provides a glimpse into the era in which it was written: an era in which women were coming out of the shackles of the early twentieth century and were on The Pill, freely gabbing about their extramarital affairs and their love of the male genitalia (see below). Speaking of which, I am currently working on my time machine. 

In closing, I think this is one of those books where a bunch of random excerpts will do a better job of describing the book than I ever could:

The Penetrator #44: Deep Cover Blast-Off

The Penetrator #44: Deep Cover Blast-Off, by Lionel Derrick

December, 1981  Pinnacle Books

Man, how have I gone over a year without reading a volume of The Penetrator? For a while there I was reading a few books a year. Well anyway, at this point we are in the homestretch, with less than ten installments to go in the series. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been reading The Penetrator for 14 years now; it’s like it has become a part of my life at this point. 

Fortunately, the series refresh seen in the previous volume continues with this one; Chet Cunningham seems to come out of the doldrums that he was in for the past, oh, I don’t know, 15 or so volumes. Maybe series editor Andy Ettinger told Cunningham and series co-author Mark Roberts to get their shit together. To be sure, Deep Cover Blast-Off is not a return to the violent form of early Cunningham entries like #4: Hijacking Manhattan and #12: Bloody Boston, but at least Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin kills a bunch of bad guys this time, instead of just knocking them out like some TV detective. He also lives up to his name, uh, “penetrating” not just one but two sexy babes in the short course of the novel, though for the most part Cunningham leaves the sexual material off-page. I’ve often thought of doing the opposite of Bowdlerizing, ie adding explicit sex and violence to books. 

Curiously, Cunningham in this one seems to recreate Joanna Tabler, Mark’s casual girlfriend of earlier volumes (and a character Cunningham introduced to the series). Joanna was a tough but beautiful federal agent…and in Deep Cover Blast-Off, Cunningham introduces another tough but beautiful federal agent who becomes involved with Mark Hardin. This one’s named Malona and she’s an Intelligence officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which we’re informed is Canada’s version of the FBI. Also curiously, Cunningham never once refers to Joanna Tabler in the course of this book – other than vague mentions of “women” who have suffered for becoming involved with Mark – but it’s funny because Malona is pretty much the same character, only she’s Canadian and she’s a brunette. 

But then, Mark suffers another female loss early in the book. Up in Windsor, Ontario to investigate the murder of an old ‘Nam pal who went on to work for the CIA, Mark becomes involved with a hotstuff waitress named Beda. She’s soon caught and suffers the ultimate price for being with Mark, but Mark spends about a hot second mourning her…and then Malona is literally introduced a few pages later. Cunningham clearly has his tongue in cheek, with the bonus that Mark takes the first girl’s death in stride and is promptly checking out Malona. But as I’ve already mentioned Cunningham for the most part ends the scene when the hanky-panky gets started, and in fact doesn’t even dwell much upon the ample charms of either Beda or Malona. 

A funny thing about Deep Cover Blast-Off is that Mark Hardin heads to Canada to research the death of an old ‘Nam pal…but spends more of his time investigating the death of some other guy. It turns out that three CIA agents have been killed while investigating affairs in Canada, Mark’s ‘Nam buddy being the most recent. Humorously, the Agency isn’t much concerned over the deaths, chalking them off as random murders or somesuch, so it’s up to The Penetrator to do his own investigation. 

Curiously, despite this being the 44th volume of the series, we get the usual brief rundown and recap of who Mark Hardin is and some of his past exploits. We even get that recurring note of how his voice lacks a regional accent; this time Cunningham humorously refers to Mark’s accent as “CBS neutral.” Man, if only CBS was neutral! But another curious thing is the stuff Cunningham forgets. For example, there’s a part where Mark uses this new concoction of Professor Haskins to knock someone out without harming them or killing them…which is weird, given that this is what Mark previously used his dart gun “Ava” for. But Ava seems to have been written out of the series, and I’m not sure the last time the Penetrator used it. 

Cunningham delivers some fun stuff this time around, as if he’s finally invested in the series again. Most notably is a bit early on where a lead takes Mark to a gay bar (“There wasn’t a woman in the place”), one that’s filled with “swivel-hipped males.” Raise your hand if you remember when Mark, in an earlier Chet Cunningham offering, once posed as “the Pierre?” But Cunningham doesn’t do much with this scene, other than Mark acting incredily aggressive toward the patrons (“Which of you queers here pulled the trigger?”), and for the most part it’s all just setup for an action scene, as Mark finds out the owner of the place is somehow involved with the murders. That said, the chapter is titled, “Mark Three, Gays Zero.” 

Another returning gimmick from earlier novels is that Mark gets hurt in the ensuing action; he’s shot, but manages to get away, and later hooks up with the busty waittress he literally said only a few words to, earlier in the day. This would be Beda, who gamely takes Mark in and nurses him to health, with the expected shenanigans resulting: “[Mark]…kissed her pulsating breasts.” Man, she must be in the X-Men or something! “I shall unleash my pulsating breasts!” But as mentioned (frequently, now), Cunningham leaves the actual sordid details off-page. Mark’s a slow learner, though, as sure enough Beda is captured by the bad guys the very next morning, suffering fatally for it, but Cunningham spends more time detailing how Mark escapes the police once he has dealt with Beda’s captors. 

And like a few pages later Mark is already salivating over hotstuff Malona Mitchell, RCMP Intelligence. Cunningham has the two get down to it posthaste, with a lot of saucy banter between then but again fading to black during the actual sleaze. Malona becomes Mark’s companion for the rest of the novel, under the impression that he works for the CIA. The RCMP also suspects something is up with these agent murders…and meanwhile we readers know it’s the Russians, in particular a deep-cover agent named Ustinova, who was implanted in Canada back in the 1960s to research germ warfare and was gradually forgotten by his superiors in Russia. Now Ustinova has gone insane and plans to carry out an attack on DC; to this end he sends out his sadistic thug, Turgun, to dispatch anyone who gets in his way. 

Action is more frequent than previous volumes, and again Mark Hardin once again kills most of his opponents, rather than just knocking them out. He’s also picked up a gift for very lame one-liners, like when he tells a guy, “Don’t be a nerd.” This might be the earliest usage of that word I’ve encountered in a book…and no, the guy Mark calls a nerd isn’t a dweeb in Coke-bottle glasses, it’s a dude with a gun, so either “nerd” meant something else in 1981 or Chet Cunningham just didn’t know what it meant. 

Despite being a sadistic thug, not to mention the guy who killed Mark’s pal, Turgun is the victim of Mark’s “kill-free” takedown: a concoction of tear gas and ether made by the Professor. Curiously though, not much is done with this concoction despite much build up. And besides, Mark does eventually deal with Turgun…in a sequence that seems to come out of the Penetrator of old. Vowing to get brutal justice for his slain pal, Mark uses a tractor’s manure spreader to mete out Turgun’s comeuppance, though Cunningham doesn’t get as gory as he could in the sequence. 

The finale of Deep Cover Blast-Off further demonstrates the détente of the early ‘80s, as Mark takes down Ustinova’s missile-firing silo with…a group of KGB agents. There is a friendly rapport between the group and the reader can tell much has changed in the world since the series started in the early ‘70s. And the novel ends on this sequence, with a quick capoff noting that Malona has gone on a fishing trip with Mark…which, curiously, was the same thing the never-mentioned Joanna Tabler used to do. So, one wonders if Malona will return in future Penetrator installments.

The Numbers Man

The Numbers Man, by David J. Gerrity

May, 1977  Signet Books

The “Cordolini trilogy” by David Gerrity wraps up with this novel, which was published two years after the first volume (hard to believe I reviewed that one over ten years ago!). As with the other two books it’s a slim paperback, coming in at 153 pages, and as with The Plastic Man most of the running time is given over to Mafia types bickering and bantering with each other, with “series protagonist” Frank “The Wolf” Cordolini essentially reduced to a walk-on role. 

The action occurs about a month after The Plastic Man. Gerritty does not seem to have any grand intentions in mind and I get the impression he was turning this book out solely because the first two sold, and accordingly he wings his way through the narrative. The Numbers Man is dull and unnecessary, and doesn’t even have an eleventh-hour twist like The Plastic Man did to liven things up. Given that a lot of the dialog either recaps what happened in previous volumes or is given over to random musings on the life of a Mafia thug, my assumption is that Gerritty’s heart wasn’t in this one. Also my assumption is that Signet wanted more “Mafia” books, so Gerrity was catering to the publisher to make a sale, or hell maybe he just wanted to write a third novel so he could have a “trilogy.” 

The only problem is, The Never Contract told the complete story; the second and third volumes kind of just spin their wheels, dwelling on the ramifications of that first book. The Never Contract established Frank “The Wolf” Cordolini as an almost mythical character in the Mafia, a killer who went after the Family and got his revenge. In The Plastic Man, Cordolini was shuffled off to the side, with even major incidents – like his starting a family after the events of the first book, and then losing them to the Mafia – given short narrative shrift. The Numbers Man goes one better, by killing Cordolini himself in the opening pages! 

But then, even someone entirely new to the trilogy will doubt Cordolini’s truly dead. As it is, we get a harried opening sequence in which some Mafia thugs ambush Cordolini’s car in upstate New York, blasting it and sending car and driver into a lake, where the car submerges, with Cordolini’s body conveniently inside. Apparently this is like a few weeks after The Plastic Man. From here The Numbers Man turns into an oddball book in which a bunch of low-level mobsters shoot the shit and plot against each other while a mysterious figure begins to sow trouble between two families in New York City. 

This figure first shows up as a cop, and later as a mailman. The title of the book refers to a particular incident in which the mysterious figure hits a numbers operation that is run by one of the families. The curious thing is that these action scenes are over and done with in the span of a few paragraphs, but Gerrity will spend pages and pages on one-off mobsters discussing the events that transpired. The two characters who most rise to the surface are Don Albert, presumably returning from the previous volume(s), who is consigned to an iron lung thanks to traumatic injuries he suffered in Cordolini’s attack at the denoument of The Plastic Man, and Mike Sachetto, a goombah with designs on becoming a don himself. 

There is (are?) a plethora of Italian names to keep track of in the novel, and as if doubling down on it Gerrity even makes the sole non-Mafia character in the novel an Italian, too! He’s a cop and his name is Gino Coletti, and given that Gerrity most often refers to him as “Coletti,” I kept misreading his name as “Cordolini.” Not only that, but Gerrity has doubled down on “C” names, as if intentionally making it hard for his readers to keep track of who is who. Seriously, we have Cordolini, Coletti, Colmo, and a guy named Cookie. What, no Cobretti? Also I should mention here that there isn’t a female character in the novel, other than the hapless wife of one of the thugs, who appears for a page or two. 

I don’t exaggerate when I say that a lot of The Numbers Man is given over to dialog. There’s even a lot of stuff with Coletti shooting the shit with his partner, particularly over Coletti’s frustration with how the Mafia gives Italian-Americans a bad name. Meanwhile everyone tries to figure out who is honing in on Don Albert’s operation, and the reader will have figured out long ago that it is indeed Cordolini; no spoiler, as one of the mobsters figures this out early on, though he’s not believed. I did find it humorous how all these mobsters kept insisting that Cordolini was killed in that upstate New York ambush, even though his body was never found and also because “The Wolf” was, you know, a friggin’ legend in the Mafia, so you’d think these people would be a little more willing to suspect he faked his death. 

And on page 75 we learn this is indeed what happened, as Cordolini is introduced to us in the narrative without much fanfare, sitting in an apartment in Brookyln and planning his next hit. He was in fact the fake cop and fake mailman, and his goal is to start an internecine war to wipe out the two New York families. We only have a cursory reminder of his war on the Mafia, started for real when they killed his wife and son, but just like last time Cordolini’s off-page more often than not. In The Never Contract David Gerrity established that Frank Cordolini was more myth than man, so apparently Gerrity’s goal was to follow through on that in the narrative itself, with Cordolini more of a shadowy figure than a protagonist the reader can root for. The problem is Cordolini is too aloof and distant from the reader. 

Even more of a problem is that this leaves the heavy narrative lifting to one-off characters, same as in The Plastic Man. And given that they all turn into a bland retread of each other, The Numbers Man quickly becomes a chore of a read. Gerrity introduces so many characters that he seems to lose sight of them; one major character dies in the final pages almost anticlimactically. And speaking of which, the “climax” itself is almost an afterthought, a quick shootout on 57th Street in Brooklyn. 

Gerrity leaves Don Albert’s comeuppance off-page, but The Numbers Man ends on a nicely-handled scene in which the don’s fate is clearly implied. But curiously the door is left open for future tales of Frank Cordolini, as by novel’s end he has more money in his pocket thanks to hitting more numbers operations, and he still has a score to settle with the mob. But this was it for Cordolini, and I believe this was it for David Gerrity’s writing career, as I don’t believe he published anything else after this one…but then, The Numbers Man seems clear enough indication that the well had run dry.

The Making Of The Happy Hooker

The Making Of The Happy Hooker, by Robin Moore

October, 1973  Signet Books

A few years ago I reviewed The Happy Hooker, a book I had been meaning to read for years and years, as I’d picked up the majority of the books Xaviera Hollander published at the time. But that review is a bit of a sore spot for me, given that Blogger for no reason whatsoever put it behind a sensitivity filter, flagging it for adult content. I tried editing the title, the image, etc, but nothing worked and to this day the review is stuck behind a privacy screen, and stuff like this makes me laugh because it’s yet another reminder of how things are becoming more and more restricted in our otherwise “progressive” age. (To be filed under: “Sex parties are for me, not for thee.”) 

Well anyway, The Happy Hooker is credited to the titular hooker herself, Xaviera Hollander, but “co-written” by Robin Moore and Yvonne Dunleavy. Published a few years after that bestseller, The Making Of The Happy Hooker is by Robin Moore himself, telling the tale of how The Happy Hooker came to be, and the fallout from the book’s publication. Interestingly, Xaveria published a few more “nonfiction books” under her own name, without Moore or Dunleavy, so I wonder if those books – with titles like Xaviera! and Xaveria Goes Wild! – cover the same ground. I’m betting not, as glancing through them they appear to be more focused on Xaveria’s robust sex life, whereas The Making Of The Happy Hooker is more focused on the uninentional criminal and federal ramifactions that were spawned in the research and writing of The Happy Hooker. 

Moore was an incredibly prolific writer and I’m surprised I’ve yet to review one of his books on here. When I was 10 years old I picked up a paperback copy of his early ‘60s bestseller, The Green Berets, and it’s one of the few books from my childhood that I still have. (It has a lame cover photo of a soldier wearing camo facepaint.) But to this day I have not read the book, nor have I read any of Robin Moore’s many other books. I even have some PBOs he did through Manor Books in the late ‘70s, which might indicate that Moore gradually lost his “name” in the literary world; but then, The Happy Hooker itself was a PBO, and according to this book was the number one selling PBO of all time, with 7 million copies sold. 

I only bring up the “name” stuff because Robin Moore is at pains to remind us that he’s a big-name author throughout the entirety of The Making Of The Happy Hooker. He so often informs us that he’s well-known – at one point he even has a character directly state that “[Moore] is a big-time author” – that I got the impression the guy already knew his “name” was slipping, and was trying to double down on the fame he previously enjoyed. But that’s just my impression. There’s just a level of arrogance to his narrative that is not too disimilar from Norman Mailer’s, in Of A Fire On The Moon. That said, he also just as often reminds us of how skillfully-researched his books are, but then Moore is reportedly the only civilian to ever graduate Green Beret training, all during the course of research for his book on them. 

Well anyway, one suspects he published this book as a further boon to his rapidly-fading literary star; the only reason it seems to exist is so that Moore can provide his own interpretation of the bestselling The Happy Hooker, which is strange given that he was credited as the “co-writer” of the actual book. And a lot of the same material is covered herein, with the caveat that Moore’s “making of” book becomes more of a crime thriller, or at least more of a sub-The Anderson Tapes yarn, with its focus on illegal surveillance and the ensuing fallout of such. The plot is also less focused on Xaviera’s whoring life than it is on the Knapp Commission, which was tasked with rooting out corruption in the NYPD; basically, Xaviera’s cathouse became an illegal listening post for various cops who were trying to bust people. 

But then, Moore cagily asserts in his intro that The Making Of The Happy Hooker is “faction,” stating that some of it is “the fantasy of a middle-aged man who may wish more may have happened under certain exotic and erotic circumstances.” On that note, Moore tells us straight out that he had sex with Xaviera, and a few times at that. Indeed, their first meeting led to the inevitable; Moore has it that he was finishing up work on a book titled The Khaki Mafia, co-writing it with a lovely young dish named June who apparently had nice breasts (in true sleazy early ‘70s style, Moore does indeed tell us about the breasts of his female co-writers), and Moore started getting calls from a foreign-voiced chick who wanted him to visit her. Moore quickly deduced that she was a new hooker in town (this being 1970), and she’d bought the “black book” of another hooker – one who had Moore’s name in her book. 

Well, Moore does visit, and he informs us that Xaveria “wasn’t really a pretty girl,” but she carried herself like a “superstar.” Also, according to this book Xaviera had a tendency to say things like, “I would like to suck your cock” to a man shortly after meeting him, which certainly goes a long ways in making of up for her not being “really pretty.” “[Xaveria] encouraged me into positions I had never tried…taking me deep up into her,” Moore informs us in what will be one of the very few sexual scenes in the book – and one that only lasts a paragraph, at that. We get another Moore-Xaveria boff later in the book, when a horny Xaveria insists Moore stop working on the book and come back into her room: “Xaviera was astride me…begging me to ejaculate in her.” This part is funny, though, as Xaveria’s boyfriend Larry (who wrote his own book on Xaveria, believe it or not – and yes, I have it and will read it someday) comes back, knows what Moore and Xaviera are doing in there, and gets mad – not because of Xaveria’s infidelity, but because he knows Xaveria is giving Moore a freebie! But all is well when Moore hands over fifty bucks, after which Larry’s treating him like his best friend. 

As for The Happy Hooker, Moore has it that he hit upon the idea after that first tustle with Xaveria. But then, he states he’d already been thinking about a book on prositution, and indeed the prologue of the book is perhaps the best part, as Moore relates another funny story. It’s 1968, and Moore has brought in 18 Green Berets for the New York premiere of the film version of his book The Green Berets. They ended up at a fashionable East Side townhouse after the premiere, and Moore piles on the sleazy description of the madam’s five-floor bordello…which is raided by the cops the next day, after Moore and the Berets have left. But it’s from this that Moore got the idea to do a “Hookerbook,” which he informs us was his original title for the book that became The Happy Hooker. 

Moore also makes it clear that Xaveria Hollander did not write The Happy Hooker. He breaks it down in movie terms: “Produced by Robin Moore. Written by Yvonne Dunleavy. Starring Xaveria Hollander.” But then, Moore doesn’t even tell us much about Dunleavy’s contribution, other than her frequent run-ins with Xaveria. Dunleavy is apparently Australian, and is another lovely young thing with “nice breasts” that Moore hires to co-write with him, arguing that a book on a hooker needs a “woman’s touch,” indeed a woman who would understand that Xaveria’s blatant whorish attitude would seem alien to the average female reader. But really, all we learn of Dunleavy is she gets annoyed with Xaveria, who is constantly asking Dunleavy to “help out” at the cathouse, ie serve as a hooker for a group of men who are coming in, etc. 

The book starts off on the sleazy footing we’d expect, with Xaveria casually informing Moore and Dunleavy of her kinky customers and her history of hookering…but it’s also gross, because we get a lot on the “freak” aspect, complete with a dude who likes to eat shit. Literally. But The Making Of The Happy Hooker changes course with the introduction of “Ben the Bugger,” a wiretapping expert Moore hires to bug Xaveria’s place…so Moore doesn’t have to be there all the time, picking up material for the book. Essentially Ben bugs all the rooms, with Xaveria’s blessing, so Moore and Dunleavy can later listen to the tapes and transcribe the sleazy details for “Hookerbook.” 

The only problem is, Ben the Bugger starts tapping the phones and calling over cops, and Moore soon discovers that Ben is part of the Knapp Commission, and Moore has essentially funded an illegal surveillance scheme. This is what The Making Of The Happy Hooker ultimately becomes concerned with, and in fact Xaveria sort of gets lost in the narrative, only appearing willy-nilly, and usually being duped iby Ben the Bugger. At one point he even puts a video camera behind her mirror, controlled by “laser,” so that he can videotape Xaveria as she’s having sex…and since he’s broadcasting on “the high band” of the UHF spectrum, it so happens that one day something slips and the real-life hardcore stuff s being broadcast on “a Puerto Rican station” in New York City, until the Feds hear about it and shut it down…but really they just ask Ben to stop, given that they all are aware of him. I suspect this material could be that “faction” stuff. 

The book does take on the tone of a crime thriller, with Xaveria even agreeing to work with the Knapp boys, using her girls to ensnare people they have their eyes on…like a group of Arabs. Oh, and there’s also a subplot about Ellen, a married British lady Moore likes who takes a job secretly at Xaveria’s so she can get enough money to leave her husband, and Ben the Bugger falls in love with her. The stuff with Ben also has an unintentionally humorous aspect to it, because at one point he zeroes in on a dirty cop named…Don Johnson. And humorously, “Don Johnson” comes off exactly like Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice, just a too-cool cop, but unlike Crockett he’s essentially corrupt. So I guess he’s more like Sonny’s alter ego, Sonny Burnett. 

We do get a recreation of the scene that opened The Happy Hooker: Xaveria and her posh girls thrown in jail with a bunch of street-hardened black hookers. It’s even more outrageous here, with the lead black hooker taking a “small, phallus-shaped gravity knife” from out of her inner recesses and threatening to cut up Xaveria. Also, we learn that Xavera did not like the title “The Happy Hooker,” arguing correctly that she was not a “hooker,” but a “madam.” She wanted the book to be titled “The Happy Madam,” but Moore – who suddenly claims he was the proponent of titling it The Happy Hooker late in the book, despite his earlier statement that he wanted to call it “Hookerbook” – prevails, and soon enough they have a bestselling monster on their hands. 

Moore basically makes The Making Of The Happy Hooker a behind the scenes meets “where are they now?” affair, telling us of the fallout of the book – Xaveria on the witness stand, due to serving the Knapp commission, Ben the Bugger fleeing to England and fighting against extradition, and Moore moving on to his next book. He says nothing of Xaveria’s many other books, no doubt because he wasn’t involved with them (and also none of them were published by Signet). Moore also doesn’t tell us much about his own life, other than mentioning his various books and research for them. He casually informs us he’s unhappily married – and this only after we’ve had a few conjugal visits with Xaviera – but the wife isn’t even named. 

At 184 small, dense pages, The Making Of The Happy Hooker moves at a fairly fast clip, but be advised that the title is a bit misleading. The actual writing of Xaveria Hollander’s book is sort of the framework that Robin Moore uses to tell a tale that is more concerned with wiretapping, bugging, and other illegal surveilling techniques. It also has a topical relevance, as the wiretapping entrapment scheme with the New York-based Knapp Commission and Xaviera seems quite similar to whatever is going on with Puff Daddy today.

Men’s Adventure Quarterly #10

Men's Adventure Quarterly #10, Edited by Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham

February, 2024  Subtropic Productions

This volume of MAQ focuses on the Vietnam War, and editors Robert Deis abd Bill Cunningham have done a great job, as usual, of selecting stories that run the gamut of the men’s adventure magazine field. There’s everything from factual reportage on the war to the escapist pulp one most thinks of when thinking of men’s adventure magazines, and you get even more of it in The Vietnam Issue, which is longer than the previous volumes of this series. 

I wasn’t sure I’d be as much interested in this one, as I thought Vietnam was a little too “real” for the pulpy stuff I prefer in men’s mags. Also, I’m not as much into military fiction, or war fiction in general. At one point in time I ranked Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers as the greatest novel I’d ever read, and Michael Herr’s Dispatches as the greatest “nonfiction” book I’d ever read, but that was like over 20 years ago. In fact, I reviewed both books on Amazon way back then; I even liked Hasford’s followup, The Phantom Blooper. But really, that Vietnam is not the Vietnam of the men’s mags; the surreal, drug-fueled vibe of Apocalypse Now has been replaced with something more akin to Robin Moore’s The Green Berets, or even the film version, only without the patriotic vibe of the film. The writers in the stories collected here never judge the merits of the war, or dwell on how ‘Nam was “the first rock and roll war,” but instead focus on the hellzones the soldiers had to battle through, on land, air, and under the ground. 

Bob Deis provides one of his typically-informative intros, in which he relates his own personal thoughts on Vietnam. Bob as well does not provide his views on the justness of the war, focusing more on how the growing public distaste with it gradually led to fewer and fewer ‘Nam stories in the men’s mags. That said, even the early stories here aren’t gung-ho in support of the war; it’s clear that even at the time the editors were putting a different spin on Vietnam stories than on the typical WWII combat stories. One thing I was curious about was whether soldiers in ‘Nam – or ones who served early in the war and then returned home – were readers of the men’s adventure mags. Or was the readership mostly limited to WWII vets and Korea vets? It would be interesting to see what insights the publishing companies had on their readers back in the day, but that’s just the marketing professional in me, I guess. 

Oh and Bill Cunningham’s art direction is as usual perfect throughout; one story is even graced with an original duotone that was not featured with the original men’s mag publication. The artwork is reproduced with meticulous care throughout, with even the usual “cover gallery” we’ve gotten with previous issues. That said, the “eye candy” of earlier books isn’t as prevalent this time; what with the focus on combat stories, there is little in the way of the female presence typically expected of escapist men’s mag yarns. But as with Cuba: Sugar, Sex, And Slaughter, I’m sure there had to be a few men’s magazine stories that focused on sexpot girl guerrillas waging lusty war in the jungles of Vietnam. Maybe we’ll read a few of them if there’s ever a ‘Nam MAQ followup. That said, there’s a great pictorial piece on Raquel Welch. 

First up is “The First Gis To Die In Vietnam,” by Jack Ryan and from the January 1963 Man’s Magazine. This long piece is factual in its approach, telling the grim story of the first two American soldiers to die in combat in ‘Nam. Sent there as “advisors,” the soldiers engage in combat with the VC and are injured; the story mainly focuses on the plight of the two surviving soldiers, who are taken prisoner by the VC. This is an affecting story, with the extra impact that it is not the pulpy sort of yarn expected from the men’s mags, again indicating that even very, very early in the war the men’s magazine editors were treating Vietnam differently than other wars. 

But the next tale is pulpy, and it’s not only for that reason that it’s my favorite in the collection – it’s also great because it marks the first appearance of Mario Puzo, under his men’s mag pseudonym “Mario Cleri,” in Men’s Adventure Quarterly. Hopefully someday we’ll have an entire issue devoted to his yarns, as Cleri/Puzo is definitely my favorite men’s mag writer…and I’m not just saying that due to some prejudice over Puzo later becoming a bestselling author. In fact, I’ve only read one Puzo novel, The Godfather of course, and I’ve read it twice…once in high school and then again a few years ago. On this second reading I couldn’t believe how much of a Harold Robbins-type novel it was. 

No, Puzo was just a talented writer, bringing a great touch to his men’s mag stories…and also he was the only men’s mag writer who realized he could expand one of his stories into a feature-length novel, with Six Graves To Munich. The tale collected here, “Saigon Nymph Who Led The Green Berets To The Cong’s Terror Tunnels,” is just as pulpy and fun as the other Cleri stories I’ve had the pleasure to read; it originally appeared in the August, 1966 issue of Male. As ever Puzo packs a lot of story into this one, keeping it fast-moving: we meet a 19 year-old new recruit in ‘Nam as he goes home with a local beauty he just met in a bar, but it’s a trap and wily General Fonh wants the kid, Johnny Blake, to tell all he knows about his older brother, Korea vet Colonel Victor Blake, who serves now as head of counter-intelligence. The kid says no and pays the ultimate price. 

Thus ensues a revenge yarn, but it’s atypical from the format in that Victor Blake, who arrives in ‘Nam shortly thereafter to set up counter-terrorism methods, goes about his vengeance a little more coldly than one might expect. There’s little emotional depth, and he’s more about using his combat-trained intelligence – not to mention his penchant for remembering the odd fact – to gradually set the trap for General Fonh. Hell, the dude even sleeps with the chick who set up his brother for death, the lovely Lilly (with her “dusky nipples,” Cleri as ever serving up the goods expected of men’s mag writers), but we’re told this in an off-hand manner…also, that Blake has to “get drunk” to screw her. The climax sees Blake staging a Green Beret raid on Fonh’s secret village hideout, but the finale itself brings the emotional impact Puzo denied us earlier in the story, featuring as it does a firing line execution that leaves Blake cold, despite his vengeance having been gained. 

“Ambush By The Bridge At Nam Nang,” by Jackson Boeling and from the October 1966 Man’s Life, answers the unasked question: “What if Joseph Conrad had written for the men’s mags?” This 6 and a half-page “Book-length novel” is quite tonally different from the average men’s mag story, featuring Vietnamese natives as the protagonist. The author gives us a glimpse of how war can not only rip a country apart but a family as well, telling the story through the perspective of an older Vietnamese who attended a Catholic school and who sees the war through the prism of the old ways, while his son has joined the Viet Cong. 

“The Million-Dollar Ballad Of A Green Beret” is by Garth Roberts and from the October 1966 Man’s World, telling the tale of how Green Beret Barry Sadler wrote the famous “Ballad Of The Green Berets” and had a hit from it. More interesting by far however is Bob Deis’s intro; decades removed from the original men’s mag story, Bob is able to tell the full story of Barry Sadler’s life, and it all seems to have come out of a John Steinbeck novel, complete with Sadler gaining and losing wealth and fame, even murdering someone later in life and getting away with it. Bob also mentions Sadler’s Casca series, and like most guys my age that’s how I came to know of him; man I used to always see those paperbacks at the local WaldenBooks, but I never read any of them because there were so many of them that I was daunted by the prospect. And also, so far as I can recall, I never came across the first volume, so that further made it all seem like a too-daunting prospect. 

We’re back to the pulpy escapism with “Saga Of ‘Mad Mike’ Kovacs and His Battling Lepers of Vietnam,” by Glenn Infield and from the January 1967 Male. I’ve read and reviewed some other Infield men’s mag stories here on the blog, and also I know his name from various military paperbacks he published, so I appreciated Bob’s intro piece on the author. Otherwise this is an entertaining story of Kovacs, who is dropped into a leper colony to figure out how the VC are smuggling weapons across the Cambodian border, and he uses the lepers as his commando squad. Not much as done with this setup as you might expect, and indeed more detail is placed on the “blunderbuss,” a sled made out of the bed of a helicopter with two .50-caliber machine guns and a grenade launcher mounted on it. Kovacs places this on a path in the jungle and blasts the VC to oblivion in a memorable finale that brings to mind the climax of the 2008 Rambo. 

Robert F. Dorr provies the realistic war fiction he would become known for with “MIG Bait Over North Vietnam,” from the February 1968 Man’s Magazine. This one features Major Paul Gilmore getting in an aerial dogfight with a MIG over ‘Nam in 1966, and is very much in a “military fiction” style – and, per Bob’s insightful intro, is based on a real event, as typical of Dorr’s men’s mag work. 

“Mission Imperative: Smash The Cong’s Terror Tunnels” is by Eric Breske and from the November 1968 True Action; despite the sly callout to a famous TV show of the time in the title, this one’s not a spy yarn, but instead focused on the famous “Tunnel Rats” of the war. Here we read the claustrophobic tale of Captain Horten and his 3-man Tunnel Rat squad as they chase Charlie beneath the Earth, encountering incredible heat and fire ants and booby traps. A tale that again brings to light the plight of the average soldier in ‘Nam, and what was expected of them, and also one that concludes on an unexpected emotional touch with the note that Horten’s squad – as well as others – often adopted children who had been orphaned by the war, making them the “official mascots” of their squads and such. 

Likely the most gripping piece in Michael Herr’s Dispatches is the long, surreal piece on Khe Sahn, which I believe was originally published in Life or something, years before Dispatches came out. The next story here, “Ambush! The Horror At Khe Sahn,” provides the men’s mag take on this nightmarish siege. It’s by Dave Graham and from the June 1969 Bluebook. While not capturing the psychedelic soul-horror of Herr’s piece, Graham’s nonetheless documents the “hell in a very small place” that was Khe Sahn, where American soldiers at the titular base endured a four-month siege. 

This MAQ ends on a downbeat note with “Uncle Sam’s Universal Shafting Of Viet Vets,” by Ed Hymoff and from the November 1972 Saga. The author tells us of the dispirited post-war lives of vets who gave so much in the war, “shafted” by the very government they gave so much to. But again it’s Bob’s intro that has the most impact, telling from his own observations how vets were ignored back in the day – compared to how they are given their due today. 

In addition to all the above there are some great pieces throughout, like one on Army comics of the war by Bill Cunningham, and also Paul Bishop serves up a great piece on the Vietnam-focused men’s adventure paperbacks that were ubiquitous in the ‘80s. As mentioned before, I quite remember this as well, and indeed had a few volumes of The Black Eagles (if for nothing other than the covers!), and also I had several volumes of Eric Helm’s Vietnam: Ground Zero, which I got every other month in a package from Gold Eagle, but I never, ever read a single one of them. 

So, once again this volume of Men’s Adventure Quarterly is a winner, so I highly recommend you pick up a copy of MAQ #10 yourself!