Framed

Framed, by Art Powers and Mike Misenheimer
May, 1974  Pinnacle Books

In addition to their men’s adventure series, Pinnacle also published a lot of standalone crime-thriller paperback originals, usually labelled, like this one, as “adventure” on the spine. Unfortunately a lot of these titles are obscure and/or scarce these days, which is a pity in the case of Framed, as it’s a helluva ‘70s crime novel – and brutal, too, with grisly carnage like eyeballs popping out, point-blank blasts to the face by Magnum revolvers, maulings by killer guard dogs, and torture via spark plugs. Hell, it’s even got a fairly explicit sex scene, so what more could you ask for. 

I’d never heard of the book – and when researching it was surprised to find there was even a film adaptation, released the following year and starring Joe Don Baker, more of which below. But as for the novel itself, I was able to find out that authors Art Powers and Mike Misenheimer were ex-convicts, of the Ohio State Peninteniary, and had actually published a nonfiction book about their experiences there a few years before. It appears that Framed was their sole novel, released in only this paperback edition and promptly forgotten (other than the film, that is). It’s a shame, as these two prove themselves to be very talented authors.

Framed is written in first-person, narrated by an ex-con named Ron Lewis (mistakenly referred to as “Tom Lewis” on the back cover). Seven years ago Ron was sent to Ohio State Pen for murdering a sheriff’s deputy in Steubenville, Ohio, but it was a frame; Ron killed the man in self-defense, as the deputy had been sent to murder Ron for something Ron saw but shouldn’t have. Ron came out the victor of the fight, but the people behind it all were able to send him to prison on trumped-up charges. Now Ron has served his time and has returned to Steubenville to bust those fuckers up.

Like the best crime fiction, Framed is lean and mean and doesn’t waste time with inessentials. Like for example Ron himself. We’re given no real background on him, what he does for a living, where he’s from, etc. All we learn is that he served for two years in Korea, after which he tried college but dropped out after a semester. He then ended up in Steubenville, shortly after which he ran into the trouble which sent him to prison for seven years. And now he has returned, apparently in the present (ie 1974).

Despite their solid writing skills, not to mention their gift with a melancholy vibe, the authors appear to lack math skills. As mentioned Ron served in the Korean War, which ended in 1953. When checking in with the sheriff’s office upon his return to Steubenville after getting out of prison, Ron gives his age as 31. This would imply the novel is set in the mid 1960s at the latest. And yet the book is clearly set in the early ‘70s, with references to Twiggy, Jimi Hendrix, the 1968 Ohio Pen reforms, and even the Beatles song “Something,” which alone places the novel after 1969. But who knows, maybe like Don Pendleton Ron lied about his age so he could serve in Korea. Or maybe he lied to the sheriff’s office.

What happened seven years ago is capably dispensed in bits and pieces without stalling forward momentum. Framed occurs in almost a postmodern format, with Ron making his return, figuring out who was behind the frame, and plotting his revenge; this takes precedence over the backstory of what happened that night seven years ago. For that matter Ron’s time in prison is also only sporadically referred to, with only one (kind of jarring) part where he goes into an extended flashback about his time there. That being said, it made total sense when I learned the authors themselves were ex-cons, as former prisoner Ron marvels over things that would be ignored by the average person, like the simple act of putting a key into a locked door and letting himself in. It’s little touches like this that elevates Framed beyond your basic (but bloody) revenge tale.

The novel opens with Ron getting off the bus that has returned him to Steubenville. He’s met at the depot by Susan, aka “Susan Cool,” a hotstuff nightclub singer Ron was involved with seven years ago. She takes him back to her place where she “balls [him] out of compassion,” though the authors leave this one fade to black; a later sex scene between the two is more in-depth, with Ron’s statements that his “tumescence was complete,” and Susan “grasping [his] extended manhood.” But after the “balling” Susan tells Ron he should leave town; the people behind his frame are still around and don’t want him here.

A funny (but I don’t think it was intended as such) element in Framed is Ron’s (and thus the authors’s as well?) sentiments toward women in general and Susan in particular. Simply put, she’s there to have sex with him and make his meals. While the former is implicit the latter is, uh, plicit (I stole that from somewhere but can’t remember where). Ron often tells us that Susan’s main chore is to make his meals, and there are many scenes where he sends her off to the kitchen to whip up food while the men talk. Anytime she gives him backtalk Ron simply ignores her, and he usually evades her questions. Indeed Ron treats Susan with such casual misogyny that Bill Cartwright of Operation Hang Ten could take a few pointers from him – high (or low?) praise indeed.

What happened was that seven years ago Ron decided to go out driving late one night. Passing by a field, he was shot at by some unseen assailant. Returning home, Ron was jumped in his garage by a burly sheriff’s deputy, one with a reputation for sadism and brutality. Ron, realizing he was about to be taken away to be killed, not arrested, engaged the dude in mortal combat. This fight, friends, is to Gannon levels of brutality. These two beat each other to burger, with Ron biting out a “chunk” of the deputy’s neck and finally ripping out his eyeball, which he shows to the dying deputy before throwing it in his face! (“He was strangling on his own blood and his own eyeball.”)

Ron is sent away for murdering an officer of the law, and his story of innocence is ignored. Now he uses Susan to figure out what’s happened since he was gone. For one, the sheriff at the time, a beefy dude named Morello, has become mayor. The new sheriff was a deputy back then but doesn’t seem to know anything about what happened. There’s also a new deputy who was cousins with the man Ron killed and who periodically threatens our narrator, usually getting his ass kicked – Ron himself, by the way, is a musclebound hulk. There’s also a black cop on the Steubenville force named Sam, who gradually assists Ron; Sam is aware of the corruption in town and knows Ron was framed.

Also assisting Ron is Vince, his old cellmate, a professional thief/Mafia hitman who ironically enough has been sent to Steubenville on a hit assignment, only to realize his target was none other than his old cellmate. Instead Vince gives Ron a warning and also loans him a .38. He suggests Ron call up another old prisoner pal, Sal Viccarone, a Mafia don who still wields power despite being behind bars. A simple call to a number Sal provided gets the underworld heat off Ron, but there’s still the question of who put the hit out on him in the first place.

More assassins follow, including a pair of hitmen who show up outside Susan’s home one night; Sam takes them out, now fully helping Ron. Our hero doesn’t just sit around; in the field that night years ago he spotted a yellow sports car, and tracking down leads finds that it was owned by the hippie son of current Ohio senator Polanski. The punk now lives with a bunch of hippies in Cleveland, serving as their lawyer; the authors bring to life the squalor of a hippie pad as Ron questions young Polanksi and learns that his dad had sold the yellow car long before the night of the shooting.

Ron’s now certain Senator Polanksi was behind the frame; he gets further confirmation when three killers get the jump on him outside of Susan’s place; Susan meanwhile has revealed that she was raped seven years ago, threatened to keep her mouth shut about Ron’s innocence…and conveniently one of the guys waiting for Ron now is the dude who raped her. We get another bit of Gannon-esque ultraviolence as Ron wrecks the car they’re in into a train and then beats the guy in the tail car to burger, even ripping apart his nostrils with his bare hands – and of course it’s the guy who raped Susan. Ron then proceeds to shoot off his ear and torture him for info with a skinned spark plug. The scene climaxes with a .357 Magnum blast to the sonofabitch’s face. As I say, the novel is wonderfully hardcore.

But Polanski senior also turns out to be innocent, or at least mostly so. Cornering the senator, Ron gets the full story. That night seven years ago Senator Polanski had just killed the man who was selling drugs to his son in that field. When Ron happened to drive by, the senator flipped and thought it was an accomplice. After firing at Ron’s car, Polanski blabbed to Sheriff Morello, who promised to square things away. Ron was framed, and in exchange for keeping Polanski’s name clean, Morello was able to exert his influence over the senator in various underhanded pursuits, not to mention gaining his help in becoming mayor of Steubenville.

This takes us into the climax, where Ron and Vince break out the revolvers and infiltrate Morello’s heavily-guarded home, a sequence which has Ron punching a killer guard dog to death. While this finale doesn’t have the explosive action I was hoping for, it does at least have a satisfactory end, with various reversals and reveals, as well as a quick firefight. Also it features the above-mentioned dog mauling, which sees the unfortunate victim’s face chomped and ripped to bloody ribbons.

Framed even features that other mainstay of ‘70s crime fiction: the downer ending. Not in the “everyone dies” fashion, but more so in an ironic sort of defeatism. The last chapter jumps into third-person and tells us of a man killing off a few cops who are guarding someone in protective custody, someone who is serving as a witness against the mob. The assassin then drowns the witness himself in the ocean. While he is never named, it is implied that the assassin is Ron, who post-vengeance has taken a job with old prison pal Sal Viccarone, who at novel’s end offered him a job in the Syndicate. The irony being that Ron has spent the novel fighting hitmen who blindly followed orders, killing without care, and now he himself has become one of them.

All told, Framed is damn great. There’s a level of introspection that is skillfully worked into the narrative, never slowing it down, just enough to give it an extra dramatic boost. It also has an assortment of memorable characters, and the brutal violence goes beyond some of the men’s adventure novels of the era. About the only misstep is the cover, which is cool enough, but I figure is recycled from something else, as it has nothing to do with the novel. That sunglasses-wearing dude in the snazzy suit sure isn’t Ron Lewis, and the array of profiles behind him doesn’t bear much relation to the characters in the book – I mean, the guy in the hat at the center appears to be Chinese or something, and there isn’t a single Asian in Framed.

As for the film, Framed came out in 1975, but it’s copyright ‘74; Powers’s and Misenheimer’s novel is credited, but they did not write the script. The movie is much inferior to the novel. Joe Don Baker stars as Ron, and admittedly I didn’t picture Baker as the protagonist when reading the novel, but then I can’t think of a single novel in which I ever have. (I still think he made for the best onscreen Felix Leiter though – I mean, at least Baker’s from Texas!). Ron is more fleshed out in the movie, though I feel this detracts from his cipher-like nature in the novel. “I’m a gambler,” he helpfully exposits in the first few moments of the film, and he’s more of a bumbling redneck than the stone cold badass of the book.

The movie drops the template of the novel and follows a linear format, with Ron’s framing and prison service playing out in real time. The manner of Ron’s frame is also changed; in addition to the “wrong place, wrong time” setup of the book, here he’s intentionally framed due to his gambling winnings, which are taken by the corrupt sheriff. The action is also changed from Ohio to Tennessee, making the film part of the slew of “redneck revenge” exploitation yarns that were popular at the time.

The producers maintain the violent setpieces of the novel as closely as they can while still making it a mainstream picture; Ron’s brawl with the deputy is bloody, but no eyeballs pop out, and while Ron still shoots off the rapists’s ear he doesn’t blow off his face as in the novel. The action is the most memorable part of the film, in particular the film’s recreation of the scene in which Ron wrecks his car into a train – a stuntman is almost incenerated as he rolls away from the exploding car. All in a day’s work!

Finally, the flick skips the downer, ironic ending and gives us a veritable Happily Ever After, as Ron, his vengeance sated and his money returned, makes off with Susan – who herself has been changed in the film; gone is “Susan Cool,” replaced by a shrill harpy who grates the nerves. All told, the film adaptation of Framed is passable hicksploitation, but doesn’t come close to matching the brutal impact of the novel.

The James Bond Dossier

The James Bond Dossier, by Kingsley Amis
July, 1966  Signet Books

Published in hardcover in 1965, The James Bond Dossier was one of the first studies of the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming, following O.F. Snelling’s 007 James Bond: A Report by one year. Unlike Snelling, Dossier author Kinglsey Amis was not only friends with Ian Fleming, but also benefited from having all of Fleming’s published Bond novels at his disposal; Snelling’s book went to press just as penultimate volume You Only Live Twice was being published.

This is a cogent, humorous, and engaging overview of Fleming’s Bond novels; Amis’s enthusiasm for them carries through the page. While he’s never critical of the books (he admits at the outset that he’s a huge fan), Amis does occasionally poke fun at things, but in a way that would even make the most ardent Fleming defender chuckle. In many ways, The James Bond Dossier is more entertaining than the Bond books themselves; Amis’s wit and keen eye bring out so many details that multiple readings would no doubt be rewarding.

In a brief preface Amis states that his original intention was to write an article about Bond, but in the end decided to produce a short book on the subject. This is to every Bond fan’s benefit, but be forewarned that the Dossier has become collectible on the second-hand market (it’s long out of print, sadly). A little researching will no doubt turn up an affordable copy; I got this Signet edition, which follows the design of Signet’s Bond paperbacks of the early ‘60s, at a nice price. The book could also be read while reading the novels themselves; Amis occasionally gives away big details, but most people are familiar with everything thanks to the film versions (which are no doubt seen a lot more than the original novels are read); thus, no concerns about “spoilers.”

“The Man Who Is Only A Silhouette” is the first chapter, and gives a brief rundown on Bond and his literary ancestors. Warning for American readers: Amis refers quite often to British character Bulldog Drummond and his exploits. It’s clear that, at the time of this book, Drummond must’ve been more popular to the average reader in England than perhaps Bond himself was; throughout Amis will make references to this or that moment in Drummond’s history with little embellishment or explanation, as if assuming his readers know what the hell he’s talking about.

The first three chapters go over Bond, from personal details to his life as a secret agent, and on this latter point Amis makes the argument that Bond is not and has never been a “spy,” given that his assignments usually entail everything but spying. Amis argues that Bond would more accurately be described as a secret agent. Amis also looks into the supposed superpowers of Bond, arguing that, within the context and world of the novels themselves, his abilities are not so unbelievable – it would be common sense, for example, to accept that a top British agent would also be a top marksman. Bear in mind that throughout Amis solely refers to the literary Bond, with only a few mentions of his film counterpart; Amis was no fan of the films nor star Sean Connery, at one point even mentioning “Sean Connery’s total wrongness for the part” of Bond.

In these opening three chapters (“Sit Down, 007” and “Going Slowly To Pieces” being the titles of chapters two and three), Amis defends the “wish fulfillment” of the Bond novels, mocking critics who bemoan the pulpy nature of the series. “No adult ought to feel adult all the time,” Amis asserts, in just one of the book’s many quotable lines. Amis also makes the valid point that we readers want to be Bond, not invite him over for dinner or have drinks with him – the fact that Bond himself is almost a cipher is beside the point. He is the man all other men aspire to be. This includes Bond’s herculean smoking and drinking habits; despite being written long before the anti-smoking movement held sway, the Dossier admits that Bond’s 60-cigarettes-a-day habit might be pushing things a bit, but hell, Bond goes through a lot and deserves his indulgences.

Amis also defends Bond’s views on women in the fourth chapter, “No Woman Had Ever Held This Man” (the chapter titles cribbed from Fleming, obviously). Every Bond reader is familiar with Bond’s attitudes on women, as shown for example in Casino Royale. Amis excerpts four such examples from this novel, then defends them within the context of the book itself – Bond’s mood at the time, etc. Even Bond’s “the bitch is dead” line from the end of the book is defended as justifiable, given the revelation of Vesper’s traitorous duplicity. It goes without saying that this chapter would raise the hackles of the modern (or at least progressivised) reader. But Amis is never funnier than when he’s defending Fleming’s more “outdated” views, like Bond’s one-woman-a-novel track record:

Bond’s success with women is totally explicable within the terms of the novels. Women take to him because he likes them and knows how to be kind to them. He has, of course, further advantages. Other things being equal, women prefer handsome men to ugly and brave men to cowardly. There seems nothing to be done about that. Any number of us, however, could afford to take a couple of leaves out of Bond’s book. Unlike many heroes of more ambitious fiction, Bond is good-tempered and not moody. Women appreciate that in a man. And as Tatiana [in From Russia, With Love] notices at once, Bond looks very clean.

As can be seen, Amis here too defends the “fantasy” nature of Bond’s appeal to women; this element, apparently criticized by reviewers at the time as more of that “wish fulfillment,” is proven to be no big deal; Bond becomes intimate with one woman a novel, and given that Fleming wrote one novel a year, this is easily believable – it isn’t like we’re talking about the three or more women Bond conjugates with per movie. Amis also points out that Bond, despite his “sexist” attitude, is seldom ever mean to women (other than, he specifies, ugly villainesses Irma Bundt and Rosa Klebb; but they deserved it!). In general, Bond treats women with kindness and respect.

The wonderfully-titled fifth chapter, “Beautiful Firm Breasts,” is all about the “Bond-girl,” as Amis refers to Fleming’s central female characters. “Bond-girl shows a strong tendency to make her debut naked or half-naked,” Amis writes, and “Her most frequently mentioned feature is her fine, firm, faultless, splendid, etc, breasts.” (“I find this inoffensive, too,” he adds.) We have a rundown of the Bond-girl archetype, including Fleming’s apparent favored hair and eye colors, as well as the recurring motif that, despite her beauty and curves, Bond-girl usually has some impediment – Honeychile Rider (from Doctor No) with her broken nose, Domino Vitali (from Thunderball) with her one leg shorter than the other, etc. “Honeychile Rider is the most appealing incarnation of Bond-girl,” Amis asserts, and I agree with him. Despite talk of the magnificent curves and looks, Amis also details how Bond-girl has her own heroic makeup, and how she brings more to her respective novel than just being Bond’s latest good time. He also mentions how Kissy Suzuki in You Only Lives Twice actually saves Bond’s life.

Chapter six, “A Glint of Red,” focuses on Bond’s enemies. Amis again proves his keen eye with the observation on the “peculiar unpleasantness” of the mandatory Bond-villain confrontation in each novel, as in each case there is a father vs son dynamic at play. Amis nominates Doctor No as the “most archetypal Bond villain,” not to mention “the most fun” (and I agree on both counts). But Doctor No isn’t Amis’s favorite, as he finds him a bit too pulpy; Amis himself prefers Hugo Drax, from Moonraker. Amis likes how Drax can go from insane to casual in a heartbeat.

“Damnably Clear Gray Eyes,” chapter five, is dedicated to M, Bond’s cantankerous boss. Make no mistake, Kinglsey Amis hates M. Indeed, it would appear Amis wrote the later Bond continuation novel Colonel Sun (1968) precisely so he could abuse M in the opening chapters. We get a rundown of how poorly M treats Bond, usually sending him off into horrible situations with hardly enough information. Again and again M has Bond risk his life, usually not even giving him a “thank you” for his troubles. The observation that M’s world is like a family is compelling, particularly Amis’s notion that Miss Monneypenny and the other girls in the office are like Bond’s “sisters,” thus Bond’s relationship with them can never go beyond harmless repartee. Amis wraps up the chapter with a laugh-out-loud observation that, given the frequency of M’s ignorance, the reader must gradually come to the conclusion that “no thought is taking place behind those damnably clear eyes.”

“Warm Dry Handshakes” follows, this time looking at Bond’s allies in each novel. Amis finds Darko Kerim of From Russia, With Love the “most appealing” of them all. You Only Live Twice’s Dikko Henderson is also okay, “but goes on and on.” Better yet is the following chapter, “We May Be Slow, But…”, in which Amis defends the colonialist attitudes of Fleming, particularly his frequent use of foreigners as villains: “Some forms of prejudice may be sinister, but not these.” While “unenlightened,” it’s “perfectly harmless to lump people together by nationality.” My favorite observation is that, in Fleming’s world, Americans are only “semi-foreigners, very nearly as good as ourselves.” Otherwise this entire chapter would send today’s PC advocates into fits of rage, meaning of course it’s a blast of a read.

“Elegant Scene” details the luxury settings and opulent foods of the Bond novels, though here Amis sees no snobbery, and only occasionaly the “copywriting” vibe critics often complained about in Fleming’s work. This chapter also features one of the few mentions of the Bond movies; Amis states that, as of the time of his writing, only the first three films had been released, Goldfinger being the most recent. He calls the movies a “send-up” of Bond, which I think is a bit unfair; anyone who has seen the first two films will know they aren’t send-ups at all. They play it straight and stay true to Fleming’s novels. It’s only with Goldfinger that the movies began moving toward camp. Regardless, Amis ends the chapter with another notable observation: that, even though Ian Fleming might’ve laughed when he came up with his stories, he “didn’t laugh in his writing. I approve.”

On to “The Shertel-Sachsenberg System,” which looks at Fleming’s love of shoehorning technical terms and equipment into his narrative; here too we are reminded of the occasional copywriter vibe. Amis asserts that these technical details make Bond’s fantasy world more believable; we might not know what the hell a “Shertel-Sachsenberg System” is, but if Fleming writes that it’s the best there is we’ll take him at his word. In this chapter Amis coins the phrase “the Fleming effect,” which he defines as Fleming’s “imaginative use of information.” Amis names Thunderball as being filled with the Fleming effect. For the effect to work properly, Amis stipulates that it “has to be geared into the action,” otherwise it comes off as bland info-dumping.  The chapter also discusses the increasingly fantastical nature of the villains’s plots, with another humorous observation: “Blofeld’s schemes...were never conceived in a fit of caution.”

“Y*B**NNA Mat!” (the title taken from an apparently-unprintable Russian oath in From Russia, With Love) discusses how “Putting Fleming to right has become a minor contemporary sport.” This chapter I didn’t find very compelling; it goes and on about various mistakes in Fleming’s novels, with Amis at one point detailing his own theory on how Fleming goofed up with the entire SMERSH concept, claiming that such an organization wouldn’t be doing any of the stuff Fleming has it doing. The chapter “Upas-Tree” follows suit, Amis stating that “Every writer of action stories sooner or later finds himself with an implausability on his hands.” Here Amis defends the “conventions” of the Bond novels (ie the Bond-villain confrontation, the appearance of Bond-girl, etc) as a catering to an accepted form.

The fourteenth and final chapter, “The Beautiful Red And Black Fish,” is one of the longest in the book and is comprised of a solid defense of Fleming’s style. This too was an interesting read, implying that in his day Fleming’s work was apparently considered subpar, at least when compared to other espionage fiction, in particular Deighton’s work. However today Fleming’s Bond novels come off as downright literary, to the point that you figure the haughty style might be off-putting to someone coming to the books from the movies. Here Amis reveals that the majority of his text was written just before Fleming died; Amis knew that, even though the critics of his day dismissed Ian Fleming, history would remember him and his work – not to mention his style, which Amis also knew no other author would be able to duplicate. “He leaves no heirs.”

Amis includes three brief appendices: “Science Fiction” details the use of gadgets in the novels, and only here did it occur to me that, in Fleming’s world, it was the villains who most often used them – Mr. Big’s desk-gun in Live And Let Die, Rosa Klebb’s poison-blade shoes in From Russia, With Love, etc. “Literature And Escape” doesn’t have much to do with Bond at all, and is more so about how one can seek escape in the world of fiction. The final appendix, “Sadism,” speculates on if Fleming himself got off on writing about violence (Amis having earlier made it clear that Bond himself doesn’t get off on being tortured!), and contains lenghty excerpts from the work of Mickey Spillane, an author whom Amis states really did get sadistic in his work. We also get brief rundowns on all of the Bond novels, with locales, villains, Bond-girls, and highlights listed for each.

In sum, The James Bond Dossier is required reading for the Bond fan, and I’d say it should be mandatory reading for anyone hired to write a Bond continuation novel, at least one that’s set within the timeframe of Fleming’s original novels. Amis throughout naturally captures the pre-PC mindset that has disappeared from today’s mainstream thriller writers but should be a necessity for any author trying to duplicate the vibe of Fleming’s work; most of the new Bond novelists, in particular Sebastian Faulks and Anthony Horowitz, have taken great pains to remove themselves from the politically-incorrect world of the Fleming originals. However, I’m wondering if Faulks did read this one, as Amis uses the phrase “devil may care” throughout, and that’s the title of Faulks’s Bond novel. (Amis also uses the phrase “carte blanche” at one point, a phrase which Jeffrey Deaver used for the title of his own Bond novel.)

In 1965 Kinglsey Amis published another Bond study: The Book Of Bond: or Every Man His Own Bond, released under the pseudonym William “Bill” Tanner (ie, the name of M’s chief of staff in the novels). I also have this one, but haven’t read it – it’s even more collectible than The James Bond Dossier. By all accounts it’s is more jokey than the Dossier, but no doubt still compelling and certainly worth a read.

More notably, Amis was the first author contracted to continue Fleming’s legacy: Colonel Sun as mentioned was published in 1968, when Gildrose (owners of the Bond books) briefly attempted to start a new line of novels under the house name “Robert Markham.” That’s another one I have but haven’t read, though I do recall flipping through a library copy many years ago. While well-regarded by Bond fans today, it appears that Colonel Sun didn’t do very well at the time (Fleming’s widow hated it, by the way), and was the only “Markham” book ever published. But at least Amis wrote a Bond novel of his own, and if The James Bond Dossier proves anything, it’s that Kingsley Amis was the man for the job.

The Baroness #1: The Ecstasy Connection (second review)

The Baroness #1: The Ecstasy Connection, by Paul Kenyon
February, 1974  Pocket Books

Some people re-read Moby-Dick; I’m re-reading The Ecstasy Connection. Six years ago I first reviewed this initial volume of The Baroness, and while I enjoyed it then I really loved it this time. This is opposite of the experience I had when I re-read The Enforcer #1 last year; while I loved that one the first time I read it, on my second reading I found it rather padded and uneventful.

Not so for The Ecstasy Connection, which still retains its position as one of the more sleazy, lurid, and entertaining men’s adventure novels I’ve yet read. And true to the standards of producer Lyle Kenyon Engel’s Book Creations Incorporated, it’s very well written. I don’t know how Engel did it, but he managed to always find quality authors – authors who all seemed to have the same sort of professional style. Thanks to ppsantos at The Baroness Yahoo Group, we now know that Donald Moffitt was the author of this book, as well as the seven volumes that followed (not to mention two others that were never published). Sadly, I’ve also learned from the Yahoo club that Mr. Moffitt passed away in December, 2014. Luckily he was able to discover the fan base his old series had acquired before he shrugged off those mortal coils.

I developed a lot of respect for Moffitt as I re-read this novel; the minor sleazy tidbits he packs into the book are incredible. He leaves no lurid stone unturned, from mentioning the “foamy pubes” of a nude woman who has died of a massive orgasm to detailing the plentiful carnage in the book’s frequent action scenes. While I didn’t much care for some of the later volumes (and I plan on re-reading them, too, so we’ll see if I still feel that way), it must be said that this first volume of The Baroness is one of the best men’s adventure novels ever written, hitting all the bases one could want. 

This makes it all the more interesting that The Ecstasy Connection was actually the second manuscript Moffitt wrote – the first one he wrote was Diamonds Are For Dying, which was published second in the series. (Thanks again to ppsantos for this info!) Diamonds Are For Dying was one of my least favorite books in the series, but maybe I should’ve read it first this time around, just to see how Moffitt improved between volumes. At any rate there is textual evidence throughout The Ecstasy Connection that it actually takes place after the second volume; for example, Penelope “The Baroness” St. John-Orsini at one point mentions her “previous mission in Brazil,” where she lost her favored pistol, a Bernadelli VB. All of this happened in Diamonds Are For Dying.

Perhaps Moffitt just figured out the series he wanted to write with The Ecstasy Connection; maybe he had trouble finding his footing with Diamonds Are For Dying. Whatever the reason, he scored a home run with this one, with a wildly over-the-top plot, constant action, a likable protagonist (the Baroness here isn’t as gratingly arrogant as she sometimes is in later volumes), and plentiful sex – yet again I wondered this time who exactly this series was written for. Was Lyle Kenyon Engel envisioning a women’s adventure series? Penelope’s frequent sex scenes are all written from her point of view, so we read of the pleasure she experiences as a man slides into her “scabbard” and whatnot. In the traditional men’s adventure novel, these sex scenes would of course be relayed from the man’s point of view. But then, there’s no way to get around this when your protagonist is a woman (unless you POV-hop, which you shouldn’t), so I digress.

Speaking of the rampant, explicit sex scenes, it occurred to me this time that perhaps the focus on sex is the very reason why The Baroness was published by Pocket Books, which didn’t really do much in the way of men’s adventure. However Pocket had cornered the market on trash fiction, mostly because it retained the paperback rights to Harold Robbins. Perhaps Engel envisioned this series as expressly catering to Pocket’s demand for sleaze – the dude was a genius for marketing and packaging books. Whatever the thinking, it got some attention; another thing Moffitt revealed to ppsantos of the Yahoo Baroness group was that Robbins himself at one point was trying to make a movie out of The Baroness!

Well anyway, this volume’s outrageous plot is about a dangerous new drug which activates the pleasure center of the hypothalamus, causing its users to literally die of pleasure. The novel features I believe the most memorable opening sequence in the series, with a gorgeous and famous stage actress, strung out on the ecstasy drug, doffing her clothes in front of a packed audience and yelling, “Screw me, darlings!” Meanwhile other notables are suffering from the drug, most damningly a nuclear missile operator in a military base who almost triggers WWIII before collapsing dead on his console. After the mandatory scene in which the various intelligence agency heads argue over who should get the job, we learn that “Key” – aka NSA man John Farnsworth – has been tapped by the President to activate “Coin.”

This is of course Penelope, the Baroness herself, and when we meet her she’s hosting one of her famous bi-annual parties in her plush Manhattan apartment. All the jet-setters are here, and Moffitt capably injects just the sort of sleazy ‘70s stuff we want throughout: “A blue haze of hemp hung over the rooms and drifted out over Central Park.” Interestingly, it’s just assumed that the reader already knows that Penelope is “Coin;” she sees a Senator in her party and reflects on the “NSA dossier” on him. Clearly this is yet another indication that this was intended as the second volume; I’m pretty sure Penelope was given a little more buildup in Diamonds Are For Dying.

A famous covergirl model – whom we learn later has even starred in two movies – Penelope is a smokin’ hot, raven-haired babe with an incredible bod, “huge luminous green eyes,” and “spectacular cheekbones.” (In other words, if Robbins had gotten a movie made, there was only one damn actress he could’ve hired to play the Baroness – Lynda “Good Lord!!!” Carter.) Oh, and cover artist Hector Garrido consistently depicted Penelope in a skin-tight black suit, which I always figured was his own invention. However at one point in this volume Penelope is in fact dressed in a black leotard, so maybe that’s what inspired Garrido.

Farnsworth contacts Penelope just as she’s engaged in her favorite activity – kinky sex. This too would become a recurring scene in future volumes, each of which for the most part follows the same template as The Ecstasy Connection. Moffitt turns out the first of his pages-long, XXX-hardcore sex scenes, as Penelope eagerly boffs a Joe Namath-esque football star. No detail is spared here. But once she answers Farnsworth’s call – and Penelope is contacted via her watch, which sends shocks through her to get her attention – Penelope meets her contact in the downtown Manhattan offices of International Models, Inc., where Farnsworth, an OSS veteran in his fifties with gray hair and a clipped moustache, acts as the company’s general manager.

The Baroness, tasked with finding out where this dangerous mystery drug is coming from, puts together her eight-person team. This time I actually paid attention to who they are, but be aware they are for the most part ciphers who add little to the series. Interestingly, it turns out that Moffitt himself felt the same, and indeed was requested to give the Baroness a large team – check out his comments on the origins of the series, which he also sent to ppsantos. But for posterity, here are the members of the Baroness’s team:

Dan Wharton: Described as “blond” and “bearlike,” he’s a former Green Beret who is in love with the Baroness. He’s also curiously prudish and there are many subtle mentions of how he will shyly look away when he sees a nude woman. It’s later explained that he was raised in a strict family, but still there’s enough textual evidence here for the reader to go “hmmm.”

Inga (no last name given): A “big-boned, babyfaced blonde,” whose cover is as one of Penelope’s models. She’s one of the team members who won’t contribute much here or in future volumes. This time she gives Penelope a massage.

Joe Skytop: Like Dan Wharton, he’s one of the few team members who will actually do anything in this and ensuing volumes. Another bear of a man – it’s not outright stated but I believe he’s supposed to be even more muscular than Wharton – he’s described as a “full-blooded Cherokee Indian” and he’s a master of all forms of unarmed combat.

Tom Sumo: Like Wharton and Skytop, another of the team members who actually matters. The Q of the Baroness’s team, Sumo is Japanese-American and contributes a variety of high-tech gizmos, each of which Moffitt overdescribes with annoyingly “gee whiz”-type narrative and dialog. (Ie, “My saliva is the electrolyte.”)

Paul (no last name given): An “elegant black man,” who I believe has maybe two lines this time. He won’t go on to much greater in the series. His cover is as one of Penelope’s top male models. We’re informed he’s some sort of guerrilla warfare specialist. (Meaning maybe he was a Black Panther??) And like June Cleaver, he can speak jive; ie “chillen” instead of “children.”

Yvette (no last name given): The other black member of the team, and usually paired with Paul, stereotyping be damned. (Humorously, when Penelope sends off her team on various missions early in the book, Paul and Yvette are instructed to don fly threads and head “uptown” to find out what’s going on with the pimps and the drugdealers!) She contributes nothing here and won’t in future, either. We’re informed she’s from Haiti, speaks with a slight accent, and is expert with disguises and piloting “small craft.”

Eric (no last name given): The most cipherlike member of the team, this dude’s apparently blond, the son of a merchant seaman or something, and a good fistfighter. He does absolutely nothing. We’re informed he’s Penelope’s “top male model.” It’s implied that he and Inga are an item.

Fiona (no last name given): A ravishing redhead, Penelope’s “top female model,” with no stated speciality. About the only thing we learn is that she’s notoriously late for meetings and is generally lazy.

Penelope spends the first half of The Ecstasy Connection in Manhattan, with Skytop and Wharton sent out around the country to track down various leads (which leads up to the memorable moment of Skytop taking on a bunch of bikers). This half I believe is the highlight of the book, with Moffitt capably juggling multiple threads and really keeping things moving. Not to mention sleazy – the villain, we learn, is a mountain of blubber named Petronius Sim who is behind the ecstasy drug but has hired the American Mafia to kill off any who might have taken it, as he doesn’t want any details leaked yet. One of his thugs kills one such user, and we watch again as a female character dies in the throes of orgasm. When Penelope later discovers the nude corpse, we’re informed: “Her crotch was a foamy mess.” As mentioned, Moffitt peppers the novel with such sleazy details, and it’s a wonder to behold.

The absolute highlight of the book is almost midway through, when Penelope crashes a party of the drug elite in Manhattan, where the mysterious “Big E” drug is supposed to be handed out. But Penelope quickly deduces that something rotten is going on. The Mafia hosts don’t seem too interested in the eager women here, and they also seem to insist that everyone engage in an orgy while they stand off on the sidelines. When Penelope sees the moving trucks down below she realizes that it’s a hit – they’re planning to kill everyone off and haul away the corpses. Acting fast, Penelope sheds her clothes and heads for the “biggest pile” of group-sexers: “She dove for the bottom of the pile and began wriggling her way inside. Eager hands groped for her breasts and buttocks. It was warm and steamy in the middle of the bodies, smelling of sweat and semen.”

Moffitt pulls out all the stops here, with the Mafia soldiers blowing everyone away mid-orgy, the bullets thudding into the bodies atop Penelope. In her escape she employs one of her trademark weapons, a black cigarette lighter/holder which dispenses “a splinter of synthetic black widow spider venom.” Even though I’d read it once before, I was still very caught up in this cinematic sequence, which sees a nude, blood-covered Baroness escaping up to the building’s rooftop and luring out the Mafia soldiers one by one, killing them with stolen weapons or with her bare hands. It’s a masterfully-written scene and proof positive that there was some very high-quality material in the otherwise-grubby world of ‘70s men’s adventure novels. And Moffit’s just as wonderfully descriptive in the gory action scenes as he is in the sex scenes, like when the Baroness shoots one of the mobsters: “His shattered skull began to ooze brain tissue like toothpaste.”

After this thrill-ride of a sequence – which is capped off with a nude Penelope stealing a moving truck right out from under the Mafia stooges’s noses – the team determines that the Big E has its origins in Hong Kong. After another several pages of sex with the football star, our heroine heads for Asia, Farnsworth having set it all up as yet another photo shoot for International Models, Inc. Penelope brings along all of the high-tech gear created for her – and annoyingly overdescribed via dialog and narrative – by Sumo, including her ever-reliable spyder, the “powerful little pistol-winch” that’s used throughout the series. There are also the “plastic sandal straps” which can become throwing knives, as well as a bra with “super polymer threads” and a pair of shoes with a “thermite core” in the heel. You can tell that Moffitt was really into sci-fi, and he appears to have done a lot of research on satellite technology and espionage gear of the day.

Moffitt was also well ahead of the curve in that he seems to have predicted the future sci-fi genre of cyberpunk; Petronius Sim employs a variety of “juiceheads,” each of whom have metal plates in their heads, which they insert wires into and, after entering that day’s code (provided by Sim), they experience orgasmic joy. It’s all very much like something out of a William Gibson novel from a decade later. He’s also good at capturing the feel of exotic places; Penelope is given a tour of Hong Kong’s slums by Major Nigel Pickering, who presents himself as a member of the police, and Moffitt brings to life the squalor of the place – and still doesn’t forget the sleaze, with Pickering at one point propositioned by a prepubescent girl!

Meanwhile Penelope knows instantly that she’s going to be having some hot sex with Pickering – even though she just screwed the football star half to death a few pages before. After an expensive dinner these two repair to Penelope’s hotel room for more XXX action, Moffitt again mostly relaying it through Penelope’s perspective. Who cares that she’s already deduced “Pickering” isn’t who he claims to be, and might even be an enemy agent? She wants to screw him anyway. Another overlong sex scene follows, Penelope’s “magnificent breasts” heaving away.

Moffitt hews closely to the Bond formula – after being wined and dined at the palatial residence of Sim, Penelope finds herself a prisoner of the sadist. But instead of the “mink-lined cell” of Fleming’s Doctor No, Sim instead straps a nude Penelope onto a matress and hooks her into a colossal artificial brain! Sim has used countless human guinea pigs to fully map the human brain, something no one else has been able to do; thus he knows exactly where the pleasure and pain centers are, and how to stimulate them. He proceeds to carry out his learnings on Penelope.

It all gets pretty psychedelic, with Sim and his scientific crony Dr. Jolly (and let’s not forget the flunky named Happy!) activating the portion of Penelope’s brain which still retains the hybrid sexual state it possessed when it was an embryo; soon Penelope feels that she is equipped like a man, even though she can see her nude body is unchanged. It gets more and more out-there, capping off with the unforgettable line: “And now Penelope herself was a giant penis.” It gets even more like an XXX-rated 2001: A Space Odyssey as Sim and Jolly next activate Penelope’s female region, so that she has sex with herself in a supremely psychedelic sequence:

And then, somehow, she was a vagina too. A starry tunnel bored into the sky. The two parts of herself, male and female, worked together at their cosmic copulation, and she could feel all of it. 

And then the universe ended in a galactic explosion. There was a vast milky spurt that shot to the boundaries of creation, and an answering shudder from the vaginal sky. Fiery meteors rained down from the heavens. The solar system shook.

As Dr. Jolly later says, the Baroness, like a regular Barbarella on the Excessive Machine, has “an extraordinary capacity to feel sex.” After beating the shit out of a nurse Penelope’s able to escape, and here the novel shows that it’s a bit too long for its own good – 223 pages of small print – as we have this arbitrary bit where Penelope, feverish and dazed, just manages to get away from Sim’s men and ends up collapsing on the Hong Kong docks. There she’s picked up by a kindly old junk trawler who cares for her – for three days! Once Penelope is recovered she discovers the man’s kindness was just a ruse; he intends to sell her to an old madame. Penelope laughs it off, goes back to sleep(!?) – and then the scene proves how arbitrary it is when Sim’s men board the junk and take her captive again!

So now our heroine is right back where she started, plus Skytop and Dan are also now captives; temporarily mindless thanks to Sim’s various pleasure center controllers. Pickering’s also a prisoner – turns out he’s a British secret agent. Sim plans to wire Penelope and Pickering’s minds together, so that they feel each other’s pleasure, and to get the festivities started he orders that the two be dosed with aphrodesiacs and chained together, given a night of total privacy so that they can become attuned to one another’s sex drives(just go with it!). This of course leads to another of Moffitt’s patented super-hardcore scenes, as the chained nudes have heroic sex:

He was moving in and out in a corkscrew motion now. She butted him with her bottom at each jab, trying to get all of him inside her. One of her bumps was too violent. Pickering lost his balance and fell over backward. Before he could get to his knees again, she swung around, dragging the ankle chain with her, and squatted atop his mast. She lowered herself and it pushed deep within her. “I want to watch your face when you come,” she whispered hoarsely.

Even though the Baroness frequently gets captured, she always manages to stage an ingenious escape – what will also prove to be a recurring theme in the series, and usually the highlight of each volume. After the night of super sex, Pickering is taken away and Penelope’s all alone. She manages to cajole Happy the stooge into opening her special pillbox, which really hides a microwave radar or something. At any rate it fries the wires in Happy’s brain, and a freed Penelope once again beats the shit out of the same nurse, steals her clothes, and massacres everyone in the operating room in one of the more wonderfully-gory scenes in the book…a scene complete with Penelope ramming a bonesaw through the “soft jelly” of Dr. Jolly’s brain.

The finale gets wilder and wilder, intentionally or not recalling Island Of Lost Souls, ie the Charles Laughton movie based on Island of Dr. Moreau. Penelope and her freed comrades lay to waste half of the villa, freeing Sim’s various human experiments, all of whom want their pound of flesh. Meanwhile Sim floats in a pool of honey(!), bombed out of his skull on a super-ecstasy drug he just perfected. He’s impossible to get to, safely behind steel bars and other protective barriers. However the designers of this fortress didn’t count on the freakish strength of the human guinea pigs, who break through the barriers and rip Sim to pieces with their claws in a gloriously outrageous finale.

Sadly, I don’t recall any of the successive volumes of The Baroness reaching the incredible heights of The Ecstasy Connection. Many of them come close, though, but with this one Moffitt really struck trash gold. It’s a shame the series has become so collectible and thus overpriced on the used books market. Moffitt’s even sure to end on the sleaze, with Penelope, back in Manhattan, looking up that football quarterback and demanding another night’s fun, whether he’s playing in the SuperBowl tomorrow or not.

Technically this volume would lead into #3: Death Is A Ruby Light, but I’ll read Diamonds Are For Dying next, mostly because it was published second. Ideally I guess you should read that one first, though, then this one, and then continue on with volume three. At any rate I do look forward to re-reading the rest of The Baroness, and I had a grand ol’ time enjoying the sleazy mastery of The Ecstasy Connection.

Danger Key (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #16)

Danger Key, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1966  Award Books

The first of two novels Lew Louderback wrote for the Nick Carter: Killmaster series, Danger Key is very much in the spirit of the James Bond movies of the era. As anyone who has read Ian Fleming’s original books knows, the Bond novels are much different from the Bond films. Louderback appears to have been one of the few Killmaster ghostwriters who understood what series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel likely was going for: not espionage-heavy tales in the vein of the Bond books, but comic book-style adventures in the vein of the Bond films.

As Kurt Reichenbaugh notes in his review at the Ringer Files, this novel is pretty dense. A whole bunch goes down in the course of its 160 pages, but again as with most publications from Award Books, that’s some real small print. Louderback though really hits all the bases, and likely could’ve gone on to have been one of the best Killmaster authors, up there with Jon Messmann and Manning Lee Stokes. But as mentioned a lot of stuff happens – the novel’s almonst Pynchonesque in how many layers of plot there are – and the reader almost needs a scorecard to keep up. After this book Louderback moved on to writing Don Miles for Engel, and having read the first volume of that series I can see that dense plotting is just part of his style.

Still, it gets to be too much, and in fact Danger Key is almost so breathless that you sometimes overlook how great it is. For here, finally, we have a Killmaster novel that almost reaches the lofty heights of The Sea Trap. It’s not as lurid or graphic, to be sure, but it’s jam-packed with fun stuff and memorable images. In some ways Danger Key is like the novelization of a Eurospy movie that never was; like one of those “spyghetti” flicks of the ‘60s, the novel operates more as a string of massive setpieces, the entire thing just barely held together by an overly-convoluted plot. There’s even a part where hero Nick Carter dances to a bossa nova, which only furthers the Eurospy image.

One thing missing from the Eurospy vibe is the globe-trotting; Danger Key takes place entirely in the Florida Keys; the titular location is Peligro Key, aka Spanish for “Danger Key,” and it’s here that Nick will gradually discover a plot by the Red Chinese terror agency CLAW, overseen by Nick’s archenemy Judas. According to Will Murray’s Killmaster article in The Armchair Detective volume 15 number 4 (1982), CLAW was created by Award Books editor Samuel Post. The acroynm never explained, CLAW only appeared in a few novels; Murray had it at only two, this one and The China Doll (the second volume of the series), but CLAW was mentioned in a few others; in fact, Danger Key is for the most part a sequel to Fraulein Spy, the fifth volume of the series, a Valerie Moolman installment in which Nick again tangled with a CLAW plot.

The busy plot of Danger Key has it that something strange is going on in the Florida Keys; there’s an underwater resort-type place named Aquacity being built on the ocean floor, funded by the Howard Hughes-esque A.K. Atchinson, and eventually Nick will learn that the closed-off and remote construction site is not far from a secret US installation in which a nuclear research project is being helmed. Here an “electronic brain” is being created for a nuclear missile delivery system, something so powerful that it could change history. Nick will eventually stumble upon a CLAW plot in which a retirement community near Aquacity has been taken over by CLAW agents, their faces surgically altered to look like elderly caucasians, so they can infiltrate the government lab and take over the electronic brain.

The first quarter of the book is almost like a hardboiled novel from Gold Medal, as Nick poses as a drunkard magazine reporter who also happens to be a CIA agent; another agent was killed here, and this guy, Ralph Benson, was himself in danger of being uncovered. Thus Nick becomes “Ralph Benson,” keeping up the dual layer of disguises; just the first indication of the heavy plotting Louderback delivers throughout. Word has it the other agent was run over by a car, one driven by a hot blonde in a bikini – Nick soon discovers this could be none other than Ingra Brand, a lovely German gal who was in fact engaged to the man who was run over.

Ingra comes on strong to Nick, basically inviting him to the remote section of a nearby beach for some sex. This from a woman who just lost her fiance a few days before. But it wouldn’t be Nick Carter if he didn’t say what the hell and go along with the gal; he figures he’ll have his fun with her, even though he suspects it’s a trap. As in the Don Miles books, Louderback gets slightly explicit in the sex scene, though it’s nothing as strong as what Jon Messmann would soon be writing for the series:

Nick felt her legs part beneath him, felt the bone-tight tautness of his own body sliding into her softness. Her hands caressed and fondled him with growing urgency, until at last her fingernails bit into his back and her mouth melted against his in supplication and hot desire. Their bodies tensed and arched and flowed together, thighs straining deliciously and mouths blending. Nick let himself go – all of himself but that one segment that was always an agent, on the alert for the dangerous, the unexpected. 

He rolled her over and pulled her with him, fiercely jacknifing his desire home. And this time he found her! Each movement was a stab of ecstasy. She gasped suddenly, tore at his lips with her teeth. Her fingers clawed at his chest. He swore softly and pulled her arms away, pinning them at her sides without losing his stride. Her movements quickened convulsively in time with his, and then in one last crazed moment they both forgot the hard sand beneath them, the distant surf, their separate identities – all but the exquisite bursting inside them as their whole beings seemed suddenly ignited, then liberated and free, floating away from the world on wave after shuddering wave of ecstasy…

That’s just an excerpt; the whole thing goes on for about two pages. And we’re only thirty pages in! But Nick’s right; it’s a setup, and we’re graced with the cover image (though Nick and the girl sure aren’t in their bathing suits in the book) as two “cops” ambush Nick. It’s a brutal fistfight, again in the Gold Medal vein, and Nick’s knocked out, the heavyset sherrif hitting him with a thick ring on his finger. Later he realizes there was a drug embedded in the ring; also he realizes the fat sherrif is really a martial artist, and is in fact a Chinese man with facial surgery to look white! After escaping, Nick is so injured he needs to recuperate in the hospital.

More sex ensues as Nick’s “nurse” turns out to be none other than Julia “Julie” Baron, Nick’s sometimes-bedmate and fellow AXE agent who first appeared in the first volume of the series, Run, Spy, Run. Julie appeared in a handful of novels, the last being Time Clock Of Death; in his article Murray states that by the early 1970s Engel had grown tired of Julie, not to mention Mr. Judas and all of Nick’s fancy gadgets, and had decided to begin filtering them out, shortly before Engel himself left the series. Given this, I wonder if Julie was killed off in Time Clock Of Death. I guess I’ll just have to read my copy and find out – and also, Time Clock Of Death was one of the installments Engel claimed to have written himself.

Nick goes back to the Keys disguised as a “millionaire fisherman” and Julie poses as the new gal in the typing pool at the military base where the missile project is taking place. Here Louderback starts delivering the fun stuff, like a trip Nick takes to the old folk’s community, where he tries to visit Ingra Brand’s father, wheelchair-bound codger Gunther Brand. Gunther once worked for the Nazis and had various plans for an underwater assault on London. But Nick’s hurried out of the man’s place – and chased by a bunch of old people! More Chicom agents with facial surgery, these people chase after Nick in a long, entertaining sequence which sees him breaking free in Mobile Gal, Nick’s Bond-esque boat that was designed by AXE’s Special Effects and Editing. The thing comes equipped with heavy machine guns and blows up stuff real good.

And plus he gets laid again – once again courtesy Ingra Brand, who comes on to Nick in his latest disguise, not knowing it’s him, and even delivering the same pickup line! Instead Nick takes her back to his room and “an old fashioned rape” ensues, per the chapter title (curiously, some chapters have titles while others don’t; I’ve never seen that before). Nick gets pissed at the girl, wondering if she’s a spy, sickened with the whole bizarre caper, and basically forces himself on her in another extended sex scene. And wouldn’t you know it, the girl starts to love it after she’s screamed and cried a bit! But then her handbag explodes and Nick only manages to save them both. Looks like Ingra was set up as bait and whoever sent her didn’t mind if she got wasted, too.

Well, folks (to quote Roy), we’re still only about fifty pages in! Just like this review, Danger Key just keeps going and going. Carter eventually will sneak back to Gunther Brand’s home, where after being attacked by a man posing as Brand Nick will discover that Judas is behind all this – seeing the skullish face on a monitor in Brand’s home. Louderback goes for the “classic” version of Judas, from Run, Spy, Run, a bulky “Prussian ox” with big shoulders and a barrel chest, but still with the scarred face and metal hands. Nick here also learns of Brand’s Nazi past, his various weapons designs, and also the fact that Ingra isn’t his daughter at all. Indeed, Ingra and her twin sister Ilse (whom Ingra doesn’t know about) are actually the daughters of a man named Lautenbach, Hitler’s top scientist and a man Nick killed in Fraulein Spy.

The final quarter is another extended setpiece where Nick, in scuba gear, finds that Aquacity doesn’t exist; later he’ll learn all that money was used to build Brand’s experimental underwater warfare craft for an assault on the US. Danger Key is home to A.K. Atchinson’s ruined villa, where the portly, drugged Texan is kept entertained by a busty chick named Kathy Kane (who offers herself to Nick as soon as she meets him, but he’s busy with trying to save the world and all). And plus there’s hundreds of CLAW agents, not to mention enforced workers for the Aquacity project, divers hired to work underwater but instead conscripted into Chicom service. And there’s evil Judas, too, and Louderback continues to dangle the concept that he might be Martin Bormann.

The climactic action sequence is very much in the vein of Thunderball, which was probably raking in the dough in theaters around the world while Louderback was writing this (plus it’s also my favorite Bond movie). Nick manages to infiltrate Judas’s underwater complex and pose as one of the guards, but is of course eventually uncovered, leading to a massive firefight. Louderback isn’t one for the gore when it comes to the firefights, but he is good with hand-to-hand fights and bladed battles beneath the sea; there are many images of CLAW scuba fighters spiralling to the seabed, trailing inky pools of blood from their slit throats and whatnot.

Julie also gets in on the fun; turns out Ilse Brand has been posing as her sister (though Nick slept with the real Ingra, the second time at least), and she’s one of CLAW’s top agents. Julie finds Ilse just as she’s about to sabotage the missile project, and this leads to a brutal karate fight between the two. Louderback again proves his worth as a pulp writer with the gals tearing up each other’s clothes as they fight; first Ilse’s boobs pop out of her dress when Julie grabs her, and then Julie’s own dress gets shredded, so what’s for either of them to do but just rip off the shreds and fight in the buff? “Both girls were panting, their breasts heaving, and a thin sheen of sweat covered their naked, exquisite bodies.” All right!!

The finale continues with the Thunderball vibe as Nick leads the freed workers in a battle against the CLAW team, fighting beneath the waves as the Chicoms steal off with the missile thing on an underwater sled. But just as Nick’s about to have sex with Ingra, who claims she was captured and left in Atchinson’s mansion, he’s informed that Julie is Judas’s prisoner – and it ain’t Ingra but Ilse, who almost stabs Nick in the back. The last pages are very much like the end of a Bond film, as Nick is escorted into Judas’s lair, poor Julie strapped to an operating table and about to be sliced up by an old sadist from the Nazi concentration camps.

But it’s little Pierre to the rescue, Nick having stashed the gas pellet in his pocket, and that takes care of Ilse. Nick gets in a fight with the old concentration camp doctor, and meanwhile Dr. Brand saves the day, coming to his senses – he was only working for CLAW because they had Ingra, you see – and apparently blowing up both himself and Judas in the finale. But like any good sub-Blofeld, Judas returned again; I believe his next appearance was in the Moolman-penned The Weapon Of Night, which came out the following year.

Well, it looks like Louderback’s dense, breathless plotting is contagious and thus has resulted in a dense, breathless review. But I really enjoyed Danger Key and in hindsight I’d say it was my second favorite book yet in the series, just under the almighty The Sea Trap. In fact I intend to read it again someday. Louderback could’ve gone on to be the series author, I think, but instead as mentioned he went over to the Don Miles series. In 1968 he returned for one final volume, Operation Moon Rocket, which I have and now look forward to reading.

Anyway, Danger Key offers practically everything you could want from ‘60s spy-fy. It’s got lots of action, lots of adult shenanigans, cool gadgets, and very good writing, description, and dialog. Even when Nick infiltrates Judas’s underwater lair, the expository dialog explaining it is so effectively delivered (by one of the prisoners) that you don’t even realize it’s exposition. Louderback’s just a gifted writer, which makes it a shame that he didn’t continue in this genre; instead it looks like he got into nonfiction under his own name, in particular a hardcover book on “Fat Power” which received a negative review from Kirkus – but then, most every Kirkus review is negative.

The Psychedelic Spy

The Psychedelic Spy, by T.A. Waters
No month stated, 1967  Lancer Books

I came across this book a while back, and even though it looked like everything I could want in a spy pulp paperback, I put off reading it because it was written by T.A. Waters, whose Centerforce I found so disappointing. But I figured everyone deserves a second chance, and so finally got around to reading The Psychedelic Spy. And boy, was I glad I did – this book was great!

The pretension of Centerforce is nowhere to be found as Waters turns out a snappily-paced action story, laced with psychedelic vibes, about a Timothy Leary sort of alpha male who helps the US government stop a Chicom brainwashing plot, one that is operating in California. The book hurtles along its 160 pages with plentiful action, sex, gadgetry, and violence, with a great and memorable hero and a pair of equally-memorable villains, one of them even a sexy villainess who of course offers herself to our hero before ordering him killed. Waters I think was trying to both spoof and stay true to the pulp concept, and he nailed the balance perfectly. 

The hero of the tale is Dr. Lowell Simon Dee, the aforementioned Leary-type. That is, Leary with the kung-fu skills of Bruce Lee and the mystical mastery of Dr. Strange. His name is obviously a clue to the in-jokery of it all, but to be fair Waters only refers to him as “Dee” or “Dr. Dee” in the narrative; it’s the cover copywriter who had to go and refer to him as “Dr. L.S. Dee.” Dee is just my type of ‘60s psychedelic dude: he’s no dirty, unwashed hippie, but an aesthethic socialite who lives in a plush loft in Manhattan. He doesn’t spurn technology but embraces it, particularly when it comes to mind expansion.

In his early 30s, with brownish-blonde hair going gray at the temples, Dee has the “wiry” build of a swimmer. He has various degrees, most of them in psychopharmacology, and is known for his groundbreaking work on LSD and other psychedelic drugs; his books are big sellers. Long ago he snuck into China, staying there for three years and learning various forms of kung-fu (which he has to explain to others; the book was published before the art was commonly known) in addition to the karate and aikido he already excelled at. Now Dee resides in his spacious loft, geared up with various custom-made strobelights, mixing up drugs for himself (or just getting them out of his “drug refrigerator”), and entertaining scores of beautiful women.

What I really love is how Dee comes off like a psychedelicized Nick Carter. Like the Killmaster, Dee enjoys using spy-fy gadgets, but unlike the Killmaster they’re mostly all of Dee’s own design. In The Psychedelic Spy he uses a “jiggle pen” that can unlock most anything, a stroboscopic penlight which he uses to descramble brainwashed minds, a pair of triple-layered black gloves that secrete poison, and even a megawatt pair of stroboscopic lights which he attaches to the back of a car and uses to blow the minds of a group of pursuing bikers. Even his drugs are custom-made, like “Cyclert,” a substance Dee has made which enables “deeper memory traces.”

But Dee’s most memorable gadget is his weapon of choice, the Mercox Special. This strange-sounding gun we’re informed looks similar to a revolver, and indeed is built on a Smith & Wesson frame, but has been augmented into a sort of gas pistol along the lines of the one in John Eagle Expeditor. Dee’s though fires not only darts, but even magnesium flares and heat-seeking missiles. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that the Mercox Special actually exists: created by Smith & Wesson in 1965, it apparently never got past the prototype stage, with only 25 or so of the guns created. You can read more about it here, and here’s an image of the gun, taken from this site:

Mind you, when we meet him Dee isn’t a turned-on superspy, yet apparently he already has all of this material on hand. It doesn’t matter though; this is just part of the book’s charm. When Dee is approached by Sanders, a high-ranking spook, and Tobey, Sanders’s right-hand man, Dee ponders over the mission offered him: someone has been brainwashing college kids for some unknown reason, though one side-effect is that psychedelic drugs are going to be seen in a bad light. Dee’s concern over preventing this from happening is laughable in today’s world, but The Psychedelic Spy was published in more innocent times. At any rate, Dee’s real motive for taking the job is his hatred of control; that someone is going to such loathsome extremes to control human beings sickens Dee to his soul.

One more difference between Dr. Dee and Nick Carter is Dee’s tendency to pause and reflect, though be assured this is never at the expense of the action. He will occasionally ponder man’s inhumanity, the bloody business of spycraft, regret it, and then get on with it. Let’s also not forget his occasional drug detours, each of them also with the intent of focusing Dee’s mind on the task at hand, like when he drops 300 micrograms of LSD (his standard dose) and meditates on a mandala in his loft for several hours, ruminating on if he truly wants to accept Sanders’s job.

Right on cue with the drugs, Cathy, Dee’s nominal girlfriend, shows up for some LSD-fueled sex. Waters doesn’t get down to the nitty-gritty but lets us know it’s happening, and also uses the word “fuck” a few times, which I found surprising in a 1967 pulp paperback – usually such books from this era steer clear of the F-bomb. Cathy is insatiable, and though she’s been intimate with Dee for about a decade now she’s nowhere near to being his only bedmate, nor he hers. Indeed, after a twelve-hour or so sexual bout, Cathy practically rapes Tobey when he shows up the next day to tell Dee that Sanders wants to meet Dee at the Cloisters.

Here we get to see some of Dr. Dee’s almost superhuman skills – we already saw him easily and quickly take out two thugs as part of Sanders’s testing – as he dodges an assassination attempt. Hearing an arrow being launched, Dee knocks it out of the air just as it is about to hit Sanders’s chest, and then he actually catches the next arrow. The would-be killer, a Mongolian type, kills himself in shame, and Dee reflects sadly on this – he’s just accepted the job, and already there is death. This doesn’t stop him from some more somewhat-graphic shenanigans with Cathy.

Sanders and Tobey hand over all the intel they have on the job. Some mysterious figure named Wu Ming (a Chinese phrase meaning “no name,” Dee informs them) is behind a plot, apparently centered around a posh psychedelic club in San Francisco called the Palace of Changes, which is attempting to brainwash American youth into CommieSymps (flashforward to the college youth of today…I think the Commie brainwashers succeeded!!). Dee does his own research, coincidentally finding a young girl who visited the Palace and who tells him of the sex-and-psychedelics nature of the place; you get lots of drugs and have sex in a mattress-floored cell while colored lights play around you. But you have to sign up on a list to get access to the Palace. 

Off Dr. Dee goes to San Francisco (after a three-way with Cathy and the young girl who escaped the Palace), where Sanders has set him up with his top California agent, a black-haired beauty named Mimi Blaine, “by far the most beautiful girl Dee had ever seen.” Mimi is an interesting character, years ahead of her time, a kick-ass field agent who, unlike the manly female action heroes of today, still has a soft feminine side. She’s grown up in the spy biz, and she doesn’t appreciate Dee’s concern for her – she can handle herself. She lives in an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury (still a psychedelic paradise here, and not yet descended into the heroin-ravaged hell it became), and since space is so limited she takes Dee straight there.

Yep, time for more sex – this time almost cosmic, as Dee and Mimi are so attuned that it’s almost love at first boink. Later Dee will get a bit of a jolt when Mimi reveals she’s only sixteen years old. “I’m perfectly legal sex in most states,” she assures him. This strange element of Mimi’s youth isn’t much further explored, and she acts like your typical adult heroine, so likely Waters added this to cater to yet another pulp mainstay: the jailbait lay. Oh, and Mimi has her own personal weapon – a razored boomerang which she uses to dice people up real good. In other words, she’s basically The Baroness about a decade early.

In between more sex these two get in a few fights and also investigate the Palace of Changes. Sounding like the forgotten New York psychedelic nightclub The Cerebrum, the place has meditation rooms and private areas where you can drop acid and get busy with someone else. Waters brings the Palace to life wonderfully. Dr. Dee however knows brainwashing techniques when he sees them, especially when many of them are based on his own research. He and Mimi split up, and Dr. Dee knocks out a Chinese guy guarding a locked door. Inside Dee finds a bunch of brainwashing machinery and a beautiful – and totally naked – Chinese woman.

This is Feya Dinh, the villainess of the piece. A kung-fu master (in the opening we saw her rip off the ear of one of Sanders’s men before killing him with her bare hands), she’s also the chief brainwasher. She shows no surprise at Dee’s presence, and in fact has been expecting him. Now she wants some of that famous Dr. Dee good lovin’, and Dee, despite banging Mimi for the past several hours straight, is only too eager to comply. But afterwards Feya wants Dr. Dee himself “destroyed,” so he whips out the ol’ Mercox Special and escapes, after rescuing Mimi (who herself has been consorting with a random dude in her own mattress-lined cell). In their escape Dee employs those strobes he placed on the back of Mimi’s Triumph TR-4.

Next Dr. Dee is sent off to Mexico City, where Sanders’s intel has it that many of the brainwashed youth have been headed. There Dee will locate one of them and learn that they’ve come down here “to train,” but for what the kid doesn’t know. In his research of the mysterious villa where it all goes down, Dee is captured by Feya Dinh, who reveals that Mimi herself has been captured and will die if Dee doesn’t comply. She doses him with 900 micrograms of LSD – a “heroic dose” if ever there was one – but Dee, due to his mental mastery and drug skills, is able to keep his sanity and only feign catatonia.

The climax sees Dr. Dee staging a one-man assault on Wu Ming’s headquarters, located in a mineshaft outside of San Francisco. Here Dee will defend himself against the broadsword-weilding Churgah, Wu Ming’s massive henchman, while also saving Mimi from the clutches of death. Wu Ming is finally revealed – a “muffled” figure who speaks with a metallic voice. Turns out it’s just a “manikin,” and Mimi follows the cables that control it into the bowels of the place, where the real Wu Ming is revealed to be an old Chinese man a la Fu Man Chu.

Waters again shows his prescience with Wu Ming’s weapon: a “hydraulic biosystem” which is basically powered armor and is described almost exactly like the one worn by Ridley in Aliens. Mimi’s boomerang comes in handy against the suit’s power box, however. Meanwhile Dee chases after Feya Dinh, who has escaped in a station wagon(!!). This sequence is anticlimactic after Mimi’s fight to the death with Wu Ming, with Dee merely shooting a heat-seeking missile at Feya Dinh’s car…and reflecting sadly on the whole deal while he watches it explode.

The only unfortunate thing about The Psychedelic Spy is that there were no more adventures to follow. This puzzles me, as Dr. Dee is presented as such a fully-realized character that you’d love to read more about him. Waters leaves the ending open, with Dee and Mimi happily together and both of them telling Sanders they’re quitting, but Mimi is certain that the spook will appear again someday with a new mission. So I don’t think the reason there were no more books was because Waters didn’t want to write them. If anything, I think the concept of a psychedelic superspy might’ve been too far-out for spy paperback readers of the day, many of whom I imagine were likely blue collar types who didn’t cotton to a pill-popping hero.

It’s our loss that this wasn’t the start of a series. The Psychedelic Spy offers everything you could want in a pulp spy paperback, especially if like me you are fascinated by the ultramod, turned-on world of the jet-set ‘60s. Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius (or even Grant Morrison’s Gideon Stargrave) might be another character of the time similar to Dr. Dee, but again it must be stated that Waters plays it straight throughout, which is much to the novel’s benefit. There are no pretentious parts or intentionally “weird” parts; it’s just a straight-up spy yarn about a gadget-loving hero who enjoys his LSD. I loved the hell out of it and I highly recommend it.

BONUS NOTE: In 1990 BBC radio produced a five-part audio drama titled The Psychedelic Spy, which has no relation to this novel, despite having the same title and being set in the same year. It was written by Andrew Rissik and I finally got to hear it; occasionally the BBC will make it available to listen to via their app. While the production and performances were great, it must be said that The Psychedelic Spy isn’t very…well, psychedelic, and in fact is more hardboiled than anything, narrated by a hard-bitten British assassin who is in fact the most laughably-inept spy ever. The dude wears his heart on his sleeve and is constantly being captured or fooled, and I don’t think he even assassinates anyone in the entire thing. But at least it kept me entertained during my work commute…and those British accents made me feel super-smart!

Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood

Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood, edited by Pep Pentangeli
No month stated, 2015  Deicide Press

It’s a good time to be a fan of men's adventure magazines. Over the past few years anthologies of actual men’s mag stories have been published; previously the only books out there focused on the lurid covers and interior art, usually ignoring the stories entirely.

But that’s finally changing. Bob Deis at MensPulpMags.com has published Weasels Ripped My Flesh! and the Walter Kaylin-focused He-Men, Bag Men, & Nymphos, and someone by the awesome name of Pep Pentangeli (any relation to Frankie Five Angels?) has published three anthologies, this being the most recent of them.

All men’s mag fans owe Pentangeli a debt of gratitude, for he has focused on “the sweats,” aka the sleazy and sick men’s mags that focused on torture, violence, and eroticism…usually all three at once. These were the mags that featured covers with busty, half-nude women being tortured in innovative ways by lecherous Nazi sadists. And these are the mags that go for big bucks today – likely because the originals were either thrown away or ripped to shreds by mothers who caught their sons with them, back in the day.

And speaking of eras, Pentangeli only appears interested in the genre up to the mid-‘60s; the stories collected within Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood are mostly all from 1963, as you can see in this cheapjack photo I took of the table of contents (which also shows author/artist attributions for each story, as well as which magazines the stories originally appeared in):

The book is a feast for the eyes, printed on glossy paper, with the original black and white splash pages for each story faithfully reproduced. I’ve seen some online complaints that this book and the previous two Pentangeli anthologies feature b&w artwork, but this is true of the original magazines. However, as with the previous two anthologies, Pentangeli does include a color section in the back of the book, featuring reproductions of the garish cover art of several sweat mags. Thumbing through the book is a great experience, transporting you back to a long-forgotten era.

An interesting point is that, while they’re all very lurid and exploitative, none of the stories here are truly pornographic or overly explicit. The copious sex scenes are all in the “fade to black” mold, or at the very least are quite vague when it comes to the juicy details. And yet, these stories still bridle with a dangerous air, even in today’s era – likely because they’re just so unabashedly “un-P.C.” In our modern watered-down era, these savage, bloody tales, in which women are constantly abused and ravished, in which square-jawed, white American men are the constant and only heroes, still pack a punch, perhaps even more of a punch than they did when they were brand new.

I have all three of Pentangeli’s books but started with this most recent one due to the amount of Nazi She-Devil stories in it; as should be obvious, I friggin’ love Nazi She-Devil stories. And the ones in this book are great – in fact, Pentangeli has scored a major victory because all of the stories in this anthology are pretty good, which is really a major coup. I’m sure I’m not the only person to be unsatisfied with many of the sweat mag stories I’ve read, many of which often fail to live up to the lurid artwork or the crazy title. That’s not true here. All of these stories are sick little works of art.

As you can see from the table of contents photo, this book features 35 stories. Here are reviews of most of them, with a little more detail about the Nazi She-Devil stories:

“I Was A Call-Girl’s Boy Friend” – August 1961, and our narrator is hired to figure out where corruption is stemming from in NYC. He picks up a whore named Lucy, who “joy-pops” cocaine. Next night she takes him “behind the Bearded Curtain,” ie the second floor of her bordello, where everyone lays around smoking high-grade grass. Turns out the main importer is her boss, Menotti. But our narrator falls in love with Lucy, who snidely asks, “What do you think you are, my boyfriend?” He slowly realizes he does think of himself as so.

It ends with the narrator and Menotti in a fight, during which Menotti suffers a heart attack; Lucy kicks his pills out of his hand so that he dies. Then she gets in a shootout with a few guards, allowing the narrator to escape! Now he’s on the run, hoping for the day he can evade the syndicate’s wrath and return to Lucy, “to claim my right as her boyfriend.” Goofy but fun, with a nice hardboiled vibe. 

“Cool Broads, Hot Rods!” – This one’s about a “new breed” of teenaged hot-rodders, or as a cop in a “Midwestern city” says they should be called, “Hell-rodders!” Taking on a pseudo-factual approach, as if it were an article in a real magazine, the story’s all about the latest rash of teenaged atrocities. We’re informed of such Hell-rodder practices as “choo-choo,” in which they race trains (usually dying in spectacular crashes), or also “Trail 2,” in which they speed through city traffic without brakes.

And after all of these events there will be a “post-race sex-party.” Indeed, these coke-sniffing teens sometimes have sex while racing, usually dying in spectacular crashes. “If no plan is put into action – and put into action immediately – then more and more lives are gone to be taken by the deadly highway ‘games’ and ‘tests.’ The Hell-rodders will live up to their name – and turn our thruways, highways and city streets into blood-drenched, corpse-littered hells!”

“I Was Eaten Down To The Bone” – The narrator tells us how he and his buddy went on a long-planned trip to Polynesia in 1951. Buying a sloop, they plied around the paradisiacal islands. Vague mentions of how they enjoyed the local native gals. But the narrator’s buddy wanted to visit a remote island one day, and so they went, meeting up with a local chief who bridled at the French Jesuit rule and spoke in a strange hipster patois.

Drunk on the man’s local brew ani, our heroes were so out of it that they walked the wrong way back to the sloop and ended up sleeping on an atoll – only to awake into hell, being eaten alive by white ants, ie “cannibal ants.” The author goes to town here, with horror fiction descriptions of the ants eating them down to the bone, the narrator’s buddy losing his head and arms. The narrator himself loses both hands and most of his legs. The end! I related to this one because ten years ago I was attacked by about twenty fire ants; like an idiot I was walking barefoot in my yard one night. My right foot swelled up to the size of a football!

“Nude Virgins For The Serpent Of Lust” – It’s 1669 and beautiful, blonde, Norweigan Hortense Cerlabaud acts as the Goddess of Set in “the jungle citadel of Iztopolopo,” in Ecaudor. This pseudo-factual piece reports the story of how Hortense went from being a bloodthirsty pirate wench to ruling over the natives; her boyfriend, the depraved Chevalier, worked a white slavery angle into the scheme, with Hortense tossing the women who refused to have sex with her to the massive anaconda in a pit below her citadel.

“A Soft White Throat For The Devil’s Hangman” – This first-person narrative is a bit longer than most of the others in the collection, and it’s pretty entertaining “Nazi Horror” that the sweats excelled in. Our hero relates how he became involved with the French resistance near Limoge in ’44, after his plane was shot down. Hiding in the attic of beautiful resistance fighter Simone, he soon finds himself living the dream life: “My adventure was the kind that recruiting posters are made of.” The two engage in a months-long affair, our hero helping out the cause while engaging Simone in undescribed sexual shenanigans up in the attic.

But when the sadists of the Das Reich Division show up, aka “the chief interrogators of the Panzer Division,” things go to hell – these bastards enjoy stripping down young French women, beating and raping them, and then hanging them. Unspurprisingly, they capture Simone. Going in disguised as a German soldier along with his French companion Henrique, our hero watches as Simone is tied to a chair and strangled a bit – the act illustrated by Norm Eastman’s artwork – before he swoops in and carries her off to safety.

“The Orgiastic Gates Of Hell” – It’s 1945 and our narrator is a prisoner on an island off Singapore controlled by “the Japs.” His two fellow prisoners are Fran McKendrick, a gorgeous redhead chemist who is only kept from being raped and killed due to her work in the island’s rubber plantation lab, where she turns out latex for the Japanese war effort, and another woman, Maya, “the Malay girl, beautiful as a bird, with tiny upturned breasts that trembled when she walked.” This story’s unusual because it’s more about the horrific torture of the male protagonist rather than of the women.

When the fat major who runs the prison hears on the radio that Japan has surrendered, he goes nuts – he bashes our hero’s balls with his boots, grinding into them, and then he chops one of his eyeballs out! As the major takes away the two women to hurl them into a watery abyss, our hero staggers to his feet, picks up a samurai sword, and Pulp Fiction style gains his bloody revenge, gutting the fat major. After a “spell of surgery” he awakens to find the two women waiting worshipfully at the foot of his bed…

“Prison Break Massacre From Chawcagee Hell Hole” – It’s 1960 and the narrator is a former soldier who has worked as a guard at the titular women’s prison since 1953. The story opens with an unforgettable image: a gang of gorgeous female prisoners running half-nude through the darkened woods, their leader a stunning blonde wielding a machete, the severed head of the prison’s sadistic matron cradled in her arm.

Backtrack to the beginning, which has it that the matron, a “bull” with the body of a “tank,” would demand lesbian favors from the female prisoners. When one of them, the gorgeous blonde, rebuffed her, it led to a prisonbreak, in which the narrator was unwittingly caught up. The story ends with all of the culprits dead save for the narrator, whose story no one believes; he ends his tale begging someone to believe him, as they’re planning to hang him!

“A Crypt Of Agony For The Screaming Beauties Of Belgium” – Another longish piece of Nazi Horror written in third-person. Going for a slow-burn approach, it also doesn’t begin at the ending, like most every other men’s mag story does. Instead we meet young Beatrix, a Belgian resistance fighter, as she’s riding her bike to the nearby college, where she plans to secretly broadcast news of British victory in the air.

But the Gestapo closes down the college and takes all the girls captive, in vengeance for a raid some Belgian fighters made the previous night on Nazi forces. Beatrix is taken to a furnace-heated crypt in which women are stripped to undergarments and chained up, roasted over a fire. She watches as one girl is tortured, then the eunuch sadist in charge jams a hot poker into Beatrix’s belly – right before his head explodes, Beatrix’s hotstuff rebel boyfriend showing up at the last moment to save the day.

“Blast Out Of Hell With The She-Beast Of Ploesti” – The first Nazi She-Devil in the book is also one of the best I’ve ever read. Martha Zent, female commander of Stalag 606 in Romania, “the sadistic Nazi bitch…beauteous assassin of 133 American and British plane guys,” is trying to escape her camp as it’s being bombed when we meet her, our narrator holding a gun to her back. He’s only been here for a few weeks, but he’s seen the lady’s sadism. She enjoys stripping down to her underwear and parading before the male prisoners. “First they made love to her, then she killed them.” Here’s the splash page – is it just me or does the dude look like Adrien Brody??

Stalag 606 we’re informed is “noted for its unspeakale depravity and oversexed guards. All Nazi SS women.” Save for the chief commander, Paul Koch (brother, we’re informed, of the infamous Ilse Koch), “a hermaphrodite maniac who not only devised the system of making lampshades of human skin, but also, as a matter of policy, executed at least three prisoners a day – one with every meal.” The sick imaginations of these sweats authors is a joy to behold – on his first day at the stalag our narrator watches in shock as a prisoner is gutted and Martha orders three other prisoners to piss on his dying form! When they refuse they’re gutted by bayonets wielded by “blonde and bosomy” Nazi She-Devils.

Our narrator isn’t one of the lucky hundreds who gets to pleasure Martha Zent, though she comes on strong to him as a ploy when the Americans strike; instead he blows away Koch and then shoots Martha in the face – “I pulled the trigger till the gun clicked empty.”

“Hideous Secrets Of Hitler’s Mad Doctor Of Agony” – Another longish tale of “Nazi Horror,” courtesy Jim McDonald, who was very prolific in the sweats. Like “A Crypt Of Agony” above, this one’s in third-person and takes its time, but it’s even better – and it’s definitely more twisted. Norm Eastman’s art shows lovely young women being frozen by Nazi sadists, and that’s exactly the tale McDonald delivers. Odette, a pretty young Maquis (ie French rebel), is captured by the “traveling circus” of Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician, who now goes about France capturing women for his sick medical experiments.

He takes Odette to a building with a freezing-cold vault in which other pretty young French girls are encased in blocks of ice. For spurning the obese freak’s advances, Odette will suffer the slowest of deaths, forced to watch as one of the girls is frozen in a block of ice. McDonald excelled at torture-porn, thus this story is quite unsettling as the poor girl is crushed to death by the pressure. Odette’s turn comes up, but she’s saved, just like the heroine in “Crypt Of Agony,” by the last-second appearance of her commando Maquis boyfriend.

“Writhe, My Lovely, In The Tent Of Torture” – It’s Cairo, 1957, and a gorgeous, well-built young Frenchwoman named Suzanne is our main protagonist for this long if slightly tepid slice of Nazi Horror, which is also written in third-person. An orphan of the war, Suzanne now makes her living as as a sort of bar girl at the Kit Kat Club, overseen by a lecherous Arab. Suzanne pines for a handsome American named Gary Larkin whom she bedded down with a few weeks before; Larkin is consumed with vengeance, hunting around Africa for Kurt Eisle, a Nazi fiend who tortured Larkin in the war and killed Larkin’s girlfriend through some vile torture.

But Larkin’s gone now, and besides the Arab is pushing Suzanne to become friendly with a VIP at the club – who of course turns out to be none other than Eisle. He drugs her and takes her away to a tent in the middle of the desert, where he strips her down and plays a massive spider over her, taunting her with horrifying death. Then he burns her feet with a flaming brand, all to find out what she knows about Larkin. But then the man himself appears, unsurprisingly, blowing Eisle and his Neo-Nazi goons away with a submachine gun and making off with Suzanne…we’re informed the two go on to spend a full two days in Larkin’s bedroom.

“Torture Of 1,000 Cuts” – This one’s unusual in that it’s set in the early days of the Vietnam War. It’s also told in convoluted fashion, the entire first half nothing but backstory. It is however redolent with gore; our narrator informs us how two escaped Vietcong mutilated a few Vietnamese soldiers in their escape from the narrator’s US Army base. But the two cong are themselves horribly killed, as a monstrous-sized Asian dude tracks them down, bashing one’s brains out with his bare hands and then crushing the other’s head into a pulp, again with his hands. The author gives copious detail of the juicy brain matter and gore.

This monstrous dude proclaims himself a “samurai wrestler” and has the strength of ten men. He hangs out on the base for a while, but then disappears – turns out it was all a ruse, and he’s really a Japanese Communist, dedicated to killing Americans for the loss of his wife in WWII. He captures the pretty nurses at the base and vows to slice them all up with the titular thousand cuts, but our plucky narrator chases after him and engages him in a brawl, drowning the heavier man in a lake. 

“Fettered Nudes For The Monster’s Collar Of Agony” – Another pseudo-history piece, this one takes place in 15th century Spain and is about Lucrezia Mantua, a sadistic beauty who rides into battle with her lover, rebel leader Ugo Sorcate: “Clad in black armor, scarlet velvet and leopard skin, her shimmering auburn hair cascading about her shoulders like living flames, Lucrezia Mantua was the incarnation of the warrior female…” Does she also have sapphic tendencies and enjoy stripping down nubile young women and torturing them? You bet!

The majority of the tale is given over to Lucrezia’s torturing of the wife and daughters of the Viceroy, ie the Spanish ruler who has just been defeated by Lucrezia and Ugo in battle. While Ugo wears pantaloons and a mask, Lucrezia wears a revealing costume of black satin; they put the Viceroy’s wife in a garrotte and laugh as she slowly dies. The two daughters follow. We learn that Lucrezia was born in Naples, and her parents killed during the Spanish invasion, which was led by the Viceroy. We’re further informed that Ugo eventually became enamored with a teenaged girl, who compelled him to have Lucrezia condemed to death for being a witch.

“Secret Nude Weapons Of St. Belvedere” – June of 1944, and our narrator is in a rifle company that’s just come into St. Belvedere, a small town in France. The German tanks must come through here and it’s up to his company to stop them, but the only problem is the squad with their anti-tank weaponry is two days away. The townspeople rally to the cause, in particular four beautiful young women; their leader, a knockout named Marie Delmot, claims that she and her fellow women have “secret weapons” to stop the Germans long enough for the weaponry to arrive. Grabbing her own breasts, she proclaims, “These are our secret weapons!”

The four head on over to the nearby town in which the Germans are camped out, and from here the story switches into third person. The girls invite themselves into German lines for a party and soon whore themselves out to the entire regiment, four lines of men standing outside each door. But their treachery is soon discovered, and the German commander has the women, still nude, tied to the front of their tanks! Now as the German tanks invade St. Belvedere the Americans are unable to employ their just-arrived anti-tank weapons lest they kill the women.

But it’s back to first person now, and our narrator tells us how he figures out that when the tank commanders open up their hatchways to look out at the destruction they’ve caused, he can drop a grenade right down in there with them. The Germans all killed, Marie and her three friends declare another party – this one for the Americans, who split right up into four lines and wait their turns… 

“The Ordeal At Jap Camp Agony” – This longish, third-person piece is like a “Yellow Peril” variant of the Nazi She-Devil subgenre. But as is typical with these Japanese-themed tales, the women are a lot more sadistic and lack the pulpish charm of their Nazi She-Devil counterparts. Rather, the evil Japanese women, at least in the sweat mag stories like this I’ve read, are just plain scary. It’s Formosa, January of 1945, and an American B-24 is shot down.  The crew of ten is taken prisoner, led to Akasaki Prison Camp, which is overseen by female guards.

In control of the camp is a busty Japanese beauty named Okatsu. She and her fellow guards, particularly her two junior commanders, despise the Americans. This is proved posthaste as Okatsu cuts out the tongue of a crewman who dares to speak to her out of turn. Okatsu and her second in command, Yuka, run roughshod over the men of their camp over the next months, gutting them, jabbing out their eyes with their thumbs, the works.  Sgt. Richard Moss gradually becomes the hero of the captured crew; the other male prisoners are bedraggled by constant starvation and horrible treatment.

Thus it’s Moss and friends who get to play horsey as Okatsu and Yuka hop on their backs and whip at each other, tearing up their human mounts with the barbs on their boots. Finally Moss can take no more and storms into Okatsu’s room, planning to “sexually assault” her, but finds himself unable to do it, such is his hatred for the woman (meanwhile he’s already gotten lucky – even here in this hellhole – with a geisha conscripted into duty at the prison). He beats Okatsu instead, after which he’s taken into custody and thrown into a pit filled with leeches. But just then news arrives at camp that Japan has surrendered; Okatsu and her sister guards walk off, and later we’re informed they each commit ritual suicide.

“Blood-Soaked Queen Of Buchenwald” – Technically a Nazi She-Devil tale, this one’s about Gerta Holland, a hot tramp who is really more so just a prostitute, but one that caters to SS sadists; so it’s a fine line, you see. Indeed, the tale opens with Gerta laughing as rabid dogs tear apart a prisoner in the camp. Gerta is mistress of an SS bigwig at Buchenwald concentration camp, but when he’s sent to the front lines she’s cast adrift, seeking a new sugar daddy. A new SS goon named Ludwig uses her but quickly grows sick of her – after all, he says, there’s a love camp just down the road, where nubile German gals are throwing themselves at SS men for free! But Ludwig comes up with a money-making scheme for Gerta: she can prostitute herself to the prisoners!

In what is the most darkly comic story in the collection (and likely also in the poorest taste), Gerta now services prisoners in the basement of the crematorium; the author (this being another third-person story, by the way) informing us how the fires rage during the day, immolating prisoners, but at night Gerta lies down in the eerie darkness and waits for her clients. And the prisoners beat and kill each other to find money to pay her; Ludwig knows that prisoners can always find a way to smuggle in money. Things go along swimmingly until Patton’s forces arrive, and in the mass exodus Gerta meets her just end – run to ground by the same rabid dogs she found so delightfully vicious in the opening of the story.

“Trapped By The Nazis’ Kissing She-Devil Of Agony” – This is the best Nazi She-Devil tale I’ve yet had the pleasure to read, and due to that it’s my favorite story in the book. It’s a work of sleazy art. Our narrator is an American soldier who is captured in 1943 and, since he’s half Jewish, the Nazis send him to Aschenwald concentration camp, in Germany. Here he gets his first glimpse of the Nazi She-Devil who runs the place:

I saw the red leather whip she gripped in her black-gloved hand. She wore polished jackboots and black jodhpurs that molded her powerfully-curved hips like rubber…Inga Hein was as sadistic a bitch as ever cracked a whip for the glory of Der Fuhrer.  She was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite officers of the SS-Totenkopfverbande Madel (Women’s Deaths-Head SS Units), a distinction she undoubtedly owed to her singularly German predilection for flogging human beings to death.

Beautiful Inga, “the Blonde Bitch of Aschenwald,” with her “incredible, upthrusting breasts,” lives in a palatial room with a “Hollywood bed,” attended by Angel, her “pert little lesbian maid.” After nude massages courtesy Angel, Inga likes to put on “sheer, Paris-made lingerie…tight black jodhpurs, stiletto-heeled boots, and a smartly tailored SS jacket lined with leopard skin” and entertain male guests. Our narrator is one such guest. He’s tossed scraps of food by the merciless woman; he’s so starved he drops to his knees as ordered and scoops the morsels off the floor. All as illustrated in the awesome splashpage:

The story is filled with sadism, full-on torture porn as various POWs are beaten and whipped to death in brutal ways, all for Inga’s enjoyment. The narrator himself is frequently beaten by her, in between lots of taunting. One evening Inga strips and offers herself to him, but he snatches her gun, puts it in her face, and pulls the trigger. It jams. “Again,” Inga demands, getting off on it. He pulls the trigger again, but the gun jams again, so he punches her, and this gets her off even more – cue a vague but sleazy sex scene, with our narrator beating Inga during the act.

Afterwards he’s her “love slave,” chained up in her private quarters and used by Inga whenever she wills it.  Months later the US Army liberates the camp. The freed prisoners drown the male camp commander in the latrine while the narrator chases down Inga.  He beats her to a pulp and then hangs her from the fence that surrounds the camp, fashioning a noose out of the barbed wire. He smokes one of her cigarettes as he watches her die, realizing that Inga was right all along: sometimes there is joy in the suffering of another.

“Fantastic Lust Plot Of The Nazi Harlot Spy” – One of the longer stories in the book, this third-person tale with an awesome title is only a Nazi She-Devil yarn by default. It’s the end of the war in Europe and Else Streit, beautiful young “personal prostitute” of Stauffer, a high-ranking general in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, is planning her escape route. The Russians are on the outskirts of Berlin and time is limited. After a bit of vague lovin’ with Stauffer, Else, who enjoys the obese lecher’s obvious fear, waits until the big man is asleep and roots through his secret office, looking for some intel to sell to the Reds as barter for safety. But Stauffer finds her and Else blows him away with his “Lugar.” Else is not a Nazi She-Devil – she isn’t even a Nazi, just a hooker – but she has the same kind of sadistic streak.

After getting a ride from a horny young chaffeur she’s allowed to screw her before (so as to ensure his loyalty), she blows him away, too. But the story turns out to be the sweat mag variant of an O. Henry morality story – after giving herself to the Red commander in Berlin, Else is slapped around and called a whore; the intel she stole is already known to the Russians, because Stauffer gave it to them: he was an undercover agent! Hence his promises to Else that he was her only chance of escape were true. The story has a memorable if bleak ending where our heroine gets her comeuppance – tossed into a house filled with lust-crazed Russian soldiers, whom we’re told will carry out Stauffer’s dying promise: “You deserve the Reds. They will grind you into mincemeat.”

“Blood Beast Of The Third Reich” – The author claims to have been a Luftwaffe pilot who came down with “a mild case of TB” and was thus removed from air duties. Due to his skill with the camera he was soon given a plush new assignment – cameraman for Herman Goering’s porno films! It all starts in 1936, before the war, and the narrator informs us it lasts on until 1940 as Goering’s film crew travels around Germany and newly-conquered territory, scoping out hot chicks for porno flicks. 

Goering demands realism and when he takes the porn into darker realms of torture he gets attractive female prisoners from the camps. Vague details of a lesbian shoot, another with a German dude and two women, and another strange bit where Goering himself appears in a film where he screws three generations of women – a grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter!!  We’re informed that the “actors” were always dipped in acid afterwards, so there could be no survivors to tell of it. This is one of those stories where you can tell the author was chortling to himself as he wrote it:

American readers may be interested to know that we used many American men and women in our films. Some of them were excellent in their parts, so good that they would have undoubtedly become Hollywood stars if we hadn’t been under the unfortunate necessity of liquefying them in acid.

I remember one girl, from California I believe… She was a delightful creature. After Goering finished with her – in this case he personally went through a bondage-rape scene with her – we all made use of her fine figure and soft, yielding flesh. She was a very interesting girl. We permitted her to live an extra forty-eight hours and then, because she had been so sweet to have around, we knocked her unconscious before plunging her into the acid, instead of dropping her in alive and fully awake as was customary.

The fun and games come to an end with the official start of WWII, and our narrator – who informs us he himself occasionally stepped before the cameras, to “act” with some newly-captured maiden in yet another of Goering’s films – has to say goodbye to the movie life. As for what happened to Goering’s stock of porn, the narrator has no idea.

“Torture Trap Of The Nympho Schoolgirls” – This goofy piece of teensploitation is narrated by a “hygeine” teacher who is taken captive, along with a history teacher and a school cheerleader, by a sadistic pack of sweater-and-skirt wearing teen girls. But these “ponytail punks” are vicious. One evening at school our protagonist hears a girl screaming, only to find a half-nude cheerleader strung up to the school gate, the beginning of a letter “B” carved on her chest. Her name is Doris and she claims the cut was made by Millie, mad-dog boss of a group of tough girls; Doris hooked up with Millie’s old boyfriend, and Millie got vengeance by starting to carve “Busted” on her chest – only the narrator showed up in time to stop it.

Instead of telling Doris to call the cops, the narrator tells her to forget about it!! Soon enough Millie and gang swoops in for more revenge, tying the two teachers up in a room, stripping them, whipping them. They strip Doris and go to work on her, finishing out the word “Busted.” But one of the gals gets horny over the scene and implores the narrator to take her; she drops her .38 and he gets the upper hand. When Millie tries to run, he body tackles her, smashing her head into the marble floor! Not dead, but suffering from a severe concussion, Millie is sent with the rest of her gang to the state pen for three to five years.

“Screaming Virgins For The Nazi Rites Of Agony” – The final story in the collection is another piece of Nazi Horror, which really is what these sweat mags were known for. Like most other such tales it opens with an unfortunate young woman, Gerta, being thrown into a dungeon. Her “crime” is that she dismissed the advances of a game-legged Nazi lech named Heinrich Brauer. But what she doesn’t know is that Brauer is one of Hitler’s favorite people, a sadist who puts on pagan-themed occult shows of bondage, torture, and murder for a Nazi elite audience. Gerta is stripped to lingerie and chained in a small amphitheater, to watch as six tall, nude, oil-covered blondes carry out another attractive young woman. This one they tie to a bed, and soon Brauer appears, with a ceremonial blade; he carves up the girl for the audiences’ delight. Now it’s Gerta’s turn.

From here it’s a history lesson, as we’re informed how Brauer came from nothing in 1923 to being Hitler’s go-to guy for pagan-bondage-torture scenes, eventually opening up a “health club” in Munich that was really just a Nazi bordello. Brauer, we’re told, disappeared after the war – and this is one of the few torture/horror stories in the book in which the female, Gerta, is not saved at the last moment by her commando boyfriend/invading Americans/some other lucky twist of fate; she dies, just like “thousands of other women.”