Phoenix Prime

Phoenix Prime, by Ted White
No month stated, 1966  Lancer Books

Ted White was an editor of various science fiction magazines and, in addition to writing many short stories, published several paperbacks. I’m not sure how well they resonated with the readers of the day, as it seems that many of them only received a single printing, Phoenix Prime being one such example. And perhaps the novel itself provides the reason why – it’s a bit ponderous, self-important, and takes forever to tell a story that proves to be underwhelming and familiar.

Humorously, Phoenix Prime starts off being about one thing before taking a sudden plot change and becoming something else – almost a prefigure of the later Richard Blade series, but without the lurid charm. For White, strangely, wants to play it serious throughout, invoking the novel with a gravitas that comes off as more irritating than compelling. This is particularly strange when you consider that Phoenix Prime is about a superhero-type guy who is thrust into a Conan-esque world. One expects lots of comic book-type fun, but instead one gets lots of ponderous page-filling, including lots of walking in the desert.

I’m not sure when the novel is set. It seems to be the mid ‘60s, as there’s no effort to make it sound like the future; people still listen to transistor radios, there’s no mention of space travel, etc – though World War II is referred to as “long ago” and our hero apparently feels the need to explain what it even was to his girlfriend. But then that could just be the pedantic nature of our hero – and the pretentious tone of the novel itself. (Actually of the decade itself! Friggin’ hippies!!)

Our hero is Maximillian Quest(!), a 23 year-old New Yorker who has never applied himself; while intelligent, he dropped out of school and makes his meager living via various menial jobs. But the novel opens with Max waking with newfound, inexplicable powers – levitation, pyrokinesis, etc. He just plumb wakes up with superpowers, folks. His girlfriend Fran walks in on the latest display of superpowers – “the Human Torch and all that,” and freaks out; Max explains to her his new condition in a rambling dialog that displays the ponderous nature of the entire novel:

“It was like double vision, a second sight. I could turn it on and off. I could make it overlap my normal vision, or supplant it. The funny thing was, I discovered that I could function on my new sense equally well. I could look at the whole room that way, ignoring the minute patterns and seeing the larger ones. In a way, it blended right in with normal sight. I mean, have you ever really looked at things? If you stop just glancing over all the familiar objects, and look at the room as though you’d never seen it before, it can be fascinating. You can make out all sorts of relationships, the rhythms of color, the placement of masses and empty areas, the similarities and clashes in the lines of different furniture – this place is a real hodgepodge – and you can see the whole room as a three-dimensional area, an integrated whole.”

Have I mentioned yet that Max drives a taxi?

Seriously though, Phoenix Prime is so of its time you can almost hear The Jefferson Airplane in the background. Normally I like such things – any era is better than this one – but in this case it comes through most strongly in the pretentious vibe. On the other hand, I suspect I would’ve loved this novel had I read it several years ago, when I was into the hippie literature of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. White hits all those bases, from mentions of The Fantastic Four to Alan Watts. But he appears to want to take this sort of psychedelic superhero concept he’s come up with and treat it seriously, instead of the fast-paced pulp actioner the concept demands.

To put it another way, folks: at one point in Phoenix Prime we get a two-page dissertation on “What is love?”

Anyway, just a few hours after getting these powers, Max discovers that he’s being watched, and then tested in increasingly-dangerous (but pretty humorous) ways: first he’s attacked by a squirrel and some pigeons in Central Park, and later some kid turns momentarily nuts and tries to push him into the path of a train. Max dubs his unsees assailant “The Other,” assuming correctly that someone else has the same powers as Max. He gets confirmation of his theory later that day; a conservative-dressed but nondescript man gets in the back of Max’s taxi and tells Max he is to “renounce his gift” or else suffer the consequences. There isn’t just one “Other,” but a few, and they are evil and do not appreciate the fact that Max intends to use his gift for good.

Max tells ‘im to go to hell, the guy disappears, and later Max finds that, of course, Fran has been kidnapped. The Other had given Max an address in Manhattan, for a law office, and there Max finds a party of the jet-setters in full swing. In one of the novel’s few cool sequences, the Other and his comrade summon Max through a mirror, where they wait for him in some sort of pocket reality. Fran is there, unconscious on a couch. They tell Max they’ve sent her soul into another dimension, and he can follow her there to reclaim it. I guess it’s one way to get rid of the competition. Max takes the challenge, and is promptly zapped away, his body left behind here on Earth.

Now here, at page 54, the novel changes entirely. We’ve spent this first quarter expecting a story of superhero Max taking on the supervillain Others, but instead he’s zapped off to a new planet – a planet where he no longer has his superpowers! Folks this was so goddamn dumb I almost tossed the book, but I didn’t want to damage the awesome Frank Frazetta cover. I mean the entire point of the first 50 pages is rendered moot! Why even bother with the belabored intro of giving your protagonist superpowers, when in reality you just want to write a planetary romance about some guy sent nude and confused onto some alien planet?

But anyway here Phoenix Prime prefigures Andrew Offutt’s Ardor On Aros, only this one’s in third-person and it isn’t as snarky or satirical (however Offutt’s book also had a Frazetta cover, so how’s that for unironic irony??). Finding himself in the middle of a seemingly-neverending desert, Max trudges on…and on…and on. The novel is an uphill climb, as it’s nearly 200 pages of dense narrative, with hardly any dialog or white space – it’s practically all telling instead of showing. Even the action scenes are boring, like when Max is attacked by what he dubs “desert pups,” and later on when he takes on some wolves by a pool – a scene Frazetta captures in his masterful cover painting. 

Max picks up one of the wolves and it becomes his sort-of pet; he calls it “old boy” in what few patches of dialog we get in this turgid section of the book. Again befitting the style of the times, Max at one point drinks the “water” from a cactus even the wolf seems to shy from, and of course it sends him on an arbitrary drug trip which entails him carrying on a coversation with mental projections of Fran and his Other enemies. Eventally Max comes to a city, Ishtarn, and there befriends some desert folk; the tribe leader “gives” him 15 year-old girl Bajra, but Max turns down her offer of sex, as she’s too young. He apparently changes his mind later on, as they engage in some off-page screwing – Max consoling himself that the people of this world, despite their actual age, are of hardier, tougher stuff than the humans of his own world.

The Richard Blade parallels get stronger with a bonkers sequence that has Max and his new desert pals attacked by a tribe of gay desert warriors who put women in harems, using them only for procreation, but look to men for their true sexual delights(!). Bajra’s put in a harem, a development she takes almost casually, and Max himself is harrassed by the desert chieftan who “won” him in battle; Max makes short work of him before he can act on it. From a harem girl Max learns that Fran, for whom he’s been searching in vain, was briefly in the harem as well, and was the favorite of Rassandra, ruler of these desert warriors.

But when Max catches up with Fran, he finds that she’s already gone – through a “matter transmitter” that took her to another world! It’s like this from now on in Phoenix Prime, almost like a Looney Tunes cartoon, Max eternally just missing Fran. Anyway he steps through the portal and finds himself in another part of this world, which is called Qanar; this new place is an island kingdom, and the matter transmitter is used by a “sorcerress” who herself is from a different place – actually a different era, as she’s from this world, just not this age. Through her Max learns the transmitter creates a “local anomaly” in the space-time continuum which lets him, at much explanation, retain the use of those superpowers he had back on Earth, but here he draws the power from within himself and thus quickly tires.

Oh, and Fran’s no longer here, either – just missed her! But Max uses the machine to somehow track Fran, and gradually locates her in another place, one called Qar. After a fight with some Robin Hood-esque outlaws, Max frees Fran, who casually informs him, “I’ve been raped a number of times,” as if she were telling him the hour of the day. But hey, at least they’re together again. One problem, though: Max, the dumbass, only now figures out that the Others, back home, have destroyed his body, so he has no body to return to! So they continue with the ‘60s tenor of the novel and merge together into Fran’s body, voyaging back into the dimension of Earth.

Now Max-Fran wreak their vengeance on the two Others…and White, for reasons unknown, keeps the vengeance off-page. He keeps it off-page!! Instead we are informed the two Others have themselves been cast into Qanar. Now, vengeance sated, Max takes his leave of Frank’s body, having become a “phantom;” indeed, the “next step in human evolution.” He don’t need no stinkin’ body, folks. No, he’s gonna venture on into the infinite, to probe and think and whatnot, and he leaves Fran to her own devices – and meanwhile we learn that, during her own time on Qanar, her comatose body here on Earth was repeatedly raped by paying clientelle. She takes this raping just as casually as the raping she endured on Qanar.

White published two more novels that take place on Qanar, The Sorceress Of Qar and Star Wolf!, but I don’t think I’ll seek them out.

Conan Of Cimmeria (Conan #2)

Conan Of Cimmeria, by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter
December, 1985  Ace Books
(Original Lancer Books edition, 1969)

Everyone’s favorite barbarian returns in this second anthology, which once again sports an awesome Frank Frazetta cover. This Conan book in particular I recall reading as a kid, thirty-some years ago, however re-reading it again now I was surprised to discover that I didn’t remember the majority of the tales. But overall I enjoyed this one more than Conan #1.

“The Curse of the Monolith” (de Camp and Carter) – This one’s basically Conan versus The Blob. De Camp and Carter again kick off the proceedings with another of their pastiches, which ostensibly exist to “fill in the gaps” in Conan’s life, but really just come off like pointless, supernatural-tinged adventures. Conan when we meet back up with him is in a country called Kusan, leading a party of Turanian warriors; the events of last volume’s “The City of Skulls” are given as six months ago.

Conan is slightly more refined, this time; rather than the loincloth-sandal ensemble of the previous book, he now wears a coat of mail and a spired Turanian helmet. But these very things get him in trouble in this story. The purpose of this trip to Kusan is to foster an accord between Turan and Kusan, but treachery is afoot, courtesy the wiley Duke Feng, a Kusanian who is part of a group that doesn’t want peace with Turan. He fools Conan one night, telling him of riches in a nearby area, riches that he needs the help of a strong man to acquire.

Our hero doesn’t come off too bright in this story, so it’s really not the best introduction for him. But he heads on off with Feng and soon enough is ensnared by the titular monolith, which is a giant magnet – something no one in this Hyborian Age is familiar with. Worse yet, a massive blob (referred to as a “jellylike mass”) lurks on the top of the monolith, and its touch melts flesh; the place is littered with the corpses of its victims. But Conan is able to move himself around to a broken weapon, saw off the leather thongs that bind his jacket of mail, and free himself in time to deliver a fitting revenge to Feng. He then apparently burns up the blob. All told, a short and trifling story.

“The Bloodstained God” (Howard and de Camp) – Howard wrote this one in 1935 as a contemporary Middle Eastern adventure starring recurring character Kirby O’Donnell, titled “The Curse of the Crimson God,” but it was rejected everywhere. De Camp discovered it in the ‘50s among Howard’s papers and went about revising it, changing O’Donnell to Conan and adding a supernatural element to the story. I had a hard time connecting with this one. It seems very messy; Conan’s in Middle Eastern-esque Arenjun and comes upon some dude being tortured, but after hacking and slashing the tormentors, Conan’s knocked out. He wakes up and finds some other dude watching over him: Sassan, an “Iranistani,” who is an enemy of those tormentors.

Sassan is after some priceless valuables that are protected by a god or something, and Conan in a typical “why not?” moment decides to tag along. But Sassan is dead in like a few more pages and Conan is working with his enemies as they’re besieged by yet another enemy. Long story short, it ends with Conan alone in a castle of stone that houses the titular god, which is a statue that comes to life, per the de Camp norm. Guess who wins? Honestly the story was rushed, boring, and came off like the typical de Camp padding – he could’ve at least set up the next story, in which Conan is suddenly out of the Middle East and back up in the northern countries.

“The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” (Howard) – The first pure Howard yarn in the book is an immediate standout, not to mention the inspiration for Frank Frazetta’s incredible cover painting. Famously rejected by Weird Tales when it was written sometime in the early ‘30s, “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” was turned into an adventure starring some other one-off Howard creation, before surfacing again in the ‘50s when de Camp discovered it among Howard’s papers. He supposedly rewrote it extensively, and it’s that version that appears here in Conan Of Cimmeria, but I read the undiluted Howard original in The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian (Del Rey, 2003).

This is one of the stories I still remembered all these years after first reading this book; it’s a dreamlike tale, very mythic, and wonderfully told. Humrously though – at least when taken into context of this “carefully constructed” timeline de Camp and Carter have created for the series – Conan is suddenly back in the northern climes, whereas just in the previous yarn he was down in the Middle East. You’d think the two pastiche authors could’ve come up with an interim story of how Conan got from there to here, but who cares, because this is a Howard original and he wasn’t bound to any constricting continuity. At any rate Conan is way up in the frozen wastes of Nordheim, not too far from his homeland of Cimmeria.

It’s not a long story, but it definitely makes an impression; Conan is part of a war-party from Aesir, battling against the Vanir. Howard constantly refers to the ice-covered mail of the warriors and it’s some effective word-painting. Conan’s the last survivor, and as he stumbles in a battle-spawned daze he hears a woman’s laughter. It’s a flame-haired beauty who wears nothing but a wisp of gossamer. She offers herself to Conan, who madly chases after her. But she’s leading him into a trap, hoping for her “brothers” to kill him so they can serve up his heart to their father: Ymir, the Frost-Giant, a god worshiped in this land.

Conan makes pretty short work of the frost giants, truth be told – though Frazetta certainly brings the moment to life on the cover. So too did young Barry Smith (before he was “Windsor”), in the early days of the Conan The Barbarian Marvel comic. Speaking of which, blacklight poster company Third Eye featured Smith’s “Frost-Giant’s Daughter” splash page in the lineup of Marvel Comic blacklight posters they produced in 1971. Several years ago I acquired this poster…only to find out I’d actually gotten a bootleg of it. Who knew they bootleged blacklight posters?? Anyway, it’s still sitting on the floor of my study room, framed and waiting to be put up on the wall, but here’s a quick photo I took of it, both in regular light and under a blacklight:

When Conan gets the better of the two giants and continues chasing after the half-nude girl, growing more and more insane with lust, the frost-giant’s daughter calls to her father, and Conan’s knocked out. When he comes to his Aesir comrades have found him, and it appears that it was all a dream – except for the fact that Conan’s still clutching the wisp of gossamer the girl was wearing. It’s a cool story and also inspired my man John Milius, who featured a tribute to the story in the first draft of his ill-fated Conan: Crown Of Iron script in 2001. This would have been the long-awaited sequel to his Conan The Barbarian, but got scrapped when Arnold became governor. My understanding is Milius removed the “Frost-Giant’s Daughter” bit in his second draft.

Actually, just to continue with this thread for a moment, because you don’t read about it much online, but Conan: Crown Of Iron just isn’t very good, and in a way I’m glad it was never made. It has really nothing at all in common with Milius’s masterful ’82 movie. Indeed, it comes off more like a movie about ancient Rome – no surprise, then, that a few years after this script was canned, Milius created the HBO series Rome. And as for the “Frost-Giant’s Daughter” sequence, it has none of the weirdness of Howard’s story, and the Daughter herself isn’t as cruel – rather, in the script she offers Conan a son if he gives her a kingdom. This is just the first of many such WTF? moments in Milius’s script, as we are to understand that the stoic, laconic hero of Conan The Barbarian suddenly wants not only a son but a kingdom. And mind you, this sequence was actually the best part of what was really a lackluster and, dare I say it, boring script.

“Lair Of The Ice Worm” (de Camp and Carter) – Okay, now our favorite pastiche authors decide to do a little continuity-patching; we’re informed that it’s shortly after the previous story, and also Conan’s getting sick of being up here in the frozen north and misses the hotspots down south. So he’s making his gradual way back down there. Who knows why he even went back up north in the first place; maybe he realized he’d left the oven on. Otherwise this one is another de C and C misfire: lots of buildup to another lame supernatural threat. Every one of them so far has either featured the undead, statues coming to life, or giant monsters.

Well folks, Conan runs across some apelike creatures that are attacking a lone woman. Why apelike creatures are even up in the snowbound Aesir region is anyone’s guess, but Conan hacks ‘em up and saves the babe. Her name is Ilga and she appears to be afraid of something, but regardless camps out with Conan in a cave that night. Well, Conan knows one sure cure for nervousness – “a bout of hot love.” Yes, friends, it’s the first sex scene yet in the Conan saga, but of course it happens off-page. Conan bangs the lass into a restful slumber…but she wakes up, these weird glaring eyes hypnotizing her and calling her away.

Conan wakes – and finds Ilga’s corpse lying in the cave, her head smashed to a pulp. Most of her flesh has been sucked off, and what’s left of her is covered in ice. So long, Ilga! First it was ape things, now it’s a giant friggin’ worm here in the icy wastes – as Conan, sporting a random access memory type of a brain, suddenly recalls legends of a “vampiric worm” that operates in the vicinity. Conan heats up an axe, hurls it into the monstrosity’s gaping maw, and high-tails it out of there as both the giant worm and the glacier itself explode, as if a friggin’ heated axe is the Hyborian equivalent of C4. But one most admit it’s an appropriately-moronic end to a moronic tale.

“Queen of the Black Coast” (Howard) – Justly regaled, this story is considered one of Howard’s pinnacle Conan yarns. Yet I always seem to remember it being longer than it actually is; upon this third (or fourth?) reading, it again seemed to me that “Queen of the Black Coast” was heading for its conclusion just as it was getting started. My assumption is the richness of Howard’s prose, which is in exceptional form throughout, makes the story seem longer. My only problem with it is the chapter that abruptly detours into a too-long history of the batlike creatures that show up toward the end; otherwise “Queen of the Black Coast” is great, and definitely my favorite tale yet.

Once again I read the Howard original, as collected in The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian. Conan’s back down south, in Argos – well, “back down south” if you’re following the de Camp chronology. But obviously there’s no link with the previous tale because it didn’t exist for Howard. So anyway when we meet Conan he’s running from the Argos authorities for a crime he eventually exposits upon – once again, the exposition in Howard can get to be a little annoying. Also worth noting is that Conan’s in full armor, with a horned helmet, black hauberk, and silver chain mail covering his arms and legs. But then Conan usually sports armor in the Howard originals, at some points wearing full-on plate armor; it always annoyed me that Marvel Comics never depicted this, and about the most armor you would ever see Conan wearing was a mail vest. 

Conan forces his way onto a merchant vessel about to leave the Argos port; the captain is one of those “silver lining” types and instead of seeing Conan as a stowaway, figures he could provide some much-needed security for the ship! They’re headed down into Kush (aka Africa, I believe), which is the notorious stomping grounds of pirate queen Belit, a white beauty of Semite (ie Jewish, I believe) stock who commands a ship of “blacks” that look upon her as a goddess. And soon enough the ship is attacked by these very same reavers, hacked down to a man by Belit’s warriors – all save Conan, who fights heroically and impresses Belit.

So there’s only one thing for Belit to do – perform her “mating dance” and have sex with Conan right there on the deck of her ship with all her black warriors watching the hijinks. Of course, Howard doesn’t get too explicit, but I guess it’s spicy enough. And Belit herself is firmly in the spicy mold, wearing nothing but a “broad silken girdle.” Which I would imagine to mean that good ol’ Belit goes around topless and bottomless. No wonder Conan decides to become her mate!

But it’s here that the story suddenly heads into the climax, just as it’s getting started. We’re informed that Conan and Belit’s reavers become a fearsome force, and Conan and Belit a hot item, but the focus of the story instead becomes Belit’s obsession with the fabled riches of an ancient ruin near the poisonous waters of the river Zarkheba. Immediately upon discovering the haunted ruins, Conan sees some weird stuff, in particular these batlike ape-things. But Belit finds the riches she’s been seeking and seems unconcerned that the creatures might be sabotaging her ship.

Conan leads a party of warriors into the jungle, to get water, and here we have that extended flashback to the origin of the bat-apes and the other creatures who now live in this haunted place. It’s all very Weird Tales but to tell the truth I’d rather read more about Belit and Conan’s reaving adventures. No wonder Roy Thomas and John Buscema extended the Belit saga into a year’s worth of comics for Marvel’s Conan The Barbarian. Because, for me at least, the story pretty much comes to a dead stop for an entire chapter. When Conan comes to and finds all the warriors slaughtered, he rushes back to the ruins and finds poor Belit hanging from her own ship.

Another moment that made it into the ’82 Conan film, existing also in Oliver Stone’s original 1978 screenplay – which Stone apparently wrote under the influence of heavy drugs, with a pile of Howard books and Conan comics at his side (not a criticism, mind you) – Belit has sworn to Conan that, even if she dies, she will come back to fight by his side. And true to her promise, she does indeed briefly come back to save him, however I feel it was much more effectively handled in the movie (in which it was Valeria who came back, not Belit, of course). It’s almost an afterthought in Howard’s story, but it has the same outcome – Belit saves Conan’s skin at a pivotal moment, then vanishes. 

Otherwise the finale is almost a prefigure to another Arnold Schwarzenegger movie: Predator. For a vengeance-minded Conan gets together his weapons, stakes out a spot on a pyramidal structure in the ruins, and waits for night to fall – and for the bat-things and its subservient creatures to come meet death by his various bladed weapons. It’s a great ending to a pretty great story, and it’s a shame de Camp and Carter were incapable of delivering equally great pastiches. No wonder de Camp later bemoaned that he’d hired Carter instead of Leigh Brackett, when it came to writing these Conan stories…now Leigh Brackett sure as hell could’ve written a Conan yarn at least as good (and likely even better) than “Queen of the Black Coast.”

An Australian outfit did a 7-part, full-cast audio adaptation of “Queen of the Black Coast” a few years back, but were legally restrained from doing anymore such projects; even though the story “Queen of the Black Coast” is now public domain, the character of Conan is not. However, the adaptation is up for free download on the The Internet Archive.  I haven’t been able to get through the whole thing myself; it’s done so over the top that it’s borderline parody. The dude doing Conan’s voice in particular sounds like he’s straining with a serious case of constipation.

Finally, If you’ve ever wondered what it might’ve been like had Frazetta done a painting of this story instead of “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” for the cover of Conan Of Cimmeria, then check this out – a Frazetta-inspired painting of “Queen of the Black Coast” by modern artist Brom:

“The Vale of Lost Women” (Howard) – We get another Howard original straight after, but this one was not printed in Howard’s lifetime, and perhaps was never even submitted for publication. The original can be found in The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian, which is where I read it. In many ways this one’s more along the lines of a Tarzan story, and doesn’t much feel like a Conan tale. It also triggers the sensitive types of today with its outrageous racial elements; what few reviews you’ll find of the story all complain about the racism. You won’t find such snowflake bullshit here, folks – for one, I prefer (nay, demand) my pulp to be outrageous, and two, I think there are a helluva lot more things to get upset about than an 80 year-old pulp story that wasn’t even published during the author’s lifetime.

And Conan isn’t even the main character; it’s Livia, a stacked blonde (who spends the final quarter of the tale naked) who has been captured, deep in the jungles of Kush, by a black tribe. Her brother was also captured but was killed earlier that day. When Conan makes an unexpected visit, leading his own tribe of jungle warriors – following the de Camp chronology I guess we’re to assume he gathered them up while he was in the area, after the death of Belit – Livia sees her chance for escape. She gets away long enough to make her plea to Conan. And boy, it’s a helluva plea, insisting that Conan is obligated to help her as a “fellow white.” Humorously, our hero doesn’t seem much interested in helping Livia out, though her promise to screw him silly in repayment does interest him at least a little.

Rather than the race angle, what I personally found unfortunate about “The Vale of Lost Women” is that the climax consists of Conan slaughtering the other tribe – apparently down to every man, woman, and child. This occurs during what is initially a friendship feast between Conan’s tribe and the other, but our “hero” gives the signal and his boys set to a-slaughterin’. Livia flees the melee and ends up in the titular vale, which is supposedly haunted and avoided by the supersitituous natives. This part’s like some weird Japanese horror film as female zombie-spirit things come to life out of the woodwork and creep up on her.

There’s also a bat-creature, which of course brings to mind the similar bat-creatures of the previous story, and sure enough Conan shows up just in time to feed it some steel. Livia, now twice rescued, figures it’s time for that promised screwing, which apparently also implied that she’d marry Conan, or give herself to him, or something, but Conan has deemed that if he were indeed to screw Livia, it would prove him the “barbarian” she thinks him to be. So forget about it; he’ll just get her back to civilization.

Overall I can see why this one was never sold, or perhaps never even submitted, who knows. It just feels more like the average “jungle pulp” story of the day, and little like a Conan story. Given its locale it’s easy to place it here in the chronology, though, and one could further theorize that Conan seems a little off – and a little more savage than normal – due to his heartbreak over Belit’s loss. Otherwise what you basically have here is a too-long story featuring a self-involved blonde babe of a protagonist, with Conan in what’s really just a walk-on role.

“The Castle of Terror” (de Camp and Carter) – Our pals return with another middling tale that’s probably courtesy Lin Carter alone, as it turns out that this story originally featured Carter’s recurring character Thongor of Lemuria before being rewritten as a Conan tale. Same as the previous book’s “The Thing In The Crypt” – and, just like that story, this one also opens with Conan on the run from a pack of animals. In “The Thing In The Crypt” it was wolves, this time it’s lions. Conan, who we learn late in the game has lost the hauberk and mail he wore during his time with Belit, is reduced to his usual low-frills getup, so doesn’t have much to defend or protect himself with.

Perhaps de Camp’s contribution comes with the material that refers back to “The Vale of Lost Women;” we’re informed Conan has run afoul of his old tribe and ended up killing the shaman-type before beating a hasty retreat. He’s still in the jungles of Kush, looking for a way out, but there are these damn lions chasing him now. He comes to a broken-down black castle that seems to have been built off-kilter, leaning upon itself and looking like it’s about to fall apart. A storm is coming so Conan decides to camp out in the abandoned place.

We have a pure Lin Carter part with this random, almost psychedelic sequence where a dreaming Conan’s spirit, or “ka,” exits his body and astrally voyages around the haunted castle! I say “pure Lin Carter” because it’s all exposition and coincidence; somehow Conan’s spirit “just knows” all there is to know about the castle and the vampiric spirits that now inhabit it. They hunger for Conan but are too weak to manifest themselves.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated subplot, a war-party of Stygians (ie Egyptians, I believe) are headed through this area, having been looking for slave material. They decide to camp out in the castle to avoid the storm. So the “climax” is composed of Conan hiding up on a balcony and watching these Stygians down below; they get drunk and pass out and then the dark spirits of the castle pull up old corpses and carcasses and whatnot and form themselves into this grotesque, multi-limbed, mult-headed creature, which begins to rip apart the Stygians in full gore detail.

And Conan’s still up there watching. He finally sneaks out, kills a crazed Stygian who himself tries to escape the castle, and takes the dude’s armor and sword. And then Conan leaves, folks! Nope, he doesn’t fight the gruesome monster, doesn’t even try to! So I guess in that regard at least this tale is a bit different than the repetive de C and C pastiche norm. Bear in mind though that the majority of the tale either features Conan running from something or dreaming.

“The Snout in the Dark” (Howard, de Camp and Carter) – Here we have yet another unfinished “fragment” started by Howard sometime in the ‘30s but never completed; along came de Camp and Carter, decades later, to finish the job. This one’s similar to “The Vale of Lost Women” in that it has a lot of racial stuff and also in that Conan doesn’t appear for the first quarter of the story. We’re now in Meroe, which is like the capital of Kush or something; interestingly, it is run by non-blacks; “brown” is how they are specifically referred to. I believe they’re supposed to be descendants of Stygians or something? At any rate, we are often reminded of the “black dogs” who live outside Meroe and serve all the slave functions.

The title “snout” belongs to a phantasmic creature that sprouts a piglike snout and kills some one-off character in an overlong opening chapter. Turns out this monster is at the behest of a black wizard named Mulu, who himself works for despotic nobleman Tuthmes. The villain is using the creature to kill off various notables and blame the deaths on Queen Tanada, who you won’t be surprised to know is a “brown”-skinned beauty who wears “metal plates” that just barely cover her “full breasts.” Sounds like prime Conan bait, doesn’t it? Our hero makes his eventual appearance when Tanada is almost killed by a Kushite mob, one that has been fooled into thinking she was behind the death of the dude killed in the first chapter.

The crowd attacks Tanada and rips all her clothes off, and Conan rides into the fray and saves the nude babe. This one has a bit of the spicy vibe of “The Vale of Lost Women,” too, as Tananda makes Conan the captain of her guard, but more so uses him as her latest stud. We don’t get any full-on smut, but we are informed that Conan pleases the cruel queen more than any other man ever has, to the point that she herself has become a slave to his, eh, maleness. Unfortunately this stuff is given short narratorial shrift and instead the authors focus on Tuthmes and his latest plot against the queen – sending her a stacked blonde from Nemedia named Diana who will act as his spy, whether she likes it or not.

Conan is again lost in the background, appearing only occasionally; we’re told though that he has successfully put down a riot or two “of the blacks.” (Howard’s original fragment, included in The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian, implies that this would have taken greater precedence in the story). We do though get good spicy stuff like Tananda whipping a nude Diana; Conan shows up, tells her to stop, and incurs the queen’s wrath – but she cries because she’s so addicted to that good Cimmerian lovin’ that she won’t do anything about it.

The story – which I actually enjoyed quite a bit because it’s so bonkers – wraps up humorously fast; Conan goes back to his place on a whim, finds the titular demon manifesting there, and fights it, while Diana looks on in horror. The rulers of Meroe are rapidly disposed of in a quick revolution – so long, Tananda – and Conan high-tails it out of there, with a happy Diana riding off with him. Needless to say, she’ll be out of the picture, and not even mentioned, in “Haws Over Shem,” the first story of the next collection, Conan The Freebooter.

And that’s it…I have to say, writing these reviews is a bit exhausting. And also, the series has yet to get very good. The Howard originals are fun, but even they aren’t as good as I remember them…I’m looking forward to re-reading The Hour Of The Dragon eventually. I loved that one when I read it, but I was 18 at the time, so we’ll see. Anyway, on to Conan The Freebooter, which is one I did not have as a kid; it features “A Witch Shall Be Born,” which I’m really looking forward to, as a lot of it was used by Oliver Stone in his Conan script, and thus made it into the Milius film.

Men Who Die Twice (Mind Brothers #3)

Men Who Die Twice, by Peter Heath
No month stated, 1968  Lancer Books

Okay, consider me officially confused. Supposedly the third and final volume of The Mind Brothers, Men Who Die Twice instead comes off like a standalone spy thriller, one that’s only connected to the previous two books in that it features the same protagonist, Jason Starr. Otherwise it’s as if Peter Heath (aka Peter Heath Fine, who actually died in 1995 and not 1975, as mistakenly reported in my review of the first volume) has distanced himself from the series concept.

As we’ll recall, the first volume was mostly sci-fi, about Jason Starr dying in ‘Nam and being reborn via his “mind brother” identical twin Adam Cyber, who came from 50,000 years in the future to see what the world was once like (and to also help fight the Commies, let’s not forget!). Then the second volume sort of jettisoned all that; Jason Starr was more of a regular ‘60s spy type, complete with all kinds of fancy gadgets and gear, and Cyber was relegated to supporting status, off-page for the majority of the narrative. The “Mind Brothers” concept was barely even discussed. A new character, teenager Mark Brown, was introduced – but in the climax of the book, we learned that Mark had been sent into the future by that volume’s villains, and also that Cyber had been sent to the Earth’s core “five minutes ago.” And the book ended on this dual cliffhanger.

Given this, the reader of the third volume would understandably want to know what happens next. Well folks, you can forget the hell about all that. All of it!! There is zero, zilch, nada pickup from the previous volume, or even the first volume. Neither Adam Cyber nor Mark Brown appear, and they aren’t even mentioned. The phrase “Mind Brothers” appears nowhere in the text. Again, the only tie-in to those earlier books is the appearance of Jason Starr, who here appears to be retconned into a “self-employed mathemetician,” one who has lots of Intelligence-world background.

So what the hell?? My assumption is Heath turned in the first book and got the request to turn it into a series, which he fumblingly did with the second volume. But maybe he had a hard time of it, or lost his interest. All the sci-fi wankery of the previous two books is gone in this one – honestly, it’s just your typical ‘60s spy-pulp, and not a particularly good one at that. It’s beyond frustrating for the reader of those first two novels, though. I guess we’re to assume Adam Cyber really did die in the climax of the previous book (an off-page death at that?). So much for his much-ballyhooed voyage across the millennia to come help Jason Starr.

Anyway when Men Who Die Twice opens, Jason is in a stopover in London, on his way to a vacation in Greece(!?). He’s stopped by a phone call in which some dude named Harry Brentwood pleads with Jason to come see him at some hospital. This guy somehow knows Jason and claims it’s a life or death sort of thing, etc, but when Jason gets to the place, they claim there’s no Harry Brentwood there. Plus there’s a stooge who throws Jason out on his ass. The whole place seems mysterious, and Jason tries to figure out the puzzle.

Meanwhile Heath hopscotches all over the place with random incidents and events. For example there’s a doctor named Derby in an underground research lab somewhere in the Midwest, a place where hallucinogenics and germs are being studied for warfare; Derby contaminates the area, massacring everyone, before he escapes – and we get an overlong sequence in which the military wonders if they need to nuke the area to prevent outspread of the contamination. There’s also a nuclear sub commanded by a dude who reports to Derby – who in reality turns out to be a former Nazi spy named Rudi Vreelander.

Jason, still in London, meets pretty young Moira, who claims to be Harry Brentwood’s fiance. At great length we’ll learn that Harry was a scientist at this very same underground lab we just saw – an eerie subplot has it that the scientists, upon their eventual release to the world, have their minds swapped, so that they have no memories of their research beneath the ground. Jason goes around London and over to Scotland in his research, getting in the occasional action scene, and also at one point briefly captured by a bumbling pair of CIA agents, one of whom Jason knows from his (apparent) past life with the agency.

Our hero does get to use at least one gadget this time around; captured again, midway through, Jason’s on a private plane, when he pushes his way free and jumps right out into the night sky. Turns out he’s wearing an experimental “balloon” on his back and thus makes his leisurely descent to the ground. But otherwise Jason is in pure investigative mode this time around, with none of the action-pulp of the previous two books. The majority of the novel is given over to one-off characters; even the President features in an endless subplot in which he wonders if his military commanders are trying to pressure him into what could be an unjust war against Russia – the USSR being set up by Vreelander, who hopes to spark WWIII.

The action eventually climaxes aboard that nuclear sub, which has gone rogue under the command of Vreelander’s henchman. It’s off the coast of Sardinia – where Vreelander himself has been anticlimactically dispensed with – and about to fire off a salvo of nukes. Jason alone storms the ship and tries to stop its insane commander, but here the novel does veer into sci-fi: DC gets nuked! Vreelander’s dude manages to fire off one rocket, and Heath ends the tale with DC a radioactive ruins. Jason, finally setting off for Greece, hopes that mankind “learns something” from the catastrophic event, but figures it won’t.

And that’s it – for the book and the series. Really, this novel was so unconnected to the previous two that you might as well just figure this “Jason Starr” is not the same guy who appeared in those other books. Sort of like how Daniel Craig isn’t playing James Bond, but another character of the same name. I enjoyed the first two books to some extent, but Men Who Die Twice left me cold – and confused.

Conan (Conan #1)

Conan, by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Lin Carter
July, 1984  Ace Books
(original Lancer Books edition, 1968)

If you had asked me when I was 13 years old who my favorite author was, I probably would’ve said Robert E. Howard. When my men’s adventure novels phase abruptly fizzled out around that time, I found myself moving on to sci-fi and fantasy, in particular the Conan stories. At that time these Ace paperbacks were ubiquitous in bookstores, at least in my area – unfortunately though I was just a poor kid and couldn’t afford all of them. But I had this one, though I have no recollections of it, other than one or two stories – and I can’t believe it was almost exactly thirty years ago that I first read it!

These days the Ace books (which themselves were reprints of the original Lancer editions) are out of print and out of favor; Howard purists lose lots of sleep over the editing L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter did to the original Howard tales, not to mention the “pastiches” they wrote to fill in the gaps in Conan’s life. As is well known, Howard didn’t write the Conan stories in any sort of chronological order, but in response to a fan’s letter he did construct a sort of template; de Camp used this when fleshing out the Conan saga.

The Conan series ran to 12 volumes, taking Conan from youth to old king; initially most of them were published by Lancer, but after that imprint went out of business, Ace took over. The books also weren’t published in order; Conan The Adventurer, for example, while being the fifth book in the series, was actually published first. Millions of copies of these books were sold over the decades, no doubt due in large part to the cover paintings by Frank Frazetta (his work is kind of butchered on this Ace edition of Conan #1, though; the original Lancer edition shows more of the painting). Boris Vallejo’s paintings, later in the series, are also great, I think.

Anyway, for this re-read I did something a little different. For the Howard tales contained herein, I read the original, unadulterated versions, which are now readily available in a trio of Del Rey trade paperbacks that came out several years ago. (I would bet good money that these Del Rey editions haven’t sold anywhere near the amount the old Lancer/Ace editions did, though…) So I can’t speak to the tinkering de Camp/Carter did to the REH originals, though you can find copious amounts of info about this sort of thing online, particularly on Wikipedia.

Re-reading Conan #1 all these years later, in addition to finding that I hardly remembered any of the tales, I also found that the majority of them were overly repetitive. The same thing basically happens over and over again, and Conan himself doesn’t really stand out until late in the book. In this way perhaps this book isn’t the best introduction to the character, but I decided to start with it (again) anyway.

Here are the stories:

“The Legions Of The Dead” (de Camp & Carter) – Okay, I’m cheating here; this story doesn’t actually appear in Conan #1. It’s from the 1978 Bantam paperback Conan The Swordsman, which is yet another book of Conan pastiches by these two authors, written after their Lancer/Ace stuff. I included it here because this story takes place before “The Thing In The Crypt” (below), thus chronologically it was the earliest tale in Conan’s life that these two authors wrote.

Conan is just a teenager when we meet him, serving as a mercenary with an Aesir war party that has ventured into “haunted” Hyperboria; we’re informed he has left his native Cimmeria due to a “blood feud.” The Aesir are here to rescue Ranni, daughter of Njal, the Aesir leader. There isn’t much to the story, and Conan doesn’t really come to life – we’re just informed that his ideas are usually discarded by the Aesir. But through his ingenuity he’s able to rescue Ranni from the castle in which she’s imprisoned, and the Aesir escape.

The titular legion of the dead soon attack – it is an army made up of their fallen comrades, as well as other “gaunt” Hyperboreans they’ve recently killed. This is necromancy courtesy wicked Queen Vammatar of Hyperborea, an ageless beauty with “high breasts.” It was she who took Ranni captive, and now aims to get her back with her undead warriors, but Conan again saves the day; as Njal and the others fall to the sword-wielding zombies, Conan knocks Vammatar off her horse, puts Ranni on it, and the horse races off. Meanwhile Conan is caught, destined for the Hyperborean slave pens, and here the tale ends.

“The Thing In The Crypt” (de Camp and Carter) – The previous story was basically a prequel to this one, which is the official first story in Conan #1. It’s another trifle of a story, but well-known in its own right because writer/director John Milius included it in his awesome ’82 film Conan The Barbarian. (The sequence is not present in Oliver Stone’s original draft of the script.) The problem with reading “The Legions Of The Dead” before this one is that repetition I mentioned above.

I imagine Lin Carter got a chuckle out of seeing this story in the film, as it turns out “The Thing In The Crypt” started life as a story featuring Carter’s character Thongor of Lemuria. Thongor was changed to a young Conan, who when we meet him has escaped those Hyperborean slave pens and is running from wolves that chase him. He has no weapons, same as in the film, and finds a passageway into an underground crypt – again, same as in the film. But where the movie diverges is the skeleton in the crypt is inanimate, other than when Conan takes the Atlantean sword from it.

In the story, the “thing in the crypt” is actually a “mummified” corpse with rough gray skin, and it comes to life to attack young Conan when he has the umbrage to take its sword away. Conan is understandably freaked out, but fights back – however, given that I read “The Legions Of The Dead” before this, I was like, “Conan, you just fought an entire legion of zombies – you’ve got this, man!” But admitedly, that story was written much later, and clearly the authors didn’t go to too much trouble to connect the two stories. Needless to say, Conan gets the sword and makes his escape.

Back to the film, Milius also improved on the sequence by making the sword so important that it became Conan’s main weapon – indeed the one he used to break his father’s sword, thus implying that Conan had become stronger than his father. In this story, the sword is just a sword, and it’s not mentioned again as being important in any way. I know purists dislike Conan The Barbarian, but I love it; I could care less that it isn’t faithful to Howard’s work, as it stands on its own…the movie is like a Nietzschean myth on film, and it might be my favorite movie ever. Here is a great review by someone who gets it.

“The Tower Of The Elephant” (Howard) – First published in the March, 1933 issue of Weird Tales, “The Tower Of The Elephant” is another Conan yarn that found its way (sort of) into the ’82 film; it’s even present in Oliver Stone’s original script. This was the only tale I remembered from this book. But I didn’t read this version, this time – I read the faithful reprint of “The Tower Of The Elephant” that can be found in The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian (Del Rey, 2003).

I actually re-read this story several years ago, when I got that Del Rey book at the library, shortly after it was published; I recall at the time I was underwhelmed by most of Howard’s early Conan yarns, not liking them nearly as much as I had when I was a kid. And with this reading…well, I sort of felt the same. “Elephant” is a cool story, sure, but there really isn’t much to it. Conan’s in depraved Zamoria, where he wants to prove his mettle as a young thief. Promptly displaying his barbarian nature, he kills a local who has the temerity to mock him in a tavern. Oh and incidentally, the tales collected here are ones in which Conan is actually stated as wearing the damn loincloth-and-sandals ensemble he wore in every single issue of the various Marvel Comics series. So Conan’s a true barbarian here with no refinements.

Conan sneaks into the titular Tower, accompanied by a famous and portly fellow thief. On the temple grounds they are attacked by trained lions, and other evils wait inside the tower. Up top resides a Ganesha-like creature which appears to be an ancient alien, one imprisoned here by the evil wizard below. Conan just sort of stands and listens to a long speech, kills the elephant-headed alien at its bidding, then watches as the evil wizard is shrunk down in celestial vengence. Sadly, this isn’t the only story in the book where Conan just stands around.

“The Hall of the Dead” (Howard, de Camp and Carter) – This is a de Camp and Carter fleshing-out of a Howard outline; the original outline can be found in The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian. Conan’s still in Zamora, still thieving, and tries to loot a deserted section of the city that’s supposedly haunted. A group of soldiers are chasing him, led by a “Gunderman.” Conan kills all of them and gets into the city, in which he finds a massive slug, which I guess just lives there. Anyway, it tries to attack him, and he kills it. He then finds that the Gunderman’s still alive, and Conan talks him into looting the place with him.

The titular hall features a bunch of skeletons which, you won’t be surprised at this point to learn, come to life and attack Conan and friend. So that’s the third tale in which our hero encounters the undead. De Camp’s dialog is incredibly lame and juvenile throughout, including even a “Let’s get out of here!” courtesy the Gunderman. The story features an O. Henry-esque finale in which the priceless jewels the duo have looted either crumble to dust or become animate – and poisonous.

“The God in the Bowl” (Howard) – This one was rejected by Weird Tales when Howard submitted it sometime in the ‘30s; it was published decades later with de Camp revisions, and that edit is included in this Ace book. However, I read the original Howard version, again collected in The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian. I can see why this one was rejected. It doesn’t feel like a Conan yarn at all; it’s a locked room murder mystery in which our hero once again stands around for long portions of the narrative.

Anyway Conan’s in Nemedia, having been hired by a fallen noble to loot a temple. However Conan is wrongly accused of murder; he’s caught in the act of snooping through the temple by a guard who has come across the murdered corpse of the temple owner. Conan’s accused of murder, and there follows a tedious story of various one-off characters coming along to exposit on this or that, accusing Conan of murder, when of course he’s innocent. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the supernatural is to blame, as the dead owner had recently curated an ancient artefact of Set – another element which made it into the film, as the Set logo is even described as a two-headed snake.

Another element that made it into the film is the creature itself – here it is a massive snake with the head of a man, which of course brings to mind Thulsa Doom’s transformation to a snake in Conan The Barbarian. (Thulsa Doom of course was a villain of Howard’s other character, King Kull, but then, the ’82 movie has more in common with Kull than it does Conan, even down to the titular character, as Arnold’s Conan is just as prone to brooding as Kull was.) But otherwise the only thing I found memorable about “The God in the Bowl” was Conan constantly calling his accuser “dog.” Conan The Gangsta Rapper!

“Rogues in the House” (Howard) – The REH originals continue; this one first saw print in Weird Tales, January 1934. Once again I read the faithful reprint in The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian. This turned out to be my favorite Howard story in the book, even though I had no recollection of it from my first reading, three-score years ago. It also sufficiently inspired Frank Frazetta, who chose a scene from this story for his awesome cover painting – a scene that also appeared to inspire the producers of the crappy Conan The Destroyer (1984).

Conan’s in a prison near Zamora when we meet him, having been working as a thief alongside a “Gunderman” who went rogue from his ranks – a Gunderman who is dead before the story even begins, having been hanged. Likely we are to assume it is the same Gunderman who became Conan’s sort-of ally in “The Hall of the Dead,” which I guess one could see as clever pastiching on de Camp’s part. Conan’s in pure badass mode, finally; he’s visited in prison by a nobleman named Murilo who wants Conan to kill an evil priest named Nabonidus. In return Murilo will engineer Conan’s breakout.

Conan takes the job, and manages to escape prison even when the nobleman’s plans fall through, “braining” a dumb guard with a bone and making his “leisurely” escape. Conan then takes care of unfinished business: revenge on the whore who sold him out. First he guts one of her customers, then he dumps the half-nude babe into a cesspit. After this he figures it’s “time to kill” the priest. In a nice bit of characterization, while Conan is an uncivilized barbarian, he keeps his word and he pays off his debts; he feels indebted to the nobleman, even though technically Conan freed himself.

The “rogues in the house” turn out to be Conan, Murilo, and Nabonidus himself, all of whom make it into the darkened tunnels beneath the priest’s home. Nabonidus’s apelike creature-servant Thak has taken over the place, sitting above on Nabonidus’s throne in the preist’s red robes. There’s a lot of standing around and listening and watching as Murilo and Nabonidus take turns expositing on this or that (a Howard mainstay, one I always forget about until I read him again). Then they all watch as some interlopers are killed off by Thak, using Nabonidus’s hidden weapons. The cover painting comes from Conan’s brutal but brief mortal combat with Thak. This one’s good, but a bit too much of it is composed of exposition and characters just standing around.

“The Hand Of Nergal” (Howard and Carter) – Now it’s Lin Carter’s turn to flesh out an untitled outline Howard jotted down in the ‘30s. Despite its reliance on coincidence (a Carter specialty), and the fact that Conan acts a bit out of character so far as his willingness to fight the supernatural goes, I liked this one a lot more than I expected. Conan’s serving as a mercenary in a Turanian army, battling the forces of Munthassem Khan; Carter attempts to tie back to the previous story by mentioning that Conan is riding the horse Murilo gave him. The opening is the best part, with a gore-spattered Conan on a bloody battlefield of corpses. You won’t be surprised to learn that this is the portion that’s mostly by Howard; the outline he wrote can be found, again, in The Coming Of Conan The Cimmerian. 

Carter adds supernatural stuff – a horde of demon-bats descends on the carnage, and Conan alone has the gumption to fight them off. In his escape he finds a nubile wench named Hildico who, Carter coincidence in full effect, was tasked by her ruler to come here, to a battlefield, and find Conan. Conan recently came across a talisman of sorts, just plumb found it (Carter in effect again), and it turns out this means he’s now “the chosen one” who can stop the evil Munthassem Khan, possessor of the titular Hand of Nergal. This talisman by the way also succeed in scaring off those demon-bats, which turn out to have been sent by the Khan.

This one’s kind of similar to the previous story, in that Conan stands around in a dungeon-type setting while supernatural forces come into play, but this time those spirits do all the heavy lifting and Conan just watches it all go down. His ass is saved by Hildico, who coincidence-again-be-damned knows how to use Conan’s talisman against the Khan; despite all the fuss made about Conan being chosen and whatnot, only this serving wench-type knows that you have to throw the talisman at your victim to full activate it(!). Pretty damn dumb, but Carter’s invested in the tale, so it’s entertaining despite its dumbness.

“The City Of Skulls” (de Camp and Carter) – We end the anthology the way we started it: with another pastiche by de C and C. Believe it or not, this was my overall favorite story in the collection, and by a wide margin. I really liked it! The authors do an admirable job of capturing the vibe of a Howard original, but I liked this one better than any of the actual Howard originals in the book. It opens identically to the previous yarn, with Conan serving as a mercenary in a war party that’s in the process of being slaughtered. It’s a little over a month after the previous story (which is recapped, as if we didn’t just read the damn thing a few pages ago), and Conan’s in a party that is escorting sexy Princess Zosara into Hyrkania to marry “the Great Khan.”

I read somewhere that, in his “edits” of Howard’s original work, de Camp removed some of the more racist material. This accusation is thrown into doubt within the first few pages, where we come upon stuff like, “[Conan] drove the point of his tulwar straight into the slant-eyed, yellowish face,” not to mention our introduction to Conan’s new best bud, Juma: “a gigantic black from Kush.” Conan, Juma, and Zosara are captured and taken on the long journey to Shamballah, the City of Skulls, the capital of a hidden kingdom called Meru which is like at the bottom of a valley or something. Zosara is to be wedded to the depraved “god-king” ruler, and Conan and Juma are consigned to the galley of a ship as slaves.

Conan’s actually pretty badass here, “braining” dudes left and right, even with the chains of his manacles. The authors dole out lots of gore, from the opening massacre to Conan and Juma’s inevitable revolt on the slave galley. The novella ends in Shamballah, where the duo rescue the bound and nude Zosara from the god-king, who sits on a throne of skulls, worshipping a massive jade statue with many arms. It comes to life, trying to smash them, and Juma saves the day, tossing the god-king beneath the statue’s crushing feet. Features a goofy finale in which, a month later, the two safely deposit Zosara in the kingdom of the Khan she’s to marry, and Conan gossips to Juma that, unbeknownst to the Khan, Zosara’s already bearing him a heir – courtesy Conan, of course.

Overall I enjoyed Conan #1, with the caveat that none of the stories were particularly memorable. You know something’s up when the de Camp and Carter pastiche is the most entertaining story in the book! Writing-wise, Howard’s prose is head and shoulders above de Camp and Carter’s, but bear in mind that REH was a pulpster given to some seriously purple prose; he is in particular enamored with the word “ejaculated,” which isn’t used in the sleazy way you might think but instead as a dialog modifier. And he regularly uses thirty words where two would suffice. (Hey, just like my wife!!) He is also prone to exposition, and telling rather than showing. It appears that de Camp and Carter tried to mimic his style in their pastiches, but I’m unfamiliar with either man’s work outside of their Conan oeuvre. Regardless, their stories don’t have that weird fire of Howard’s original work.

On to Conan Of Cimmeria, which is one I do remember very well, if only for the masterful “Queen Of The Black Coast.”

Soldato #1

Soldato #1, by Al Conroy
No month stated, 1972  Lancer Books

Starting off a five-volume series, Soldato! reminds me a lot of The Revenger #1 by Jon Messmann, both in plot and how it comes off like a standalone book…one that just happened to initiate a series. The novel is credited and copyright Al Conroy, which is one of the many pseudonyms used by Marvin H. Albert (aka Nick Quarry, Ian MacAlistair, etc). He wrote the first two volumes and the fifth one; volumes 3 and 4 of Soldato were written by another old hardboiled author, Gil Brewer. I’m looking forward to those.

The titular character of the series is only referred to as a “soldato” (aka Mafia soldier) in passing; his name is Johnny Morini, and he hasn’t been in the mob for a while, thus the title of the book (and series) is a bit of a misnomer. But I guess “Soldato!” has more of a ring to it than “Morini!” Johnny, now 29, was raised in the mob; an orphan who grew up on the tough streets of New York, running various “kid-gangs.” Eventually he became the top soldier of Don Renzo Cappellani of Manhattan. 

But now Johnny (as Albert refers to him throughout) is living in the Witness Protection program, hiding out as “John Hawkins” in a desolate Utah town. Don Renzo desperately wants to find him – and kill him. For some reason Renzo doesn’t understand, Johnny “went crazy” a few years ago, turned against the don, and actually served as a witness in a trial against him; a trial which was ultimately thrown out of court. But Don Renzo looked bad, despite getting off, and wants to kill Johnny as an example.

Eventually we’ll learn that the don, via one of his many underlings, killed off Johnny’s sort-of foster father, and also had his sort-of foster sister gang-raped (she later jumped off a roof and killed herself). This is how he unwittingly incurred Johnny’s wrath. Johnny vowed revenge, killing off the murderer of his foster father and setting his sights on the underling who had ordered it. When he was arrested in the attempt, a Federal lawyer named Riley offered Johnny the chance to take down the grand poobah himself, the man who’d been behind it all from the top: Don Renzo. Johnny agreed to testify that he took part in Don Renzo’s murder of a rival don five years ago.

Even though the trial failed, thrown out when Renzo’s lawyers made a mockery of “star witness” Johnny and his troubled, crime-ridden past, the government upheld its bargain and set Johnny up with a new life in a new town. Meanwhile a former cop turned private eye named Charles Moran has been doggedly seeking Johnny for the past year, paid well for his efforts by Don Renzo. After much trouble – which is elaborated on a bit later in the novel – Moran has tracked various Federal receipts and come upon a “John Hawkins” here in Utah, who owns a country store and lives on a small home near a factory. The novel opens as Moran confirms it is in fact Johnny Morini. (And yes, it does get a little confusing that two of the main characters are named “Moran” and “Morini!”)

As for our hero, he takes a while to appear, and truth be told Albert doesn’t spend a lot of the narrative with him – and doesn’t do much to bring him to life, either. The fact that Johnny was a murderous young punk is sort of glossed over. He’s fearful that Don Renzo will someday find him, not that this has prevented Johnny from marrying a sexy young gal from California named Mary. To again differentiate from the men’s adventure norm – and another parallel with The Revenger – is that Mary is three months pregnant. She has no knowledge of Johnny’s past, only a fake story that he “owed money” to some bad people and the government set him up with this new life here.

Moran comes into Johnny’s store one morning and Johnny suspects something as soon as he sees this stranger; this is one of those places where everyone knows everyone. Also, it occurs to Johnny that night when he can’t sleep, Moran has “cop eyes,” something Johnny learned to spot long ago. He’s gotten paranoid before but he’s certain Moran is the person he’s been afraid would come here someday. And of course he is; after a phone call to Don Renzo, a pair of guys who look like “cowhands” are sent to Moran. These are professional hunters of men.

The majority of the text is given over to a practically endless chase these two put Johnny through in the desert; pages 59 to 107 of the novel, in fact. Johnny, urging Mary to leave town the next morning, spots an unfamiliar car coming down the road and hops in his Mustang with Mary, the hunters in pursuit. Johnny ditches Mary and takes off on foot through the rough terrain. The two hunters pursue. Luckily Johnny has a .38 and a rifle for this very occasion, but the hunters have carbines with telescopic sights.

What with the drawn-out suspense of man hunting man in the harsh desert, this entire sequence has the vibe of a western, particularly with the carbines and rifles being used. You can almost hear the Sergio Leonne music. While it’s all suitably tense and thrilling, personally I prefer more gun-blazing sort of action; I felt this bit just went on and on. City-boy Johnny has spent the past year learning the area, hunting with the locals, and due to his newfound knowledge of the desert he’s able to (gradually) turn the tables on his hunters, so that hunter becomes prey. Also to note is that Albert doesn’t dwell much on the violence; this is one of those novels where people just get shot and fall down – no exploding fountains of gore or geysering jets of cerebrospinal fluid, more’s the pity. 

Actually, Soldato! is really just comprised of a sequence of chase scenes. Immediately after this long chase is over, we get another, as Moran, who was waiting for the two hunters to return, spots Johnny escaping town and gives his own chase, gradually tailing him all the way back to New York. Johnny has decided to take the fight to his old boss; only with Don Renzo’s death will he be free. Moran remains in the narrative, appearing sporadically; he gets more money from Don Renzo, and even when he loses Johnny in the city he tracks him down via Mary, who, against Johnny’s orders, ends up phoning her mother from the boarding house in Hackensack, New Jersey Johnny has deposited her in.

Meanwhile Johnny runs from shadow to shadow in New York, hunted by the don’s endless legions of men. Albert to his credit doesn’t give the book an ounce of sap; while Johnny knows all of these men, and indeed some of them were his “sidekicks” in that old gang, there’s none of the “but we used to be brothers!” bullshit there would no doubt be in a modern take on this story. These guys are out to kill Johnny, period, and Johnny’s out to kill them first.

But he has grander designs for Don Renzo. Calling up Riley, that old Justice lawyer, Johnny claims he’s going to “get” the don for real this time. Not kill him, but something else. What Johnny does is bust up another old acquaintance, this one a drug dealer, and makes off with all of his coke. He then breaks into a dry cleaners with the Don’s clothes and sews the packets into one of the jackets. Johnny also gets in a few more chases from various Mafia goons, including the occasional shootout, one of which leaves Johnny half-dead, with a shot-up left arm and a bullet in the ribs.

The most unusual character in the book only briefly appears: Doc Miller, a fallen-from-grace doctor who now operates out of a flophouse with a pair of nude teenaged girls at his beck and call! He patches Johnny up, tells him he’s gonna die soon – but be sure to pay up first – and gives him a handful of codeine pills. And this is our hero for the last few pages; rather than the slam-bang action finale we might’ve expected, we instead have a practically comatose, zombielike Johnny camping out in the dingy apartment he’s rented, across from Don Renzo’s headquarters in Brooklyn, watching through binoculars and waiting for the day the don shows up wearing one of those special jackets.

It’s pretty trying, for sure…page after page of Johnny stumbling in a dying funk from bedroom to bathroom, praying that this is the day the don shows up in a coke-lined jacket. Johnny lives off grungy tap water and codeine pills, his left arm numb and every breath killing him. Thus it is as big a relief to the reader as it is to Johnny when the don finally shows up in one of those jackets and Johnny calls Riley – who, realism be damned, swoops in with a bunch of cops and whatnot and summarily arrests the don on the spot, even if it’s clear he’s been framed as a drug-runner.

The novel ends with a flashforward to two months later; Johnny’s mostly recovered, if a bit battered and bruised, and he and Mary head off to a new life, with a new name, in Denver. Johnny’s been saved, in a very nice bit of character-redemption, by none other than Charles Moran, who, upon finding out Don Renzo has been arrested, quickly figures out that whoever called the cops had to be someone within viewing distance. In this way he’s come upon Johnny, lying mostly dead in his apartment, and it’s Moran who calls the cops for him, something Johnny is never to learn. Moran’s even hiding there in the airport as Johnny and Mary fly off.

This would appear to be the end of Johnny Morini’s story, but four more volumes were to follow. I figured something had to happen to Johnny’s wife and kid, otherwise why would he get back into mob busting? And sure enough, checking Marty McKee’s review, I see that in the next book Albert “discard[s] the wife and child via divorce and miscarriage!” Well, that’s….depressing.

Overall I enjoyed Soldato!, which is written in that firm, assured manner of an old hardboiled/pulp master. But while his writing is economical and fast-moving, Albert is an unrepentant POV-hopper; one paragraph we’re in one character’s perspective, and the next, with no warning or white space or anything, we’re in the perspective of someone else. This is particularly annoying in the chase scenes – we’re with Johnny as he desperately races through a canyon, then in the very next sentence we’re in the perspective of the men chasing him. This commits the ultimate author affront of pulling the reader out of the fictive experience, and to this day I still can’t understand why some writers don’t realize it!

Spykill

Spykill, by L.W. Blanco
No month stated, 1966  Lancer Books

I had no idea when I picked it up, but Spykill turns out to be the work of veteran hardboiled writer Lionel White, who six years earlier published the heist thriller Steal Big. I’m not sure if White wrote this one as a contractual obligation or to pay off a debt or even just for booze money, but surely it must’ve been written at least partly in jest, as evidenced by the goofy pseudonym he used, sort of a Spanish play on his name.

Cashing in on the mid-‘60s James Bond craze, Spykill features virile, tough, and ultra-wealthy secret agent Tommy Marco (identified as Thomas Jefferson Marco on the back cover) in his one and only adventure. Marco is basically James Bond meets pre-seclusion Howard Hughes. A lanky Texan with incredible wealth who owns a series of airliners, businesses, and whatnot, Marco flies about the country on his own plane and occasionally helps the US government in the fight against foreign espionage. It’s never mentioned how Marco got into this, what exactly qualifies him for it, so you just have to take it for what it is: a pulpy spy yarn.

At least, for the most part it is. Betraying his hardboiled past, White still finds a way to make Spkykill come off like a Gold Medal paperback from a decade before, as halfway through Marco finds himself in Vegas, confronted by a variety of gangsters. But that’s just one of the plots. I was only joking about the “booze” above, but as I read this book I began to suspect that Lionel White might’ve had some problems with the bottle, or at the very least couldn’t figure out how to plot a spy caper. Spykill starts off about one thing, changes into another, changes into yet something else, and then quickly wraps up in a few unsatisfying pages. The one thing I can be sure of is that it was quickly written.

Maybe White just wasn’t comfortable in the spy genre – according to Will Murray in the The Armchair Detective volume 15, number 4 (1982), White’s one and only contribution to the Nick Carter: Killmaster series, The Mind Poisoners (1966), had to be extensively rewritten by Valerie Moolman. Spykill was published that same year, so one wonders if this is what White’s original manuscript was like before Moolman reworked it. At any rate hero Tommy Marco is more along the lines of another Bond imitator, Mark Hood, in that he’s globally famous and uses that fame as a cover for his secret agent work. Unlike Hood Marco doesn’t have any fancy karate moves, and unlike Nick Carter he doesn’t rely on gadgets; his sole weapon is a .38 revolver, which again more so calls to mind White’s hardboiled work.

Marco when we meet him has been contacted by Greybone, Marco’s shady government contact; it’s never stated who exactly Marco works for. The complicated plotting begins here, as Greybone details how the Commies are using a small New York art museum as an info drop. In particular an 8-inch nymph statuette is being used to convey information; the original, it’s been discovered, was lead coated in gold paint, but the Commies don’t know this, and thus they have been replacing it with a replica of real gold. Apparently they’re stashing info in the statuette, and the prime suspect is an auburn-haired beauty named Carla Jason, who serves as secretary for a broker named Sigrid Winterset.

This proves to be the plot for the first quarter, as Marco meets with Winterset, claiming to want to hire him for a European deal – and meanwhile hitting hard on Carla. “Hitting on Carla” doesn’t really sum it up; rather, Marco bullies her, instantly assuming she’ll want to have dinner with him now and sex with him later. Carla bickers back and forth with him, going out on a date with Marco anyway, but spurning his advances. Later he saves her from two thugs who break into her apartment to murder her, making it look like a rape-killing; orders from Winterset’s KGB (or whatever) bosses, given that Carla’s now been compromised, or something.

The fight is again Gold Medal style, as Marco beats them around and shoots one of them. Carla sneaks off and meanwhile it’s over to the next plot, which has Marco heading to Vegas. Here, Greybone informs him, an Army sergeant working at a nearby missile base was recently killed, deep in debt at the Wrapper casino. Marco, posing as himself, hits the casino and gambles big like a regular pseudo-Bond, trying to figure out what the casino owner, a Mafia-type named DiAngelo, is up to. How these two plots intersect isn’t something White is concerned with, and you get the feeling he’s just using material left over from some earlier book.

This section’s bodacious babe is Charlene, a busty redhead who entertains at the Wrapper and is sent up to Marco’s suite with the champagne. He has her strip and gets in the shower with her, filtering out any possible bugs, trying to get her help on the recent killing. Instead Charlene sets him up and Marco himself is almost killed. The novel’s sole sex scene occurs off-page as Charlene, grateful to Marco for saving her from DiAngelo and his crooked empire, gives herself to Marco as they fly to California; Marco’s promised her a new life with a new name in Europe, working for one of his many companies, in return for her spilling the beans on DiAngelo.

Again, this Vegas stuff has nothing to do with the plot of the first half. Now Marco’s in LA and he tracks down a suspicious European-type seen in the Wrapper, a dude named Bole. When this guy, a contract KGB assassin named Harold, and none other than Carla Jason rent a boat for a three-day cruise, Marco first tails them via amphibious plane and then sneaks aboard the craft itself. Once again he saves Carla, who apparently was about to be killed, the two men meeting with a Russian sub from which a female scientist boards their boat. The idea being that the boat left port holding two men and one woman and would return the same, Carla, having been murdered and dropped in the sea, replaced by the Russian woman. Or something!

Marco apparently gets more sex-in-gratitude, though White forgets to tell us about it; next thing we know Marco and Carla are suddenly sharing a hotel room bed. Carla’s sob story has it that she fell in love with an Iron Curtain consulate guy, one wom she had a kid with, but the dude took off behind the Iron Curtain with the baby and blackmail letters began coming to Carla; if she didn’t work for Winterset and the Commies, her kid would be killed. Marco brushes all this off, assuring her the kid will be fine(!?), and finds out from her about a ranch in the Nevada desert owned by Winterset.

Given that we’re running out of pages – in true Lancer fashion, the novel is a mere 150-some pages of big print – this is where the “climax” takes place. Armed with a “machine pistol” that he doesn’t even use, Marco surveys the ranch…and is promptly captured. As is Carla, who has for no reason at all come along with him. Winterset, Bole, Harold, and all the other Commie villains are here, as are a bunch of Mafia-types. White himself appears to be confused, sometimes using the wrong names for the wrong characters.

And here Marco learns the plot – the Iron Curtain agents are about to take over that nearby missile base and launch one of its rockets at Fort Knox. With its destruction the US economy will collapse. Marco just sits there while the crooks shoot each other, and in the final pages he hits one guy and then shoots Harold. Then he makes a phone call to Strategic Air Command, or something, hoping for an air strike on the missile base. Instead, we flash forward to some time later as Marco and Carla sit on a beach, and via exposition we learn that the missiles had a self-destruct mechanism which prevented the catastrophe. The end!

Yeah, Spykill is a damn mess. It wants to be Bond but it feels more like Hammer, only in third-person, and the book is more a series of disconnected setpieces than an actual novel. Marco himself is too distant to be likable; he’s mostly a cipher, the usual virile superstud type, but his bad-assery is rarely on display. The villains are also interchangeable and forgettable; I spent the final pages hunting back in the book to confirm who was who. 

As mentioned this was Tommy Marco’s sole appearance. My copy has a hole punch on the cover, which I believe is the oldschool method of tagging books for the cutout bin. Most likely Spykill didn’t make much of an impression, lost in the clutter of other spy paperbacks of the day, and White moved on to other things.

Spy In Black Lace

Spy In Black Lace, edited by Noah Sarlat
No month stated, 1964  Lancer Books

This vintage anthology of men’s adventure magazine stories is thematically similar to Women With Guns, and also shares the same editor: Noah Sarlat. However unlike that superior anthology Spy In Black Lace is comprised of the shorter stories that ran in the Sarlat-edited “Diamond Line” of men’s mags (ie Stag, Male, etc); in other words, none of the stories here are novella-length like those in Women With Guns.

And also I should quickly point out that those expecting Modesty Blaise let alone The Baroness will be greatly disappointed; with only one exception, the women in the stories collected here are not female James Bonds and certainly aren’t the aggressive ass-kicking females so common in today’s action garbage. All of them (with one exception) just use their bodies in the line of duty, relying on sex as their sole weapon. In other words the collection isn’t very spy-fy in nature and is more about gorgeous women using their ample charms to sway various men in the line of duty.

First up is “Lily Stein: Spy In Black Lace,” by George Raffey and copyright 1960 Newstand Publications. Unlike the other men’s mag anthologies I’ve read, Spy In Black Lace doesn’t tell you which particular magazines these stories came from. Anyway this tale, about fifteen pages in length, sets the precedent for the style and length of those that follow. Unfortunately it’s not the strongest opener for the book, as Raffey spins out a yarn that’s mostly told in summary or in the format of a fake article.

Lily we learn is a beautiful young Austrian who in the early 1930s decided like so many other starving young European women to become a prostitute. But Lily became a “high-class” whore and set her sights on bigwigs across Europe. Soon she was wealthy herself, entertaining men from Austria to Paris. Then one day in 1938 she was contacted by the Gestapo and drafted into service. Now Lily would be a spy for them, acting as a courier. But Lily always struggled to be the best and threw herself into spycraft, eventually becoming a capable spy herself – but again, only in the bedroom.

In 1940 she is sent to New York and there brings military officials and businessmen involved in the beginning war effort into her yoke. There’s no sexual material here, by the way, with what little there is relegated to quick mentions of Lily’s nice rack or her and her latest conquest waking up in bed together. But Lily is worried about the security of her dead-drops, where she mails intel to an “aunt” in Switzerland; she’s very happy when a Gestapo contact comes to the US and shows her a new short wave radio. But the Gestapo dude is a double agent, and the tale ends with Lily arrested just a few days before D-Day; she was about to send info about it to Berlin before she was captured. 

Next up is “Madame Li Sang: Bait for an OSS Trap,” by Hal Hennesey and copyright 1961 Newstand. This one’s in first-person and I’m certain the original story carried a fake “as told to” credit; here Hennesey himself becomes the narrator and character, which I’m sure is only via editing trickery courtesy Sarlat. Hennesey himself was a men’s mag editor and published at least two novels in the ‘60s under his own name. Anyway in this yarn “Hennesey” is an OSS agent deep in Central China, surrounded by “Japs.”

Hennesey’s storytelling is much better than Raffey’s in the earlier story; he keeps the tale moving and it’s never relayed via summary. It’s July 1945 and our narrator has just gotten word that “fifty Kamikaze Tokyo-trained Chinese” have been sent into China to kill all American OSS agents. Now Hennesey has to figure out which “Jap agent” is after him. The sole American here, Hennesey is in charge of a group of Chinese soldiers led by Colonel Chou, whom Hennesey calls “Colonel Joe.” Joe’s idea is to have nearby Madam Li Sang call in her eight hookers for a party, get the men drunk, and figure out which one’s the secret agent!

Once again there’s precious little sex, though Hennesey does report to us that Li Sang spends the night with him. This one plays out more like a mystery, with Hennesey suspecting everyone, even Joe, who summarily kills off one man wrongly accused of being the spy. It climaxes with an assault by the Japanese, ending with Joe saving Hennesey’s life from the agent, who has gotten into the camp disguised as a coolie. Oh and we learn one of Li Sang’s hookers killed herself due to a broken heart – she was in love with the guy Colonel Joe executed.

“Suissa Overmaat: Target for Seduction” by Leon Lazarus follows, and it’s copyright 1961 Newstand. Suissa is a busty blonde Belgian who is the “avowed mistress” of a Nazi officer in 1942 Brussels. As in the previous story, though, Suissa isn’t the main character; it’s a Belgian underground fighter named Paul Waldeck who has been tasked by his superiors to “know Suissa well.” Suissa’s open fling with the Nazi has gotten the interest of the underground rebels, and they figure if Paul can get close to her, he can pick up all sorts of intel.

Suissa’s Nazi boyfriend has a map of anti-aircraft weaponry around Belgium; the underground desperately needs this map. Paul plots with a group and ambushes the officer one day as he’s walking out of Suissa’s apartment – the girl is not a spy by any means and indeed has no idea who Paul really is. The officer is killed and Paul escapes, to hand over the map to a young boy before being shot down himself. Suissa we learn is taken in by the Gestapo, interrogated, and then executed off-page. Bummer! But at least the kid turns over the map to the Belgian underground and the Nazis are again thwarted.

“Kim Suim: Prostitute for the Cause” by Alex Austin takes place apparently in the year it was published, 1958 (copyright Atlas Magazines). Kim Suim is “Korea’s Mata Hari” and we learn she eventually opened a whorehouse in Seoul which was populated with girls trained in the Commie arts of seduction. Unfortunately Austin does little to exploit this and instead the majority of the short tale is given over to recounting Kim’s hardscrabble youth in post-World War II Korea. She goes from man from man in a sort of repeat of the storyline in “Lily Stein.”

But one of Kim’s boyfriends is a North Korean spy and tells Kim she’d be a great addition to the Commie effort. Kim becomes a great spy herself, again relegated to screwing UN officials visiting Seoul and sneaking through their briefcases and whatnot to snap photos, which she sends to North Korea. But she has grand intentions and as mentioned opens her very own cathouse, one filled with similar spy-whores. But just as the story’s getting good it perfunctorily ends: Kim comes home one day to find a few plainclothes police waiting for her, and they take her off for a summary trial and execution. The end!

“Violette Szabo: Wild War Widow” by Morgan Bennett follows; it’s copyright 1961 Newstand and is the best story in the anthology by far. It also would’ve been more at home in Women With Guns than any story actually collected in that book, save for the fact that it’s shorter than any of them, again only coming in at 15 or so pages. But this story is the one exception I mentioned above: Violette is really more so a female commando rather than a spy. It’s World War II and the raven-haired beauty, born in France to a British dad and French mom but raised in London, is a commando for the British Secret Service and has just parachuted into the French countryside to kick a bunch of Nazi ass.

The story is mostly comprised of a long-running action sequence with brief flashbacks to Violette’s past. Unlike most men’s mags stories, this one does not start off in the “present” before getting lost in a long flashback; Bennett keeps the tale moving as Violette, along with a male Maquis comrade, blows away hordes of Nazi soldiers with her Sten submachine gun. It’s apparently D-Day and Violette has brought papers that will help the Maquis in their effort to take on the rear guard of the German defenses. Violette is basically a female Terminator, mowing down legions of Nazis.

We learn in the brief flashbacks that her husband was a French Foreign Legionaire killed in combat; after giving birth to a daughter, Violette wanted to go fight herself – “the child brought her little joy.” She’s apparently seen action before but this is her biggest fight, however she injures her ankle and demands that her Maquis comrade rush to safety with the papers. Violette is caught and taken to a prison; there’s a big buildup with the Maquis attempting to bust her out, but they learn Violette has been put through “unspeakable tortures” and moved to another camp. The finale is a depressing series of “Violette was sent to this camp, and then that camp,” vaguely tortured all the while, until she is summarily executed by a Gestapo officer. We learn she was posthumously awarded a medal for bravery.

“Celia: Camp Follower in the Command Tent” is by Harry Harrison Kroll and copyright 1961 Atlas Magazines. This one takes place in 1864, during the Civil War, and given my lifelong disinterest in this area of history I skipped the story.

“Eva Baronet-Petrovka: Afrika Korps Fraulein” is by Arthur Orrmont and copyright 1961 Newstand. It’s similar to the opening story, “Lily Stein,” in that it’s about a sexy German babe who spies for her country, even though she isn’t a full-on Nazi. She does it more so out of patriotic duty or somesuch. At any rate it’s June 1942 and Lilly has been sent to Cairo, where she is to scope out the city in preparation for Rommel’s eventual conquest. She hooks up with a pair of wealthy Egyptian twin brothers, Abdul and Ahmed, steeling herself to the fact that she’ll have to have sex with both of them in order to maintain her playgirl cover – and to use their fancy bathroom to hide her transmitter-receiver.

From there it follows the usual men’s mag template, flashing back to how Eva’s career began. A virgin teen in pigtails, she was chosen due to her beauty to be sent into spy school, where she was taught the arts of seduction, intel transmission, and sex…again, this particular spy’s “gadgets” are relegated to her own ample bodyparts. She hops from bed to bed in her intel-gathering, almost undone at one point by a New Zealand spy posing as a reporter. Eva manages to destroy all of her spy equipment before the cops come, however she’s sent to a prison camp just as a safeguard, where she sits out the rest of the war in relative comfort. Here we’re informed she also learns the truth of the Nazis, turns against them, and “today” is married to a British official involved in the Intelligence trade, acting as a sort of consultant for him.

“Magda De Fontagnes: Everybody’s Spy – Everybody’s Mistress” is by Ted Stoil and copyright 1960 Atlas. It’s slightly longer than the other stories, which is a shame, as this is another that’s mostly told in summary format, or at least in the style of a pseudo article. The tale opens in June 1937 as a lovely young redhead shoots down a French ambassador in a Paris train station. The man lives and the girl is arrested; she claims the man got in the way of her love life. Newspapers will uncover that the woman is Magda De Fontagnes and the person she was having the affair with – the affair ruined by the meddling of the ambassador – was none other than Il Duce himself, Mussolini.

From here the overlong tale is basically just a fake article like you’d read in a regular magazine, as Stoil recounts Magda’s past. She is a triple spy, working for the French, the Germans, and the Italians, but not through any cunning or wickedness – no, just because Magda “loved too much.” Basically in her sexpionage assignments Magda would fall in love with whatever guy she was boffing, to the point where she’d decide to start spying for him.

This leads to the occasional arrest or dramatic situation, like the incident with the ambassador (Magda freed from prison in exchange for spying for France as well). It’s all very dry and not nearly as torrid as it should be, which sums up practically every story collected here. However Magda is the second protagonist in a row to actually survive her tale; the story ends with her final arrest, caught spying for Germany, and she’s sent to prison for 15 years of hard labor.

Overall this was a middling collection. Sarlat had a good idea for the anthology, though; too bad he was unable to find better stories for it. Someone interested in checking out these old men’s mag anthologies would be better suited looking for Women With Guns or even Our Secret War Against Red China.