The Spy Who Came To Bed

The Spy Who Came To Bed, by John Nemec
May, 1968  Triumph News Company

This grungy little paperback, while packaged as a spy thriller, is really just a “stroke book,” as Grandma used to call ‘em. (Just kidding.) Seriously though, The Spy Who Came To Bed is unrepentant ‘60s sleaze with some parts that are reminiscent of Ennis Willie’s Sand books, only with more of a sleaze overlay.

Like Sand, the protagonist, Rudy Heveson, is a private eye with a notorious reputation for being a bad-ass. Like Morocco Jones, Heveson was an Intelligence operative before quitting the Agency and starting his P.I. business. He operates out of North Lisa, California. Despite cashing in on the secret agent craze of the era, there is a definite hardboiled vibe to The Spy Who Came To Bed, as if it were from a decade earlier; while Heveson doesn’t actually do much bad-ass stuff (unlike Sand or Morocco Jones), he at least has some bad-ass dialog: “No shady moves. My hand’s cold and that’s why I’ve got it under my coat.”

Hired by the CEO of Alamo Aircraft, Heveson is given a regular assassination assignment: a mysterious KGB saboteur who goes by the name Alexander Shaw has been targeting Alamo, and the CEO wants him dead. Only problem is, no one knows who exactly Shaw is or what he looks like, despite which it is known he’s tops with a gun and other incidental details, as well as being a killer with the ladies.

Not that any one could match Rudy Heveson – the novel is mostly comprised of Heveson hopping into bed with one eager gal after another. As mentioned, a difference between this and other vintage sleaze books I’ve read is that Nemec really puts the focus on the sex to the detriment of the plot. But this is that unerotic sleaze of yore:

His answer was drowned under the onslaught of a throbbing need wich zigzagged into the body of Maxine and swiftly smashed her backward into the pillow and conquered her with its unmatchable strength. Because of her zeal, a contagious fever that could drive a man wild, he reached climax early. But she was right behind him, and they unlocked their arms and legs while the ebbtide swept into mastery in the motel cabin.

Or:

He felt himself reach the zenith and he knew that the damp, spasming wonderland of her valley had claimed its pulsating invader to the hilt. She bent away from him in a cruel arc. He moaned as she pushed her fists into his chest, and then he wrestled the nymphish woman down to defeat. He ground into her. She hopped and jumped as he ended the physical suspense with the eruption of a dazzling universe within her.

Heveson, tracking various digressive, go-nowhere leads, tries to hunt down Shaw, but mostly just screws a bunch of women. These range from Heveson’s sort-of girlfriend, Maxine, who herself is a CIA agent (who doubles as a topless waitress) to Jesse, a sexy Red Chinese agent who ultimately tries to kill Heveson later in the novel and who herself is killed (Heveson’s first kill, I believe), tossed into an alligator pit(!). There are dozens of others, from a switch-hitting babe who has naturally just been waiting for a real man like Rudy to come along, to a self-proclaimed “hippie” babe who spouts some New Age drivel before screwing Heveson.

It’s all just pretty dismal though, mostly due to how repetitive it is. Nemec shows some inventiveness with dialog, which ranges from hardboiled to free-spirited (particularly from the hippie chick), but the dullness of the sex scenes can’t be overlooked. The plot of chasing the mysterious Shaw is also underwhelming, with the Sand similarities again coming to the fore with Heveson more so chasing after a local Syndicate tough named Nick Talirosa, who had a working relationship with Shaw. While the Syndicate goons lack the spark of Willie’s characters, I would hazard a bet that Nemec might’ve been inspired by the Sand books.

Action is slim. Heveson resorts mostly to his fists, but at one point he arms himself with a “.48 caliber” automatic pistol – which he never even fires. This even during a battle with Hayseed Jones(!), a hitman Talirosa hires to take out Heveson. Characters by the way are abruptly introduced throughout, giving the novel a very rough, awkward feel – there’s barely any setup for anyone and Nemec will casually refer to not-yet-introduced characters as if we know them as well as Heveson does. At any rate a dude named Chester Devy emerges from the woodwork as one of the few recurring characters (most of which are one-off women); he’s a CIA agent who occasionaly assists Heveson.

The surprise reveal of who Shaw is comes just as abruptly in the final pages, Nemec clearly hitting his word count and figuring to hell with it. Here in the last pages Heveson actually shoots someone, and then ponders if he’ll marry Maxine after all…Nemec does his best to build a “will they/won’t they” dynamic between the two. Not so far as the sex goes, of course; rather, Heveson occasionally muses that he should give up the life and go ahead and settle down with the uber-busty babe who’s so crazy about him.

Anyway, The Spy Who Came To Bed is most recommended for those who like their vintage sleaze straight up. There’s really nothing else about it I could recommend – while many of these old sleaze novels are really great books with just hints of sleaze, this one doesn’t even beat around the bush (so to speak). It’s all screwing, all the time.

They Do It With Mirrors (Jana Blake #2)

They Do It With Mirrors, by Jim Conaway
No month stated, 1977  Belmont Tower Books

The second and final volume of the Jana Blake series is once again courtesy J.C. Conaway, who again brings sleazy ‘70s New York City to life; the guy was so familiar with the seedier areas of the city – and so gifted with presenting a gutter-level view of them – that I’m starting to think that Conaway might’ve been the mysterious author of The Savage Women.

Our heroine doesn’t even appear for the first 46 pages; we open with Stash, a black pimp with movie-star looks who is given to outrageous fashions. These opening pages of They Do It With Mirrors are almost a guide to grungy ‘70s Manhattan, with Stash doing the rounds of the sleazy parts of the city, including a jaunt along 42nd Street which sees him checking out a live sex show where Conaway leaves no gross stone unturned. Stash lives in utter poverty (cockroaches litter his cupboards in another memorable bit of detailing) and runs his stable of whores with an iron fist – actually, make that a sharpened knife. When he catches three of his working girls cheating him on pay, he takes his knife to the scalp of one of them to leave her a permanent reminder not to screw him over again.

The reason Stash takes center stage is because he’s gradually shaping up to be this volume’s villain; Conaway inserts a lot of faux-“API” stuff and fake news columns (most of them an obvious page-filling gambit) about the recent migration of famed blonde goddess film star Chiara Locatelli, who is moving with her movie producer husband and toddler daughter Risa from their native Rome to Manhattan. Stash you see has recently hooked up with a blonde transvestite named Honey (Stash we’re informed has “unusual sexual leanings” so it’s cool with him that Honey’s a dude), who has real boobs but hasn’t yet gotten “the operation” to go full-on woman. But Honey looks identical to Chiara, and Stash slowly (very slowly) is beginning to form an idea to make some big bucks capitlizing on her resemblance to the famous woman.

Meanwhile Jana, when we finally get to her on page 47, is still hanging out with her gay pal Charlie, who has since opened his own boutique and is trying to lose weight. Conaway shows a passing familiarity with the then-underground world of the gays and the transsexuals, so much so that you go “hmmm.” As with all of Conaway’s other novels I’ve yet read, They Do It With Mirrors even takes the time to briefly feature a gay or at least underground musical; this time we’re treated to an all-tranny revue of Grand Hotel, in which Honey plays the Jean Harlow part. But otherwise we get lots of stuff from Charlie’s boutique, how he cuts patterns and gives fashion advice, and it all shows a bit more “research” than you’d expect from the average men’s adventure author – not to make any assumptions, of course.

It’s some unstated time after the previous volume, and Jana hasn’t had a big case since. She’s still trying to hide the fact from her landlord that she secretly lives in her office, which as we’ll recalll is on the same floor as a gay-dominated gym (“hmmm” again) and one floor down from a porn film production company. Jana when we meet her is swimming laps with Charlie, and Conaway shows a complete disintrest in conveying tension; it’s all very much in a long-simmer trash fiction mode as Jana and her GBF shoot the shit and go eat at a health food restaurant. Here again Conaway brings seedy New York to life; indeed he’s almost a regular Len Levinson throughout, sometimes even giving exact locations of his fictitious locales, complete with walking directions.

Jana’s still in a relationship with hunky Gianni, the Italian dude who works in a fruit stand across from her building (and whom she has off-page sex with here – Jana’s sole such scene in the novel), however the hunky cop she was also involved with last time out isn’t mentioned this time. But friends, Jana is a supporting character at best in They Do It With Mirrors. I kid you not. She’s absent from the book more than she’s in it. Jana disappears for long stretches…for example, other than a page-and-a-half cameo, she’s completely absent from pages 78 to 158. That’s eighty pages where our heroine isn’t even seen or mentioned! So it seems clear to me that Conaway wasn’t much invested in this series or his protagonist, and basically went about filling the novel with incidental characters.

So in that regard the true protagonist is Stash, who saunters around various Times Square establisments and has frequent sex with his transvestite “girlfriend,” Honey. There’s also lots of stuff about Honey’s dreams of stardom and her appearances in various off-Broadway plays, as mentioned a recurring staple in Conaway’s work. It’s via Honey that Jana makes that brief cameo between pages 78 and 158, as Honey hires Charlie to design a new gown for “her,” and Jana happens to be in the boutique when Honey stops by to check the designs. But Stash and Honey aren’t the only characters who steal the show from the series protagonist. Conaway also spends a lot of time with Chiara and young Risa; most of the novel is told through their perspectives.

The incident promised on the back cover – the kidnapping of Risa – doesn’t occur until well over a hundred pages in. Stash, at great page length, earlier watched a lame magic show performed by a drunk, older married couple – and Conaway, not getting enough mileage out of this, actually writes the sequence twice, as Stash later takes Honey to see the show, too – and thus Stash hatches a scheme to steal away Risa via magic. Coincidence be damned, the drunk couple has been hired to do magic at Risa’s birthday party, and here the abduction is carried off. One can’t help but feel bad for poor little Risa, who is locked up in Stash’s grungy apartment with only her stuffed monkey to keep her company. Stash, wearing a ski mask, periodically brings her food, but otherwise he just forgets about her for long periods of time.

Chiara and husband receive the ransom note and the cops tell them not to play along, but the Italian couple is frantic. Also, Chiara is frustrated by the slowness of the cops in handling the case, and conveniently remembers an ad she just happened to have seen in the paper recently – an ad for Jana Blake, private eye who only handles cases for women. Thus in the last 30-some pages Jana’s finally on the job.

And here’s the unique skill she brings: when Chiara shows Jana around her apartment, Jana notices the dumbwaiter and figures that’s how the kidnappers abducted Risa. Jana’s theory is confirmed when she finds a scuff mark inside the dumbwaiter, no doubt left by a shoe – Risa’s shoe. She shrugs off Chiara’s comment that the cops already searched the place, scoffing that the cops wouldn’t know a scuff mark when they saw one, as none of them have likely ever scrubbed a floor! And that’s it, friends, Jana’s sole lead here is provided via her sexism.

Even here there’s no action or suspense. Jana just goes around the grungier areas of Manhattan asking one-off characters about a truck, Jana haviing learned from a neigbor of the Locatellis that a mysterious truck was seen outside the building before the little girl disappeared. This goes on and on, Jana calling people, visiting them, finding out they’ve sold the truck, and then moving on to the new owner.

Like the previous volume, you can forget all about that cover image of an ass-kicking Jana toting a pistol. The only “weapon” she uses here is a telephone, and she doesn’t get in a single fight. In fact Stash and Honey are chased by the cops while Jana instead saves poor Risa, who is in danger of being burned alive in a fire accidentally started in Stash’s apartment, Honey having dropped a smoking cigarette when she left with Stash to collect the ransom.

As for Stash and Honey, neither are killed – the cops chase them through the city and shoot Stash in the arm, while Honey meanwhile freaks out in a heroin trip. We’re informed via another of those faux-API news bulletins that the two have been arrested, along with the other accomplices. And this is how They Do It With Mirrors ends, with Conaway, out of space due to padding, not even bringing us back into Jana’s world long enough to say goodbye. It’s debatable if he intended another volume, but I’m betting not – it’s clear from this volume that he had lost all interest in the character, and his disinterest is contagious.

While this was it for Jana Blake, I have more Conaway books on tap…including most promisingly another two-volume series he wrote in the ‘70s about a female private eye: Meet Nookie and Get Nookie, which were published by Manor Books under the pseudonym “Ross Webb.” Oh, and I’ve since found out here that Conaway was a WVU graduate (class of ’57), meaning like myself he might’ve grown up in West “the middle of nowhere” Virginia. I’d suspected this for a while, mostly due to the WV setting of The Deadly Spring.

Cage #1: The Lady Killers

Cage #1: The Lady Killers, by Alan Riefe
No month stated, 1975  Popular Library

Brought to you by the same imprint that published Hardy, Cage ran for six volumes and was more of a men’s adventure deal than the aforementioned bore of a private eye series. Alan Riefe, a real person and not a house name, turned out the action-packed tale of “twin supersleuths” Huntington and Hadley Cage, as represented by the studly ‘70s dudes on the photo cover with their groovy ‘70s chicks.

The Lady Killers is a good opening to the series, as it features my favorite pulpy concept: good-looking female villains. As part of his P.I. work, Manhattan-based Huntington Cage comes across the Chain of Silk, an five-woman hit squad that works for the mob. However there’s no part where Cage or his brother get busy with any of the sexy ladies, and indeed Riefe seldom even describes the women. He instead plays more with the Chain of Silk being like a “women’s lib” movement in the mob. As a minor character complains, “Women are getting into everything these days.”

“Hunt” Cage, who I suppose is the main protagonist of the series, doesn’t fare very well in this first volume. Within a few pages he’s gunned down on the street, shot by a hitman posing as a motorcycle cop. The hit was ordered by Angie Visconti, obese Mafia cretin. But Hunt survives and is in the hospital; Visconti sends the same hitman to kill him there. But Hunt has a mysterious savior, an unseen figure summoned by a special transistor switch on Hunt’s wristwatch; the savior blows away the hitman and fades into the shadows. Six weeks pass and Hunt has sufficiently recovered…and meanwhile, Angie Visconti himself has been blown away, by that same mysterious figure. 

Meanwhile, we already know who the mystery figure is – of course, it’s Hunt’s twin brother, Hadley “Lee” Cage. An artist based out of New Jersey, Lee helps Hunt in his investigations for reasons that are never disclosed. Honestly, there’s no reason why Lee, a successful artist and ladies man, would keep meeting Hunt on the waters beneath the George Washington Bridge (the two brothers never venture to each other’s stomping grounds, so that no one will ever figure out that either of them has a twin brother) and agreeing to fill in for him on certain jobs. But Lee’s even Hunt’s gun supplier, hooking him up this time with a .357 magnum he insists Hunt try out.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, as that’s the novelty factor of this series: the world doesn’t know that there are actually two Cages, identical twins. Actually this gives the series a bit of a ’30s pulp vibe; the idea of Hunt Cage having a special gizmo watch which will alert his twin brother is so weird that you could see it being a big hit with Depression-era readers. But Riefe wisely sleazes it up a bit, mandatory for ‘70s pulp, in particular with digressions on “the art of making love on a waterbed,” as Hunt reconnects with his redheaded girlfriend, Rosemary O’Boyle, a beat cop. Riefe doesn’t go for full-bore sleaze but we do get a lot of info on how to properly screw on a waterbed.

Meanwhile the brothers try to figure out who is apparently continuing Angie Visconti’s assassination work. Lee cases the man’s family in Jersey while Hunt tracks down Visconti’s sole Manhattan-based family member: a twenty-something daughter named Marie, a gorgeous blonde with big breastesses who is so perky and upbeat when she meets Hunt Cage that he figures there’s no way possible this chick could be a hitwoman. Plus she’s a schoolteacher and has no knowledge of her dad’s wrongdoings. So who’ll be surprised when Hunt and Rosemary come back to Hunt’s apartment one night and there’s Marie Visconti, in a skintight black jumpsuit, leaping out of his apartment window and running acrobatically across the rooftops?

She’s left behind a vial of nitro glycerine, intended to blow up an unsuspecting Hunt when he opened his medicine cabinet. After checking the rest of the place, instead of calling the bomb squad for a thorough search, Hunt and Rosemary head on over to the waterbed for more of that good stuff. Who’ll be surprised when the next morning the living room explodes – turns out there was another bomb, hidden in the television set – and Rosemary is killed in the blast? Hunt’s so consumed with vengeance that he’s not thinking properly, so Lee bashes him on the head and takes him back to his place in Jersey so Lee can pose as Hunt in Manhattan and draw out Marie Visconti.

Lee Cage turns out to be the better protagonist; within moments of posing as his brother he already draws out one of the members of the Chain of Silk and blows her away as she’s planting explosives on Hunt’s boat. Despite the women’s lib angle of the Chain of Silk, these girls are all bunglers, constantly goofing up. I’d like to think this is “subtle” commentary on Riefe’s part, but again, he really doesn’t exploit the fact that these particular assassins are all women. It’s such a head-scratcher of a miss that you really don’t know what to think. But anyway, they’re now down one more thanks again to Lee, and soon thereafter he takes out yet another in a firefight.

Meanwhile, Hunt, the “star” of the book, spends his time running away from Lee’s hot-to-trot girlfriend, Mina(!). Seriously, Hunt’s in the dumps due to his girlfriend’s death, but long portions are given over to Hunt trying to throw off the busty gal, who’s burnin’ for some good lovin’. And Lee continues to act more like the protagonist of an action series, tracking Marie and another of her assassins up to Vermont, where he eventually deduces that they are planning to assassinate a crusading old journalist named Atherton.

Hunt finally gets in on the action in a long sequence in the Hotel Gatewood, in Harlem, a posh all-black luxury palace in which a bigwig loan shark named Breadman resides. Hunt has learned Breadman too is on the hit list, though the man disbelieves Hunt’s story. But when one of Breadman’s goons tries to kill Breadman, everyone realizes that Hunt was on the level; Marie Visconti, back from Vermont, is in a hotel across the way, holding the goon’s family hostage. The goon is to kill Breadman, or the family gets it.

Devising an elaborate scheme, Hunt swindles the lady with a fake corpse, so that when she pops out of her hotel window with a rifle he shoots her, hanging from an old stone gargoyle on the Hotel Gatewood’s edifice. Yes, Marie is summarily killed off, with little buildup or payoff – Hunt just shoots her, and that’s that. More focus is given to the stuff up in Vermont, where Lee poses as Atherton in a parade, dodging yet another unsuccessful Chain of Silk assassination attempt. Shortly thereafter the brothers switch places, Lee back to Jersey to boff Mina, and Hunt engaging the final two Chain of Silk gals and two Mafia hitmen in a protracted action scene in the forest.

Hunt doesn’t even kill the Chain of Silk girls, just capturing them after blowing away the rifle-toting men in their party. He calls the law and that’s that; there’s no resolution to the Chain of Silk or explanation of how or when Marie Visconti put them together, even why they were still operating after Marie’s death. It’s all very anticlimactic, but that’s unfortunately par for the course for many of these cheapjack ‘70s action series. Otherwise Riefe’s writing isn’t bad, with a bit more word-spinning than typical of the genre and a good touch with the dialog exchanges. Actually the writing is for the most part so good that it actually makes you expect more from the plot, which is why I’m coming off a little too hard on it.

At 172 pages of fairly big print, The Lady Killers moves pretty fast. Riefe has a firm handle on the requirements for ‘70s men’s adventure fiction, from the action to the sleaze to the generally lurid feeling, and I wonder if the series would’ve lasted longer if it had found a home at a more appropriate imprint, particularly Pinnacle Books.

The Hook #2: Sight Unseen

The Hook #2: Sight Unseen, by Brad Latham
September, 1981  Warner Books

William “The Hook” Lockwood returns for another caper, a few months after the previous volume (though published the same month); this one sees him going up against some Nazis who have stolen a top-secret experimental bombsight. It’s the late 1930s, America still considers Germany and Japan its allies, and Lockwood spends the whole novel disbelieving that America will get into another world war.

At 180 pages of small, small print, Sight Unseen just sort of drags on and on. Not that the first volume was a rollercoaster or anything, but still in comparison it was a lot more fun, what with the bizarre assortment of underworld types Lockwood interacted with. But this time the Hook’s purely in insurance investigator mode, dealing with Treasury Department agents (aka “T-men”), scientists, and most importantly a redheaded beauty.

Whereas the first novel traded off between lots of boring “investigation” stuff and super-hardcore porn, this one focuses more on the former and really tones down the latter. In fact there’s such a disparity between the explicitness of the sex scenes that I wondered if maybe some editor at Warner might’ve gotten freaked out by some of the stuff in The Gilded Canary Caper and asked the author to lessen the impact this time. Who knows. But sadly, that ultra-hardcore stuff was about the only enjoyable aspect of the previous novel, mostly because it was so crazy and so weird and most importantly because it jolted the reader out of the stupor he’d fallen into.

So while there’s some sex in Sight Unseen, particularly with the redhead, who turns out to be the head of research on the bombsight project and is named Myra Rodman, it’s nowhere as graphic as in the previous book. I believe this is so because Lockwood actually falls in love with Myra over the course of his investigation, which takes a few weeks; long parts of this book are like a romance novel, as Lockwood courts the beautiful young lady, taking her out to dinner and dancing and whatnot. But then later in the book, when also as part of his investigation, Lockwood sleeps with a hooker, this scene too isn’t very explicit, which again makes me suspect “Brad Latham” (supposedly David Schow) was asked to tone down the naughty stuff.

Anyway, Myra Rodman works for Northstar, a company in Long Island founded by Dr. Josef Dzeloski initially as a refrigerator manufacturing company, but due to (too long) backstory we learn the military eventually started using the company as a weapons contractor. Now Northstar has made a 500-pound bombsight, which is so top secret that Transatlantic, Lockwood’s employer, has insured the item without even knowing what it is. But the thing’s somehow been stolen out of Northstar’s windowless, single-entry plant in Long Island, and Lockwood must figure out if it was an inside job or if a foreign power stole it.

The novel is more of a private eye thriller than the previous book, with much of the narrative given over to Lockwood ambling around and interviewing this or that suspect. There’s Pops, the elderly guard who was on duty that night, Guy Manners, the engineer on the project, even Dzeloski himself. But as mentioned most importantly there’s Myra, who Lockwood starts falling for pronto. There are also several T-men afoot, a dude named Guy Manners in charge of them; he and Lockwood immediately get in a contentious relationship, but eventually Manners makes Lockwood a temporary Treasury agent to help with the investigation.

There’s no action at all – that is, unless you count the parts where Myra takes the train into New York City and goes out to the hottest restaurants and clubs with Lockwood. There’s a Casablanca riff going on, as Lockwood refuses to get involved with the anti-Nazi sentiment sweeping across “the liberals” of America; Myra is very political and is desperate for the US to step in and do something about Hitler and his legions, otherwise all of Europe will be engulfed in war. Lockwood starts to suspect the lovely lady is correct, particularly when he comes across the intel that some Germans might’ve stolen the bombsight.

In addition to fighting with Manners, Lockwood also periodically argues with his boss at Transatlantic, Mr. Gray , who demands that Lockwood find the bombsight so TA doesn’t have to pay. Lockwood mostly uses his underworld contacts to find out where the bombsight might’ve been spirited away to, but every time we think there’s about to be an action scene, like when Lockwood and friends sneak up on a warehouse, it fizzles out, with the place being empty. There’s only one action scene in the book, really, and that’s later when Lockwood leads some junior T-men on an ambush of a Nazi hideout, but it’s over quick, and Lockwood even gets shot.

Another too-long sequence has Lockwood investigating the German girlfriend of Heatherton, a secret Treasury agent who poses as a Nazi. This lady throws herself at Lockwood, but he turns her down, caught up in his growing love for Myra. After all, he’s already feeling guilty for having screwed a hooker named Barbara Wilson, a suspected Nazi spy, earlier in the novel, all so as to secretly get some info out of her as part of the investigation. Yes, Lockwood is totally in love with Myra, even thinking what it will be like to marry her and to begin “a new adventure” in his life, with kids!

So my friends, I think it’s plainly obvious what fate is in store for poor Myra Rodman. What action reader will be surprised when, just a few paragraphs after thinking about having children with her, Lockwood discovers Myra’s corpse? It’s such an expected “shocking moment” that you have to laugh out loud. What makes it all the more humorous is that, other than a burning desire for revenge, Lockwood doesn’t act much different afterward; he isn’t too heartbroken or devastated. Of course, the novel ramps up to the finale within the next twenty or so pages, but I’m betting Lockwood will barely even recall Myra by the next volume.

For the finale, Lockwood impersonates an American Nazi and goes out to a U-Boat that’s docked off New York to get the bombsight. Even here the author tends more to dialog and suspense, with Lockwood planting an explosive and hightailing it out of there before she blows. Lockwood himself takes some damage this time, getting shot in the novel’s sole gunfight and having to recuperate in the hospital. He rarely busts out the boxing moves which gave him his nickname, only at one point using his famous “hook” on an old man who turns out to have been Myra’s assassin – but since the guy was only following orders and gives Lockwood the desired info, Lockwood lets him live(!?).

Anyway, Sight Unseen wasn’t too great. It was boring, padded to the extreme, and suffered from the diluted naughtiness – the previous volume was boring, too, but at least it had crazy, Harold Robbins-esque moments of sleaze to sporadically liven things up.

The Lady Killer (aka The New Lady From L.U.S.T. #6)

The Lady Killer, by Rod Gray
No month stated, 1975  Belmont Tower Books

The Lady From L.U.S.T. was another of those ‘60s spy paperback series that was packaged as sleaze but was really just goofy satire. I’ve tried reading these types of books before (M.O.T.H.E.R. Versus Mafia by Rosemary Santini, one of Clyde Allison’s Man From Sadisto books, etc) and they just fell flat for me; too much focus on ridiculous acronyms, character names, and plots, and too little focus on action, suspense, or thrills. In short, these books kind of suck, just light-hearted spy spoofs that aren’t funny.

The Lady From L.U.S.T. series was likely no different, but the books in this series go for stupid prices these days; apparently Gardner Fox served under the house name of “Rod Grey” for the majority (all?) of the 18 installments from the series inception in 1967 to its end in 1973. Two years later Belmont Tower brought the series back, this time as The New Lady From L.U.S.T., and it ran for two years, amounting to seven volumes. The Rod Gray house name was once again used, but apparently Gardner Fox wasn’t the writer this time. I’m guessing it was a revolving door of ghostwriters, and it’s only a fluke – actually, my own sad over-familiriaty with trash fiction – that led me to discovering who wrote this particular volume.

Anyway, what with sleaze being at critical mass in the mid-‘70s, the New Lady From L.U.S.T. was a lot more hardcore than the earlier series had been; I have one of those early installments, #4: Five Beds To Mecca, from 1968, and it appears to go for the expected lyrical/metaphorical approach in the sex scenes, which are of course light-hearted to begin with. Compare to The Lady Killer, in which the three brief sex scenes on offer are straight-up porn, with the anatomical parts in question clearly named and no purple prose getting in the way of the humpin’ and bumpin’.

That being said, the series, at least judging from this entry, is still pretty lame. The Lady Killer is not much of a spy novel, even comparitively speaking; it’s more along the lines of a private eye novel. Hell, protagonist/narrator Eve Drum is even made a temporary detective in New York City during the course of her investigation. Eve is a gorgeous blonde with a brick shithouse bod (she kindly gives us her measurements on the first page) and she lives in a penthouse in Manhattan where she poses as a worldly, well-to-do socialite. All very much like Cherry Delight, of course, and in many ways The Lady Killer is very similar to Len Levinson’s contribution to that series.

Eve works for top-secret spy organization L.U.S.T., and per the back cover her archenemy is the evil organization H.A.T.E., which not only plays on the SPECTRE deal but also is yet another indication of the unfortunate focus on punny acronyms these spy spoofs were known for. Now, H.A.T.E. is namedropped on the back cover, but the dudes don’t even really show up until the final page. Instead, The Lady Killer is an Agathie Christie-type deal where four doctors who have invented a new, stronger form of methadone are being killed off one by one by a sadistic redheaded female assassin. Eve Drum must figure out who is behind the plot and how to stop further killings.

The first few chapters alternate between Eve’s humdrum narration – her life in Manhattan, her casual sex affair with boss David Anderzanian, her current paramour Mac Morris, a famous mystery novelist – and third-person chapters in which an attractive redhead named Jobeena goes out on assassination missions. This alternating viewpoint stuff, particularly with the skewed viewpoint of the clearly-disturbed female villain, was the first element that started nagging at the ol’ memory banks – I was certain I’d read something almost identical to this before. As the book progressed, with Eve using her wits and beauty rather than weapons or karate, and particularly with Eve coming to the conclusion that the redhead was getting revenge for something that happened in the past, it all gradually came to me.

My friends, this is the exact same plot J.C. Conaway gave us in Deadlier Than The Male. It’s even written identically (save for the fact that Deadlier Than The Male is in third-person throughout), with the alternating viewpoints and the gradual reveal that something rotten happened on a college campus several years before, something which is now causing rampant death. It’s basically the same novel J.C. Conaway delivered two years later, once again via Belmont Tower Books.

At this point I did some deep Google diving and enjoyed one of my rare moments of vindication: according to the 1975 Catalog of Copyright Entries, The Lady Killer was indeed written by J.C. “Jim” Conaway.

As with that later Jana Blake novel, The Lady Killer is a slow-moving affair that’s more concerned with detailing the mundanities of the heroine’s high-society life while sleazing things up every once in a while with visits to New York’s more sordid establishments. You know it’s a ‘70s Belmont Tower book when the first murder takes place in a massage parlor, and Conaway brings the place to such grungy life that you suspect he might’ve visited a few such parlors for “research.” A later kill takes place in a gay nightclub called The Tubs which again has the same sort of over-the-top debauched vibe as the disco club in Deadlier Than The Male (where a murder was committed, as well).

And like Jana Blake, Eve isn’t an ass-kicking protagonist by any means. In the course of the 160-some pages of the novel she chops one dude in the throat and, in the very final pages, shoots two H.A.T.E. guys in the shoulder. She’s more in the brains department, but it’s not like this case is a puzzler. As mentioned Eve learns that these four doctors were pals in Harvard over a decade ago, where something mysterious happened. Eve’s certain that whatever it was is what’s causing these murders today. In yet another prefigure of Deadlier Than The Male, no one but Eve believes this theory, particularly the gruff New York detective who is working the case (yep, just like in Deadlier Than The Male).

While Eve isn’t much for the fighting, she’s quite capable in the lovin’ department, bedding her boss David, her boyfriend Mac, and a muscle-bound club bouncer. Each sequence runs a few paragraphs and leaves nothing to the imagination, though yet here again we have that strange conundrum where a male writer delivers hardcore sex scenes from a female character’s point of view. The scenes don’t go on very long, though, yet coupled with the massage parlor and gay nightclub stuff it all lends the novel an overall sleazy feel, which is again typical of every Conaway book I’ve yet read.

One difference between this and Deadlier Than The Male is that Eve, suprisingly, does not boff the studly detective she works the case with, though Conaway gives a few intimations that they might before he apparently forgets all about it. Rather, more time is given to Serena, a teenaged Gypsy girl who had a hardscrabble youth and now, at seventeen, works in the massage parlor in which the first murder occurs. Eve pities the young girl and actually takes her home with her (Serena’s lecherous boss at the massage parlor is the recipient of Eve’s karate chop), giving her nice clothes and eventually hooking her up with a job as a typist at L.U.S.T. HQ in Manhattan. (The novel features a “several months later” epilogue in which we learn that Serena has gotten married…to Eve’s boyfriend Mac Morris!)

It turns out that redhead assassin Jobeena was raped as a young Radcliff student a decade ago by those four Harvard doctors, and somehow H.A.T.E., wanting now to steal the secrets of their new drug and sell it to the commies, got wind of her sad plight and hired her as an assassin. Or something! Jobeena actually takes out three of the doctors (the third one she strangles with his blood pressure monitor) before Eve figures out what’s going on. However Eve herself is quickly caught by Jobeena, who delivers on her promise to H.A.T.E. by handing them Eve Drum on a veritable silver platter.

Things look bad for our heroine, but Conaway delivers another of his cheesy copout finales with the appearance of a little boy who lives in Jobeena’s building and who just happens to be going by the window of the cellar Eve and Serena are captive in. Eve gets the kid to come in and tells them they’re play-acting as spies and the kid unties them! Then Eve karate-chops Jobeena (who is eventually arrested and sent to an insane asylum), shoots a few of the H.A.T.E. dudes (not killing them), and that’s that.

So yeah, this was a pretty unsatisfying read, filled with mundane, expository dialog and boring snatches of non-action, salvaged only by brief flashes of sleaze – which pretty much describes every other novel I’ve read by J.C. Conaway!

The Black Moth

The Black Moth, by Charles Runyon
No month stated, 1967  Fawcett Gold Medal

Sporting one of the greatest covers in the history of paperbacks, The Black Moth is yet another mostly-enjoyable Fawcett Gold Medal publication; Charles Runyon was an old hardboiled hand but this is the first of his novels I’ve read. While entertaining the book is a bit too long for its own good (192 pages of small print) and meanders at times, plus the climax isn’t satisfactory; but then again there’s that cover…

It’s May 1967 and in Prathersville, Missouri there’s a sort of reformatory school for young women called Wakefield College. But these aren’t your average juvenile delinquents; they’re all members of wealthy families and have been placed here for going astray in some fashion. Wakefield, run by the elderly LaVera Belle, the headmistress of the school, prides itself on orderliness and obedience. But there’s a dark secret lurking in Wakefield, and as the novel opens two of its students pay for it: one is drowned, and the other is stabbed to death while having sex in a car with her boyfriend.

Enter the hero of the story, Marcus Greene, a private investigator hired by the father of the boyfriend, who has been wrongly accused of the second murder. Greene we’ll learn is a former CIA agent and is a regular master of disguise. He also lugs around a metal “equipment locker” which holds a vast array of electronic spying equipment; ten thousand dollars worth of it, we’re informed. The novel is not written in the expected first-person narration, which you’d figure a given due to the PI protagonist, and Runyon keeps the POV-hopping to a minimum. For the most part we stay locked in Greene’s perspective, and he’s a fairly interesting hero, though it must be admitted he doesn’t do very much. 

Greene is in disguise throughout the novel, posing as new Wakefield professor Herman Melville Bligh, who was hired to fill the vacany created by the previous professor, Petrie, who is currently in an insane asylum. The real Bligh is back at Greene’s office in Chicago, kept in a perpetual dope fog by Greene’s (apparently sexy) secretary Rose Marie – and when the drugs lose their efficacy she resorts to old-fashioned screwing. Speaking of which there’s a fair amount of sex in The Black Moth, more than you’d encounter in an earlier Gold Medal publication, but it’s not very explicit. Greene does pretty well for himself, getting lucky with three women over the course of the weekend in which the novel occurs.

Wakefield harbors all kinds of secrets, as Greene discovers promptly upon arrival. There’s the sleazy Public Relations guy, Creighton Bauer, the only other male on the faculty, who treats Greene with immediate suspicion. Then there’s Victoria Galen, the beautiful blonde gym coach with her “small, pointy breasts,” who flip-flops between treating Greene frostily or coming on strong to him. She doesn’t come on nearly as strong as plump but pleasing Virginia Black, school nurse, who promptly upon meeting Greene asks him if he wants some quaaludes and then stretches out on her table, offering herself to him. (Greene obliges her.)

Then there’s beautiful and busty Nadine DeVore, a Wakefield student. A school trusty with various privileges, Nadine serves as the headmistress’s secretary and seems to test Greene when they meet. And it turns he’s failed her test – that night Greene is caught unawares as he scopes out the campus, Nadine holding a .38 on him. She reveals that she met the real Professor Bligh years before and thus knows Greene is an imposter. But the two are on the same side; Nadine was friends with one of the murdered girls and wants to help Greene find the real killer, as she too doesn’t think the boyfriend is guilty. But first she wants to have some sex with Greene, and once again he obliges. Nadine proves to be a plucky heroine, providing Greene with ideas that ultimately help him solve the case – that is, in between all the times she’s offering herself to him.

In addition to the slightly more graphic sex, another indication of the changing times is the psychedelia which creeps into the book. The groovy title font on the cover is just the first clue. Midway through the book Greene is spiked with LSD (whether it was in the coffee Victoria served him that morning or the breakfast he was served in the school cafeteria he’s unsure), and Runyon wites a too-long section of fractured text to display Greene’s disjointed thoughts. It’s all like Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot In The Head, as the narrative becomes gibberish and Greene wanders around in beffudlement. He does gradually realize that this is what drove Petrie “insane,” though, and it’s yet more indication that Wakefield hides some mysterious operators.

Through Nadine, Greene learns of a secret group of Wakefield girls called “the Artemis Club” who sport a black moth tattoo on their abdomen; Nadine isn’t a member, but she knows that these girls serve as hookers in a nearby club. It turns out that this is the big secret at the heart of the murders: someone at Wakefield runs a white slavery sort of racket, with the “black moth” gals whored out to various bigwigs, the girls forced into servitude by photos of their illicit adventures. But ultimately this makes little sense as these young women are already supposed to be hellions, anyway, and were sent here to this school for the very fact of their authority-bucking. Not that this really serves to take the reader out of the book, though.

Any fool would suspect Victoria, who’s always in just the right place at the right time, and also appears to be in cahoots with Verdelet, the sadistic Wakefield guard who seems to really have it in for Greene. But our hero is a bit out of sorts due to all the willing women on campus, and Victoria’s just another of them. When they have the expected sex scene it’s actually unexpected, and the only time I can think of where a protagonist has sex with a woman while they’re being shot at. This happens in Victoria’s living room as some unknown assailant fires through the picture window at them. She’s already quite randy and Greene is pulled along with her; afterwards he gives their attacker chase, Victoria driving her car while still fully nude.

Greene, despite how bad ass Runyon wants us to understand he is, doesn’t really do anything bad ass. He mostly relies on his “equipment locker” to bug various rooms and break into various places. He doesn’t even carry a gun, though he does chop off a guy’s hand at one point. The women are more dangerous, and Greene is constantly being uncovered (in more ways than one). Even when he discovers the whole white slavery angle he still can’t figure out that Victoria’s the main villain, even though any fool would see it. But really it’s apparent from her first appearance in the narrative. 

Greene’s confusion stems from the fact that Victoria’s there with him during many of his closer scrapes. She’s also there when it all builds to a climax, Greene having uncovered the conspirators and their stash of blackmail photos. However she also “accidentally” kills off every single one of them, and only at the last does dumb-ass Greene realize she’s doing it on purpose, to silence them. The finale is at least memorable, with Victoria, suddenly crazy now that she’s been outed, blithely revealing how sick she is of life and only finds enjoyment in being evil. She begs Greene to strangle her to death, and Runyon makes us think he actually does – only for us to be informed later that a bitter and defeated Victoria is being hauled off by the police, screaming at Greene that he’s a no-good cheat.

Runyon is a good writer, but the book does become a bit padded. I don’t know much about the guy but he uses words that I found odd, like “stool” instead of “toilet.” This became particularly unsettling at times, like the sentence “she flushed the stool” after a sex scene. The faux-psychedelic stuff is also unfortunate, but Runyon does come up with the occasional memorable hardboiled line for Greene, like: “I’ve got a theory about girls who play with guns. They’d rather play with something else.”

It was entertaining and all, but part of me suspects that the biggest appeal of The Black Moth is the cover. Otherwise it’s not very memorable, and maybe with some of the fat trimmed it would’ve been more of a fast-moving and entertaining piece of pulp.

Dakota #1: Warpath

Dakota #1: Warpath, by Gilbert A Ralston
November, 1973  Pinnacle Books

As Marty McKee notes, Gilbert Ralston was a TV writer, most known for the creation of The Wild Wild West, and his five-volume Dakota series bears all the hallmarks of a made-for-TV mindset. Indeed, it’s interesting that Pinnacle even published this, let alone labeled it as “adventure” on the spine; it has more in common with the low-rent private eye thrills of Hardy.

You know you’re in trouble when the back cover and first-page preview both spotlight the same action scene – and that’s because it’s the only action scene, really. Also curious that Pinnacle doesn’t inform us who Ralston is anywhere on the book; you’d think they would play up the fact that the dude was a successful TV writer. But anyway I have to agree with Marty, who waded through three of the Dakota novels, that the series was likely envisioned as a potential TV series. But if it had ever come to be it doubtless would’ve been one of the more boring shows in the annals of TV detectives.

Our series protagonist is Clay Dakota, an American Indian somewhere in his 30s who was a Force Recon Marine in ‘Nam, where he sustained a leg injury that sometimes still gives him trouble. After that he served as a “one-man police force” in some town in upstate New York, and then he opened his own “Pinkerton’s agency” in Carson Valley, Nevada. Dakota lives on a ranch in Genoa and does various private eye jobs; he’s been deputized by his buddy, Sheriff Al Bennedetti, and works closely with him. Dakota drives an old Chevy that has an auxilary fuel tank in the trunk and a .38 revolver hidden beneath the dash.

Dakota is perhaps the only men’s adventure protagonist to regularly call home to his mother. This should tell you all you need to know about the guy’s qualities as a kick-ass action hero.

Ralston goes for a slooow-burn approach; the cover art and slugline actually makes the book sound like a Western, and maybe that’s the vibe Ralston was attempting. This is not a frantically-paced tale by any means, and the central plot, of Dakota visiting an old mining town ruled by a millionaire despot, is also straight out of a Western. Dakota as an Indian hero is in for the same amount of racism, harrassment, and bullying as in a Western; there are too many parts where slackjawed yokels will amble over to his table and try to stir up shit over his heritage.

I’m too lazy to look up how old Ralston was when he wrote this, but I’m betting he was on in years, as he imbues Dakota with the wisdom of an old man. Maybe this is a play on the old “wise Indian” cliché, but Dakota is so patient and pragmatic as to be inhuman, like a Vulcan men’s adventure hero. Much of the narrative is given over to his ruminations on this or that, particularly on the foibles of people. It has the cumulative effect that you start to picture the guy as a geriatric rather than a tough-as-nails ‘Nam vet with an occasionally game leg.

Well anyway, Warpath gets the ball rolling for the series. Dakota’s called into the store owned by his old Chinese pal Sam Lew; Sam thinks he has a case for Dakota. It’s a young woman who won’t give her name or where she’s from, but she says her husband was killed and she wants Dakota to find out who did it: “Find the men who killed my husband. Barbecue them.” Dakota requests time to mull over if he wants to take the case, but then Sam and the young woman are killed by a car bomb. Dakota is now determined to see justice is served.

With Bennedetti’s help he discovers that the murdered woman was named Amy Rainey, and her husband was named Jack. They owned a bar in Poison Springs, Nevada, an old mining town owned by Burton Ashley. Dakota goes undercover as a cattle purchaser. The majority of the novel is focused on Dakota’s run-ins with the locals and the local law enforcement. He makes enemies with a trio of toughs (whom he beats up in a bar fight – this scene being the source of those front and back cover excerpts) and makes friends with a deputy named Phillips. He gets in the hair of Sheriff Hanna, and also becomes cozy with an attractive bank teller named Janet Hartley.

Suprisingly, Ralston actually writes a sex scene between the two. Here it is in its entirety: “He plunged into her.” That’s it! But Janet might as well be dating Charles Death Wish Bronson, as it becomes clearly obvious what fate is in store for her, given that she’s dating the only stranger in town, a stranger who is hiding ulterior motives and who has already run afoul of various people. There are a few muddled attempts on Dakota’s life, but he brushes it all off, gathering intel from drunken reporter Clifford Spring, a man who has long suspected Burton Ashley of being an evil bastard.

When Janet meets her expected fate Dakota takes the expected route – a peyote trip with a local tribe. Meanwhile he gets shot in the arm but he’s feeling practically brand new when Bennedetti shows up, helping Dakota work the case here in Poison Spring. But to tell the truth it’s all pretty bland, only salvaged by a very late moment where Dakota is stranded in the desert and five men come after him. This sequence plays off more on his “Indian skills” of sneaking up on people and also on his survivalist instincts, like how he knows that high ridge desert sand is very combustible.

The climax itself is more along the lines of a mystery thriller; after a nice sequence where Dakota and Bennedetti scale the electric fence surrounding Burton Ashley’s mansion and tranquilize his guard dogs, it instead devolves into lots of dialog as Ashley tries to barter for his freedom with Dakota. We also get an 11th hour reveal where one of Dakota’s pals turns out to be a sadistic killer, but it’s pretty hard to buy. But don’t worry, Dakota solves the case and arrests Ashley just in time to get home for dinner with mom and dad!!

Four more volumes were to follow, and if Marty’s comments are any indication, they become progressively more bland, so I’m in no hurry to get to them.

Meet Morocco Jones (Morocco Jones #1)

Meet Morocco Jones, by Jack Baynes
No month stated, 1957  Fawcett Crest Books

Starting off a four-volume series, Meet Morocco Jones is like a men’s adventure series ten years early. My guess is Fawcett wanted to tap in on the success of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer books, but instead series protagonist Morocco Jones, while nominally a private investigator, comes off more like the sort of hero you’d encounter in the men’s adventure paperbacks of the ‘70s and ‘80s.  The book (and series) is even written in third-person, unlike the first-person of the Hammer novels.

Apparently “Jack Baynes” was a pseudonym used by someone named Bertram B. Fowler, but it doesn’t look like he ever published anything under his own name. And since “Jack Baynes” is such a damn cool name that’s how I’ll refer to him. His writing is good, not as hardboiled as you’d expect, more along the lines of something Lyle Kenyon Engel would’ve produced, with that firm command of craft, character, and plot. To be sure, the plot does get out of Baynes’s hands a bit (just like in many of those Engel productions, in fact), but the novel is a lot better than you’d expect, even with a bit of an unexpected social conscience when it comes to inner-city blacks.

Now, as for our hero, it’s hard not to picture ubuiquitous paperback cover model Steve Holland in the role. Described as a lanky but muscle-bound, craggy-faced stalwart of manhood, Morocco Jones is such a badass that the mere mention of his name is enough to make men piss themselves in terror. For the past five years Morocco was with “the top counterespionage unit in Europe,” where he took on “the Commies,” and he hates them almost as much as Richard Camellion hates them. Morocco served under General Weyland, a moustached bastard described as looking like he walked off the cover of a men’s magazine; their chief adversary was the mysterious Bardo, “the top Commie spy,” whose face has only been seen by one person.

In exposition-laden backstory, we learn that, on the unit’s last job, Bardo kidnapped a young woman and unit member Chris Shane went after her. After being tortured horribly Shane had his face changed and disappeared. Morocco saved the girl, and spirited her away with no one else on the unit learning who she was. After which Morocco, the General, and other unit member Brett Culver quit the spy game, moved to Chicago, and put their Cold War skills to work in a private eye venture. All this Morocco relays over breakfast to the lovely Llora Madigan, his sometimes-girlfriend who herself is a fellow spy, codenamed “The Countess.” I mean, this series prefigures so many ‘70s action series it isn’t even funny; Llora is basically The Baroness about two decades early.

She too is out of the spy game but Llora intimates that she came to Morroco’s penthouse apartment last night to see if he was aware of anything about to happen. Instead the two went straight to bed (true to the era the author is firmly in the fade-to-black mold when it comes to sex), and now as Llora’s about to reveal the purpose of her visit the two are interrupted by the entrance of Syndicate goons. Here we get our first taste of Morocco’s bad-assery as he dispenses of these guys with his bare hands. He has nothing but contempt for the Syndicate and figures he won’t even need to use his .45 on this latest caper.

Bardo is supposedly in town, trying to track down that woman who saw his face back in Europe. The General, who has a sort of antagonistic relationship with Morocco, informs him that Bardo has apparently made a deal with the Syndicate and something big is going down. Gradually we’ll learn that the Commies have been supplying the Syndicate with tons of heroin, the idea being to weaken the US with it. In exchange the Syndicate will provide Bardo with enforcers to help him take on the General’s agents while he tracks down the girl who saw his face.

Morocco really isn’t too sharp, but this is more so due to the demands of Baynes’s plotting. The lady who saw his face is Leni Grayson, married to a former reporter named Phil. Morocco heads on over to their place here in Chicago only to find that Leni is gone; he figures due to clues that none other than Llora Madigan has spirited her away for reasons of her own, and thus she’s safe. Instead of placing a distraught Phil under guard, Morocco instead orders the guy to eat a steak and have a few beers and then sends him home! How very surprising it is when later Phil finds some Syndicate thugs waiting for him at his place.

Our hero roams all over Chicago on this caper and the author seems to know the city well. In particular he writes about the dissolution the South Side was falling into at that time, and how the area had been abandoned by whites and taken over by blacks. What’s surprising is the sympathy the author shows for the blacks, how they are forced to share apartments at three times the rent the former white tenants paid, and the fact that they’re only here because the South Side offers the only jobs available to them. In fact this novel features an author who seems very sympathetic toward blacks, even if he does refer to them as “Negroes” and “the coloreds.”

In particular there’s Thurm, a tough enforcer for Elijah “Lije” Woodruff, the sort of black godfather of the South Side. Lije with his web of informants is privy to practically everything that goes on in the city and gives Morocco plenty of details on where Bardo and the Syndicate might be. Thurm, after getting his ass kicked by Morocco, becomes his BFF and throughout the novel will appear out of the woodowrk to give Morocco news or to offer his services. But really there’s not much help to give, as Morocco takes care of everyone with ease, usually with his fists. Not that the novel is filled with action, but there are plentiful fistfights and shootouts; however the violence is nil, with the author never dwelling on the gore.

Morocco operates on his own for the most part, occasionally meeting up with the General to trade info. Llora the Countess also pops up here and there, mostly to fret over Morocco and to spend the night with him. She’s apparently a kick-ass spy in her own right but she spends most of the novel off-page. A part Baynes doesn’t really explain is that Llora was hired by previously-MIA Chris Shane to get Leni Greyson, so he could use her to go around Chicago and find Bardo. Really the entire novel is comprised of Morocco looking for one person or another while taking on various Syndicate thugs. 

The plot gets muddier and muddier with dashed-off subplots that quickly fizzle, like when a pair of Mafia hitmen are heavily built up in the narrative, hired by the Syndicate to take out Morocco and the General, and are dispensed with just a few pages after being first mentioned. Baynes does at least keep the bullets and fists flying; Morocco at one point kills a dude by slamming his head through the railing of an iron fence. His killcount gives cause for a lot of deadpan dark humor; the Syndicate thugs are referred to so derogatorily throughout that some of the lines are a bit funny. Morocco and the General also exchange a lot of humorous banter.

But as mentioned the plot gets more and more bloated with a barrage of new characters introduced. While we start off expecting Bardo will be the villain of the piece, he doesn’t even appear until his outing in the final pages, and Morocco goes after one newly-introduced villain after another. First it’s Ardello, the top Syndicate man in Chicago, then it’s Ardello’s second in command. Then it’s the Mafia. Then it’s Bardo’s second in command. It’s almost like a video game as Morocco and crew advance from one level to the next, but the problem is the central plot just sort of evaporates. Even the whole heroin thing is muddied up as we learn that Bardo’s men have gotten greedy for it and want to steal it from the “top Commie” and sell it for themselves.

The surprise reveal of who Bardo really is won’t come as much of a surprise, but at least it doesn’t turn out to be Morocco’s old teammate Chris Shane, which I figured would be a given as soon as it was revealed the dude was missing and had gotten a new face. The novel ends with Morocco feeling crestfallen over the fact that his life will always be filled with blood, even if he is “retired.” It’s also implied that he’s about to become serious with Llora Madigan, the Countess, who by the way officially retires from the spy game at novel’s end.

Three more adventures followed, and while Meet Morocco Jones lost its way after a bit, it was still sufficiently entertaining – and such a precursor of the men’s adventure novels that were to follow – that I look forward to eventually reading them.

Web Detective Stories, October 1960 (Volume 3, Number 3)

Very similar to (but not as enjoyable as) the issue of Two-Fisted Detective Stories I recently reviewed, this October 1960 issue of Web Detective Stories features a handful of lurid crime stories with EC Comics levels of dark humor and “twist” endings you can see coming a mile away. No surprises there, as despite not carrying the Reese Publications imprint logo, this mag was also edited by publisher Bud Ampolsk, who turns in my favorite tale in the magazine.

“The Triple Cross” by Richard Deming starts things off; this one’s narrated by Deming’s recurring character Manville Moon, a private eye who has an artificial lower right leg, something only given cursory mention in this story. Since getting on my recent hardboiled kick I’ve seen Deming’s name quite often, but I don’t as yet have any of his novels and this is the first of his work I’ve read. The story isn’t bad but seems pretty quick and underdeveloped, which is true about most every story here – this certainly isn’t Manhunt magazine.

Moon’s hired by Henry Sheffield, a mega-rich guy whose young wife Sylvia was murdered a few months ago. Local hoodlum Eddie Dallas is the prime suspect but the cops can’t pin it on him. Sheffield thinks he’s next on Dallas’s list and hires Moon to protect him. Eventually they visit Dallas in his penthouse apartment, and as they check out the mobster’s collection of vintage weapons Dallas professes his innocence. Then the hoodlum later calls Moon, blaming him for stealing his WWII trench knife. Moon didn’t do it, which leaves only one other candidate. That night Dallas turns up dead in Sheffield’s home; the story Sheffield gives is that Dallas tried to break in and kill him with the knife, but Moon knows that Sheffield had the knife and Dallas was merely coming to get it from him – in other words, Sheffield just murdered the guy.

“Model Of Murder” by Christopher Mace is more along the goofy, EC Comics-esue vibe these Ampolsk-edited digests were known for. It’s about a sculptor named George Carlton who lives off of a heavyset wealthy lady named Bernice. Meanwhile George has a nice thing going with blonde hotstuff Yvonne, secretly shacking up with her in his artist’s loft just off from the main house. Yvonne pushes him to divorce Bernice, but George can’t do it, he needs the money. So he decides to kill Bernice, coming up with the most bizarre method you’ll ever read.

Sculpting a realisitc hand, he stores it in the fridge for a while and then dips the cold marble in chocolate and ties it to the pull-chain for the light in the bedroom closet. That night when Bernice comes home George makes up a story he claims to have read in the paper, about a maniac loose on the streets who chopped up someone and made off with the bodyparts. Bernice, aghast at the tale, goes into the closet, grabbing for the light-pull – and grabs hold of that “severed hand.” She has a heart attack and dies, and George figures her two million is now his. Only he forgot to factor in Goldie, Bernice’s equally-obese maid; she says she knows what George did, and unless he marries her she’ll turn him in to the cops.

“Daughter of Darkness” by O.W. Reynolds is a short nasty about Margaret, a pretty 17-year-old who works as a waitress in a dive somewhere. With a mother who whores herself and a long-gone father, Margaret yearns to get the hell out of town. She puts down the constant proposals of various men, until one night she decides to get in the car of some random guy who pulls up alongside her as she walks home. He tells her she can be his partner on a cross-country con game. Margaret, who hates men, gets in. Their first job will be to rob a diner; the guy will go in, rob the joint, and then run back to the car, Margaret driving them off. Instead Margaret runs him over and drives off to a new life in a new town. The end!

“Dumb Bull” by Flip Lyons concerns Rosie Haver, high-class hooker for bigwig crook Tony Marchione. Teddy Landon, a junior cop, arrests Tony while he’s in the middle of doing the deed with Rosie, something his superior bashes him for – he should’ve nabbed Rosie instead and tapped into her knowledge about the Marchione crime family. Back Landon goes to Rosie’s place, figuring someone’s likely about to kill her – and of course, a few Marchione thugs are on the way to her place. Features a lackluster finale with Rosie running for safety across the rooftop of her apartment building and Landon, whom she’s called “a dumb bull,” showing up to blast the thugs and save the day.

“You Can’t Cheat Death” by Earle Smyth is like I Know What You Did Last Summer a few decades early; a guy named Smathers has just run over someone, out driving around late at night with his busty mistress Caroline. Now Smathers, who runs a fashion company in New York, is desperate to keep it all out of the papers, lest he be ruined. This long tale then goes into a flashback on how Smathers hired Caroline, who showed up one day willing to both model his lingerie and work around the office. Lots of “spicy” stuff here with details on how Caroline would waltz around in “wisps” of lingerie for department store buyers, the men oggling her curvaceous bod and buying Smather’s lingerie in bulk.

This leads somehow to an affair between Smathers and the girl; I say “somehow” but any idiot can easily figure that Caroline has something up her sleeve. This goes on for a few months and then one night the two are driving back to Caroline’s place and Smathers, as usual, has had a few too many, and he runs over some guy in the gutter. Caroline checks the body, says the man is dead, and Smathers panics. They keep it quiet but the next day Smathers receives a threatening note; the sender claims to know what Smathers did and demands payment to keep quiet. A panicking Smathers has Caroline do all the dirty work for him, answering the blackmailer’s calls, taking the demanded payment to him. Who will be surprised when the blackmailer turns out to be the man who was in the gutter – ie Caroline’s partner in a long-running con game?

“Lust Isn’t Funny” by Fletcher Flora has one of the goofiest titles ever. Flora’s like Deming, a hardboiled writer who’s name I see a lot but haven’t actually read…until now! This short tale probably isn’t the best indication of his writing talents, though. Leo Baldwin, “a publicity bloated punk comic with a sponsor,” likes to frequent the club owned by Clay Cooper. Baldwin is a notorious prick who picks up women with ease, due to his fame and wealth – all while his wife sits right there. Gilbert, the club’s headwaiter, complains that Baldwin treats his wife like shit, just openly pawing women while she sits there beside him. After Baldwin’s wife tries to commit suice that night – Gilbert having saved her – the headwaiter decides to do something about it. He spikes Baldwin’s drink with his wife’s poison and then blithely informs Cooper later that the annoying comic is dead. 

“Mistress of Evil” is by Bill Ryder, aka Bud Ampolsk himself, and it’s very much along the lines of the sort of thing he’d write for the sweat mags he also edited and published. In a way this one’s almost like a “part two” to the Nazi Horror tales he edited/wrote for those sweat mags, such as the type seen in Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood; it’s about Gustave Himmelman, a pyschiatrist in an American city who is really taken to task by his latest client, an attractive young woman named Margery Coleman. Margery’s problem is that she gets off on being hurt, especially being whipped, and it’s driving a wedge in her marriage because her husband doesn’t get it.

As Gustave sits and listens, breaking out into a sweat, Margery goes into a long backstory over the many times she’s gotten off on pain. Starting with her father, who whipped her (much to her enjoyment), to the boy who took her virginity, Margery basically demanding that he beat her up before, during, and after the act. And let’s not forget about her sorority sisters, who as part of hell week stripped her down and whipped her, something which made Margery actually pass out, due to the power of her orgasms. What she wants from Gustave is not psychoanalysis but instead for him to whip her! If not, she’ll make up a story that he raped her.

But what we learn in the last moments is that Gustave was really a medical officer at Dachau, and is a wanted Nazi, “Himmelman” just being the name he took up when he fled Germany. He also knows that this gorgeous young sadist will be “the end of him,” because, once he starts whipping her, he won’t be able to stop. Whereas the title makes you think Margery is going to be the evil one, it’s actually Himmelman, and all she has done is unleashed the evil he’s blocked in himself this past decade and a half. He begins whipping her nude body, knowing he will whip her until she is dead – just as he whipped to death so many other women at Dachau.

“As Hot As Ginger” by Art Crockett rounds out the mag. This first-person tale doesn’t feature Crockett’s recurring character Juan Kelly; it’s narrated by a 21 year-old petty thief named Petey who when we meet him is watching as his fellow burglar, 17 year-old Big Sal, is punching some woman in the gut. Crockett goes to town detailing how savagely the woman’s been uppercut, so hard that the “squishy” sound of it makes Petey figure the gal will be puking her guts out for the rest of the week. He and Sal are in the midst of robbing the woman’s apartment, only to be surprised when she shows up – and they’re even more surprised when she produces a .38 and, despite being half-dead from agony, blows a few holes into Big Sal. 

The lady passes out after that and Petey makes a run for it. The next day on the news he hears that the lady was actually a policewoman named Ginger and she’s given Petey’s full description to the force. Now all the cops in the city are out looking for him, even the ones with the day off. A frantic Petey attempts to escape, only to be caught in a traffic jam – and to find that Ginger is the policewoman directing traffic! He abandons the car and hightails it for a barbershop, where he gets a buzz cut; next he gets a pair of glasses. Getting some books so he’ll look like a student, Petey’s almost home free when some cops yell at him. He runs for it, falls, wonders how they figured he was the guy from the break-in; turns out they were just yelling at him because they assumed he was a truant, but they’re sure glad to hear they’ve just nabbed the guy who had the audacity to rob a policewoman’s apartment.

EDIT: As Walker Martin mentions below, Peter Enfantino also reviewed this issue of Web Detective (as well as all of the others) at the Barebones e-zine blog; you can read the review here.

Two-Fisted Detective Stories, October 1960 (Volume 2, Number 3)

I’ve been on a hardboiled pulp kick recently and discovered that a lot of good material was published in the ubiquitous digest-size crime magazines of the time (roughly 1953 to 1965 or thereabouts). Then I discovered that some of the more lurid crime digests were published by the same twisted folks who also turned out the various sweat mags of the time, ie the stuff that was anthologized in Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood. In particular Two-Fisted Detective, Web Detective, and Off Beat Detective, and I got a few volumes of each, luckily for acceptable prices.

This October 1960 issue of Two-Fisted Detective is the first of them I read. At 113 pages of double-columned stories, it basically amounts to a paperback-sized anthology. Some stories were okay, others just middling. While entertaining it was nothing mindblowing, with each of the stories short, snappy, and heavy on the torture/lurid vibe. I’m betting the more famous (and respectable) Manhunt magazine didn’t feature so much torture and bondage! Practically every story in here features a woman being tied up and slapped around by a thug.

“Kill Me With Kisses” by Art Crockett, the lead story, is a case in point. Narrated by recurring protagonist Juan Kelly, a private eye with a talking parrot in his office, the story sees Kelly hired by wealthy Mrs. Southwell to find her daughter Barbara, who has run off with some damn beatniks. In reality “Babs” has been abducted by Charlie Sleeper, a rough pimp who keeps the young girl tied up in a room for his clients who are into rape scenes. Our hero Kelly when we meet him is surrounded by several of Sleeper’s gorgeous hookers, each armed with a dagger. He is very much in the Mike Hammer mold, dishing out punishment with his fists.

When Kelly finds Babs he takes her back to his place, only for Sleeper to call and say he’s sent in all of his clientele – all of whom would want Babs permanently silenced. The finale is pretty good, with Kelly and Babs running across rooftops, being chased by the bloodthirsty creeps, though the finale is perfunctory with Kelly merely blowing Sleeper away and the others running for it. Of course Kelly must inform us that Babs, who has been bound and raped for the past week or so, demands they go back to his apartment so they can have sex.

“No Escape” is by Don Unatin, which according to Philsp.com was a pseudonym of Reese editor (and owner?) Bud Ampolsk, who also wrote as “Bill Ryder.” Ampolsk I’m betting wrote many of the stories that appeared in the sweat mags he edited, and according to Bob Deis at Men’s Pulp Mags, Ampolsk was also the guy who devised the crazy, torture-focused covers Norm Eastman would paint for the Reese mags. So then it’s safe to say Ampolsk had a quite fevered imagination. It’s at work here in this short, breezy tale written in third-person about a girl named Ronnie who keeps getting calls from a horny sadist named Duke who claims he got her number off a payphone, where someone had written that she offered a great time.

The calls have become more and more aggressive, with Duke even figuring out her address. He says he’s coming over for a little loving, and might even rough her up a little because he likes that, too. And don’t bother calling the cops ‘cause they’d never believe you, or something like that. Finally Ronnie talks him into meeting her somewhere. They meet at a hotel where, surprisingly, Duke actually does have sex with her, though obviously it’s an off-page event. But as he’s lying there afterward Ronnie takes an icepick from her purse and jams it into his brain. Turns out Ronnie is a killer, putting up her own number on payphones so as to root out and kill off “lust crazed animals.” 

“Hell School” by Pete McCann returns to the first-person narration and concerns Craig Bradman, a gym teacher at deadbeat Southside High, which is populated by “duck-tailed punks” and promiscuous young women who are hookers in all but name. The narrator’s wife wants him to move on to a better job in a better school, but Bradman wants to stick around. On his way into the school one day he comes across one of the punks having sex out in the open with one of the gals. Bradman isn’t surprised when later he’s called into the principal’s office and there’s a cop there, having busted them. Also the cop found dope in the backseat. The principal convinces the cop that they can handle it – turns out Bradman earns his living by beating the shit out of the punks who break the rules! As a double ironic twist we also learn Bradman is the supplier for the punks, hooking them up with drugs and using them as salesmen so he can eventually get his wife out of the hovel in which they live. 

“Save Her For A Passion” by Grover Brinkman is narrated by Joel Vance, an enforcer hired to pull a hit on Diane – who turns out to be the wife of Joel’s boss, Jud. He’s about to assassinate her along a beach but the lady gets the drop on him, coming armed with her own gun. She talks Joel into teaming up with her against Jud, who doubtless will send Joel up the river for doing this job, anyway. She reminds him what a bastard Jud is, like that innocent girl Jud raped and got hooked on drugs in New Orleans. The narrator goes along with it, absorbed with Diane’s great breasts, and the finale sees a quick fight on Jud’s drug-transporting ship. But then Diane shoots Joel in the gut and leaves him: that innocent kid in New Orleans was her sister, and Joel’s the one who snatched her off the streets for Jud.

“Mistress of Mayhem” by Al James is another third-person tale with an ironic twist ending you can see coming even with blinders on. Mira is a hotstuff 19 year-old married to deadbeat Phil, 23 and unemployed, a former car mechanic. Mira is having an affair with Jim, 40, and hopes to marry him, but Phil won’t give her a divorce. Al James appears to have written sleaze paperbacks in the ‘60s and that’s quite apparent here, as the word “breasts” is used more than all the other stories in the issue combined; Mira must be quite stacked.

Mira demands Phil leave to look for a job and then when Jim comes over for their daily rendevous (cue a sex scene that isn’t as vague as the others), she tells him she wants him to kill Phil. There’s a red-gloved bandit going around the neighborhood, attacking people in their homes, and they can set Phil up so Jim shoots him, mistaking him for the bandit. Can you see the ironic twist? Yes, Phil turns out to be the red-gloved bandit, and the tale ends with Jim dead and Phil revealing his true identity to Mira, as well as his knowledge of her affair with Jim; it’s intimated he’s about to strangle her. 

“Come-On Cutie!” by Flip Lyons has a hell of an opening: a con man named Bennie beating the shit out of his female accomplice, Jodi. He bashes her in the stomach, the face, beating her to the floor. Why? Because he came into a hotel room and caught her packing her luggage with ten thousand bucks she just conned from an old millionaire named Hollingsworth. Battered and bloody, Jodi tells Bennie he’s an idiot; she packed his bag, too. Hollingsworth, whom she knocked out with a sleeping pill, is on his way with the cops and they need to leave town. Further, she and Bennie are now through; she refuses to stay with a guy who beats her. After cleaning up – during which she shows Bennie her breasts and tells him he’ll never see them again! – Jodi takes off…only to immediately be snatched by Hollingsworth and the cops.

Feeling bad about it, Bennie tries to con Hollingsworth so Jodi can be freed. But then he finds out that Jodi really stole 90 thousand from the guy. He springs Jodi from prison and tells her he’s going to beat her to a pulp this time – that is, right after she tells him where she hid that ninety thousand. Jodi talks him into a last meal at the local diner, where she of course slips a mickey in his drink. A bizarrely light-hearted finale sees Bennie, that woman-beating maniac, merely falling asleep at his table as Jodi announes her plans to go live like royalty in Europe with the 90 thousand!

“Lust Holds The Gun!” by Gil Grayson concerns Spandau, a con who came up with his latest idea in prison; he’s going to rob Marie Rodgers, a high-class madame who makes monthly payoffs to a mob boss named Rodman. Spandau became pals with one of Rodman’s men in the slammer and learned how Rodman’s men collect from the various madames. This tale definitely has the feel of a vintage men’s mag story as it’s all about the bondage and the breasts. Spandau, wielding a .38, sneaks into Marie’s office building at night, an hour before the scheduled money pick-up, and barges in. He roughs her up, which she seems to enjoy. Also she’s certain Rodman won’t believe that she’s been robbed, so she wants him to hurt her.

So Spandau ties Marie up and then, because she seems eager for it, rapes her. (She apparently enjoys that, too…) Afterwards he burns her with cigarettes, all so as to get the safe combination. Finally Marie gives it, and Spandau absconds with twenty-five thousand bucks. The story features a typical EC comics-style twist with the greasy, obese elevator operator being a pickpocket who ends up lifting Spandau’s wallet. This third-person story is written in a goofy hardboiled style, with such enjoyable lines as, “The elevator door finally opened, revealing a sallow faced man whose bald head looked like something you might step on in a graveyard at midnight.”

“Dark Hunger” by Jay Richards is the shortest story in the book and the goofiest. It’s also very much in the EC Comics vein. Marty is a serial killer who strangles women, and he’s set his sights on a lovely young lady named Erica as his latest kill. With the opening lines of “She was young… Lovely… Stacked…”, you know this one also upholds the Reese Publications standard, and thus there’s a definite lurid vibe throughout. Mostly the dark comedy comes through Marty chastisizing himself that his last kill was named Loreta, which blew the A-B-C nature of his previous kills; if only Loretta had been named “Doris!” He takes Erica home, ready to strangle her – and who will be surprised when Erica herself turns out to be a serial killer, pulling a knife from her purse and killing Marty? The lurid vibe continues with the vague detail that Erica orgasms when she kills. And now she’s on the hunt for a new man…

“Don’t Tempt Murder” by Jim Arthur is another dark comedy piece; this one’s about Alfie, a would-be “professional bleeder” who has just gotten his first job from mob boss Turk. Alfie’s been ordered to kill Turk’s old flame Sue Martin, who is about to turn state’s evidence. Alfie goes to Sue’s apartment with a .38 Special that only has one bullet in it, so as to fool the cops into thinking an amateur was behind the kill (professional bleeders we’re informed use six slugs on their hits to ensure death, an industry standard).  But Sue turns the tables on him, opening her door fully nude. The dark comedy ensues as Alfie gawks at her awesome bod and keeps telling her he has to kill her. She offers herself, he reluctantly refuses; somehow he shows her he only has one bullet, and then he spins the chamber and it’s like Russian roullette, with the girl passing out with each blank shot. Finally the cops show up and it turns out Sue is under police protection and she also took the bullet out of Alfie’s gun, so it was empty the whole time!

“A Darling For The Devil” is by Lawrence Stone and rounds out the magazine. This “novel”-length tale is narrated by Charlie, a chaffeur for a sadistic kingpin named Bugs Martin. We watch as Bugs beats some hapless diner owner nearly to death, then moves on to a local nightclub. Along the way our narrator informs us how Bugs gets his rocks off whipping women with a studded belt. This story is very heavy with the sweat mag vibe. The nightclub has a new act – a hotstuff lady named Francie who turns out to be the childhood sweetheart of our narrator. Bugs gets the immediate hots for her, and due to his span of influence the club owners turn away as he basically abducts Francie. She fights back and now he’s all hot and bothered, just ready to whip the shit out of her.

They go to a cottage outside of the city, where Bugs has his fun, and when the narrator can take no more he ends up getting bashed in the face by Bugs. It culminates in a bizarre ending where the narrator finds some spiders on a milkjug and throws it at Bug’s feet, after he’s been whipping Francie for a good long while – Bugs freaks out (turns out he’s afraid of bugs, hence his nickname!), and in the chaos Charlie picks up his .38 and blasts him. The story does not feature the expected denoument in which Charlie gets lucky with the gal; instead, he carries her home and he tells us he never heard from her again. Jeez, wonder why?

Men's Mag Roundup: Blood Duels and Death Wish Patrols

Like the previous Male Annual I read, Male Annual 14 (1972) is chock full of stories, most of them retitled reprints of earlier Male, Stag, and For Men Only stories and articles. This particular issue is interesting because most of the material in it is from 1970, when the art/photography in men’s mags had become slightly more risque, but nowhere as exploitative as it would become in just a few short years.

“A Bullet For The Enforcer” by W.J. Saber is the reason I tracked down this issue. The magazine’s misleading cover blurb had me expecting a Godfather ripoff, or at least a lurid Mafia novella; instead, the story turns out to be a retitled reprint of “Hit Man For the Aiport Heist Mob,” which appeared in the September 1970 issue of Stag. Earl Norem’s awesome splash page is retained for this Male Annual reprint, with only the title being changed. Here’s a screengrab of the original version:

With opening dialog of “Come on, spike me harder. Nail me to the mattress,” you know a different era has dawned in the world of men’s adventure mags, and the ensuing sex scene is fairly explicit (though again not as explicit as such tales would be within a year or two). But this is how “A Bullet For The Enforcer” begins, and it follows the same template as every single other men’s adventure mag story I’ve read: we open on a sex or action scene (or both), before cutting back “three months ago” for the looong buildup, before meeting back up with the opening section and then hurrying through the rest of the tale for a rushed finish.

Faber is a new men’s mag writer for me, but his prose is of a piece with everything else I’ve read in this particular genre, with that polished, professional feel. I have to say though the dude isn’t much for scene changes, or maybe that’s just lame editorial work afoot; seriously, we’ll change scenes, locations, and even times without a line space or anything. It gets to be a little confusing at first, but otherwise Faber has that firm command you’d expect of a men’s mag writer, doling out a tale about an antihero who is very much in the Parker mold.

Only this guy, Carl Strand, is a lot meaner than Parker ever was. As noted Strand’s getting busy as the tale begins, boffing a buxom blonde stewardess in a hotel room. But he hears hit men sneaking in, and knows the “stew” has set him up. So the dude punches her out just before she climaxes, gets the jump on the hit men, shoots them point blank in the head…and then shoots the stewardess point blank in the head! This is how our “hero” is introduced to us, and it isn’t for several pages that we learn the girl set him up, and thus “deserved to die.”

Strand is a former ‘Nam Special Forces badass with a penchant for judo. He’s recently been imprisoned for beating to death some dude he loaned money to. Strand’s knack is for heisting the heisters; originally just a regular crook, he moved on to robbing criminals. A team of government officials in some unstated city need a certain specialist; airport cargo in their city is being looted and heisted, and they have no leads. It appears to be an independent syndicate at work. What they need is a professional criminal who can infiltrate the syndicate. They settle upon Strand and offer him the job. But first he has to break out of prison in a belabored sequence.

Strand’s contact is “The Controller,” who answers Strand’s calls from a payphone and hooks him up with cash, clothes, a gun (Strand’s choice of weaponry is a snub nosed .32 revolver), and whatever else he needs. Strand follows leads and ends up in a “swinger’s apartment” that’s filled with, you guessed it, horny stews. That’s just how it goes in the world of men’s mags and I for one am not complaining. Strand gets laid asap by a petite-but-busty brunette named Janice who does him, I’m not kidding, like five seconds after they meet. She just shows up at his door, asks for a drink, and offers herself while she’s reclining on a barstool. Once again, the ensuing sex scene isn’t as vague as it would be in the earlier decades of this particular genre.

Janice is a stewardess and Strand uses her to test out his own heisting scheme, coming away with a bunch of gems. When he tries to make off with them on his own, the Controller gives him a call – eyes are watching Strand from everywhere. So instead he uses the gems to broker a deal with Dryden, a fence who apparently works for the mysterious air cargo heisters. These guys, in the form of a boss named Robinson, eventually make contact with Strand. But when he rubs some of the higher-ups the wrong way, they send some hit men after him – cue the opening sequence, in which Strand’s getting lucky with another stewardess, this one a blonde who is one of the heisters, unlike Janice.

Both the hit men as well as the blonde stew dead, Strand moves in for the big score. He talks Robinson into hitting the airport bank. Meanwhile the Controller will be sending in cops in gas masks, to compensate for the knockout gas Strand will be using on the bank. All of this, as you can see, as shown in Earl Norem’s splash page, which actually turns out to illustrate the final few paragraphs of the story. And true to the men’s mag template, the finale is rushed, with the crooks hitting the bank and the cops hitting the crooks, and Strand himself gets blown away by Robinson, living only long enough to tell the Controller that it’s better this way – he doesn’t want to go back to prison.

“Traitors Die Slow” by Grant Freeling is not only another “smash book bonus,” but it’s also another retitled reprint. It was originally published as “They Crippled Hitler’s D-Day Defenses” and appeared in the September 1970 For Men Only, and I reviewed it here.

The longest story in the book is “My Blood Duel with the Texas Cycle Brutes,” which is “as told to Mark Petersen,” aka the guy who wrote it. Labelled as a “true extralength,” it really is a novella, and follows the same template as “Bullet For The Enforcer;” opening en media res, to a long flashback, to a hurried-off finale. The story is officially credited to Quint Lake, who relays the story in first person, however the majority of the story is courtesy another character: Virginia Carley, a smokin’-hot blonde who shows up nude on Quint’s Arizona ranch one afternoon, having driven there on a stolen Harley chopper.

After recuperating for a few days, Virginia is well enough to tell Quint her story, which makes up for most of the narrative. She’s in her early 20s and was born and raised in some nowhere section of Texas. Bored with life, she was happy one day when the Devil’s Disciples showed up, “the most vicious cycle gang ever to roar down the highways of the Southwest.” Led by Killer Joe, an “All-American type” who wears a WWI German helmet with a spike and leads a group of leather-clad psychopaths, the gang offers Virginia a chance to escape her humdrum life.

Becoming Killer Joe’s woman, she aids and abetts them in their theivery; they like to steal wallets from motorists and knock over gas stations. But in some town in Arizona Killer Joe finds a place that fixes up and sells hot cars, and he decides to knock it off. So they send in Virginia as the honeytrap; she goes home with the owner and Killer Joe busts in just before the naughtiness begins, threatening the dude for the twenty thousand Joe knows he has. But the owner swears the money’s gone and says Virginia stole it. So the Devil’s Disciples string her up and begin beating her, Killer Joe using a belt and another dude stabbing out cigarettes on her skin.

This is where we came in, as Virginia manages to escape, beaten and fully nude. She slices the tires of all the bikes save for Killer Joe’s and takes off on it, eventually ending up in the home of our hero, a young ‘Nam vet with a fondness for guns who has, would you believe it, managed to fall in love with Virginia over these few days he’s tended to her. Cue a super-vague sex scene that is very much like those in earlier men’s mag stories, just immediately cutting to black. Dammit! But anyway our narrator is a dolt. Virginia has begged him to tell no one of her presence. So what does he do after she’s been with him for a month? He decides to surprise her by fixing up that wrecked chopper of hers…you know, the one she stole from Killer Joe.

Sure enough, our dumbass hero is out smoking his “last cigarette of the day” one evening when he’s knocked out by a biker. He wakes up to find himself tied up and Virginia, once again, nude and being tortured. Killer Joe and pals are back and they want that twenty thousand. Our hero manages to free his bonds through sheer strength and takes out Killer Joe and a few henchmen in the strangest way possible: putting bullets in small holes in his wooden firing range and slamming rocks into them, which causes the cartridges to explode and hit the bikers!

The strangest thing about “Blood Duel” is that Virginia’s role in the theft of the twenty thousand is never explained. After killing off Killer Joe et al and rounding up the other bikers, Quint discovers that the blonde is gone, running away without even bothering to see if he’s okay. A month or so later he receives a letter from her, saying that she misses him, loves him, and if he wants her she’s waiting for him at some hotel – she knows she has a lot of explaining to do. And Quint figures to himself, well, if she does actually have that twenty thousand bucks, then he’ll suggest she invest it in some steers for an old rancher he knows…! The end!

“My Body For The Taking” by Michael Sarris is labelled as “Daring Fiction” but it’s about as tepid as you can get – it’s a short tale about a dude on a bus ride to Connecticut who meets up with some hot chick who offers him a job at her uncle’s amusement park. He fixes a few lights and whatnot and then one night she’s waiting for him on one of the rides – cue a vague sex scene. The end.

“Captured by Assam’s Amazon She Devils” harkens back to the glory days of men’s adventure mag pulps, most likely because it’s by an old master of the craft: Emile Schurmacher. This tale isn’t as long as those in editor Noah Sarlat’s days of the early ‘60s, but it packs an entertaining adventure tale in its otherwise brief length. Even though it sports a not-fooling-anyone “as told to” credit, the tale is straight-up fiction, written in third person. Schurmacher has a sure hand of the genre and indeed makes you realize how the older men’s mags stories were generally better, particularly in the Diamond line of publications.

Anyway, it’s 1970 and ruggedly virile anthropologist Bill Kudner is on the Assam-Burma border, searching for the wreckage of a DC-3 that crashed in this area back in 1949. There were nine “white women” on board, nurses all, and no one knows if anyone survived the crash. However tales have leaked out of savage-looking white women running around in the jungle; in other words amazons. So Kudner’s looking for them, only for his sherpa guide to get killed by his cowardly followers, none of whom want to go into the supposedly-haunted valley in which the amazons, referred to by the natives as “Miguri,” apparently reside.

Kudner is captured posthaste by a group of white jungle women, all of them of course smoking hot, in particular a “lithe blonde” named Nadja. Their leader is a bit older and thus evil, per the reasoning of men’s mag logic; her name is Temeh, and she orders Kudner put in a cage. But Nadja has the hots for Kudner and comes to his cage that night, after giving him a meal for his virility. Cue an off-page sex scene which apparently goes on all night. Nadja has limited English and informs Kudner that she is the daughter of one of the nurses on that crashed plane, the wreckage of which sits nearby. Her mother and the other nurses are dead, as are the men of the village, all of them killed in a war with a rival tribe.

The usual stuff happens; Kudner is left alone during the day, only to receive nightly conjugal visits courtesy Nadja. But his presence sows dissent in the tribe and Nadja and another hot amazon named Pantho get in mortal combat over him. Temeh breaks up the fun and orders the two women to kill Kudner; with him out of the picture harmony can return to the camp. But Nadja breaks Kudner out and the two make their escape into Burma, where we are informed they eventually get married in a Buddhist temple. This was a fun story, filled with that adventure-fiction vibe of the old pulps, with very good writing.  I have a few Schurmacher books and look forward to reading them.  

Speaking of the later years of the men’s mags, this August 1976 issue of For Men Only is a sterling example. The sleaze runs rampant, with full-color, full-frontal shots of a variety of ‘70s chicks with feathered hair. The letters to the editor and various features are all about sex and foreplay and how to pick up chicks and etc. The stories are greatly reduced, with none of the “true extralength” yarns you would get in the earlier days, and even those few stories which are here are more so presented as actual articles like you’d read in Playboy.

“Sex Lives of Female Private Eyes” by Sam Phillips is one of those “factual” articles which, instead of being a narrative, is instead quick interviews with a few ladies who are willing to go all the way for a case. There’s hardly any explicit detail at all, and it’s basically just a bunch of dialog from (fictional?) women. However, the artwork this baby is graced with is phenomenal. Someone should’ve colored it and put it on the cover of some paperback novel about a female private eye; it would’ve been perfect for Hatchett, Fernanda, or better yet one of the Jana Blake books:

“Mercenaries – Soldiers of Fortune or Hired Killers?” by Robert Joe Stout also goes for the pseudo-factual approach, coming off as a sort of interview with Gregory Lyday, an Irish mercenary who recounts his tale of going from the army to working as a soldier of fortune in Greece and Tel Aviv. But our fictional mercenary is more focused on sex, telling us about the awesome blowjobs he’d get from a whore in Tel Aviv. Again, nothing overly graphic, but the focus on sex is an indication of the changing times in the genre. As for the action material, it’s threadbare, with “Lyday” more intent on telling us about how he’d blow up stuff.

“The Man with the 10-Inch Magic Wand” purports to be an interview with Dave Gregory, a well-endowed commercial artist in New York; the “interview” is credited to T.J. Roberts. Mr. Gregory tells us about his various sexual exploits, from appearing in a porno “for the fun of it” to taking bets to heat up notoriously-frosty women.

“Death Wish Patrol That Nailed A Rapist” is the reason I sought this mag out; it’s written by Roland Empey, which is a pseudonym for well-regarded veteran men’s mag writer Walter Kaylin. Tapping into the Death Wish craze, this one’s summed up entirely in its title. A dude named George Wheeler, who lives an idyllic life with his family in Pleasant Valley, goes to some unnamed “big city” once a month for work. There he stays in a sleazy hotel, gets drunk, and then goes out and savagely rapes a woman. He’s raped seven women in just as many months, and the locals have had enough of this shit.

Kaylin doesn’t go for the exploitation, really, with the assaults obviously focusing more on the horrors perpetrated on the unfortunate women. One thing that holds “Death Wish” back is its too-short length. It’s several pages long but could stand to be fleshed out more, as the street toughs who band together to take down the mystery rapist are a bit vague to the reader. I’ve often wondered why guys like Kaylin didn’t expand their stories into novel length; the ‘70s were the time for paperback fiction, the more lurid the better, and something like “Death Wish Patrol” could’ve made for easy paperback fodder.

The locals use their smarts to figure out that these rapes are happening once a month, and decide an out-of-towner is behind them. The cops meanwhile have more pressing concerns, given that the rapes are occurring in a sleazy part of “the big city.” So it’s up to the local toughs, who band together and eventually get the lockdown on Wheeler. There’s no action, really, no Charles Bronson-style fighting or violence; the patrol just finds Wheeler after his latest assault and chases him down, capturing him on a rooftop and beating him, then tying him up and briefly lowering him over the building as a sign to all potential rapists. After which Wheeler is arrested and hauled away.

Here’s Bruce Minney’s art for the story, which illustrates the final scene: